Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report, Revisited Five Years Later

...The final verdict on Goldstone would thus seem to consist in two possibilities. One, if he was really of the opinion that the Hamas regime were the innocent victims of Israel’s “closure regime,” and that Israel was really the harsh, oppressive, apartheid nation whose marauding hordes were unleashed to terrorize the good people of Gaza on a whim, then the motives of his involvement in this inquiry and his authorship of the Report were consistent with the highest moral standards of human rights advocacy. Two, if he was not, then, at the very least, he knowingly allowed himself to be used by those he knew to be unfriendly to Israel for the sinister purpose of darkening and defaming the Jewish state with the most heinous crimes that any nation can stand accused: the deliberate commission of war crimes against a defenseless people.

Robert Werdine..
Times of Israel..
02 January '14..

Excellent, a must read! Y.

On the night of November 4, 2008, Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip near the town of Kissufim and targeted a tunnel that Hamas terrorists were planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence some 250 meters away from the border and directly adjacent to an IDF border outpost, not unlike the one they used to seize soldier Gilad Shalit a few years back. Intelligence had established that Hamas operatives had been specifically trained for a planned abduction, and that they planned to activate the tunnel in a few days.

Hamas gunmen were waiting there for them; they had anticipated the possible discovery of the tunnel by the IDF and had thus had the entrances to both ends manned and heavily booby trapped. In the firefight that followed, six Israeli soldiers were injured, two of them seriously. Two Hamas gunman were killed, and several injured, and they then let fly with a volley of mortars at Israel. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.

A six month lull/cease-fire had been established in June 2008 between Israel and Hamas that was brokered by Egypt, and the IDF spokesperson made clear that the operation was not an attempt to abrogate the cease fire:

“This was a pinpoint operation intended to prevent an immediate threat,” the Israeli military said in a statement. “There is no intention to disrupt the cease-fire, rather the purpose of the operation was to remove an immediate and dangerous threat posted by the Hamas terror organization.”

The tunnel skirmish of November 4, 2008 was then met by Hamas in the launching of some 193 rockets and mortars in November, and some 290 between December 1 and December 24, every one of them a war crime.

The Hamas regime, upping the ante, now demanded the following terms for a renewal of the lull/cease-fire, which lapsed on December 18: a complete opening of all border crossings, an opening of the Rafah border with Egypt, and a ban on all IDF activity in Gaza. Hamas was thus now demanding a removal of all the restrictive measures and “IDF activity” that the terrorist actions they had previously committed, and were currently committing, had made absolutely necessary.

On December 24 Hamas launched “Operation Oil Stain” to the accompaniment of a 60 rocket and mortar volley. On December 25 Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said: “I am telling them now, it may be the last minute. I’m telling them stop it. We are stronger.” This was met with an attack of 5 rocket and 14 mortar attacks, and the next day there were 12 more. All efforts to constrain or contain the attacks being ineffective, on December 27 Israel commenced Operation Cast Lead, a three-week sustained military strike on Hamas’ terror infrastructure and rocket launching sites in an effort to thwart future attacks.

But such spurious claims are belied by the facts.

Read more: Five Years Later: Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report, Revisited | Robert Werdine | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/five-years-later-operation-cast-lead-and-the-goldstone-report-revisited/#ixzz2pK8ZDkD6
Follow us: @timesofisrael on Twitter | timesofisrael on Facebook

Noam Chomsky, Andrew Sullivan, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, and others have all charged Israel with responsibility for deliberately breaking the ceasefire that led to the Cast Lead operation, have pointed to Hamas’ willingness to renew the ceasefire, and have cast doubt on whether the Israeli response was thus really legitimate self-defense. The Goldstone Report, too, makes clear its view of Israel’s responsibility for the escalation of rocket attacks in the weeks following the tunnel incident, attributing it to Israel’s “preventive measures,” the closing of border crossings, and the harsh privations inflicted by Israel’s “closure regime” of Gaza, whose horrors are elaborately inventoried for the benefit of the reader, while Hamas’ rocket and mortar attacks, along with their attempt to kidnap another Israeli soldier, are barely mentioned in passing.

