A Case Study in the Goldstone Report’s Fundamental Dishonesty

Evelyn Gordon
Commentary/Contentions
03 January '11

As Omri Ceren noted last week, the Goldstone Report on Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza has already prompted numerous detailed rebuttals. But with the report hitting the Israeli headlines again this month in honor of the war’s second anniversary, one cannot help being struck anew by its fundamental dishonesty.

A lengthy Haaretz piece published this weekend offers a salient example. Ironically, reporter Shay Fogelman tried hard to back Goldstone’s accusations. Thus, in an 8,000-word dissection of Israel’s attack on Palestinian police stations on December 27, 2008, the war’s opening day, he somehow didn’t find space to mention Hamas’s own recent admission that most of these policemen belonged to terrorist organizations, just as Israel had claimed all along. But he had plenty of space to quote such unbiased sources as an Al Jazeera reporter (“it was a massacre”).

Where it all falls apart, however, is when he comes to a detailed study submitted to the Goldstone panel that identified 286 of the 345 policemen killed — fully 83 percent — as members of terrorist organizations, based solely on public sources like Palestinian newspapers, the Palestinian Interior Ministry’s website, and the websites of Hamas and other terrorist organizations, where the policemen’s affiliation with various terror groups had been reported.

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