From the executive summary of the Goldstone report:

The Mission is concerned by declarations made by various Israeli officials who have indicated the intention of maintaining the blockade of the Gaza Strip until the release of Gilad Shalit. The Mission is of the opinion that this would constitute collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

From Mitchel Prothero’s Under the gun in Gaza:

I ask him if that means the human rights situation was better under Israeli occupation that it is today for residents of both the West Bank and Gaza. “Why do you think I ask you not use my name? Yes, 100 percent yes,” he said. “At least the occupation had a positive effect of drawing the Palestinian people together instead of dividing them. I now fear that we’re seeing a systematic effort by Hamas and its religious backers to enter every component of society.”

From Peter Hitchens’ Lattes, beach barbecues (and dodging missiles) in the world’s biggest prison camp

Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands? Once again, the word conceals more than it reveals.
In Gaza’s trapped, unequal society, a wealthy and influential few live in magnificent villas with sea views and their own generators to escape the endless power cuts.
Gaza also possesses a reasonably well-off middle class, who spend their cash in a shopping mall – sited in Treasure Street in Gaza City, round the corner from another street that is almost entirely given over to shops displaying washing machines and refrigerators.
Siege? Not exactly. What about Gaza’s ‘refugee camps’. The expression is misleading. Most of those who live in them are not refugees, but the children and grandchildren of those who fled Israel in the war of 1948.
All the other refugees from that era – in India and Pakistan, the Germans driven from Poland and the Czech lands, not to mention the Jews expelled from the Arab world – were long ago resettled.

These and similar data lead Michael Horesh to conclude (h/t Barry Rubin):

Is Gaza rich? No. It still needs the tons of daily aid, which Israel facilitates. On the other hand, a utube video from an unknown source shows beyond doubt just what multiple resources are available in wide parts of the territory.

Again from the executive summary of the Goldstone report:

589. Even if the Israeli armed forces were under fire from anti-tank missiles from Palestinian armed groups at the time, all of the information referred to above indicates that the commanders in question did not take all feasible precautions in the choice of methods and means of warfare with a view to avoiding or, in any event, to minimizing incidental civilian casualties or civilian property damage.

The recent Wikileaks revelations about Iraq though give a much different perspective. Joshua Mitnick wrote in the Christian Science Monitor:

Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli-American professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, shares the view that the volume of international criticism of Israel is out of proportion, though he departs from Ben Ari when it comes to the case of the US.

“In the US, we already have a greater understanding. They know that they are vulnerable and they will be the next in line”‘ to be accused of wartime misconduct, says Mr. Steinberg, who also runs NGO Monitor, which has criticized non-profits that criticize Israel. “If this was a fair world and there were universal human rights, then Goldstone would open up an investigation, and the United Nations would meet to investigate the allegations… There would be more Wikileaks about violations in China and Saudi Arabia.”

Or to generalize and put it into numbers, as Evelyn Gordon did:

This elicits an obvious question: if civilians routinely account for 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare, why is the world up in arms about the civilian casualty rate in last year’s Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — which, by even the most anti-Israel account, was markedly lower?

Then there’s the matter of the members of the Hamas police force. The Goldstone report found Israel’s striking of the graduation ceremony to be excessive:

To examine whether the attacks against the police were compatible with the principle of distinction between civilian and military objects and persons, the Mission analysed the institutional development of the Gaza police since Hamas took complete control of Gaza in July 2007 and merged the Gaza police with the “Executive Force” it had created after its election victory. The Mission finds that, while a great number of the Gaza policemen were recruited among Hamas supporters or members of Palestinian armed groups, the Gaza police were a civilian law-enforcement agency. The Mission also concludes that the policemen killed on 27 December 2008 cannot be said to have been taking a direct part in hostilities and thus did not lose their civilian immunity from direct attack as civilians on this basis. The Mission accepts that there may be individual members of the Gaza police that were at the same time members of Palestinian armed groups and thus combatants. It concludes, however, that the attacks against the police facilities on the first day of the armed operations failed to strike an acceptable balance between the direct military advantage anticipated (i.e. the killing of those policemen who may have been members of Palestinian armed groups) and the loss of civilian life (i.e. the other policemen killed and members of the public who would inevitably have been present or in the vicinity), and therefore violated international humanitarian law.

However it was recently reported that:

An admission by a militant named Abu Khaled, whose interview appeared in the Christian Science Monitor in its Nov. 1, 2010 edition, that “two thirds of Hamas policemen are police by day and Al Qassam by night” lends support to those who all along contended that the overwhelming majority of the police were Hamas militants. Al Qassam is the Hamas military formation which is also responsible for carrying out terrorist acts. Israel claims that at least 709 of 1166 Palestinian fatalities were combatants, approximately 61 percent. This figure includes the policemen as combatants. PCHR claims that only 236 of 1,417 fatalities were combatants, calculating 83 percent as civilians. Palestinian Policemen are described by PCHR as “non-combatants.”