(Continue)

Robert Werdine lives in Michigan City, Indiana, USA. He studied at Indiana University, Purdue University, and Christ Church College at Oxford and is self-employed. He is currently pursuing advanced degrees in education and in Middle Eastern Studies.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out! 
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Israel Matzav - The education of R*I*C*H*A*R*D* G*O*L*D*S*T*O*N*E

Carl
Israel Matzav
01 November '11

The Jewish community is very small and the word is that Richard Goldstone is trying to make amends for his pernicious Goldstone Report due to his virtual excommunication from the Jewish community. The latest effort is an op-ed in the New York Times, in which Goldstone defends Israel from charges of apartheid. This passage made me wonder whether he gets it yet.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

(Read full "The education of R*I*C*H*A*R*D* G*O*L*D*S*T*O*N*E")

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Stones of gold, feet of clay

Soccer Dad
01 November '10

Recently, reports appearing the media contradicted assertions made by the Goldstone report. These go to the beliefs promoted by Judge Goldstone and his confederates that Israel's restrictions imposed on Gaza constitute collective punishment, that Israel did not take adequate care to avoid civilians casuatties and members of the Hamas police force should not automatically be considered terrorists.

From the executive summary of the Goldstone report:

The Mission is concerned by declarations made by various Israeli officials who have indicated the intention of maintaining the blockade of the Gaza Strip until the release of Gilad Shalit. The Mission is of the opinion that this would constitute collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

From Mitchel Prothero's Under the gun in Gaza:

I ask him if that means the human rights situation was better under Israeli occupation that it is today for residents of both the West Bank and Gaza. "Why do you think I ask you not use my name? Yes, 100 percent yes," he said. "At least the occupation had a positive effect of drawing the Palestinian people together instead of dividing them. I now fear that we're seeing a systematic effort by Hamas and its religious backers to enter every component of society."

From Peter Hitchens' Lattes, beach barbecues (and dodging missiles) in the world's biggest prison camp

Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands? Once again, the word conceals more than it reveals. In Gaza's trapped, unequal society, a wealthy and influential few live in magnificent villas with sea views and their own generators to escape the endless power cuts. Gaza also possesses a reasonably well-off middle class, who spend their cash in a shopping mall - sited in Treasure Street in Gaza City, round the corner from another street that is almost entirely given over to shops displaying washing machines and refrigerators. Siege? Not exactly. What about Gaza's 'refugee camps'. The expression is misleading. Most of those who live in them are not refugees, but the children and grandchildren of those who fled Israel in the war of 1948. All the other refugees from that era - in India and Pakistan, the Germans driven from Poland and the Czech lands, not to mention the Jews expelled from the Arab world - were long ago resettled.

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Hamas Finally Admits Most Gaza Fatalities Were Combatants, Not Civilians

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
01 November '10

Here’s a news item certain to be ignored by every human rights organization, every UN agency, and every country that backed the Goldstone Report: almost two years after the war in Gaza ended, no less a person than Hamas’s interior minister has finally admitted that Israel was right all along about the casualties — the vast majority were combatants, not civilians.

The first crucial admission in Fathi Hammad’s interview with the London-based Al-Hayat is that the 250 policemen Israel killed on the war’s first day by bombing their station were indeed combatants, just as Israel claimed. Human rights organizations have repeatedly labeled this raid a deliberate slaughter of civilian police tasked solely with preserving law and order, dismissing Israel’s contention that these policemen functioned as an auxiliary Hamas army unit. But here’s what Hamas’s own interior minister says:

On the first day of the war, Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs who were part of Hamas and the various factions fell.

In short, just as Israel claimed, many of these policemen belonged to Hamas, while the remainder belonged to other “factions” — the standard Palestinian euphemism for their various armed militias.

In addition, Hammad said, “about 200 to 300 were killed from the Qassam Brigades, as well as 150 security personnel.” The Qassam Brigades are Hamas’s main fighting force.

