Goldstone’s Report: A Different Look

Goldstone’s report, incriminating Israel for war crimes, has been optimistically received by many as a sign of dismantling Israel’s impunity from legal actions for her war crimes and violations of international laws. Yet, at the same time, it is full of political booby-traps that Israel could use to indemnify herself and turn the blame onto Palestinians. Besides equating the Palestinian victims with the genocidal Israeli criminals, and denying them of their moral humanitarian right of self-defense, the report also grossly ignores historical events, distorts reality, and legalizes Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Let us remember, here, that the UN has illegally and immorally created and sponsored the terrorist state of Israel in Palestine; the heart of the Arab World. One should understand that the UN, with all its organizations, was established mainly by WWII victorious Western countries as a tool to serve their interests and to expand their authority on the expense of other weaker and poorer countries.

It is so obvious that the UN has no interest in solving the Israeli/Arab conflict in any way. Since its establishment in 1948 Israel has perpetrated a pre-meditated genocide against Palestinians, uprooted the whole population from their country and driven them into refugee camps into the desert, wiped Palestine off the map and is building the rogue terrorist state of Israel in its place. In this process, during the last 61 years, Israel had committed many war crimes, violated all international laws and all humanitarian laws, had broken hundreds of UN resolutions, and even murdered UN personnel and destroyed its facilities. Yet the UN did not lift one finger against Israeli crimes, and did not send its troops to protect Palestinians the way it sent its troops into old Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia), Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan. The UN’s disregard of Palestinian life was reflected in the visit of the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, to Gaza last January to inspect only the damage Israel inflicted on UN buildings, and did not take even one single look at the human sufferings of Palestinians.

In the few incidents the UN was pressured to deal with the Israeli/Arab conflict (Israeli occupation of Palestine) it had sent investigating committees usually led by a pro-Zionist or a Zionist Jewish officials. The latest such officials was the Zionist Jewish Judge Richard Goldstone (Goldstein). His daughter Nicole describes him as a “Zionist who loves Israel.” When the UN Human Rights Council asked Goldstone to chair the mission with the mandate to investigate Israel’s crime during its onslaught on Gaza last December 2008, Goldstone, as a good Zionist, refused the offer unless the mandate is modified to include “crimes on all sides”; a clear pre-biased assumption that Palestinians had also committed war crimes rather than defending themselves.

Goldstone is a well known official with a long international judicial history. He also serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations, has affiliations with famous American universities (Harvard, Fordham, and New York University Schools of Law), and he is a trustee in the board of directors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With the many clear evidences of Israeli war crimes in Gaza broadcast by all televised media (except American media), and with the Israeli objections against such investigation calling it pre-biased, one could not but raise the question why would a well-known Zionist Jewish supporter of Israel accept such a mission knowing very well that his reputation would be attacked and smeared by all Zionists and Jewish organizations the same way they did to Jimmy Carter for just criticizing Israel?

Goldstone, like many other misguided Zionist Jews with blind loyalty to Israel, who sacrificed everything they had, even their own lives, for the sake of Israel (God’s chosen people) might have thought that he could reduce the damage to Israel’s reputation, and use his well-known reputation and judicial expertise to induce, in the report, some legal loopholes to divide the blame, and to give Israel a chance to blame Palestinians, or even some “few rotten apples” in the “most moral” Israeli army, and to justify her massacres in Gaza as some type of self-defense, although disproportionate. And that he did.

Goldstone’s report aimed to annul the many previous investigative reports done by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many other Israeli and international human rights organizations. Such reports incriminated only Israel. Goldstone’s report sought to incriminate both parties.

Goldstone’s investigations were launched with the false perspective that there was a war between Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Authority, and his report was thus restricted in the language of violations of the international laws of war. It equated the poor, bankrupt, besieged, hungry, thirsty, unjustly ignored and persecuted by the international political system, and unarmed Gaza Authority with limited security forces plus the few hundreds lightly armed, barely trained militia cadres of the resistance groups on one side, with the well trained, well armed with the most technologically advanced (American) weapons, well supported, and well financed Israeli army on the other side.

The report states, “The Israeli armed forces are, in technological terms, among the most advanced in the world”, “… have an elaborate legal advice and training system in place … possess very advanced hardware and a market leader in production of the most advanced pieces of military technology available, including UAVs … have a very significant capacity for precision strikes…”

It was not war that happened in Gaza. It was a pre-meditated Israeli onslaught against all kinds of lives in Gaza; humans, animals, and plants. It was genocide; a burning holocaust with nuclear (DU) weapons producing 5,000 degrees of burning heat equals to the heat of the sun according to Dy Williams; the British weapons expert on Al-Jazeera. It was an immediate and long term destruction of life, and contamination and destruction of mother earth. The report stated in this regard:

“Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available [weapons], and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, the Mission finds that the incidents and patterns of events [genocide, holocaust] considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions.”