More directly, those newly graduated police cadets are now acknowledged to have been terrorists.

And thought Goldstone actually makes a mention of the arbitrary killings of others by Hamas, Hamas’s procedures for executing rivals should make it clear that Goldstone’s expectation that Hamas could properly investigate itself, is bogus.

Richard Goldstone was set up as some sort of demigod. These latest details suggest that he was a hack whose main purpose was to convict and condemn Israel. It would be fair to say that Judge Goldstone’s feet are of clay.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The report by Goldstone, a South African jurist, lambasted both sides in the December-January war, which killed up to 1,387 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, but was harsher toward Israel.

The accuracy of that claim is undermined by the paucity of specific mentions of Hamas in the report.

At one point, ala OJ, Hamas actually expressed a willingness to investigate the charges against it.

Hamas authorities said on October 15 that they will investigate the allegations against them. “Although we do not agree with certain aspects of his report, we intend to act on his recommendation and to carry out our own investigation into any alleged crimes committed by members of the resistance movements in Gaza,” the Hamas-run Foreign Ministry said about the Goldstone report.

However, now, a month and a half later, Hamas claims that the report exonerates them.

Hamas second-in-command Musa Abu Marzouq said in an interview: “All paragraphs in the Goldstone report convict Israel and totally exonerate Hamas from any misconduct. For instance, the report exonerates Hamas from the accusation of using civilians as human shields and attributes this accusation to Israeli forces. Likewise, the report exonerated Hamas from all other accusations mentioned by Israel, and even when the report is dealing with the rockets which were launched from Gaza, it speaks about military groups without naming Hamas.” Translated by Jonathan D. Halevi (Al-Mashahid Al-Siyasi-UK, Arabic, 5Dec09)

Given the provenance and makeup of Goldstone’s commission, it’s hardly surprising that it reached the results it did. The point of the report was not to do away with the “culture of impunity,” but to condemn Israel. Unfortunately Judge Goldstone refuses to address substantive challenges to his report, instead cloaking himself in a mantle of self-righteousness. No doubt he will ignore this latest claim from Hamas, because Hamas was irrelevant to the commission’s goals. Its report was not flawed, it achieved its purpose – it condemned Israel and let Hamas off the hook. That is what Hamas concluded. An honest man would vigorously dispute Marzouk’s claim; but we can expect silence from Goldstone.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

There’s something horrifying about the amount of damage that a slight to one man’s ego can do. I’m well aware that there was more to the Goldstone report than that, but nevertheless it appears to me to be a factor that can’t be ignored. The fact is that, his protestations notwithstanding, it’s Goldstone who has made the controversy over this report all about him.

Well that ego has bruised again, this time by Israeli President Shimon Peres (h/t My Right Word):

Richard Goldstone, who authored the United Nations report accusing Israel of perpetrating war crimes in its Gaza offensive earlier the year, is a man devoid of any real sense of justice and is intent on harming Israel, President Shimon Peres told Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during their meeting in Brasilia on Wednesday.

“Goldstone is a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence,” Peres told his Brazilian counterpart, adding that the South African jurist “was on a one-sided mission to hurt Israel.”

Goldstone didn’t try to hide his bruised ego:

South African jurist Richard Goldstone lambasted President Shimon Peres on Thursday for a personal attack on him, which the president launched in response to a damning report he compiled on Israel’s winter offensive in Gaza.

“I would say that the President’s comments are specious and ill-befitting the Head of the State of Israel,” Goldstone said in an interview with Haaretz.

“I am content to be judged by my actions over the course of my career both in terms of my professional judicial career and my voluntary service.”

Meryl observes:

His report’s “message” has been addressed, many times, by many sources—factually—and Goldstone’s response, over and over again, is that people can’t attack him on the facts so they attack him personally. He sticks to this defense even in when he is confronted with evidence that directly contradicts his report, seeming shocked that such evidence exists. So Goldstone is either utterly disingenuous, if not outright lying—and he’s been doing this dance since the beginning. The martyr role is getting tiresome.

Since he asked for it, let’s judge the judge.

One of his most damning assessments was the commission’s account of the attack on the Maqadameh mosque.

Col. Jonathan Dahoah Halevi recently reviewed some aspects of the incident. (h/t Elder of Ziyon)

The Goldstone Committee also failed by thoroughly examining the data. If Committee members had examined the names of the Palestinians killed at the Maqadmah mosque, they would have discovered that their identities and the membership of many of them in terrorist organizations contradicted the “eyewitness” claims that there were no terrorist operatives in the area, and contradicted as well the conclusions of the Report in that respect.

Seven of the 15 Palestinians killed at the mosque were members of terrorist organizations who had participated in fighting the IDF, most of them members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military-terrorist wing, and a few of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Regarding one of them (Ahmed Abu Ita of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades), it was reported that he had gone to the Maqadmah mosque to meet “friends,” i.e., other armed terrorist operatives.