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NGO Monitor letter to Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty Int'l

NGO Monitor
26 August '10

Mr. Salil Shetty
Secretary General
Amnesty International
London, UK

Dear Mr. Shetty,

Your appointment as Secretary General of Amnesty International follows a major decline in this once prestigious organization’s moral reputation and influence. We therefore strongly urge you to give priority to ending Amnesty’s systemic bias, lack of credibility, and violation of universal principles in many of its activities.

In particular, NGO Monitor notes:

1) The Gita Sahgal incident, in which Amnesty’s leading women’s rights activist was forced to resign after questioning cooperation with an alleged Taliban supporter, Moazzam Begg, and the interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone publically condoned “jihad in self-defense.” Amnesty’s behavior also demonstrated the absence of accountability in the organization’s response to legitimate criticism.

2) Amnesty’s activities related to the Arab-Israel conflict reflect a consistent and intense bias. For example, during and after the Gaza war (December 2008-January 2009), Amnesty issued many unsupported condemnations of Israel’s response to rocket attacks against civilians, including unverifiable and false charges of “war crimes.” Amnesty also led one-sided calls for an arms embargo against Israel, as part of the wider BDS campaign. This focused on Israel ignored illegal arms shipments from Iran and Syria to Hamas, reflecting the disproportionate attention given to Israel by Amnesty.

3) Amnesty has been central in promoting the distortion of international law and false claims made against Israel in the Goldstone report, including intense lobbying the UN and the EU. Similarly, Amnesty called for discriminatory sanctions against Israel in the form of suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and also for politicized “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials in the International Criminal Court.

(Read full letter)

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Time to leave Human Rights Council

Noah Pollak
Politico
18 July '10

Among the first things the Obama administration did to break from the “unilateral” policies of the Bush administration was to join the United Nations Human Rights Council, which the U.S. shunned when it was formed in 2006. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised that “we will engage in the work of improving the U.N. human rights system.” U.N. ambassador Susan Rice declared that we were joining “because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights.”

Now, almost a year and a half later, the Council remains as it ever was: a body composed of some of the worst human rights abusers in the world, devoted to attacking Western democracies, demonizing Israel, covering up the abuses of authoritarian regimes, and undermining the pursuit of human rights. The only difference today is that America’s name is being lent to this effort.

The administration’s desire for cooperation and engagement at the U.N. has led to acquiescence and even active involvement in a number of unsavory proceedings. The United States co-sponsored a “freedom of expression” resolution with a dictatorship, Egypt, which in effect endorses the suppression of free speech. When Libya and other authoritarians were elected to the Council, Ambassador Rice refused to say whether the U.S. had opposed their admission. When the Syrian representative claimed that Israeli children “sing merrily as they go to school, and, I quote, ‘With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood,’” the U.S. representative made no protest. This summer, the U.S. voted for a resolution that seemed to absolve Iran of human rights abuses.

One of the Council’s flagship projects has been promoting the Goldstone Report on last year’s war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. The Council is now pushing forward with a second phase that seeks to “implement” the findings of the report. This new effort will attack the very legitimacy of the Israeli legal system and declare Israel unfit to conduct its own investigations, opening the door to the involvement of the International Criminal Court.

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PA Goldstone commission says Qassams do not violate int'l law

Elder of Ziyon
18 August '10

I just started going through the Palestinian Authority's second response to Goldstone as required by the UN. It is attached to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's second report to the General Assembly on the followup to the Goldstone recommendations.

It will take a while to go through, but this part shows pretty much where the PA is coming from. Practically the entire report is about alleged Israeli abuses of international law, of course, but it is forced to address Qassam rockets:

65...The PIC [Palestinian Independent Investigation Commission] affirms that, should it be acknowledged that the armed resistance groups in Gaza did intentionally target Israeli civilians, then such a practice would undoubtedly represent a violation of international
humanitarian law. The PNA has on many occasions condemned rocket firing and called on armed resistance groups in Gaza to respect international law and to exercise their right to self-defence in a manner that ensures that the Palestinian people maintain their moral high ground and does not harm their national cause and interests....

