President Obama can solidify broader global respect by supporting the recommendations of the just-released Goldstone report in the United Nations Human Rights Council. Richard Goldstone, an eminent South African jurist, led a mission to investigate allegations of war crimes in Gaza last winter.

Indeed, the Goldstone mission concluded that Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The report recommends that both parties be given six months to mount independent, internal investigations — and if they fail, that the United Nations Security Council refer the matter to the International Criminal Court for investigation and possible prosecutions.

Much of the 575-page report documents Israeli violations of the laws of war and human rights surrounding the intense fighting of last winter. That is fair, as the scale of harm Israel caused to lives and property in Gaza vastly exceeded that inflicted by Hamas. Israel killed approximately 100 Palestinians for every Israeli who died, and destroyed vast swaths of private housing, industrial buildings, agricultural facilities, and public infrastructure.

The Israeli government boycotted the Goldstone mission; Palestinian authorities, in contrast, cooperated with it. Doubtless, the group’s conclusions would have been more definitive had Israel shared information with its authors. Israel now seeks to discredit the report, attacking everything from Justice Goldstone himself to the United Nations Human Rights Council, and claiming that the report’s findings would hamstring other nations — including ours — facing “asymmetric warfare.”

This is nonsense. Justice Goldstone is a man of impeccable credentials and great personal integrity, and his colleagues are similarly distinguished.

The report is judicious and even-handed, and cannot be casually dismissed.

Nor is there anything novel about “asymmetric warfare,” at least not of the kind waged by Israel, requiring departures from standard international law.

Colonial powers that displace indigenous peoples, as Israel does regularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, have always faced armed, and sometimes crude, popular resistance. Israel’s war against the Palestinians shares more with the French in Algeria than it does with our fight against al-Qaeda. Israel might prefer that international law to revert to pre-World War II levels, but that would undermine protections for us all.

The Obama administration should echo the Goldstone report and urge Israel to mount serious investigations of its military’s documented misdeeds. In fact, our ambassador, Susan Rice, already did so in her January inaugural address to the United Nations. We should also not quail at the Goldstone mission’s recommendation that the Security Council refer the matter to the International Criminal Court, if Israel fails to credibly investigate, as it has to date. Enforcement of international law cannot only be for the losers of international conflicts; indeed, the legitimacy of international law depends on its universal application. The world will take notice when President Obama’s warming rhetoric is matched by equally principled deeds – and will likewise take notice when it is not.

• Violating its duty to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. Despite Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, the territory remains occupied. Israel unleashed military firepower against a people it is legally bound to protect.

• Imposing collective punishment in the form of a blockade, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In June 2007, after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed suffocating restrictions on trade and movement. The blockade — an act of war in customary international law — has helped plunge families into poverty, children into malnutrition, and patients denied access to medical treatment into their graves. People in Gaza thus faced Israel’s winter onslaught in particularly weakened conditions.

• Deliberately attacking civilian targets. The laws of war permit attacking a civilian object only when it is making an effective contribution to military action and a definite military advantage is gained by its destruction. Yet an Israeli general, Dan Harel, said, “We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas government and all its wings.” An Israeli military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, avowed that “anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target.”

Israeli fire destroyed or damaged mosques, hospitals, factories, schools, a key sewage plant, institutions like the parliament, the main ministries, the central prison and police stations, and thousands of houses.

• Willfully killing civilians without military justification. When civilian institutions are struck, civilians — persons who are not members of the armed forces of a warring party, and are not taking direct part in hostilities — are killed.

International law authorizes killings of civilians if the objective of the attack is military, and the means are proportional to the advantage gained. Yet proportionality is irrelevant if the targets of attack were not military to begin with. Gaza government employees — traffic policemen, court clerks, secretaries and others — are not combatants merely because Israel considers Hamas, the governing party, a terrorist organization. Many countries do not regard violence against foreign military occupation as terrorism.

Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including 121 women and 288 children, according to a United Nations special rapporteur, Richard Falk. Israeli military lawyers instructed army commanders that Palestinians who remained in a targeted building after having been warned to leave were “voluntary human shields,” and thus combatants. Israeli gunners “knocked on roofs” — that is, fired first at corners of buildings, before hitting more vulnerable points — to “warn” Palestinian residents to flee.

With nearly all exits from the densely populated Gaza Strip blocked by Israel, and chaos reigning within it, this was a particularly cruel flaunting of international law. Willful killings of civilians that are not required by military necessity are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the Nuremberg principles.

• Deliberately employing disproportionate force. Last year, Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, head of Israel’s northern command, speaking on possible future conflicts with neighbors, stated, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.” Such a frank admission of illegal intent can constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution.

• Illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorus. Israel was finally forced to admit, after initial denials, that it employed white phosphorous in the Gaza Strip, though Israel defended its use as legal. White phosphorous may be legally used as an obscurant, not as a weapon, as it burns deeply and is extremely difficult to extinguish.

Israeli political and military personnel who planned, ordered or executed these possible offenses should face criminal prosecution. The appointment of Richard Goldstone, the former war crimes prosecutor from South Africa, to head a fact-finding team into possible war crimes by both parties to the Gaza conflict is an important step in the right direction. The stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity.

What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza.

Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to re-classify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances.

While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war — including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects — the standard permits far greater uses of force.

Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced “targeted killings” since the 1970s — always denying that it did so — but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile.

President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether.

Today, most observers — including Amnesty International — tacitly accept Israel’s framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel’s actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

Israel’s campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel’s 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General’s office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries … International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.”

In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges – all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation.

Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a “voluntary human shield” and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed “knocking on the roof,” was to fire first at a building’s corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians — penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle — understood this signal is fanciful at best.

Israel has a lengthy history of unpunished abuses of international law — among the most flagrant its decades-long colonization of the West Bank. To its credit, much of the world has refused to ratify Israel’s violations. Unfortunately, our government is an exception, having frequently provided diplomatic cover for Israel’s abuses. Our diplomats have vetoed 42 U.N. Security Council resolutions to shelter Israel from the consequences of its often illegal behavior.

We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all. Our government has already been seduced to follow, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel’s example of targeted killings. This policy alienates civilians, innocently killed and wounded in these crude strikes, and deepens the determination of enemies to harm us by any means possible.

We do not want civilian police in the United States to be bombed, nor to have anyone “knock on our roofs.” For our own sakes and for the world’s, Israel’s impunity must end.

In promising U.S. support of Israel’s claims to all of Jerusalem, Obama couldn’t have picked a better way to offend the world’s 325 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims. Israel’s 41-year stewardship of the Holy City has alarmed Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia. Upon seizing East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel razed the ancient Muslim Maghribi quarter to make room for Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall. Since 1991, Israel has steadily ratcheted down Palestinians’ access to Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. Most West Bank Palestinians can no longer worship there.

Obama’s unnecessary promise deviates from nearly six decades of U.S. foreign policy that held Jerusalem to be occupied territory under international law. This long tradition was first broken in 2004 when President Bush acknowledged Israel’s demands to keep its illegal West Bank settlements in a final peace agreement, including those around Jerusalem. Thus Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, would both scorn the international legal system’s foundational principle — the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by war — and echo President Bush, whose failed Middle East policies he has rightly deplored.

If Sen. Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race was a model of courage and nuance, his AIPAC talk was brimming with the pro-Israel orthodoxy that typifies this year’s presidential campaign. Like presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, Obama also backed Israel’s so-called right to exist as a Jewish state.

How has it become an article of faith for U.S. politicians to support a state’s privileging of one ethno-religious group over others? For what Israel seeks in recognition as a Jewish state is permission to permanently discriminate against Palestinians. Israel is, by law, a Jewish state. Its declaration of independence and basic law declare it to be so. But its population, excluding the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is not exclusively Jewish: 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are native Palestinians, and another 4 percent are mostly immigrant non-Jews. Moreover, Jewish demographic predominance was achieved through the expulsion by force or fear of about 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Israel denies Palestinians refugees — with their offspring, about 5.5 million persons — their internationally recognized right to return to their homes and homeland in order to maintain a strong Jewish majority.

According to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, 20 Israeli laws explicitly favor Jews. Israel’s law of return, for example, grants rights of automatic citizenship to Jews no matter where they are from, while Palestinian exiles still holding keys to their family homes in Israel are denied this right. Religious parties play pivotal roles in Israeli politics, and Orthodox Jewish rabbinical courts govern matters of family law there.

Why should any American presidential aspirant promote ethno-religious supremacy in Israel? Don’t we see a “Christian state” or a “Muslim state” as inherently discriminatory? Why don’t we recognize the same in Israel’s quest to be ordained a “Jewish state?”

Like Israel, we are a nation that combines a sincere commitment to democracy and a history that includes injustices. While we have never fully atoned for our dispossession of Native Americans, in facing the legacy of slavery, we have made an unyielding pledge to equal rights. A truly visionary American president might respectfully press a similar commitment on Israel, not endorse its urges for ethno-religious privilege. The terrible suffering inflicted on European Jews in the Nazi holocaust does not entitle Israel to subjugate Palestinians.