(This isn’t some sort of post facto analysis. Elder of Ziyon discovered that one of those killed was a Hamas operative prior to the release of the Goldstone report by using publicly available sources.)

Halevi notes elsewhwere that a number of the witnesses the commission to this strike were from the Silawi family, who had an agenda. (Halevi also notes there, that the questions asked of the witnesses were hardly comprehensive.) Yet the commission accepted their testimony uncritically.

The Goldstone Commission’s report is based on many omissions and distortions as shown in this case. Yet Goldstone feels:

Goldstone emphasized that his conclusion that war crimes had been committed was always intended as conditional. He still hopes that independent investigations carried out by Israel and the Palestinians will use the allegations as, he said, “a useful road map.”
…
“We couldn’t use that report as evidence at all,” Goldstone said. “But it was a useful roadmap for our investigators, for me as chief prosecutor, to decide where we should investigate. And that’s the purpose of this sort of report. If there was an independent investigation in Israel, then I think the facts and allegations referred to in our report would be a useful road map.”

Nevertheless, the report itself is replete with bold and declarative legal conclusions seemingly at odds with the cautious and conditional explanations of its author. The report repeatedly refers, without qualification, to specific violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention committed by Israel and other breaches of international law. Citing particular cases, the report determines unequivocally that Israel “violated the prohibition under customary international law” against targeting civilians. These violations, it declares, “constitute a grave breach” of the convention.

That first paragraph should be chilling. Goldstone feels that Israel is now guilty of war crimes until proven innocent. Is it any wonder that Israel’s president would attack him? Golddstone has declared Israel a pariah, Peres should not have been silent.

Goldstone’s commission – effectively accepting a mandate from the OIC – has set out impossible standards for a democracy, specifically Israel, from defending itself against terror. All of Israel’s efforts to protect civilians were arbitrarily deemed insufficient.

So according to Goldstone, how would Israeli defend itself? And why does he fear debating Alan Dershowitz?

Like another Richard he seems unable to take criticism. Unfortunately he’s so convinced of his own righteousness that he won’t just go away for a few years.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Goldstone also revealed a personal aspect. “I was afraid to enter Gaza. I had nightmares that Hamas would kidnap me and that the Israelis would rejoice,” he said.

Judge Goldstone has been maintaining that he saw no sign of pressure exerted by Hamas on any of his witnesses. And yet he felt menaced? Goldstone was in Gaza under UN auspices and presumably there temporarily. What of the people who wouldn’t have the freedom to leave? Wouldn’t they fear kidnapping or worse, especially if they didn’t give Goldstone the responses that Hamas wanted them to?

But the second part of the remark is telling too. If he thought he was being fair why would Israelis rejoice at his kidnapping? I think that he’s strongly suggesting that he knew the verdict before the investigation. My Right Word noticed the same thing.

The Boston Globe also covered the debate.

Goldstone said the forum allowed him a chance to explain the substance of his findings “and avoid the personal and ad hominem attacks that have marked the debate on the report to date.” Goldstone, a former South African constitutional court justice who is himself a Jew, said much of the criticism of the report was based on false premises.

For example, he pointed out that many complaints say the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to Goldstone was biased because it called only for an investigation of illegal Israeli acts. But Goldstone said he had refused to accept that mandate precisely because of its bias, and he had agreed to take part only when he was given the chance to rewrite the terms of the investigation.

He said the revised language called for a probe into the conduct by both sides in the three-week war, which raged from late December last year to mid-January and took 13 Israeli lives and those of more than 1,300 Palestinians.

Yes, I know he was hurt by the ad hominem attacks, But in order to argue that his opponents failed to critique the substance of his report, starting off with a distortion like that, wasn’t a good idea. Yes, Goldstone purported to change the mandate of his mission. But as Rep. Howard Berman’s revised resolution condemning Goldstone points out, the changes Goldstone “insisted” upon had no legal force.

Whereas Justice Richard Goldstone, who chaired the `United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,’ told the then-President of the UNHRC, Nigerian Ambassador Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, that he intended to broaden the mandate of the Mission to include “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after,” a phrase that, according to Justice Goldstone, was intended to allow him to investigate Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians;

Whereas Ambassador Uhomoibhi issued a statement on April 3, 2009, that endorsed part of Justice Goldstone’s proposed broadened mandate but deleted the phrase “before, during, and after,” and added inflammatory anti-Israeli language;

Whereas a so-called broadened mandate was never officially endorsed by a plenary meeting of the UNHRC, neither in the form proposed by Justice Goldstone nor in the form proposed by Ambassador Uhomoibhi;

And then Goldstone got off into his “collective punishment” argument. Funny, but having 1 million Israelis in missile range didn’t qualify.

The Globe also synopsizes Dr. Gold’s repsonse:

Gold – who has three degrees from Columbia University, including a doctorate, and now runs the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs – answered that while the report did criticize Hamas, it concentrated more intensively on alleged Israeli wrongdoing, when it was Hamas units that hid among civilians and all but ensured they would end up in the crossfire.

