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Author of U.N. report accusing Israel backtracks

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Author of Israel-Hamas report: Would reconsider findings
By the CNN Wire Staff
April 2, 2011 10:05 p.m. EDT

Author of Israel-Hamas report: Would reconsider findings - CNN.com


(CNN) -- The chairman of a U.N. mission whose report accused Israel of "actions amounting to war crimes" during its fight against Hamas says he would have reached different conclusions if the Israeli military had been more forthcoming and if he had known the results of subsequent investigations.

"If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document," wrote Richard Goldstone, a former South African jurist, in a Washington Post op-ed column Friday.

Israel, which has long been critical of the conclusions presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council on its war against Hamas forces in Gaza in 2008-09, on Saturday called for the body to cancel the findings.

"Everything we said has proven to be true," said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Israel did not intentionally harm civilians, its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while the Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything. The fact that Goldstone backtracked must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all."

There was no immediate reaction from Hamas.

Goldstone's report, issued in September 2009, said both Israel and Hamas likely committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009.

Israeli investigations found cases involving individual soldiers, but the intentional targeting of civilians by Israel was not a "matter of policy," Goldstone now writes.

Israel launched the offensive against Gaza militants in response to ongoing firing of rockets against southern Israeli towns.

The U.N. Human Rights Council, which assigned Goldstone and others to the fact-finding mission, approved the controversial report, which focused more on alleged war crimes by Israel.

Israel later provided the United Nations with a report justifying its actions. Israel said it faced "asymmetric conflicts" and blamed "militants operating from within and behind civilian areas" for placing civilians at risk.

In his column, Goldstone cites a subsequent report by a U.N. committee of independent experts, which found Israel investigated more than 400 allegations of misconduct while Hamas has "not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel."

"That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying -- its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets," Goldstone wrote Friday.

Goldstone said Israel should have conducted proceedings in a public forum and been more cooperative during his panel's investigation.

"Israel's lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants," Goldstone wrote in the Washington Post article, adding Israeli has concluded few of its investigations.

Asked about whether the Israeli government should have cooperated with the Goldstone commission from the start, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Saturday the government did not want to set a precedent for bodies it considers hostile to interfere in government decision-making.

Hamas, Goldstone said, continues to fire rockets and mortar rounds at civilian targets in southern Israel and should be condemned by the Human Rights Council.

The judge wrote of military commanders "making difficult battlefield decisions" and that he is confident Israel is appropriately investigating the deaths of 29 members of one family. "The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack.

"Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn't negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes," Goldstone wrote.

Goldstone said since the 2009 report, Israel Defense Forces instituted new procedures for protecting civilians, limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights put the death toll in the war at 1,419, and said that 1,167 of those were "noncombatants." The Israeli military released its own figures, claiming 1,166 people were killed and that 60 percent of those were "terror operatives."

In 2009, when the Goldstone Report came out, Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to the United Nations, called it professional and unbiased.

"This report should not be another report to just document and archive," Khraishi said. "My people will not forgive this council if they let these criminals go unpunished."

But the United States, which along with with the European Union considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization, has contended the report was "deeply flawed."

In February 2010, Alejandro Wolff, U.S. deputy representative to the United Nations, criticized the report and "its unbalanced focus on Israel, the negative inferences it draws about Israel's intentions and actions, its failure to deal adequately with the asymmetrical nature of the Gaza conflict, and its failure to assign appropriate responsibility to Hamas for deliberately targeting civilians and basing itself and its operations in heavily civilian-populated urban areas."

Speaking Saturday to Israel's Channel 2, Israel's Liberman said, "I want to congratulate Goldstone's new conclusions, but I am not surprised by them. We knew the truth, and we had no doubt that it would eventually come out."
 