Although Goldstone’s mission was to investigate Israeli war crimes his mission chose not to investigate the weapons of the crime. His report states: “This chapter does not intend to present a comprehensive analysis of all the aspects raised on the kinds of weaponry used during the military operations. It is rather a summary of the Missions’s views”.

While the Mission did not exclude the use of nuclear DU bombs by Israel “the Mission decided not to investigate the matter further”. The report justified Israel’s use of white phosphorous, flechette missiles, and DIME munitions as “not prohibited under international law”.

While sidelining the holocaustal Israeli weapons Goldstone’s report found the time and the expertise to describe in details and in numbers the types of rudimentary home-made missiles the Palestinians fired at the Israeli colonies.

Although Goldstone’s report accused the Israeli army of bombing civilian infrastructure; homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and UN facilities, it did not “…discount the possibility that Palestinian armed groups were active in the vicinity … launched attacks close to civilian protected buildings, unnecessarily exposed civilian population of Gaza to danger”. The report stated that Israel showed concern about civilian lives by sending warnings before bombing the area; the mission “accepts that Israel dropped leaflets, made phone calls, left recorded messages and dropped smaller explosives on roofs as stated by the Israeli Government.”

Goldstone’s report gave Israelis the best justification of their attack (holocaust) on Gaza when it considered Palestinian launching missiles at Israeli communities as terror attacks. “The Mission finds that there is significant evidence to suggest that one of the primary purposes of the rocket and mortar attacks is to spread terror amongst the Israeli civilian population, a violation of international law”. It explains further the economical and social disruptions and the psychological trauma suffered by populations in the Israeli communities of Sderot, Netivot, Beer Sheba and others by those missiles.

Goldstone here ignores historical events and distorts the facts by switching them to the opposite direction. He ignored the fact that Israel had occupied Palestine since 1948, and that the southern Israeli communities such as Sderot, Netivot, Ashdod, and others are not Israeli towns, rather are Zionist colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. He also ignored the fact that these colonizers in these communities are usually armed and hostile against neighboring Palestinian town, many of them are either on military active duty or on military reserve.

These Zionist occupiers are like an enemy, who occupy your own house, imprison you and your family in one room and deny you all means of existence. Thus it becomes your duty and your human obligation to defend yourself and your family. The mere existence of such Zionist colonies on occupied Palestine is an act or war. The Israeli wall surrounding Gaza Strip and the military siege are acts of genocide that break all humanitarian and all international laws. Genocide is not only the use of weapon to murder people; it is also depriving them from all means of living.

Goldstone faults Palestinians for resisting Israeli aggression from within Palestinian civilian areas, yet he neglects to mention that Israel has a history of attacking civilian areas, and thus would face resistance from within these civilian areas.

In an attempt to portray Palestinians as violent people, even against their own citizens, Goldstone faults the intra-Palestinian conflict between Ramallah’s authority, dominated by rogue small faction of Fatah, and Gaza’s authority, dominated mainly by Hamas faction. What he ignored is the fact that such conflict was planned, orchestrated, and fed by previous American Bush administration, as reported by Vanity Fair, in order to topple down the democratically elected Hamas government.

To maintain credibility Goldstone’s report could not but criticize the obvious blatant Israeli crimes witnessed by the whole world. Yet it did not spare any opportunity to fault Palestinians themselves, deny them the right of self-defense, and even call them violent and terrorists. For defending their lives and the lives of their children the report is accusing the victims (the Palestinians) of the crime inflicted on them by the criminals (occupying Zionist Israelis), who claim to protect the lives of their own children. Israel’s rejection and the pro-Zionists’ harsh criticism of the report meant only to divert the attention away from these facts.

In conclusion, Goldstone’s mission proposes the following major recommendations, among others: that the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) brings the report to the UN Security Council in order to require both parties to launch appropriate independent investigations, establish an independent committee of experts to monitor such investigation, and refer the situation in Gaza to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

The report also recommends that Israel ceases border closure and blockading access to sea, and pays reparations into a special fund to compensate Palestinians, although the Mission views “the current constitutional structure and legislation in Israel leaves very limited room, if any, for Palestinians to seek compensation.” Therefore the report urges international aid providers to step up financial and technical assistance for organizations providing aid to Palestinian (paying for Israel’s crimes).

The report recommends the Palestinian armed groups renounce attacks on Israeli civilians (indirectly calling their self-defense terror), yet it did not recommend Israel to do the same.

Finally, knowing the UN’s ineffective history in dealing with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, one wonders whether the Security Council would respond seriously, this time, to the report, given the fact that the powerful members of the Council are now busy with what they consider the Iranian nuclear threat.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer of Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala and now living in the US. He can be reached at: eakleh@ca.rr.com. Read other articles by Elias.