“There’s no question there was enormous damage in Gaza,” he said. “But why doesn’t Hamas appear as a responsible party for what happened? Who booby-trapped the buildings in Gaza? Who launched an eight-year war against Israel? Who built tunnels under people’s homes? The Hamas political leadership, which seems to get off the hook.”

Israel Matzav was there and blogged the event. He notes that Dr. Gold rebutted the report’s finding that Israel didn’t make sufficient efforts to alert civilians of impending attacks.

They said that they would hit any house that stored rockets, but sent multiple warnings to the civilian population. They entered into radio transmissions, leaflets were dropped, and then there was an attempt to directly contact families through cell phones or home phones. He put up a message in Arabic with an English translation.

How do we know that they received those warnings? Here’s a Hamas TV clip and how Hamas tried to keep the civilians among the military. (I haven’t seen these before – this is impressive). He said that the Goldstone Report wanted proof that the Palestinians were forced to be human shields – that’s an impossible standard to meet. He shows the famous video that I have of Fathi Hamad telling a rally that they must act as human shields and how they desire death. There’s no separation between Hamas and the ‘armed elements’ that fight Israel. He talked about Israel redirecting missiles while putting up a slide about the Palestinian police station strike.

How did Judge Goldstone respond to such presentations? Elsewhere, Israel Matzav observes:

Overall, I really felt that Dore Gold won the debate. That assessment is based on the audience reaction and on the comprehensiveness of his presentation. Goldstone seemed dumbfounded at the slides and video that Gold produced.

That’s pretty incredible. In this day and age, to learn anything of what Dr. Gold presented would have required a computer, an internet connection and a browser. But Judge Goldstone and his confederates couldn’t be bothered. If it didn’t fit their conclusions, they wouldn’t seek it out.

Courtesy of One Jerusalem here is Goldstone:

and here is Gold

In the end it’s impossible to escape the impression that Goldstone relishes playing the put upon prophet who only tells the truth, no matter the cost. However looking at his commission’s work and his smug self-righteousness you can only conclude that he cynically cherry picked his information in order to support his belief in Israel’s guilt rather than attempting to determine the truth. Impartiality was not a quality that Goldstone’s commission possessed.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Al Jazeera: The UN’s Goldstone report has been in the headlines in the past few weeks – not without controversy – and has brought to light the conduct of the Israelis and Hamas during the war on Gaza earlier in the year. Does the OIC see this as a step forward in recognising what transpired during that war and in bringing the plight of the Palestinians to the fore on an international scale?

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu: Let me first start by completing the story of the history of the Goldstone report. What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.

On January 3, during the attacks on Gaza, we convened the executive committee of the OIC on a ministerial level. It was decided that the OIC group in Geneva should ask the Human Rights Council to convene and consider the possibility of sending a fact-finding mission to Gaza.

The OIC was instrumental in getting through this resolution and thanks to the good offices of Ms Pilay, the UN high commissioner, that she formed this fact-finding mission headed by Judge Goldstone.

On October 8, I visited Geneva and had a meeting with OIC ambassadors and the high commissioner. We revived the process again and the Goldstone report has been approved by the rights council.

Now as for the prospects of the Goldstone report, I think the first thing to mention here is that the acceptance and approval of the report by the UN’s human rights council is itself testimony of the world’s public opinion about what happened in Gaza.

This report has certain operative paragraphs which aim to determine who is responsible for the massacres and destruction – illegally and in flagrant violation of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.

I think now the OIC and the international community should work hand-in-hand to implement the proposals made in the Goldstone report.

The OIC, it should be remembered, opposed the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. In other words, in the view of the OIC international law is war by other means. It is an instrument to be used for its members’ benefit or ignored if inconvenient.

The Washington Post editorialized at the time:

To be sure, some human rights groups have alleged crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza. But, according to Palestinian accounts, 1,409 people were killed during the offensive, of whom a substantial number were armed Hamas fighters. In contrast, the United Nations has reported more than 300,000 civilian deaths in Darfur as a result of the genocidal campaign sponsored by Mr. Bashir. Scores of villages have been systematically burned, and thousands of women systematically raped. Mr. Bashir responded to the ICC’s arrest warrant last month by expelling international aid groups from Darfur. The result has been growing food and water shortages and new epidemics, according to the Enough Project.

Regardless of this blatant hypocrisy, Israel Matzav points out:

But the key figure in this article has nothing to do with Israel: The OIC is the second largest intergovernmental body after the UN. So long as internationalists (like Barack Obama) try to govern the world on the basis of ‘one country, one vote,’ there will always be an automatic majority against Israel and Jews everywhere.

So if someone has ambitions in the milieu of international organizations, playing along is a great way to get ahead. And who better than a Jew, someone who could provide a fig leaf to this ugly conspiracy to vilify Israel?

