Judge Goldstone Disavows His Own Anti-Israel UN Report

Last night, Judge Richard Goldstone published a mea culpa in the pages of the Washington Post. He trashed his own report which has been used by Israel’s opponents to delegitimize the Jewish state.

“We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The Goldstone Report was the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) inquiry into the Gaza War, known in Israel as Operation Cast Lead which was initiated by Israel in response to the thousands of unprovoked missile attacks by Hamas into civilian communities in and near the Negev. His original report to the HRC, corrected in the WAPO Op-ed, concluded that there was a deliberate policy by Israel to target civilians (which he now corrects) and it claimed to have found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by the Jewish State.

From the beginning it was pointed out that the report was very flawed. Goldstone’s investigative committee threw any standards of investigation out the window. The report violated international standards for inquires, including UN rules on fact- finding. The Commission systematically favored witnesses and evidence put forward by anti-Israel advocates including Hamas, and dismissed evidence and testimony that would undermine its case. For example it ruled that Hamas did not use its own citizens as human shields despite a wealth of video evidence. The commission relied extensively on mediating agencies, especially UN and NGOs, which have a documented hostility to Israel (such as Human Rights Watch); and reproduced earlier reports and claims from these agencies.

But that didn’t stop Israel’s opponents to use the report to accuse the Jewish homeland of being a war criminal. Just like the al Dura hoax, The Goldstone Report was used to incite additional violence and hatred toward Israel.

That was until last night, when Judge Goldstone published hit “Oops never mind.”

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

That was one of the problems with Goldstone’s report. It went without saying.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

In Goldstone’s report, that went without saying even though it should have been said. War is disgusting but sometimes necessary, especially when it is for self defense as was Cast Lead. Unfortunately despite the best intentions of a government and army, there will be people who cross the line, the IDF investigates each case and if it finds evidence of a crime, they will prosecute. On the other hand, the entire Hamas bombing of Israel was a war crime.

Goldstone goes on to scold the organization which sent him on his mission the UN Human Rights Council:

As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation[Israel refused to cooperate because the HRC’s well know anti-Israel stance] . The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of even handedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.

Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank [but his report was taken as a criminal investigation].

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I am happy that Judge Goldstone has decided to correct the record, but that does not absolve him of his “crime,” of sloppy investigation, using Hamas terrorists for the basis of his report, ignoring video evidence and of course making allegations of intent simply because as he said in the Op-Ed “no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.”

Both in the original report, and in the Washington Post retraction, Judge Goldstone mentions over and over Israel’s lack of cooperation with his investigation. Yet in this latest article he admits that the HRC’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.” Why would he expect Israel to cooperate with an investigation authorized by such an organization? An even bigger question is if he knew that the HRC is biased against Israel, why would he even agree to running the investigation and why would he publish such a flawed one-sided report giving the HRC more ammunition?

One explanation may be Ken Roth, the disgraced head of Human Right Watch (HRW) Roth has a vested interest in the Goldstone Report. He put him up to taking the the HRC investigation in the first place. Goldstone was on HRW’s board until NGO Monitor exposed the conflict of interest. Roth’s rabidly Anti-Israel positions have even been criticized by HRW’s founder.

In October 2009, HRW founder Robert Bernstein published an article in the New York Times, strongly criticizing the organization for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israel bias, and for “issuing reports…that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” In a lecture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (November 2010), Bernstein expanded on these ideas and noted that “Human Rights Watch’s attacks on almost every issue [have] become more and more hostile [toward Israel].”

In the end however, the Judge is an adult and needs to take responsibility for his own actions, which despite correcting the record, he doesn’t do in the WAPO article. In the end the Judge seems to be saying, Israel didn’t cooperate so I wrote a biased report and now I am sorry.

Judge, you should be very sorry.