DAMASCUS - Behind all the media buzz about
events in Libya, Yemen and Syria, the Arab-Israeli
conflict resurfaced at the weekend in a bizarre
manner.
Richard Goldstone, the South
African judge who was author of a controversial
2009 report that carried his name - wrote an
article for The Washington Post, sending
shockwaves throughout the upper echelons of power
in the Gaza Strip and Israel.
Goldstone,
for two years hailed as a hero by the Arab street,
had chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by
the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)
and its report accused Israel of committing war
crimes during the Gaza war of 2008. The report
actually was tough on both the Israelis and the
Palestinians - but
that seemingly did not matter
to the Arabs. What mattered to them was the
strength of its words.
The Palestinian
street eagerly endorsed the report, seeing it as a
triumphant victory at the United Nations, although
the same cannot be said for the Palestinian
governments in Gaza and the West Bank. Although
Hamas had facilitated the investigation, it
nevertheless was very unimpressed with the report
because it also accused the Palestinians of war
crimes for deliberately targeting Israeli
civilians.
For their part, the Israelis
dismissed the Goldstone Report as biased, having
refused to even cooperate with the UN probe.
Jewish communities around the world trashed the
report for being too harsh on Israel.
Pro-Palestinian communities around the world
trashed it for being too harsh on the
Palestinians. Goldstone himself trashed it yet
again on April 1, adding to the chorus saying that
it was flawed and misleading.
To
understand what's happening, let's go back to
early 2009. The UNHRC passed a resolution
condemning Israel for "grave violations" of human
rights, appointing a team headed by Goldstone to
investigate "all violations of international human
law and international humanitarian law that might
have been committed at any time in the context of
the military operations that were conducted in
Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and
18 January 2009, whether before, during or after".
The mandate was to investigate operations
in Gaza and not those in Israel, which means by
the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) not Hamas. When
the report was released in mid-September 2009, it
concluded that both sides had committed
violations, stating that Israel had used
disproportionate force, targeting Palestinian
civilians and destroying their infrastructure.
The Israelis, it noted, were possibly
guilty of crimes against humanity. Hamas was also
accused of targeting Israeli civilians and firing
rockets indiscriminately at northern Israel. Both
sides were encouraged to launch internal
investigations to bring wrongdoers to justice or
otherwise recommended taking the matter to the
International Court of Justice at The Hague.
In October 2009, the UNHRC voted in
support of the report, but both Hamas and Israel
dismissed it, refusing to admit that they had
committed war crimes. Even Mahmud Abbas, the
pro-Western president of the Palestinian National
Authority in the West Bank helped drown the report
at the UN - suffering tremendous damage in the
Palestinian street.
In his recent article,
Goldstone wrote: "If I had known then what I know
now, the Goldstone report would have been a
different document."
The Israelis
immediately grabbed on his apparent u-turn, with
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that the
original report "should be thrown into the
waste-bin of history". Israeli President Shimon
Peres demanded an official apology from Goldstone,
while Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said, "It is
very odd that Goldstone suddenly backtracks on the
content of his fact-finding report and says he
accepts the Israeli narrative."
Israeli
columnist Aluf Benn described the Washington Post
article as a "major public relations coup" for
Israel, explaining that Goldstone had "retracted
his allegations that Israel had committed war
crimes against humanity during Operation Cast
Lead". All Goldstone said was that people should
re-read the article closely.
I tried to do
just that, reading the article twice then
comparing it to the 275-page report that I went
through the burden of printing and highlighting.
What Goldstone basically said in the article was
that the Palestinian civilians targeted by the IDF
"were not intentionally targeted as a matter of
policy". He makes particular reference to the
killing of 29 members of the Simouni family, which
in 2009 was signaled out as one of the worst
crimes of the Gaza war. Now, Goldstone says that
shelling the home "was apparently the consequence
of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation
of a drone image".
Originally, the
Goldstone Report said that Israel's strikes into
Gaza were "deliberately disproportionate" and
intended to "punish, humiliate, and terrorize" the
Gaza Strip. It even speaks of the "blockade
policies" of Israel on Gaza, claiming that they
are a "violation" of the Geneva Convention.
The report actually quotes IDF Northern
Command chief Gadi Eisenkot saying:
What happened in the Dahiya quarter
of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village
from which Israel is fired on. We will apply
disproportionate force on it and cause great
damage and destruction there. From our
standpoint, these are not civilian villages,
they are military bases. This is not a
recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been
approved.
That only reminds us of
Peres speaking to The Jerusalem Post on January
14, 2009 (during the Gaza War) when he said that
his country's aim was to "provide a strong blow to
the people of Gaza so that they would lose their
appetite for shooting at Israel".
Goldstone neither refutes nor confirms nor
challenges, any of that information in his new
article. What he does is find excuses for Israel
to act in the manner that it did during the Gaza
war. He then praises the Israelis for bringing
wrongdoers to justice, noting that no such action
took place on the Palestinian side. "Israel has
done this [investigation] to a significant
degree."
Strangely, in the original
report, Goldstone clearly says that the Israeli
system was unfit to "deal with allegations of
serious wrongdoings by armed personnel" according
to international principles. It also says that
Operation Cast Lead could not be viewed "in
isolation" from Israel's general approach towards
the Palestinians, many of which are "violations of
international law".
How he now has faith
in Israeli justice when he doubted its
international standards only two years ago,
remains a mystery. So is the reason behind
Goldstone's decision to publish such an article,
at this particular time. However, we must not give
too much credit to Goldstone's article - it
remains nothing but an article, carrying little
weight when compared to a 275-page UN-mandated
report. That report, accepted by the UNHRC, was
authored by four judges, not one, whereas this
article was written by one person, Richard
Goldstone.
Sami Moubayed is a
university professor, political analyst, and
editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.
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