A number of reports on the Goldstone commission describe Judge Goldstone, as “respected,” but perhaps “ambitious” might be a better description. South African ex-pat Douglas Davis explains (h/t/ Barry Rubin):

‘Oh yes,’ says a former senior colleague who was close to Goldstone for many years. ‘We believed he saw himself as a future secretary-general of the United Nations. At the time Boutros Boutros-Ghali held the post, so it seemed a logical progression for Goldstone to become Richard Richard.’

It might appear unkind to doubt the purity of Goldstone’s motives in joining the human rights industry, poignantly as Israel’s excoriator-in-chief. But he is, it seems, regarded by colleagues who knew him well as an opportunist. And the record suggests they might be right. There is nothing in Goldstone’s biography to imply he was destined to become a hero of the people, let alone a human rights champion. During his career he has executed some canny intellectual and ideological manoeuvres, leveraging past accomplishments to propel himself further up the pole of seniority and celebrity.

While many of his countrymen were fighting against apartheid, Goldstone was loftily administering South Africa’s laws from the bench of the Supreme Court. The impression that he was at least ‘friendly’ towards the Nationalists gained weight when he was elevated to the appellate division.

That’s not to say that he didn’t adapt when he saw change coming.

Then, just as apartheid was reaching tipping point, Goldstone jumped. He became chairman of the South African Standing Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, a position he used to publicise the evils of apartheid and promote a new African National Congress-friendly persona (he refused to investigate ‘public violence and intimidation’ by the ANC).

Goldstone was on the road to redemption. With Mandela in power, he slid seamlessly onto the bench of the new South Africa’s highest court. Yet this was still not the summit of his ambitions. He was ready to burst onto the international stage, and in August 1994, he was appointed chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He had become a global brand.

So if Judge Goldstone is really Richard Richard, everything makes sense. Accepting the mission formulated by the OIC, is one sure way to get ahead in the world of unelected international politicians. However many times Goldstone piously claims that it his special responsibility as a Jew to investigate war crimes -

Judge Richard Goldstone, who headed the UN commission that investigated Operation Cast Lead said that he is saddened that Jews around the world feel that because he himself is a Jew that he should not investigate Israel. Goldstone said that as a Jew, he feels that he has a larger responsibility than most to investigate war crimes.

- in accepting his mandate from the UNHRC and OIC, he has violated tenets of Judaism such as judging fairly and standing up to a corrupt majority.

The latest revelations show that the point of the Goldstone Commission was to vilify Israel. Goldstone’s accepting of it had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with advancement.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

But the Gazans are living in crushing misery: The New York Times is calling Rafah a “shopping mecca,” even as Richard Goldstone, HRW, and the EU and UN insist that Gazans are starving, miserable, and oppressed. Cognitive dissonance? No. The narrative.

It’s on. It’s off. It’s on. It’s off. No, it’s Iran. Yesterday, the news was full of the Iranians accepting the draft agreement to let us enrich their nuclear fuel for them. Today, Iran did their usual thing and said, “What? We never said we’d accept that.” If Iran was a child, I’d put it in permanent time-out.

Every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples referred to above in the elaboration of the present principle of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against, and resistance to, such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of their right to self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and to receive support in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter.

About this declaration Dr. Kirkpatrick observed:

With this declaration, the General Assembly, more clearly and unambiguously than ever, took the position not only that “peoples” had rights superior to those of member states, but that states resisting the rights of “peoples” could themselves become a “threat to peace.” The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the “sovereign inviolability” of states to the struggle of “peoples” against “colonialism” and put important new restrictions on the right of states to self-defense.
The U.S. and the other Western nations joined in these resolutions without much thought, dis-
missing them as without significance outside the halls of the United Nations. This fundamentally
frivolous attitude ignored the cumulative impact of such resolutions in focusing attention, in ex-
pressing what is widely considered to be “world opinion,” and, finally, in having an impact on
international law.

And so began a slow process of allowing terror against Israel and restricting Israel’s right to defend itself.

It’s no wonder that Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu has embarked on an effort to change the laws of war.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu directed the relevant ministries on Tuesday to look into ways of launching an international initiative to change the laws of war to deal with the modern-day scourge of terrorism.

This new initiative comes fast on the heels of the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes for its military operation in the Gaza Strip against Hamas earlier this year.

Needless to say Judge Goldstone is not impressed.

When asked about Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s initiative to change the international law to allow states to fight terrorist groups, Goldstone said Israel was apparently “clutching at straws.”

“I think it’s sad… Israel is clutching at straws. International law can’t be changed just because one side doesn’t like the laws of war,” Goldstone said.

“I think it’s wrong, very unfortunate and inappropriate,” Goldstone said of the Israeli response to the report compiled by the UN fact-finding commission he led.

Does Goldstone really believe this? The purpose of his mission, he has said, was to end the “culture of impunity.” But if he effectively binds states from legally responding to terror attacks, isn’t he granting impunity to the terrorists? And the problem with his assertion is that international law has been changed, as noted above, to favor terrorists. International law wouldn’t be changed because Israel doesn’t like it; but because it’s been perverted for decades.