68. It is, however, important to understand that one of the salient features characterizing the dynamics between the Palestinian armed resistance groups in Gaza and the Government of Israel is their extremely asymmetric nature. The enormous disparity in military capabilities between the two sides is self - evident and need not be repeated. The Palestinian resistance’s capability to
respond to Israel’s full arsenal of weaponry, including fighter airplanes, helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery, as well as substantial ground forces, is limited to sporadic “crude rocket” firing and mortar shelling. Yet it is also imperative to recall that this is a situation of an occupying Power versus an occupied people, who constitute a defenceless civilian population entitled to protection under international law.

69. If and when civilian targets or populations have been affected by such “crude rocket” firing, it was essentially because of the crude nature of the weapon and the inability to control where the fired projectile lands. While this is in no way intended to justify any harm caused to innocent civilians, it cannot be considered a violation of international humanitarian law, per se. Furthermore, each alleged incident of harm to civilian persons or civilian property would have to be investigated on an individual basis, and the Palestinian Independent Commission is not in a position to do so without the cooperation of both the Government of Israel and the armed resistance groups in Gaza.

The PA's position is that the shooting of rockets at populated areas, aimed at towns in which there is no military objective, is not a violation of international law because you cannot prove that Hamas was deliberately aiming at civilians! This is even though Hamas brags about aiming at civilians!

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Yet Another Critique Of The Goldstone Report--How The UN And Goldstone Ignored International Law

Daled Amos
09 August '10

True, Goldstone and his friends will continue to ignore the criticisms of the Goldstone Report, just as they have claim that such criticisms do not even exist.

But they do.

In The Goldstone Report and International Law, Peter Berkowitz, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, writes that aside from the bias of the Goldstone Report, the emphasis of the criticisms of the report have focused on the mistakes in both the factual and legal findings of the report--

But another and more far-reaching issue, which should be of great significance to those who take seriously the claims of international law to govern the conduct of war, has scarcely been noticed. And that pertains to the disregarding of fundamental norms and principles of international law by the United Nations Human Rights Council (hrc), which authorized the Goldstone Mission; by the Mission members, who produced the Goldstone Report; and by the hrc and the United Nations General Assembly (of which the hrc is a subsidiary organ), which endorsed the report’s recommendations. Their conduct combines an exaltation of, and disrespect for, international law. It is driven by an ambition to shift authority over critical judgments about the conduct of war from states to international institutions. Among the most serious political consequences of this shift is the impairment of the ability of liberal democracies to deal lawfully and effectively with the complex and multifarious threats presented by transnational terrorists.

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Going Far Beyond Goldstone

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
06 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

Is there anything left to be said about the notorious Goldstone Report, which has now been decisively discredited by Alan Dershowitz, Moshe Halbertal, Joshua Muravchik, and Richard Landes, among others, extensively contradicted by three lengthy reports prepared by Israel itself — before, during, and after the issuance of the report — and dramatically refuted by Dore Gold in direct debate with Goldstone himself?

The answer is yes — in the form of Peter Berkowitz’s superb article in the August issue of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, entitled “The Goldstone Report and International Law,” a study of the politicizing of international law. It concisely summarizes the “stunning defects” in the Goldstone Report and then discusses a “deeper issue” — a larger and more fundamental problem that “cannot be resolved [simply] by showing that the Goldstone’s findings of fact about the Gaza operation are severely biased, or by demonstrating that the report misapplied or misunderstood the test for determining whether Israel exercised force in a proportional manner.”

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The Goldstone Report and International Law

The march of politics under the banner of law


Peter Berkowitz
no. 162
Hoover Institution

The controversy over the “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict”1 (September 15, 2009), more commonly known as the Goldstone Report, seems to have died down. But its larger significance has yet to be appreciated. For the most part, the controversy has swirled around the reliability of the Goldstone Report’s factual findings and the validity of its legal findings concerning Operation Cast Lead, which Israel launched on December 27, 2008, and concluded on January 18, 2009.

But another and more far-reaching issue, which should be of great significance to those who take seriously the claims of international law to govern the conduct of war, has scarcely been noticed. And that pertains to the disregarding of fundamental norms and principles of international law by the United Nations Human Rights Council (hrc), which authorized the Goldstone Mission; by the Mission members, who produced the Goldstone Report; and by the hrc and the United Nations General Assembly (of which the hrc is a subsidiary organ), which endorsed the report’s recommendations.

