The Times Doubles Down on Goldstone

Jonathan Tobin

Contentions/Commentary

17 September 09

The UN’s investigation of last winter’s fighting in Gaza was the farrago that every objective observer expected it would be. Based on the UN Human Right Council’s premise that the Israeli counteroffensive aimed at stopping the barrage of rockets at its southern towns and villages constituted a “war crime,” the so-called “fact-finding mission” led by South African Judge Richard Goldstone found exactly what it was looking for and regurgitated the avalanche of Hamas propaganda fed by Palestinian witnesses. Though it condemned Hamas missile attacks on Israel, the main focus of the report is to classify Israel’s attempt to defend itself from attacks across the Gaza border as an unjustifiable crime. The bias of the committee, one of whose members, Christine Chinkin, had already condemned Israel’s actions, was apparent, and Israel was right to refuse to take part in the affair.

The main point of the report was not so much the individual charges but the notion that the entire Israeli campaign was itself illegitimate, and to set an absurd standard of conduct by which Israel’s armed forces are judged as criminal for any attempt to root out terrorists who hide among civilians.

What’s missing here is any sense of context. Hamas considered itself at war with Israel and used the territory it controlled to attack Israel. But when, after completely evacuating Gaza in 2005 and holding back for years, Israel took the only step any sovereign state could—using its army to try wiping out the terrorists and their bases—Hamas cried foul and the anti-Israel cheering section at the UN has now obliged with a report that treats the attacks on Israel as insufficient to justify a serious military response. The point is that the responsibility for the fighting and all the casualties on both sides rest with those who launched the war and made attacks on Gaza inevitable.

Just as the Nazi regime bears the guilt for all the civilian casualties incurred, not only during their own conquest of Europe, but also killed and hurt during the Allied campaign to liberate the Continent, so too does the Hamas terrorist movement bear the sole responsibility for all the hurt done to the people of Gaza as a result of their calculated decision to wage war on Israel from that area. To provoke a war and then to lament their sad fate as victims of their own aggression is hypocritical on the part of Hamas. For the UN to endorse this stand renders the world body, its Human Rights Council, and the Goldstone committee as guilty as the terrorists themselves. To endorse the principle that Israel has no right to defend itself against attacks across its borders is to delegitimize the Jewish state.

This report will, no doubt, be grist for the mill of Israel bashers but will persuade few notalready convinced that Israel was born in sin and that efforts to protect it are likewise sinful. But almost as interesting as the UN’s efforts to besmirch Israel is the way some in the mainstream media have treated this story. Among the most fascinating was the story the New York Times published on its front page yesterday.

Nothing in the piece challenged the extraordinary premise of the report, which views Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense as morally equivalent. Even more important, theTimes article presented the committee’s claims that armed Hamas fighters were not located in the schools, mosques, and other civilian targets that suffered during the fighting, even though the paper’s own coverage of the war contradicted this assertion.

But not satisfied with trumpeting the UN attack on Israel on its front page, the Timesfollowed up the next day by giving Goldstone space on the op-ed page to further justify his report without giving space to any dissent to this point of view. Titled “Justice in Gaza” (no irony intended), Goldstone continued his campaign of treating the two sides of the battle as morally equivalent. Indeed, in order to justify the UN’s attempts to criminalize Israeli self-defense, he goes even further. He believes that since the West has pushed for accountability of Sudan’s government for the genocide in Darfur, they “must do the same with Israel.” In the bizzaro world of Goldstone’s persecution of Israel, Israeli self-defense is now indistinguishable from the mass murder of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, and it’s equally indefensible.

Goldstone’s premise that all civilian deaths in battle are, in the absence of any conclusive proof, war crimes and subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is clearly not sustainable. Nor is it one the United States would care to see applied to our own forces. But though the international Left would like to see such a standard applied to the United States, Israel is much more vulnerable a target. With the help of friendly media such as the Times, Goldstone and the UN have advanced the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state another crucial step.

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