In the “Lawfare pioneer,” Petra Petra Marquardt-Bigman writes about the career of Michel Massih. who is making it his goal to hamstring Israel.

Mr. Massih’s quest to bring Israeli officials to trial is doubtless motivated by a principled concern for human rights and international law. However, Massih has also acknowledged that his goal is “to end the impunity that Israel has enjoyed. The field of freedom for Israel will narrow. More and more of these warrants will be applied for. And people will become much more aware of the difficulties of waging war in this unlawful way. Frankly, all you need is one case – one case which sticks.”

But Massih is involved in other activities too:

It seems that by now, at the age of 59, Massih has additional priorities: according to his profile, “he is advising the Syrian government and military officials who are being investigated by the United Nations Security Council over the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon; and he is advising the president of Sudan, Omar al Bashir, who has been accused of presiding over genocide in Darfur by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Which brings us to this observation:

How much more absurd can it get? Imagine the scenario: the man who does his professional best to help Sudan’s president avoid being held responsible for the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of his own citizens hauls Israel’s defense minister before a British court to accuse him of conducting a limited military campaign that was necessitated by the fact that a terrorist group, hiding in a densely populated urban area among the civilians it rules, used this area as a launching pad for thousands of rockets endangering some one million Israeli civilians.

Goldstone is not as reprehensible as Massih. Goldstone thinks that by applying the law as he sees it to both sides he can effect some sort of world peace. But his methods would only apply to the side that cared about international law. Massih, on the other hand, openly sides with the bad actors. Still the effects of both their efforts will be the same: to stymie legitimate governments from fighting terror.

UPDATE: I’ve corrected a few errors and omissions.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

One of the reasons the report has caused such an uproar in Israel is its author’s background. Goldstone is Jewish and has supported a number of Israeli causes, including serving as a trustee of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The narrative continues. It isn’t the report’s many inaccuracies. It isn’t the refusal of the Goldstone Commission to take Israeli information into account. It isn’t the Goldstone Commission’s ignoring evidence that counters Palestinian “eyewitness” claims (many of these “eyewitnesses” were actually members of Hamas, certainly not unbiased in any way) about war crimes. It even refuses to take photographic evidence into account. The report may very well bring war crimes trials of Israelis to the Hague, but that’s not the main reason why Israel is in an uproar. No. It’s because Goldstone is Jewish, and pro-Israel.

I told you just two days ago that this meme is going to catch on. The AP is working it to death. Other media apparatuses will as well. It’s the reverse of saying that critics of Israel’s critics (that would be people like me) jump too quickly on the anti-Semite accusation. Because if you can say, “See, a Jew led the commission that wrote this report, therefore, it has to be true and right, because he’s not anti-Israel,” what you have done is what the magician calls “misdirection”: Watch my left hand as my right hand palms the handkerchief. As long as the media can proclaim falsely that the report must be true because a Jew wrote it, and ignore the many factual errors and outright lies, the report will steamroller its way to the ICC.

Step one is tomorrow, at the UN Security Council debate. We shall see if the Obama administration intends to keep the words he spoke in front of AIPAC while he was a candidate, and veto any resolution against Israel over this flawed, biased, anti-Israel atrocity of a report.

712. In the morning of 5 January 2009, around 6.30 – 7 a.m., Wa’el al-Samouni, Saleh al-Samouni, Hamdi Maher al-Samouni, Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni and Iyad al-Samouni, stepped outside the house to collect firewood. Rashad Helmi al-Samouni remained standing next to the door of the house. Saleh al-Samouni has pointed out to the Mission that from where the Israeli soldiers were positioned on the roofs of the houses they could see the men clearly. Suddenly, a projectile struck next to the five men, close to the door of Wa’el’s house and killed Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni and, probably, Hamdi Maher al-Samouni.403 The other men managed to retreat to the house. Within about five minutes, two or three more projectiles had struck the house directly. Saleh and Wa’el al-Samouni stated at the public hearing that these were missiles launched from Apache helicopters. The Mission has not been able to determine the type of munition used.

In additions to those killed part of the testimony accepted by the Goldstone commission is that after the fight Israel did not allow rescue workers to the area for two days. Later, in giving its “factual findings”, the Goldstone commission writes:

724. The Mission also reviewed the submission it received from an Israeli researcher, arguing generally that statements from Palestinian residents claiming that no fighting took place in their neighbourhood are disproved by the accounts Palestinian armed groups give of the armed operations. The Mission notes that, as far as the al-Samouni neighbourhood is concerned, this report would appear to support the statements of the witnesses that there was no combat.411

725. Regarding the attack on Ateya al-Samouni’s house, the Mission finds that the account given to it by Faraj al-Samouni is corroborated by the soldiers’ testimonies published by the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence. The assault on Ateya al-Samouni’s house appears to be the procedure of the Israeli armed forces referred to as a “wet entry”. A “wet entry” is, according to the soldier’s explanation, “missiles, tank fire, machine-gun fire into the house, grenades. Shoot
as we enter a room. The idea was that when we enter a house, no one there could fire at us.” his
procedure was, according to the soldier, thoroughly practised during recent Israeli armed forces manoeuvres.412

Paragraph 724 shows that evidence to the contrary was arbitrarily disregarded and 725 shows that “corroboration” came from a highly suspect source. Israel Matzav laid out the case against Breaking the Silence here and Honest Reporting had more here.

