Goldstone was aware of the report’s inherent bias from the very outset, he noted when first asked to head the mission that there was an inordinate focus on Israeli actions rather than Hamas. As such Israel refused to cooperate, unwilling to add gravitas to an organisation and to a report that was destined from the very outset to unfairly condemn Israel. It is perhaps relevant to underscore the irony of the fact that Tunisia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia sat on the UN council that instructed Goldstone and that, just eight years ago, it was chaired by the Libya of Colonel Gadaffi. Such was the stained reputation of the former Commission on Human Rights it was dissolved and renamed in 2006.
The Human Rights Council was thus formed in 2006. Since then its obsessive focus on Israel has overshadowed some of the very real human rights abuses taking place in the world today. Both the neutrality and the credibility of the Human Rights council must now be exposed: of the 10 emergency sessions 7 have been on Israel, up to 2010 32 out of its 67 resolutions were against Israel, there have been 101 resolutions addressing the Palestinian refugee issue and not a single one deploring the some 900,000 Jewish refugees. The council is led by some of the worst perpetrators of human rights violations in the world including China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and, up until recently, Libya. The secretary general himself has noted that this has meant resolutions based on political partisan rather than on the gr! avity of human rights abuses. This has led to atrocities perpetrated in countries such as China, Cuba, North Korea and Darfur going uncondemned, a tragedy to those in need of the council’s help. As chair of the commission investigating apartheid violence in South Africa and, given his long-spanning legal career, Goldstone was well aware of the risks of launching investigations and concluding with only partial evidence. In January he alluded to the inherently bias nature of the Human Right’s Council’s ‘rush to pass condemnatory resolutions ’ against Israel. Following on from these comments he has now issued a retraction of his original report.
To his credit, on Friday 1st of April, Judge Goldstone had the intellectual integrity to admit that, armed with all the facts ‘the report would have been a different document’. By his own admission he is guilty of the very rush to condemn Israel that he himself alluded to earlier this year.
Though better late than never, his admission that ‘we know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war’ still fails to appreciate the enormity of the ongoing threat to Israel’s security from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas clearly states in its charter its desire to destroy the Jewish state: ‘Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it .’ The report ignores the radical Islamic, jihadist roots of the Hamas charter; it ignores Hamas’s strategy, infrastructure and willingness to use its own citizens as human shields if it means turning international opinion against Israel. Neutral evidence asserting that Hamas has used schools, mosques, UN facil! ities and even hospitals as launching pads was also ignored in his report. Though Goldstone has revoked the allegation of Israel “deliberate[ly] targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza” and has urged the UN to condemn ‘Hamas’s heinous acts in the strongest terms’ the status quo goes unnoticed. Since Cast Lead there have been more than 799 rockets and 260 mortars in daily barrages launched towards Israeli civilian areas, which are ignored by the same international bodies who rushed to embrace the Goldstone Report two years ago.
In addition to this, military aid continues from Iran and Syria. Only last month the Israeli Navy intercepted the ‘Victoria’ Cargo Ship headed for Gaza to find it loaded with weaponry. In other words, the reasons for Israel’s incursion have not been noted and the fact that Goldstone has revoked his original allegations has been underreported to say the least.
The Goldstone report undermines the credibility of the UN; as Prime Minister Netanyahu puts it, ‘it should be thrown into the dustbin of history’. Furthermore, all official bodies who received and acted upon this fallacious report should be informed and the UN should be urged to halt any ongoing action associated with it.
Moreover, the very idea of an investigative report goes against UN protocol; there has been no report on Sri Lanka’s murder of an estimate 20,000 civilians, none on the 4 million deaths in the Congo, none on Darfur or the Ivory Coast let alone on US and British civilian deaths inflicted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Goldstone has given credence to the already enormous bias against Israel and, though his recognition of this is welcome news, it is for many too little too late. As Hillel Neuer, executive director of the NGO UN Watch puts it, ‘Goldstone will never be able to undo the poisonous anti-Israel libel that he spread around the globe, but as a judge we call on him to do the bare minimum that legal ethics and common sense require .’
Goldstone’s apologia is by no means unequivocal; it is clear that he blames Israel for a lack of cooperation with the report and, though it has now emerged that the numbers published by Israel’s military fit those verified by Goldstone last friday, and thus that her investigative procedures are honest and credible, her right to self-defence has gone and continues to go unaddressed. The very real existential threat to her territory and citizens continues to this day to be ignored not only by Goldstone but by supposedly neutral bodies such as the UN. |
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