6 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. John Jones said on September 26th, 2009 at 12:32pm #

    I am a 74 year old white male. I had been a supporter of Israel until the age of 64, when I investigated the history of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I was enraged when I discovered I had been lied to my entire life and that Israel was guilty of horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. I have briefly read the Goldstone report and I have to say that, in my opinion, your characterization of Dr. Goldstone is unfair. He had to acknowledge that the firing of rockets on civilians in Israel was a crime. Had he not done so he would have lost all credibility. Clearly his report puts the overwhelming blame for the atrocities committed on the Israeli forces, even advocating the guilty parties being prosecuted by the World Court in the Hague. Again, he could not recommend that the Israelis be prosecuted but the violence committed by Hamas forces was acceptable. He would have lost all credibility.
    One must ” read between the lines “. It would be wonderful to see an international trial in the Hague; the monstrous crimes of the Israeli forces would be on display for the world to see. The firing of the rockets – and the death of 2-3 Israelis – would be there for all to see, but the court would have little choice but to find the Israeli forces guilty of gross violations of human rights, and the Arab forces also guilty , but guilty of relatively minor crimes with extenuating circumstances that offer some justification for their acts. In other words, the court would put the offenses by both sides in perspective, finding the Israelis guilty of heinous crimes, while the Palestinians were guilty only of reacting to gross and long lasting violations of their human rights.
    It is my understanding that Dr.Goldman took the case with a heavy heart but under the belief that the crimes of Israel had to be exposed to the world. There was no way for him to do so without also detailing the actions of Hamas. You do a disservice to your cause when you distort his role in chairing the investigative commission. I understand where you are coming from, but many persons will shut you out when they sense your charges are so one-sided.

    John Jones

  2. Shabnam said on September 27th, 2009 at 9:15am #

    CHEAPENING THE HOLOCUAST BY Netanyahu – HAARETZ SAID

    [He had to acknowledge that the firing of rockets on civilians in Israel was a crime. Had he not done so he would have lost all credibility.]

    This is the main problem. The ‘chosen people’ reserve the right to kill the indigenous population in order to wipe them off their ancestral land because to prove Netanyahu’s lies which were said at the United Nation and he was blamed by HAARETZ.
    Goldstone make the rocket, a toy compare to Zionist’ modern weaponry where was shot after Israelis’ killing of Palestinian and provocation, equivalent to Israeli’s WMD to diminish war criminal activities of the colonists to protect his ‘tribe’ and to make their crimes equal to Palestinians’ act of resistance. This is a bias report. Any child can grasps this point except the ‘chosen people’ like Netanyahu who has revealed himself fully at the United Nation and in an interview by Charlie Rose that HE IS NOT CHOSEN after all, but HE IS A LIAR.
    This fact is supported by Haaretz’s critic of Netanyahu the leader of the “CHOSEN PEOPLE.”
    *********

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.

    If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, Netanyahu cheapens it. Is there a need of proof, 60 years later? Or, the world might think, is the denier right?
    And it is doubtful that any historian of stature would buy the comparison the prime minister made between Hamas and the Nazis, or between the London Blitz and the Qassam rockets on Sderot. In the Blitz, 400 German bombers and 600 fighter planes killed 43,000 people and destroyed more than one million homes. Hamas’ Qassams, perhaps the most primitive weapon in the world, have killed 18 people in eight years. Yes, they sowed great terror – but a Blitz?
    And if we can compare a poorly equipped terrorist organization to the horrific Nazi killing machine, why should others not compare the Nazis’ behavior to that of Israel Defense Forces soldiers? In both cases, the comparison is baseless and infuriating.

    Netanyahu began the speech as if he were chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial – Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust; his family and his wife’s family. Then he spoke in Shimon Peres’ terms, proposing a “rosy future” to humanity.

    No less demagogic was his attack on the Iranian regime. They shoot demonstrators there, he protested vehemently. As if they don’t do that in our Bil’in and Na’alin.

    Then came the kicker: Operation Cast Lead was a pinpoint attack. Israel telephoned thousands of people to tell them to leave their homes. Where to, Mr. Prime Minister? Into the sea? He said the IDF, which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, exhibited unprecedented restraint.

    Moving on: We made peace with every Arab leader who wanted to, the premier said. What about Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been knocking on doors for years, claiming he wants peace? No one has opened the doors.
    Talk of security and victims may still have buyers among the WIZO women of America, but that’s it. For a regional power that has almost every weapon in the world in its arsenal and is fighting primitive terror organizations, it is a bit difficult to be taken seriously when talking about security, especially when said security is only for Israelis.