Jeffrey Goldberg:
This is as shocking as it is unexpected: the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, who excoriated Israel for allegedly committing premeditated crimes against civilians in Gaza -- contributing, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state -- now says, well, Israel didn't actually set out to target Palestinian civilians, unllike Hamas, whose plainly-apparent goal was to murder Israeli civilians. It is not clear, reading Goldstone's mea culpa in The Washington Post, that he fully understands the consequences of his work...Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.

It is truly astonishing that a man brought up in the Jewish tradition, which considers false and hurtful words to be a form of murder, and in the Western legal tradition, which presumes innocence until proof of guilt is established, could issue a report like the report Judge Goldstone issued.

And one more point: We now have a situation in which the founder of Human Rights Watch has denounced his organization for spreading falsehoods about Israeli actions in the Gaza war, and in which the author of the United Nations report condemning Israel now condemns his own work. Who is going to go next?
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And from The Jerusalem Post:
How dramatic the about-face. And how terrible that it was necessitated.

How tragic, that is, that Goldstone so misplaced his moral compass in the first place as to have produced a report that has caused such irreversible damage to Israel’s good name. Tragic least of all forthe utterly discredited Goldstone himself, and most of all for our unfairly besmirched armed forces and the country they were putting their lives on the line to honorably defend against a ruthless, murderous, terrorist government in Gaza.

The “if I had know then what I know now” defense Goldstone invokes to try to justify his perfidy is typically flimsy, of course.

Sanctimonious even now, Goldstone complains about Israel’s “lack of cooperation with our investigation.” But as he knows full well, Israel could not possibly have formally cooperated with his inquiry, which had been constructed by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council with the precise intention of blackening Israel’s name, legitimizing its enemies and curtailing its capacity to defend itself in future conflicts – such as the one Israel may have to fight quite soon if the current upsurge in Hamas rocket fire continues.

To have formally subjected itself to examination by his committee and the institutionally biased UN Human Rights Council that had formed it – a bias which Goldstone now acknowledges in his article – would merely have given his work greater purported credibility.

Notwithstanding that absent formal cooperation, however, the truth about what happened in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 – the truth that Goldstone now disingenuously claims to have discovered only after he filed his malicious indictment of the IDF and of Israel – was readily available to him at the time.

Israel did informally make the necessary information available to his committee in the shape of detailed reports on what had unfolded. And open sources, honestly evaluated, left no doubt that Hamas was the provocateur, that Hamas was deliberately placing Palestinians in harm’s way, that Hamas was lying about the proportion of combatants among the Gaza dead. Open sources also left no doubt that the IDF – far from deliberately targeting civilians; the bitter accusation at the heart of Goldstone’s report – was doing more than most any military force has ever done to minimize civilian deaths, even as it sought to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and pick out the terrorists who had been firing relentlessly into Israel’s residential areas.

Only now, 18 months after he submitted his incendiary accusations against Israel, has Goldstone brought himself to acknowledge what a fair-minded investigation would have established from the start – that the IDF emphatically did not seek to kill civilians in Gaza. As he puts it in the simple phrase that should reverberate inside every foreign parliament and every human rights organization that rushed to demonize Israel: “Civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Risibly, Goldstone asserts that his report’s “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.”

In truth, the only reasonable conclusion that an honest investigation could possibly have drawn – given the evidence available, given the Hamas track record and given the IDF’s moral tradition – was that Israel had not intentionally killed Palestinian civilians. But, again, his was no honest investigation.

Unfortunately, Goldstone’s “reconsideration” will not garner a thousandth of the publicity or have a thousandth of the impact that his original, baseless accusations against Israel drew. Governments – including, to what should be their abiding shame, self-styled friends of Israel in Europe and beyond who failed to vote against this report – will not rush to deliver the apology they owe our government and our soldiers.

They will not rush to recalibrate their policies.

They will not now rush to issue statements expressing their confidence in Israel’s capacity to properly investigate allegations of misdoings by its military, even though the man who had previously given cover for their criticisms has now reversed himself and penned an article endorsing Israel’s processes for self-investigation.