According to Goldstone then Israelis soldiers arbitrarily attacked civilians and then unconscionably refused to allow help to reach them for two days. Of course, if the accounts of the armed groups, so casually dismissed by Goldstone are true, than the attack on the civilians was, in fact, a battle and the reason no help was allowed for two days was because there were still enemy combatants in the area.

Col. Jonathan D. Halevi summarizes the reports that the Goldstone commission rejected.

The al-Samouni family members firmly adhere to the version that there was no Palestinian military activity near the house and that the nearest military activity was at least a mile away, and that, they claimed, was limited to firing rockets into Israeli territory, not close fighting.

However, the official Palestinian Islamic Jihad version is completely different. In a statement issued on January 5, Palestinian Islamic Jihad said that on the evening of January 4 its fighters had fired an R[PG] from the Zeitun neighborhood at an Israeli tank and had opened fire at IDF soldiers. At 1:20 a.m. on January 5, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad engineering unit detonated a 50-kg. bomb near an Israeli tank not far from the Al-Tawhid mosque near the house of Wail al-Samouni. At 6:30 a.m., the engineering unit detonated a bomb near an IDF infantry unit operating near the Al-Tawhid mosque in the Zeitun neighborhood.23 According to another official Palestinian Islamic Jihad statement, one of its operatives was killed in fighting nearby. His name was Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni.

The significance of the foregoing is that the four men who left the al-Samouni house in the early hours of the morning, among them Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni, did not necessarily do so for the innocent reasons given by their family. They might have gone out for a reason connected to the military activities taking place in the same area between Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist operatives and IDF forces. Palestinian Islamic Jihad reported that operatives of its military-terrorist wing, the Al-Quds Battalions, “surprised the occupation forces and attacked them from behind their lines, and there was a fierce battle in the southern part of the Zeitun neighborhood.” Another report, given “exclusively to the Muslim Brotherhood website,” detailed Palestinian Islamic Jihad activities in the Zeitun neighborhood on January 5: “According to eye-witnesses, the fighters of the resistance waited and barricaded themselves in secure locations, remaining in places inhabited by civilians, from which they left to carry out planned attacks against the forces of the Zionist occupier.”

These accounts have the advantage that the are detailed and contemporaneous. However they show that fighting was going on in the area of the al-Samouni house contrary to the testimony that Goldstone accepted uncritically.

The way this finding was reported was also problematic. Colum Lynch of the Washington Post – without mentioning the claims to the contrary – reported it like this:

The panel’s findings corroborate reports, including a detailed account in The Washington Post, that Israeli forces shelled the crowded home of the Palestinian Wael al-Samuni family in the neighborhood of Zaytoun on Jan. 5, killing 21 civilians, and prevented international relief agencies from tending to the wounded.

Actually the Goldstone commission didn’t corroborate the newspaper reports. It reached the same conclusion as the newspapers after considering the same limited testimony.

Elder of Ziyon concludes

…this doesn’t mean that Goldstone is incorrect concerning the immediate area of the Samouni house, but it does indicate that the commission ignored easily-available data that could indicate that their implication that no fighting was taking place in Al-Zaytoun is wrong.

It’s not just the Goldstone commission. As I observed above the Washington Post didn’t consider contrary evidence either.

After Philip Karsenty prevailed in court over Charles Enderlin, I was disappointed that no major newspaper covered it. (The New York Times covered it in its blog, but not on paper.) But the Karsenty verdict clearly should have raised questions about the way the media reports on the Middle East. Clearly they didn’t care about getting the story right.

Clearly that’s still a problem.

Previously: Goldstone Standard.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

NOTE: I’ve edited the original slightly for clarity.

The situation in the wake of the Goldstone Report is reminiscent, to some degree, of the international uproar that erupted over the building of the security barrier, particularly the nonbinding ruling of the International Court of Justice demanding that Israel tear down all parts of it that encroached on the West Bank and compensate the Palestinians.

There were no practical implications regarding the judgment, but Israel suffered severely in world public opinion. Barring the unlikely scenario in which the Security Council agrees to turn to the ICC to investigate Israelis on charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity, the damage in this case will be of a similar scope.

And Ron ben Yishai looks at the military implications of the report:

Just as grave is the damage on the legal-military front. The report explicitly rules that the combat methods and armaments utilized by the IDF even prior to Operation Cast Lead, as well as during the campaign, are illegitimate, violate the Geneva Convention, and constitute a war crime. Should the conclusions be adopted by the Security Council and UN secretary general, this will constitute overwhelming de-legitimization to the methods and arms planned by the IDF for future combat should the Israeli home front be attacked with missiles from Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza.