    Then came our ancient right to the land and the unavoidable Biblical verses, in English and the original Hebrew, that always end the performance on such occasions – though Netanyahu, unlike his predecessors, did not pull out a skullcap at this crucial moment.

    That moment was supposed to move his listeners, but it left me, at least, unmoved by a propagandist prime minister. Hallelujah was heard last night only in Ramat Gan Stadium, at the Leonard Cohen concert.
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1116933.html

  3. Mulga Mumblebrain said on September 28th, 2009 at 3:48am #

    Well said Shabnam. Netanyahu and the other ultra-chauvinist Israelis simply do not believe that the Palestinians, or any other non-Jew, is the moral, spiritual and divine equivalent of a Jew. While not for an instant condoning any attack on any Jew simply because they are a Jew, a vile crime like any indiscriminate attack on any individual simply because they belong to a certain group, the insane arrogance, of the likes of Netanyahu and the other Zionazis, and their scarcely credible narcissism and total indifference to the suffering of non-Jews they afflict must surely be at the root of much real Jew hatred. I mean there are plenty of people without the self-control to ignore a nasty, virulent ethos of total superiority, expressed in dogma that asserts that oneself and one’s loved ones, friends and neighbours are an inferior species, in comparison to the self-declared ‘Chosen Race’. Such an ideology was vile when expressed by the Nazis alluding to ‘Aryans’ and is vile when asserted by any group. But the Judaic fundamentalists surely take the cake for delusions of supremacism. I agree with your comments concerning Yehudi Menuhin. He, his sister Hepzibah, and other non-supremacist Jews, who saw, as I understand their views to have been, the notion of human solidarity and fraternity as being higher than tribal delusions, founded in ancient mythology, of group self-adoration, are my kind of Jews. I’m sure that this type remain a significant, if, alas, diminishing minority, while the fascists and racists grow madder, badder and more dangerous to the rest of humanity by the day, just like non-Judaic Rightwingers.

  4. mary said on September 28th, 2009 at 5:25am #

    The attack on the Goldstone report has been joined by Zionist Israeli academics.

    One from Tel Aviv University, Professor Asa Kasher, who said that the IDF is ‘the most moral army in the world’ (www.bricup.org.uk/news/AcademicsVsGoldstone.htm) was to be found nine months after the end of the Cast Lead Shoah at Herzliya as one of the speakers at the International Counter Terrorism Conference. His subject –

    The Ethical Challenges of Fighting Terrorism – The Gaza War as a Case Study

    ? Prof. Asa Kasher, Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair in Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

    ? Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel Beaudoin, Humanitarian Operations and Civil-Military Advisor, Israel

    ? Ms. Yael Shahar, ICT Researcher, Israel

    ? Col. John E. Chere Jr., Army Attaché at the U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv, Israel

    ? Col. Bentzi Gruber, Deputy Commander of a Reserve Armored Division, I.D.F., Israel

    Note the presence of the US Army Attaché.

    The schedule is here
    http://www.ict.org.il/Portals/0/Conference%20PDF/ICT_2009_Schedule-website_full.pdf

    A wide choice of spine chilling subjects and speakers.

    Orwell lives.

  5. B99 said on September 28th, 2009 at 7:54pm #

    Right you are John Jones.

  6. Mulga Mumblebrain said on September 30th, 2009 at 3:28am #

    mary, you can just imagine the conference, if the Nazis had survived and adopted the unctuous hypocrisy of the West. ‘The Ethical Challenges of Fighting Terrorism-The Warsaw Ghetto as a Case Study’. The Israeli Nazis follow the German, UK and American ones by labeling any resistance to their overwhelming state terrorism as ‘terrorism’. It is, of course, a lie, an oafish and transparent one. The sheer dastardliness of Israeli behaviour in Gaza, as witnessed by the world, as reported by the Gazans and Arab media, as denounced by Israeli troops and as exposed by the Goldstone Report, is utterly unarguable. To then produce ‘professors’ and ‘academics’ who argue that it was the usual ‘moral purity’ and to spit venom, vitriol and invective at all who dare profess to be outraged by brutal, cowardly child murder, is, I believe, evidence not only of phenomenal narcissism and self-delusion, but of an inversion of reality that could only be achieved by the psychotically ill, or people who regard the good opinion of humanity as utterly irrelevant. The worst type of Jew, the absolutist supremacists, those who believe that the goyim are all animals who just live to plot the extermination of the Jews, are emboldened and reinforced in their wickedness by opposition to their depravity. We are dealing with those who absolutely do not equate Palestinian life with Jewish life, who believe it is a religious obligation and good deed to kill civilians and who see a disproportionate death-toll of one hundred to one as an occurrence of no concern whatsoever. Indeed, to point out this disproportion frequently brings demented denunciations of ‘moral equivalence’ by which they mean the crime of equating Jewish life with that of ‘two legged animals’.