The statesmen and the NGOs that savaged us, using the Goldstone Report as their “proof,” will not now, prompted by Goldstone’s reversal, ratchet up their criticisms of Hamas. They will not now express their outrage at the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to exploit the Goldstone Report to harm Israel – a key milestone on the PA’s road toward international recognition for a unilateral declaration of statehood.

They will not now demand that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas abandon his current effort to negotiate “unity” with Hamas, a terrorist group avowedly working for the destruction of Israel and, as Goldstone now writes, “purposefully and indiscriminately” targeting Israel’s civilians.

They should, but they will not. They have moved on now.

Israel’s guilt has long-since been “established.” And no matter that the man who certified it has belatedly internalized the gravity of the big lie he helped facilitate.

Nor either, pitifully, will the media organizations that so hyped the baseless allegations of Israeli war crimes now allocate similar broadcast-topping coverage and front page space to Goldstone’s belated exoneration of Israel. It will be a surprise, indeed, if we see the world’s most resonant newspapers following Goldstone’s lead and penning texts acknowledging that their reports and their analyses and their expert opinion pieces were wide of the mark.

And we had best not hold our breath, either, for Israel’s own internal critics – including certain widely cited newspapers and so-called watchdog groups that amplified the allegations of deliberate killings of civilians, and that so often seem to want to believe the very worst about Israel in the face of all reasonable evidence to the contrary – to emulate the judge’s shift.

The hollow Goldstone now writes that “I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”

Given that “history of bias” at the council, one can only wonder, yet again, why Goldstone consented to do its dirty work for it, to such devastating effect.

His duplicitous investigation has had a toxic effect everywhere on the second battlefield – in diplomatic and legal forums, in the media, on university campuses, in global public discourse. He poisoned Israel’s name.

And on the real battlefield, he gave succor to our enemies, encouraging them to believe that they could kill us not with mere impunity, but with active international empathy and support.

He alleged that we were an immoral enemy, and thus he put all of our lives at greater risk.

An apology just isn’t good enough. The very least he owes Israel is to work unstintingly from now on to try to undo the damage he has caused.
 
For Israel-bashers, recantation is heresy

Melanie Phillips
Wednesday, 6th April 2011

The reaction to Richard Goldstone’s recantation of his infamous report has been as instructive as it is predictable. The haters of Israel will not allow the facts to get in the way of the hate – even when the very author of the report they have used to foment that hate has now recanted his pivotal allegation and pulled the rug from under their feet.

In his article, Goldstone says he now accepts that Israel did not intentionally kill civilians in Gaza. The most terrible element of his report was the assertion that it had done so, turning Israel’s actions in Cast Lead from a justifiable defence of its citizens against attack into a monstrous and evil intention to kill the innocent, and thus opening up the suggestion it may have committed crimes against humanity. That is the blood libel against Israel which is used over and over again to delegitimise any Israeli military defence against attack and intended genocide, and thus make it unable to defend itself. And it is that diabolical inversion, for which Goldstone provided rocket fuel, which underpinned the thrust of his report.

That claim placed Israel on the same moral plane as the murderous terrorists whose aim is indeed to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. It thus delegitimises not just Israel’s self-defence but Israel itself, and turns it into a moral pariah -- whose own eradication is therefore implicitly to be justified. For Goldstone now to recant this claim – and to say into the bargain that the UN Human Rights Council which commissioned him is prejudiced against Israel and thus by implication cannot ever be trusted as an impartial arbiter of such matters – not only vitiates his report but calls into question the UNHRC and all those in Britain, America and Europe who treat its lethal bullying of Israel and malevolent distortions of international law as unquestionably justified.

So this recantation, given the appalling consequences of what has now been withdrawn, is an event of considerable magnitude. For the Israel-bashers, it is a terrible blow to their whole platform of hate – such a blow, indeed, that they have to find ways of pretending it hasn’t happened. This requires the kind of brazen intellectual legerdemain which, for those whose attitude to Israel is based on lies and hatred, is second nature.

