EDITOR: The Goldstone festival rolls on!
Ever since Goldstone has atoned and recanted under Zionist pressure, and did all he could to undermine his own report on the Gaza massacre, Zionists of all sizes and flavours have come out of their holes, and are having a field day with the same old excuses. The leader of the pack is the old hand with helping Israel when it is in real trouble, non other than Jonathan Friedland, the lefty Guardian Zionist. One has to retort back with disgust at the article he managed to concoct in support of Israel on this occasion – after all, he is deending the murder of iover 1400 people! So what are the arguments?
1. Israel is always singled out: Why gang on Israel, when the world is full of mad dictators, who, according to JF, are ‘worse’
2. The UN is a useless organisation specialising in anti-Israel motions
3. The UN inquiry only looked into the behaviour of Israel, but not into that of Hamas
4. Hamas did not have its own inquiry, but Israel did
5. This concentration on Israel is obsessive and has a serious undertone
Now JF does not tell us in so many words why he thinks the whole world is so mad to gang up on the poor and helpless Israelis, but those who read him on a long term basis in the Guardian, remember his article more or less celebrating the fact there are so many anti-semites around in Europe… Takes no genius to work out that the world is full of antisemitism, otherwise why ingle out Israel?…
This twaddle is getting paraded in the Guardian for years, a show of tribal loyalty of the worst kind, and all this under a lefty ‘concerned’ cover. Today the paint seemed to have peeled off, and the cover much dented, showing the Zionist below…
There is hardly space here to refute JF’s silly and obsequious arguments, but just few reminders:
1. No one singles Israel out – it does so itself! The state of the ‘chosen people’ has made the indigenous population of Palestine into refugees in 1948, 1967, and many times since. No other nation has suffered 75% of its people becoming refugees over few months, and then refused entry into their own country. Despite numerous UN resolution (yeah, infers JF, but the UN must be anti-semitic, or it would not pass so many resolutions on Palestine…) Israel has refused to allow any of them back into their country and homes, even when its own High Court has so ordered!Which other country can boast of 64 years of unbroken oppression
2. Israel has broken most of the requirements of the Geneva Convention over six decades and more, moving its own Jewish population into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, building illegal settlements, confiscating land, and oppressing the population under siege which the Convention forces them to care for and protect. Jonathan Friedland seems to either think this OK, or to roughshod and hope we all forget it.
3. Israel has occupied and held illegally territories of Four Arab nations for decades, breaking all records. Unless one wishes to go back to the days of the Third Reich during the Second World War, Israel holds the record unchallenged! It destroyed Beyrut and South Lebanon so many times, and killed so many people, that keeping track has become impossible. It also amanged to totally disregard all UN resolutions – the same ones Jonathan Friedland is so worked up about. Israel has been the most committed and systematic law breaker since the second World War, producing nuclear, biological and chmeical armaments against all traeties, refusing to join the War Crimes legislation (like the US). Need we go on?
So who is singling whom out?
4. Hamas needs an inquiry? Fo what? To discover Israel has moved into Gaza with all its mighty army, killed almost 1500 Palestinians, a third of them children, and suffered 13 dead, 4 of which it dispatched itself? For discovering this, you do not need an inquiry, you need a radio, or computer with internet connection, or a library with some newspapers… Has Hamas moved into Israel? Can it at all fight Israel seriously, or cause real harm?
5. One-sided inquiry? This is like saying: let us look into both sides and their behaviour – the Wehrmacht in September 1939 moving into the Poland, and the Polish forces behaviour defending their country, in order to work out who is right here. Excellent.
6. If the concentration on Israel is obsessive indeed, and unjustified, why does Joanthan Friedland not come out and say so? That would be at least honest, rather than inferring it slyly. Well, he does not do so, as even he knows such a false claim will invalidate his arguments altogether. Is there another single country which gets more support – financial, political, military, diplomatic – from the most powerful nations on earth? Describing Israel again as the victim is disgustingly insincere, but so normalised by Zionism, that most people tend to believe in it until they read the papers. Israel – the victim?!
Now read the vile article itself, if you have not yet done so:
Where’s the Goldstone report into Sri Lanka, Congo, Darfur – or Britain?: The Guardian
The Arab spring proves that Israel is not even the biggest issue in the Middle East – yet it gets all the attention
Jonathan Friedland
If you want a glimpse of the anger and heartache caused by the Goldstone report into the Gaza conflict of 2008-9, you could do worse than take a trip to the National Theatre. There a new and absorbing play, The Holy Rosenbergs, imagines the rift in a British Jewish family sparked by the daughter’s work as a lawyer for a Goldstone-like inquiry into Israeli conduct in Gaza. It is the eve of her brother’s funeral, and the local rabbi urges her to stay away: if she attends, pro-Israel activists will demonstrate at the cemetery.
If that sounds a stretch, think again. A year ago, Richard Goldstone – the eminent judge who had headed a UN fact-finding mission to Gaza – was told by key players in the South African Jewish community that he should not come to the synagogue where his grandson was due to have his bar mitzvah: if Goldstone showed his face, the 13 year-old’s big day would be disrupted by protests.
In the end, the row was resolved, but that is about the only part of the Goldstone saga that was: the rest remains fiercely contested, for reasons which point to a much larger story than simply the tale of one man and his report.
That particular battle has been reignited by the op-ed piece the judge wrote last week in the Washington Post “reconsidering” his own report and withdrawing what had been his most devastating finding. Goldstone wrote that the latest evidence “indicate[s] that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”.