Their conduct combines an exaltation of, and disrespect for, international law. It is driven by an ambition to shift authority over critical judgments about the conduct of war from states to international institutions. Among the most serious political consequences of this shift is the impairment of the ability of liberal democracies to deal lawfully and effectively with the complex and multifarious threats presented by transnational terrorists.

(Read full report)

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Hypocrisy’s finest hour

Op-ed: Revelations of West’s crimes in Afghanistan highlight anti-Israel hypocrisy


Shaul Rosenfeld
Israel Opinion/Ynet
30 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

In an interview with PBS earlier this year, Richard Goldstone was quite amazed by a question regarding the suspicion that he and others may, heaven forbid, adopt a double standard in respect to Israel, compared to their attitude to other states, such as the US for example.

Such claims were looked into, Goldstone said without batting an eyelid, adding that the US adopted far-reaching steps in order to protect innocent civilians in Iraq. He further noted that as opposed to Israel's war crimes and vengeful policy in Operation Cast Lead, the Americans made sure to protect innocent civilians, while apologizing in cases where they erred, for example in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Indeed, why the hell should the “bold apartheid objector” (who, as we may recall, happened to enforce racist laws in the past and send dozens of blacks to the gallows) care about some insignificant, trivialities? For example, the fact that during Operation Just Cause in December 1989, US troops in Panama killed 300 to 1,000 civilians; or that in October 1993, a UN force (mostly comprising US units) killed more than 500 Somali civilians, while “carrying out an operation,” of course.”

Elsewhere, 460 to 2,000 civilians were killed during NATO bombings in Kosovo in 1999; in December 2004, in a campaign against Islamist forces in Iraq’s Fallujah, the Americans killed more than 6,000 civilians and obliterated about 10,000 civilian homes. Yet those who determine Israel’s guilt in advance have no use for such humdrum information.

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Goldstone: Asymmetric legal warfare

Elder of Ziyon
27 July '10

The Goldstone Report was released last September.

The Goldstone Commission members were appointed on April 3. They first convened on May 4. They spent about 10 days in Gaza listening to testimony from people whose testimony was guaranteed not to offend Hamas, and another two days in Geneva listening to other people.

By the beginning of August, they were done with their investigation and started writing the report.

In those mere three months, they say they investigated some 36 incidents from thousands that occurred during a complex military action. These incidents were specifically chosen to make Israel look as bad as possible - in other words, they chose incidents for which they felt that there was overwhelming evidence that Israel was wholly in the wrong, based on the already biased evidence and testimonies.

As Goldstone said,

The Report contains an analysis of 36 specific incidents in Gaza as well as a number on the West Bank and in Israel.

In Chapter XI of the Report, for example we detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks

...These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.

The bolded statement is the linchpin of the Goldstone Report. Based on the Goldstone Commission's supposed military expertise, faced with incomplete evidence and biased testimonies, they determined that Israel engaged in numerous operations in Gaza that had no military advantage and therefore, in the view of the commission, must have been purely for reasons of punishing ordinary Gazan civilians.

Generalizing from these cherry-picked incidents, Goldstone then implies that the entire war was at least in part for that same purpose - a war to target Gaza civilians.



Generalizing from these cherry-picked incidents, Goldstone then implies that the entire war was at least in part for that same purpose - a war to target Gaza civilians. As the report said:

While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.

Since then, the Israeli government has released three reports about the Gaza war. These reports reflected painstaking investigations of the Goldstone 36 incidents as well as those alleged by various NGOs and others. Even a cursory look at the Israeli reports on the specific incidents shows that the number of man-hours spent in interviews and reviewing evidence far outweigh what Goldstone did, and that the seriousness with which they took these investigations likewise far outstripped Goldstone's.

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UN Out to Lynch Israel? Hey, They're Not Even Subtle About It!

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
27 July '10

The UN is sending a committee to Israel to follow up on the biased Goldstone Report. The report, you might remember, found Israel guilty because Palestinians who are seeking to destroy Israel said so. Oh, and the report's staff and leadership were rather intensely prejudiced themselves.