The UK government, for example, sees no reason why Goldstone’s recantation should cause it to abandon its endorsement of the Goldstone report. Not even the bits about deliberate killing of civilians and possible crimes against humanity. The Jerusalem Post reported:

The British government said that while Goldstone’s acknowledgment, and what he said in the opinion piece, is important, it was not the only report on the 22-day conflict.

And then its spokesman added:

...it was the actual report that set up a process that allowed for clarity and accountability into the conflict. Justice Goldstone makes clear in his recent comments that the Goldstone report would have looked differently if it had been produced now, on the basis of fresh evidence released by a committee of independent experts, tasked to follow-up on the Goldstone report. This latest insight into the events surrounding the Gaza conflict have come about because of the process that was set in train by his Fact Finding Mission,’ he said.

Can you believe this?! The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office is saying that it is only because Goldstone wrote his report that we now have the information that enables us to see that the report promulgated a falsehood -- and so therefore the report is still just as important!

Yesterday’s report in The Commentator contained a most revealing quote about the FCO position on Goldstone.

One diplomat told The Commentator that his [Goldstone’s] retractions would cause acute embarrassment to countries such as Britain that stand accused by Israel and its supporters of adopting a reflexively anti-Israeli position in order to placate oil rich Arab states in the Middle East, as well as Britain’s growing Muslim population.

In other words, nothing – certainly not the unravelling of a blood libel -- can be allowed to stop Britain continuing to make use of that libel and other untruths in the demonisation of Israel. Foreign Secretary William Hague was at it again yesterday, when he condemned Israel’s decision to approve more than 900 housing units for Israelis in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo and the retrospective approval given for further such construction in five other disputed terrritory areas. Said Hague:

This is not disputed territory. It is occupied Palestinian territory and ongoing settlement expansion is illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and a threat to a two state solution.

'Occupied Palestinian territory’? But there is no Palestinian territory, because there is not, and never has been, a sovereign state of Palestine to own anything at all. It is in effect ‘no-man’s land’ – which is why the only neutral and accurate way to describe it is indeed ‘disputed territories’. Who can be surprised that the British Foreign Office still supports the falsehoods in the Goldstone report - even after its author has himself repudiated them -- when it is guilty of such legal, historical and moral illiteracy?

If the FCO is so desperate not to be exposed as peddling murderous falsehoods that it dismisses Goldstone’s recantation, how much more so for the NGOs which fed Goldstone the false information in the first place. The Israeli anti-Israel activists B’Tselem are even now still peddling false claims about the number of Gazan civilian casualties in Cast Lead -- seemingly regardless of the fact that Hamas itself has now finally admitted what the Israeli authorities said all along, that the majority of those killed were terrorists. In its final report on the Cast Lead casualties in 2009, B’Tselem claimed:

According to B'Tselem's research, Israeli security forces killed 1,387 Palestinians during the course of the three-week operation. Of these, 773 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18. Of those killed, 330 took part in the hostilities, and 248 were Palestinian police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation. For 36 people, B'Tselem could not determine whether they participated in the hostilities or not.

As NGO Monitor has reported, however, not only did the Israeli military state that of 1166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were combatants – a ratio of combatant to civilian which was outstanding considering Hamas were using Gazan civilians as human shields -- but in a November 2010 interview in Al-Hayat Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad finally acknowledged that, contrary to original Hamas claims that the vast majority killed during Cast Lead were civilians, in fact 600-700 Hamas members were killed.

Moreover, Fathi Hamad also admitted that the police officers killed on the first day of the operation, when Israel attacked the police headquarters, were also not civilians; the 250 police operatives killed there belonged to Hamas and other terrorist organizations. And yet in response to Goldstone’s retraction B’Tselem is still claiming:

However, it is imperative to note that in operation Cast Lead Israel killed 758 Palestinian civilians who did not take part in the hostilities, 318 of them minors.
Then there’s the strange case of the New York Times, which as CAMERA observes, despite having previously published Goldstone’s three previous op-eds appears to have turned this one down – simply because it vitiated the anti-Israel witch-hunt that passes for journalism at the New York Times. CAMERA reports:

The New York Times acknowledges that it rejected an Op-Ed submitted by Mr. Goldstone for publication on March 22, but claims it was different from the retraction that appeared in the Washington Post.