Barack Obama whiffed in his first major foreign policy speech as the Democratic candidate. He may believe it necessary to pander to Israel’s U.S. supporters in order to gain office. But he narrowed future policy options to those that would undermine international law, offend core American values and diminish our standing in the vital Middle East.

Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30 percent shortage of texts.

No full-page advertisements in major American newspapers have publicized Israel ‘s violations of Palestinian children’s right to an education. No editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.

Israel ‘s trampling of Palestinian students’ right to education — the key to a lifetime of opportunity — has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.

Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.

In response to this policy double standard — complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand — a movement has emerged for a citizens’ boycott of Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada , Europe and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel Israel ‘s compliance with international law.

American Presbyterians have studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom ‘s 1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The latter action provoked particularly indignant protest by Israel ‘s U.S. supporters as an offense against “academic freedom.” Yet many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights.

Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their seized properties.

Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

The threatened boycott would target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish in foreign journals would continue.

Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli academics. Is this fair?

Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which applied to all academics — as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.

Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a similar choice today.

That question is raised by an expanding academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. The movement joins churches, unions, professional societies and other groups based in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. It has elicited dramatic reactions from Israel’s supporters. U.S. labor leaders have condemned British unions, representing millions of workers, for supporting the Israel boycott. American academics have been frantically gathering signatures against the boycott, and have mounted a prominent advertising campaign in American newspapers – unwittingly elevating the controversy further in the public eye.

Israel’s defenders have protested that Israel is not the worst human-rights offender in the world, and singling it out is hypocrisy, or even anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, this shifts focus from Israel’s human rights record to the imagined motives of its critics.

But “the worst first” has never been the rule for whom to boycott. Had it been, the Pol Pot regime, not apartheid South Africa, would have been targeted in the past. It was not — Cambodia’s ties to the West were insufficient to make any embargo effective. Boycotting North Korea today would be similarly futile. Should every other quest for justice be put on hold as a result?

In contrast, the boycott of South Africa had grip. The opprobrium suffered by white South Africans unquestionably helped persuade them to yield to the just demands of the black majority. Israel, too, assiduously guards its public image. A dense web of economic and cultural relations also ties it to the West. That — and its irrefutably documented human-rights violations — render it ripe for boycott.

What state actions should trigger a boycott? Expelling or intimidating into flight a country’s majority population, then denying them internationally recognized rights to return to their homes? Israel has done that.

Seizing, without compensation, the properties of hundreds of thousands of refugees? Israel has done that.

Systematically torturing detainees, many held without trial? Israel has done that.

Assassinating its opponents, including those living in territories it occupies? Israel has done that.

Demolishing thousands of homes belonging to one national group, and settling its own people in another nation’s land? Israel has done that. No country with such a record, whether first or 50th worst in the world, can credibly protest a boycott.

Apartheid South Africa provides another useful standard. How does Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians compare to former South Africa’s treatment of blacks? It is similar or worse, say a number of South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. special rapporteur in the occupied territories John Dugard, and African National Congress member and government minister Ronnie Kasrils. The latter observed recently that apartheid South Africa never used fighter jets to attack ANC activists, and judged Israel’s violent control of Palestinians as “10 times worse.” Dual laws for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, segregated roads and housing, and restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement strongly recall apartheid South Africa. If boycotting apartheid South Africa was appropriate, it is equally fair to boycott Israel on a similar record.

Israel has been singled out, but not as its defenders complain. Instead, Israel has been enveloped in a cocoon of impunity. Our government has vetoed 41 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli actions — half of the total U.S. vetoes since the birth of the United Nations — thus enabling Israel’s continuing abuses. The Bush administration has announced an increase in military aid to Israel to $30 billion for the coming decade.

Other military occupations and human-rights abusers have faced considerably rougher treatment. Just recall Iraq’s 1990 takeover of Kuwait. Perhaps the United Nations should have long ago issued Israel the ultimatum it gave Iraq — and enforced it. Israel’s occupation of Arab lands has now exceeded 40 years.

Iran, Sudan and Syria have all been targeted for federal and state-level sanctions. Even the City of Beverly Hills is contemplating Iran divestment actions, following the lead of Los Angeles, which approved Iran divestment legislation in June. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran has never attacked its neighbors nor occupied their territories. It is merely suspected of aspiring to the same nuclear weapons Israel already possesses.

Politicians worldwide, and American ones especially, have failed us. Our leaders, from the executive branch to Congress, have dithered, or cheered Israel on, as it devoured the land base for a Palestinian state. Their collective irresponsibility dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to a future of strife and insecurity, and undermines our global stature. If politicians cannot lead the way, then citizens must. That is why boycotting Israel has become both necessary and justified.

This article appeared on page B9 of the San Francisco Chronicle.