Hence, this marks a first-rate achievement for terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas; it may encourage them to keep using the civilian population as a human shield.

Judith Apter Klinghoffer makes a similar argument.

Ben Yishai, also notes that this ruling, if followed might well tie America’s hands when it comes to fighting its war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This is something that the Obama administration needs to take into account when measuring its response to the commission. This is a point emphasized by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren:

This is an independent judiciary of a democratic country. I think that, once you start establishing the precedent that democratic countries can’t investigate themselves, I think you’ve got a problem.

I think this report creates a problem not just for Israel, but for all free democracies in the world. It’s a victory for terror. It is a major setback for any country, democratic country that is having to face war against an un-uniformed terrorist organization in a densely populated civilian area. I don’t think the United States would like to see a similar report mounted against its conduct of its operations in Afghanistan.

Elder of Ziyon points out specific problems with the report too. For example he notes that the Goldstone Commission made claims that betrayed an ignorance of international law. In other cases he produced videos that contradicted assertions made by the commission.

Melanie Phillips takes aim at other specific assertions of the Commission such as:

Then there is Goldstone’s treatment of the mortar shelling of al-Fakhura junction in Jabalya next to an UNRWA school. This was the site of the infamous accusation by the UN that Israel had shelled the school itself, killing more than 40 civilians sheltering there. The UN eventually admitted that this was entirely false and the school had not been shelled at all. Israel had instead returned mortar fire at the street next to the school from where firing was still continuing, killing a small number of Hamas terrorists and an even smaller number of civilians who were standing near to the Hamas mortar position.

But Goldstone concludes:

Par 688… The Mission notes that the attack may have been in response to a mortar attack from an armed Palestinian group but considers the credibility of Israel’s position damaged by the series of inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies.

So the fact that Israel was the victim of an incendiary libel by the UN, which said falsely that its school had been hit and inflated the number of casualties — a lie that went round the world inciting hysteria and violence against Israel and Jews — is totally ignored; instead Israel is pilloried for its (undoubtedly) chaotic response as it gradually pieced together what had actually happened.

Reading a number of Goldstone’s statements, it’s clear that he needed to reach certain conclusions and tailored his pronouncements on international law accordingly – whether or not these were correct reading of the law.

Unfortunately, in reports in the MSM, none of these doubts are raised. For example the Washington Post reports:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the fact-finding mission lacked legitimacy because its mandate was biased against Israel and because it disregarded Hamas’s strategy of using Palestinian civilians as cover during war. Israel refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s panel or to allow its researchers to interview witnesses in southern Israel or Gaza. Researchers, however, were allowed into Gaza through Egypt.

This is a general rebuttal. The Post’s reporter would not have had to dig too deeply to find problematic claims made in the report. Instead he took his role to be that of a mimeograph machine rather than a reporter.

The New York Times does worse:

The Israeli government said it was studying the report, but Gabriela Shalev, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, quickly rejected it, saying it failed to take into account that the operation was in “self-defense.”

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said it had refused to co-operate with the mission, calling it biased from the start.

In Gaza, a spokesman for Hamas said it fired the rockets at Israel to try to defend itself. “We did not intentionally target civilians,” said Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas adviser. “We were targeting military bases, but the primitive weapons make mistakes.”

Palestinian armed groups have launched about 8,000 rockets and mortars into southern Israel since 2001. During the conflict, the report said, they killed 3 Israeli civilians and a soldier, and injured over 900 people.

I suppose that last paragraph might have been meant as a rebuttal to Yousef’s claim, but an explicit rebuttal that Hamas considers all Israelis to be military targets was in order. Furthermore the Times reports:

The panel rejected the Israeli version of events surrounding several of the most contentious episodes of the war.

Israel’s mortar shelling near a United Nations-run school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, which was sheltering some 1,300 people, killed 35 and wounded up to 40 people, the report said.

The investigation did not exclude the possibility that Israeli forces were responding to fire from an armed Palestinian group, as Israel claimed, but said that this and similar attacks “cannot meet the test of what a reasonable commander would have determined to be an acceptable loss of civilian life for the military advantage sought.”

But on what grounds did Goldstone dismiss the Israeli claims? As Melanie Phillips pointed out, the initial claims against Israel – made by UN personnel – were disproved. So Goldstone accepted a libel instead of the results of an investigation.

There’s more than a little chutzpah in Goldstone’s recommendation then, that Israel must conduct an investigation within six months. Given the standards that he based much of his report on, the only legitimate investigation will reach the same conclusions he did, regardless of the facts.

Goldstone’s daugher pathetically claims that her father is a Zionist, but if his concern for Israeli Jews is so great why was he uninterested in testimony about the terror they were under? More generally why, then, did he accept a mandate to defame Israel that was so blatant the even Mary Robinson refused the job?

Daled Amos and Israelly Cool! provide roundups of critiques of the report.

Crossposted on Yourish.