Now it turns out that the coordinator of the committee, Ahmed Motala, a South African lawyer, is not exactly non-partisan. In fact, during the very fighting he is asked on to judge now, he'd already made up his mind. On January 5, 2009, he wrote on a South African site

“The war in Gaza and the killing of innocent Palestinians is not about Hamas, but entirely about the forthcoming elections in Israel….What better way to gain the support of the Israeli electorate than to…kill innocent civilians….The costs of victory in an election in Israel are being paid for by the blood of innocent Palestinians.”

Related post: Blatant Bias

Now this is the kind of nonsense written about Israel that should permanently bar anyone dumb enough to say such things barred permanently from dealing with the issue. The war had nothing to do with the elections but with the fact that--despite Israel's government pleas--Hamas publicly tore up the existing ceasefire and began firing dozens of rockets at Israeli civilians.

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Blatant Bias

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
25 July '10

Anyone who still doubts the magnitude of the UN Human Rights Council’s anti-Israel bias should read this Jerusalem Post expose on the man appointed to head the council’s latest probe of Israel, German jurist Christian Tomuschat.

Tomuschat’s panel will investigate compliance with the Goldstone Report, which accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during last year’s war in Gaza and ordered each to investigate and try its own perpetrators. Thus essentially, Tomuschat is charged with determining whether Israel and Hamas have properly investigated and prosecuted the Goldstone Committee’s allegations.

So here’s what the Jerusalem Post discovered about him. First, he co-authored a brief for Yasser Arafat in 1996 on what legal strategies Palestinians should pursue against Israel — including, incidentally, one they later used with regard to Israel’s security barrier: asking the UN General Assembly to seek a judgment against Israel from the International Court of Justice. Questioned by the Post, Tomuschat confirmed his involvement in the brief but “could not recall” whether Arafat commissioned it.

That’s a distinction without a difference — because whether or not he worked specifically for Arafat, he did work, either voluntarily or for pay, for one party to the current case: the Palestinians. In most legal systems, that would disqualify him from serving as a judge. But not in the HRC’s system.

Second, Tomuschat has already asserted, in a 2002 paper, that states can never properly investigate their own militaries. In his words: “There is little hope that the judicial system of the state concerned will conduct effective investigations and punish the responsible agents. Nowhere have excesses committed by security forces been adequately punished.”

So the man charged with deciding whether Israel’s legal system has adequately investigated its military’s actions in Gaza has already publicly concluded that no legal system ever can. That, too, would suffice to disqualify him in most courts.

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UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report

New UN committee members and UN staffer have anti-Israel connections.


Anne Bayefsky
The Weekly Standard
14 July '10

Among the multitude of attacks on Israel that the United Nations has sponsored over the decades, last year’s Goldstone report on the 2009 Gaza war stands out for its dangerous distortions of fact and law. Now the UN Human Rights Council has sponsored a second-team of investigators to press forward with the report’s implementation. Just as with round one, the United Nations has guaranteed the result of round two by selecting individuals whose independence is compromised from the start.

This second rendition of Goldstone was crafted by a March 2010 resolution of the Human Rights Council. That resolution first declares that Israel – and only Israel – committed “unlawful acts” in the Gaza war. And then it establishes a committee of experts to monitor and assess all judicial and other proceedings taken by Israel to respond to the General Assembly’s endorsement of the Goldstone report and its long list of supposed Israeli crimes.

The mandate also asks the new committee to assess the proceedings of the enigmatic “Palestinian side.” In the many resolutions on the Gaza war from the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council no mention is ever made of “Hamas,” which keeps with the UN fiction that the war entailed wanton Israeli aggression in a vacuum. Instead of eight years of rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian population and an elected government that openly advocates genocide, the resolution creating the Goldstone inquiry describes the problem with the Palestinian side as “crude rockets…result[ing] in the loss of four civilian lives and some injuries.”

