Judge Richard Goldstone has repeatedly referred to his commission’s finding 36 incidents during Israel’s war against Hamas to investigate. Augean Stables has studied the report and identified the 36 incidents. The Augean Stables observes:
In other words, we didn’t look specifically into incidents of Hamas using human shields, didn’t listen to witnesses who, taking that information into account, found the IDF took remarkable risks to avoid hitting civilians. Instead, they chose 36 incidents to investigate which “appear to represent situations where there was little or no military justification for what happened,” and nonethess, found Israel guilty of targeting civilians. If Moyers had done his homework, he’d have noticed the absurdity of Goldstone’s claim.
Indeed, the FFM, even as it only tangentially considered evidence of Hamas’ military strategy of human shields, consistently dismissed any evidence to the contrary. The trope “The Mission found no evidence… did not find any evidence… for illegitimate behavior by Hamas and other Palestinian combatants runs through the report like a scarlet thread:
In other words the Goldstone commission chose the incidents to investigate, specifically because it determined that those incidents would demonstrate that Israel committed war crimes. And of course any incidents that would show that Hamas committed war crimes was ignored.
Yaacov Lozowick comments at the end:
One of the strangest things about the report, to my mind, is that the fact finders never made even the slightest attempt to figure out what the Palestinian fighters – Hamas or Islamic Jihad – were doing. At least in the case of Israel, they repeatedly asked; when Israel didn’t respond they invented what they thought might be reasonable answers (they weren’t). When it comes to the other side, however: nothing. They were in Gaza! They could have sought all sorts of facts. But no: for all the report has to say, there were evil Israelis, there were lots of poor civilians, and here and there, rarely, there were unidentified people shooting rockets. Was their any Gazan semi-military force facing the Israelis? Taking action? Planning attacks or fending off Israeli ones?
But really, it’s worse than that. It’s not just the Goldstone & co. cherry picked the incidents they investigated, they even cherry picked within those incidents.
This is from the famous Forward Goldstone article:
Some have challenged the report’s version. These critics raise questions as to whether the Samounis’ neighborhood was fully pacified when the Israeli Army shelled the house, as the report contends. Jonathan Halevi, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israel army, submitted material to the commission citing accounts of combat by Palestinian armed groups that he argued disproved many assertions made in the report.
The Goldstone report made use of Halevi’s material, finding that they actually supported Goldstone’s own findings. But Halevi faulted Goldstone for failing to look into similar material freely available elsewhere on-line.
In the material Halevi sent to the commission about the Samouni incident, he focused exclusively on the military activity of Hamas in the area at the time in question. He found there was none and Goldstone cited this in the report as evidence that fighting had ended. But Halevi said that other information–specifically, the Web sites of other militant groups–would have made it clear that another militia, Islamic Jihad, was operating in the area on the morning in question.
In fact here’s some of the information that Halevi gathered:
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 RGP 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.
This means that the Goldstone commission used Halevi’s information and
1) ignored his evidence of terror activity in the area – used it to confirm that Hamas was not operating in the area but ignoring that Islamic Jihad was –
and
2) accepted testimony from compromised witnesses as factual.
So when Goldstone told the Forward that his commission’s report would not prove anything in a court of law, he was being modest. In a court of law, as opposed to a kangaroo court such as the UNHRC, he would be guilty of suborning perjury and tampering with evidence.
It would be wrong to say that the Goldstone commission’s report is flawed. If it were flawed, it would suggest an element of good faith. But the conclusions of the report are exactly the ones its originators’ intended. The Goldstone commission was convened not to uncover the truth, but to convict Israel. The way that the commission operated by cherry picking the incidents it investigated and the evidence it accepted ensured that result.
Congress was correct in repudiating it.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