Ah! Doubtless the op-ed Goldstone submitted to the NYT was all about the vintage of the wines served in the UN’s restaurants – and only when that was turned down did he decide to retract his report’s blood libel for the Washington Post. As Camera goes on:

They [the NYT] did not seem to exhibit similar reluctance in publishing Mr. Goldstone's first Op-Ed on September 17, 2009. That column, titled ‘Justice in Gaza,’ criticized Israel for carrying out ‘disproportionate attacks’ on military targets and for ‘fail[ing] to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.’ It also predicted that any investigation by Israel was ‘unlikely to be serious and objective’ – sentiments that are perhaps more in line with the New York Times’ overall approach to covering the Arab-Israeli conflict, which tends toward criticism of Israel.

And then there’s the Guardian. As expected, it too sought to play down the significance of Goldstone’s retraction. But in its editorial, it first referred to

Richard Goldstone's retraction of one of the claims of the report that he chaired – that Israel targeted civilians in the war on Gaza as a matter of policy

and praised him for his honesty; but then went on:

The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was ‘deliberately disproportionate’ and intended to ‘punish, humiliate and terrorise’.
But this is simply not true. The report said both. It stated, for example:

...the Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility. It also finds that the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians is a violation of the right to life.

Indeed that is why Goldstone said in his recantation:
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.

Oh dear. All that cognitive dissonance must be such a strain. To be fair, the Guardian also carries a piece by Jonathan Freedland who – despite also recycling the false ‘more than 700 non-combatants killed’ figure, makes the key point that the real villain of the piece is the UN Human Rights Council:

That sounds like an eminently respectable body – until you look at its record. A 2010 analysis showed that very nearly half of all the resolutions it had passed related to Israel: 32 out of 67. And guess which country is the only one to be under permanent review, on the agenda for every single meeting? Israel. There is only one rapporteur whose mandate never expires. No, it's not the person charged with probing Belarus, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, despite the hideous human rights records of those nations. It is Israel. The UNHRC, whose predecessor body was once, laughably, chaired by Libya, had originally asked Goldstone to probe just one side of the Gaza war: it was only the judge's own insistence that he investigate Hamas too that widened his remit. No wonder Goldstone says now of the body he served that its ‘history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted’.

We can laugh at an organisation so potty it would put a murderous tyrant like Muammar Gaddafi in charge of monitoring human rights around the globe. But in its belief that no country in the world behaves worse or matters more, a belief expressed by the sheer volume of attention it pays to Israel, it reflects a view that is alarmingly widespread.

Very true; and nowhere is it more widespread, of course, than in the pages of the Guardian.

And finally there is Goldstone himself. Lo and behold, he appears to be recanting his own recantation -- doubtless under enormous pressure from the Israel-haters, who simply cannot allow him to recant his own falsehoods. Indeed, from a report in Ha’aretz it appears the pressure seems to have got to him too rather badly. For in the Washington Post, he wrote:
If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document

because he now believed that, on Israel’s part,

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

Yet one day later he told Ha’aretz:

‘As appears from the Washington Post article, information subsequent to publication of the report did meet with the view that one correction should be made with regard to intentionality on the part of Israel...Further information as a result of domestic investigations could lead to further reconsideration, but as presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time.'

So first he claims Israel deliberately killed civilians and might therefore be guilty of crimes against humanity; then he says he now realises this was not the case and he would have written a different report had he known this at the time; now he says he nevertheless sees no reason to reconsider any part of his report.

How can this man have any credibility at all?