The fact that the mandate of the Goldstone inquiry was tainted from the outset, and that its successor is cut from the same cloth, did not deter three more lawyers from taking this latest UN job. They are German Christian Tomuschat (chair), Malaysian Param Cumaraswamy, and American Mary Davis. As it turns out, the takers and their UN associates have more in common than first meets the eye.

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Winning the war you can win

Fresnozionism.org
23 June '10

A poor idea whose time has come:

Ahead of a potential new conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the IDF has drawn up plans to evacuate entire Palestinian villages and refugee camps from areas of conflict in the event of an Israeli incursion, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

During Operation Cast Lead, in the winter of 2008/2009, the IDF dropped millions of flyers over areas it planned to invade and made over a quarter of a million phone calls to private homes and mobile phones warning people to leave…

According to the new operational doctrine for the Gaza Strip, ahead of an invasion of the Jabalya refugee camp in a large-scale operation, for example, the IDF would give prior notification to residents and designate an amount of time they would be given to leave. The IDF would also enter potential conflict zones more slowly to permit residents to evacuate the area. — Jerusalem Post

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Goldstone report contained hundreds of accusations that Israel deliberately harmed civilians, and indeed even falsely concluded that the object of the operation was to hurt and kill civilians. The accusations were based mostly on hearsay evidence collected from Gaza residents by biased NGOs (Human Rights Watch, etc.) often with the assistance of Hamas-provided guides and translators.

It seems to me that the new guidelines would not prevent a similar ‘Goldstoning’, which is by nature a disingenuous process, a diplomatic lynching. Indeed, by increasing the degree of contact with civilians — if, for example a village had to be evacuated — they would increase the probability of incidents which could be spun as brutality.

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The perfidious UN

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
09 June '10

The Gaza flotilla imbroglio has provided the UN with the pretext for a new wave of anti-Israeli incitement. The Security Council instantly summoned an emergency meeting, which merely served as an arena to slander Israel and endorse a US-modified resolution demanding an investigation of its actions. The bias of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was even more blatant. It immediately condemned Israel, and only subsequently demanded an investigative commission which, like the notorious Goldstone Report, would simply be a kangaroo court.

The idealists who founded the UN and crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would turn in their graves were they aware that the noble institution they created has been hijacked by rogue states.

Today the majority of the 189 UN members consistently turn a blind eye to the abuse of human rights and outright massacres, frequently even among their own citizens.



(Almost perfect timing for Isi's article as today, Thursday, June 10th, the UN Human Rights Council will convene and Iran's human rights reviewed. Let's do our part to make sure that the regime is held accountable for its numerous abuses of the rights of its citizens.Let's do our part to make sure that the regime is held accountable for its numerous abuses of the rights of its citizens. Ask what your country's UN delegates in Geneva are doing for human rights in Iran. Please post and pass on this video to as many people as possible. Y.)

Examples abound: Russia’s response to the Chechnya insurrection in which Grozny was razed to the ground leaving 700,000 corpses; China’s brutal suppression of dissent in Tibet; the genocidal killing of more than a million Christians and animists by the Islamic government in Sudan; the barbaric crimes committed by Saddam Hussein against his own people.

UN international initiatives have also culminated in disaster. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the UN recalled its peacekeeping force, facilitating the brutal massacre of more than a million Tutsis. Subsequently, a UN force mandated by the Security Council provided a safe haven for the Hutu killers. This was under the watch of secretary-general Kofi Annan, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

During the cruel ethnic war in Yugoslavia, a UN battalion in July 1995 handed over 8,000 Muslim civilians to the Serbs, who promptly slaughtered them. In fact, it was only after 250,000 people had been killed that the Americans bypassed the Security Council and intervened to end the conflict.

THE MOST damning UN humbug is the ferocious hatred directed against Israel, the sole UN affiliate whose right to exist remains under threat. Efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state serve to unite the Islamic world, rogue states and Third World countries. They effectively resurrected the rescinded notorious Soviet UN resolution which bracketed Zionism with racism, harnessing the entire bureaucracy of the UN to portray Israel as the primary source of the evils threatening mankind.