But he cannot unwrite what he wrote in the Washington Post. The fact remains that he has pulled the rug from under his own feet, and from under the feet of all who either helped promote or rode on the back of his vile assertions – NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and the rest, along with the British government, the Guardian, New York Times, BBC and Uncle Tom Israel-basher and all.

However they squirm and dissemble and bully Goldstone back into line, the fact remains that he has shown the world that they were all willing parties to a blood libel – and if they attempt to use Goldstone’s report again, his own words can be thrown back in their faces. The lie has been rumbled. And that is ammunition that can be used.
 
Goldstone's Shameful U-turn

By Ilan Pappe


"If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document." Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: "If I had known then that the report would turn me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all." And if that wasn't the original sentence, it is certainly the subtext of Goldstone's article.

This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal dealings with the State of Israel.

Already In October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, "I've got a great love for Israel" and "I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so" (Video: "Fareed Zakaria GPS," 4 October 2009).

Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could this love could not be at least weakened by what he discovered when writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original report.

But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel, who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar mitzvah in Johannesburg since "Goldstone caused irreparable damage to the Jewish people as a whole."

The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for "doing greater damage to the State of Israel." Last February, Goldstone said that "Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not," in an interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report the website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded much more.

Readers might ask "so what?" and "why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?" Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes.

Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a "self-hating Jew" with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror.

Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of "delegitimizing" Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it.

We should have recognized that Goldstone was one of them when he stated that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective, "Zionist," is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed. You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the ideology and that policy. "I am a Zionist" is a declaration of loyalty to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone Report. You can either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity -- if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.

That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the "evidence" brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.

The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound and maim as a collective punishment. "The Palestinians are going to bring upon themselves a Holocaust," promised Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy minister of defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008.

There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that is still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the Israeli army that massive killings by Palestinians were a "mistake."

Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by "mistake." So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing only on one of dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article.

This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas in the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes that this would absolve him of Israel's righteous fury. But he is wrong, very wrong. Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article until Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon Peres commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to move from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the next in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do it; but then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah as a retaliation.

Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and was described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often fails to convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first western public opinion that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his report. Israel's international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented blow. He was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.

We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications for Israel's identity and self-image, and nature of the archival material he unearthed.

Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be re-admitted to the tribe. He went very far with his mea culpa and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist: suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.

Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that claimed, as Goldstone does in The Washington Post article, that Israel can only be judged by its intentions not the consequences of its deeds. Therefore only the Israeli army, in both cases, can be a reliable source for knowing what these intentions were. Very few decent and intelligent people in the world would accept such a bizarre analysis and explanation.

Goldstone has not entered as yet the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a "repentant Jew") between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism -- you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you.

Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine.

Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto Press, 2010).

Goldstone's Shameful U-turn By Ilan Pappe
 
^^^^^
Benny Morris has written a very detailed, almost brutal take-down of Ilan Pappe, at The New Republic. Remember, back in the 1980s Morris and Pappe were close colleagues in launching the "New [Israeli] Historians. Now there's a chasm between them, and it's depressing to see. The first reason it's depressing is that it's so necessary. Pappe, as Morris writes, is a quack. He doesn't know history, he's overtly dishonest, he's a low-life propagandist garnering attention and importance by pretending to be a scholar -
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Pappe is one of those scholars whose success in spite of their poor professionalism demonstrates that there is a big market for Israel-bashing by second-raters. Their importance is pure political hype and therefore they should be widely discredited.
 
^^^^^
link

Pappe is one of those scholars whose success in spite of their poor professionalism demonstrates that there is a big market for Israel-bashing by second-raters. Their importance is pure political hype and therefore they should be widely discredited.
hmm..one can be a quack if morris writes so.
not interested in ad-hominem..he explained the shameful u-turn of goldstone very well.
 
hmm..one can be a quack if morris writes so. not interested in ad-hominem..he explained the shameful u-turn of goldstone very well.
There is a place for ad hominem attacks. Morris doesn't just claim, he goes into great detail explaining why Pappe isn't a worthy historian. So Pappe's piece isn't even worth reading. It has to be taken as a waste of time, a likely distortion from true facts and context.
 
There is a place for ad hominem attacks. Morris doesn't just claim, he goes into great detail explaining why Pappe isn't a worthy historian. So Pappe's piece isn't even worth reading. It has to be taken as a waste of time, a likely distortion from true facts and context.

dude,do you have sth to say against what Pappe wrote about Goldstone's disgusting turn?then,go ahead..dont twist the subject..

no need to mention that Pappe is much more respectable than the kinds of Dershowitz.
 
dude,do you have sth to say against what Pappe wrote -
I'm not going there. I'm not going to let the words of a thoroughly discredited academic control what I write. Why should you?

If there is something specific you can produce independently of such authors, that's another matter.
 
seems like you dont..fair enough,im outta here.
If it says "Pappe" I don't read it any more, not anything recent anyway. There was a time he was thought respectable, now folks realize that every claim of his requires checking for fact and context. It's just a waste of time and not worth it. It's frustrating because for some stuff he was the only source, and now I can't use it any more lest I end up as stained as he is.
 
Goldstone's 'regret' is a result of emotional pressure - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Declarations were made, not from the lunatic fringes, but from central figures in world Jewry to the effect that Goldstone, the world-renowned human rights activist, was 'spreading lies' about his own people, that he was the one preventing Defense Minister Ehud Barak from visiting London.

In any event, when Richard Goldstone "retracted" he didn't really retract. Read his op-ed in the Washington Post once, twice - there's no retraction there on any substantial issues. And when he stated in his "regret" that Israel had started its investigation after his conclusions were made, that is a kind of reaffirmation of Goldstone's report. At the time, we should recall, Israel vehemently refused to conduct a probe of Operation Cast Lead. According to the strange interpretations of his "regret," 1,400 people - most of them civilians - were killed in Gaza by mistake. Well, only a professional "mistake maker" could cause killings of such magnitude.

To stand firm for two years is an act of heroism. At his advanced age, it would have been quite cruel had Goldstone been prevented, in his own community, from being called up to read from the Torah at his grandson's bar mitzvah. To humiliate him publicly, in front of his family, that's like a 20-year-old IDF soldier humiliating a Palestinian in front of his sons.

It is hard to identify when the breaking point came. Apparently it was a sequence of events: total ostracism on the part of every Jewish organization the world over; declarations, not from the lunatic fringes, but from central figures in world Jewry to the effect that Goldstone, the world-renowned human rights activist, was "spreading lies" about his own people, and he was the one preventing Defense Minister Ehud Barak from visiting London - "while Khaled Meshal, an arch-terrorist, can move around freely," as one prominent Jewish activist said. And so the judge who joined the United Nations commission as a human rights activist emerged as someone who obeys the terrorists.

We can state here: Goldstone's "regret" is a result of emotional pressure - and this time around, not a moderate amount.

The escape hatch used by a person in distress is usually the tortured question: Why go through all this suffering? For Hamas? The organization that doesn't respect human rights in Gaza itself? And that operates contrary to Palestinian public opinion, international law and ethics - firing on Israeli civilians, and in so doing providing another excuse for the Israeli government? Or for Muammar Gadhafi, whose country is a member of the UN Human Rights Council, but who slaughters his own people?

Why? For the sake of justice, to limit an insane use of force, so that not every person bearing arms will simply do whatever he pleases. Goldstone made a tremendous contribution on this issue, to both the Arabs and the Jews.

The headline in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said: "The pressure and the regret." It should have read: "The pressure and the surrender." Another successful campaign of targeted assassination. We can report on the two-way radio: "The judge is in our hands, over." Poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: "Hurray to the conqueror of a village." In that spirit we could continue: "Hurray to the subduer of a judge." It's a shame that Israeli society chose to break the mirror.
 

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