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(Another) Open Letter to Judge Goldstone

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
12 May '10

Dear Judge Goldstone,

I am one of those who have read your report, and have followed your subsequent comments about it. I just read your most recent statements in the Jerusalem Post and Ha-Aretz (for those who can’t read Hebrew, consult the CAMERA’s discussion). Once again you repeat, unchanged, two prominent claims:

1) If only Israeli had cooperated, things might have been different; and
2) No substantive criticism has arisen to challenge your findings.

Now your first claim is a counter-factual, hence speculative. But even then, it’s misleading. While Israel didn’t cooperate officially, through various channels (Israeli NGOs, Daniel Reizner, the former head of the International Law department at the IDF), Israel submitted extensive evidence to your committee. You not only ignored these submissions, but to this day refuse to put them up at the UNHRC website devoted to your Mission.

Your second claim, however, is more concrete; and here the evidence against your is formidable. There is an extensive and substantive critique of your Report. In fact most close readers – even neutral ones – find the Report surprisingly unprofessional and stunningly credulous in its handling of evidence. These critiques are available online (collected at a handy website), and your denial that they have any substance contradicts your second claim categorically. Why would it have made any difference if Israel had participated in the Mission’s work, since you have and continue to ignore any evidence that contradicts your findings against them? Are you really saying, it’s too bad Israel didn’t participate because then the findings would be still more damning?

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Human Rights Watch versus human rights

Based on recent revelations, there were systematic violations in the organization, especially regarding Israel.


Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/Jpost
09 May '10

New York-based Human Rights Watch – once the “gold standard” of moral watchdogs – is playing a leading role in demonizing Israel through false allegations of war crimes. HRW supported the UN report condemning Israel on Jenin (2002) and the attack on the separation barrier as a violation of international law (2004), charged Israel with “deliberate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on civilians in Lebanon (2006) and issued a flood of such allegations about Gaza (2009).

HRW also claimed credit for Judge Richard Goldstone’s one-sided UN “inquiry” on the Gaza fighting. Goldstone is a close confidant of HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth, and was a member of HRW’s board.

But HRW has been shattered following revelations of systematic factual, moral and ethical violations, particularly with respect to Israel. Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “senior military analyst,” who wrote many of the accusations about Gaza, including the white phosphorous libel, was fired. This followed discovery of his obsessive collection of Nazi war memorabilia, but the deeper issues relate to the credibility of his military analyses. (The investigation HRW promised six months ago never happened, and instead, it imposed a gag order on Garlasco.) Garlasco is a symptom, and after NGO Monitor’s systematic revelations of HRW hypocrisy, founder Robert Bernstein denounced his own organization for helping undermine the principles of human rights. Articles by Jonathan Foreman in the Sunday Times and Benjamin Birnbaum in The New Republic have further exposed the mythology.

BASED ON interviews with HRW board members, employees and others, Birnbaum documented systematic bias and factual distortions. Sarah Leah Whitson (who led a bizarre fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia, invoking the specter of the “pro-Israel” lobby) was brought in by Roth to head the Middle East and North Africa division. Whitson is an admirer of Norman Finkelstein, who, as Birnbaum notes, is a “Hizbullah supporter who has likened Israel to Nazi Germany” and accuses Jews of exploiting the Holocaust. In an e-mail, Whitson wrote of her “tremendous respect and admiration for him, because... making Israeli abuses the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task...”

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UNIFIL: "The Worlds Most Expensive Summer Camp"

Daled Amos
29 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Michael Rubin writes about the utter failure of UNIFIL to do what it was supposed to:

The rearming of Hezbollah -- to the point that, as Secretary Gates points out, they now have more missiles than most countries -- highlights the utter failure of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. What was a force of slightly less than 2,000 men, before the 2006 war, ballooned in the aftermath of the end of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 ending that war into more than 11,000 troops -- the budget for which, this year, is more than $500 million. Rather than maintain peace or prevent Hezbollah's rearmament, UNIFIL has become, in effect, the world's most expensive summer camp.

Not only has UNIFIL failed in its mission, but its continued presence in southern Lebanon has also transformed it into a human shield for Hezbollah. UNIFIL's deployment has convinced Hezbollah that they can rearm without consequence.

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