The import of that sentence can hardly be exaggerated. His original suggestion that Israel had been guilty of “wilful killings” of “protected persons” had been received as the most damning indictment possible, an international mark of Cain on Israel’s forehead. Anti-Israel activists had seized on it; many Israel supporters branded Goldstone a traitor, ignoring his own description of himself as a proud Zionist.
Now the two camps are strapping on their rhetorical armour all over again. Israel advocates are savouring the Goldstone semi-retraction as sweet vindication, believing the entire report can now be trashed; Israel’s opponents are looking for those unwithdrawn charges that still have to be answered. One side revels in Goldstone’s bald declaration that “Hamas has done nothing” to follow the report’s key recommendation – which was for both Israel and Hamas to investigate the charges against them. The other notes the gravity of the outstanding claims and the fact that Israel’s own investigations, while numbering 400, have led to all too few prosecutions.
None of this will bring back the more than 700 noncombatants, many of them children, who were killed in Gaza during those appalling winter weeks. Nor will it end the argument chiefly because, as many have noted, Goldstone was never going to be a cool, legal process but a burningly political one. That was baked in from the start, in a way that points to that wider and deeper problem.
For who was it that commissioned Goldstone and his team to look into Gaza? It was the UN Human Rights Council. That sounds like an eminently respectable body – until you look at its record. A 2010 analysis showed that very nearly half of all the resolutions it had passed related to Israel: 32 out of 67. And guess which country is the only one to be under permanent review, on the agenda for every single meeting? Israel. There is only one rapporteur whose mandate never expires. No, it’s not the person charged with probing Belarus, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, despite the hideous human rights records of those nations. It is Israel. The UNHRC, whose predecessor body was once, laughably, chaired by Libya, had originally asked Goldstone to probe just one side of the Gaza war: it was only the judge’s own insistence that he investigate Hamas too that widened his remit. No wonder Goldstone says now of the body he served that its “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted”.
We can laugh at an organisation so potty it would put a murderous tyrant like Muammar Gaddafi in charge of monitoring human rights around the globe. But in its belief that no country in the world behaves worse or matters more, a belief expressed by the sheer volume of attention it pays to Israel, it reflects a view that is alarmingly widespread.
Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the “core issue” in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine conflict – that it is the “running sore” whose eventual healing will heal the wider region and beyond.
That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn’t relieve those in Damascus or Manama or Sana’a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not “the heart of the matter”, as the cliche always insisted it was. The heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in, day out, for 40 years or more.
Yet it is not the suffering of these hundreds of millions of Arabs which has attracted the sympathy of the UN Human Rights Council. Nor has it stirred the compassion of left-leaning liberal types who pride themselves on thei r care for the oppressed. Few places get them excited the way Israel does.
So in 2009 Sri Lanka could kill between 7,000 and 20,000 civilians, displacing 300,000 more in its bombardment of the Tamils at about the same time as the Gaza conflict – but you will search in vain for the Goldstone report into Sri Lankan war crimes. Nor will you find Caryl Churchill writing a play called Seven Sri Lankan Children – asking what exactly is it in the Sri Lankan mentality that allows them to be so brutal.
There is no Goldstone or Churchill to probe the 4 million deaths in the Congo, the slaughtered in Darfur or the murdered in the Ivory Coast, let alone the civilian deaths inflicted by the US and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one is proposing an academic boycott of those nations or any of the other serial violators of human rights. Tellingly, two members of the four-person board of the LSE’s Middle East Centre are firm advocates of cutting all scholarly ties to Israel – but were only too happy for the college to receive £1.5m from the Gaddafi family.
Many will say that there is indeed a double standard – but it benefits Israel, routinely protected by a US veto at the UN unavailable to those weaker states deemed hostile. That may be true of the most powerful western governments. But when it comes to the academic, cultural and, yes, the media sphere, the bias often works the other way around.
To be clear, this is not to deny that there is a desperately serious problem in Israel-Palestine. There is, and Israelis and Palestinians need it to be solved. I fully understand why Jews and Palestinians regard their conflict as the central issue in the universe. But for the rest of the world to see it that way – the way those who despatched Judge Goldstone saw it – makes no sense at all.
EDITOR: But the Guardian Editorial itself disagrees with Friedland!
Very unusually, the Guardian Editorial is refusing to tow the line which is dictated by Friedland! Unheard of. They must all be anti-semites…
Goldstone report: the unanswered questions: The Guardian Editorial
Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly Israel’s state policy
It is difficult, in this digital world of instant claim and rebuttal, to say that you were wrong. But Richard Goldstone’s retraction of one of the claims of the report that he chaired – that Israel targeted civilians in the war on Gaza as a matter of policy – is one such instance. Mr Goldstone deserves credit for honesty. It is another matter altogether to decide whether all the other claims of a 575-page report are now invalidated. The Goldstone report was a fact-finding mission, not a judicial inquiry. It was not a document of verdict, but put forward evidence for further investigation. So which facts caused Mr Goldstone to retract? Three, principally: that the shelling of a home in which 22 members of one family died was the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image; that the officer was still under investigation; and that Israel has since investigated over 400 allegations of operational misconduct. Had he known then what he knows now, he concludes, the report would have been very different.
Two of the three other members of the mission disagree with their former chairman’s change of heart. Hina Jilani, who served on a similar fact-finding mission on Darfur, said that nothing changed the substance of the original report, and Desmond Travers, an expert on international criminal investigations, still feels the tenor of the report stands “in its entirety”. Mr Goldstone has parted company with the other members of his mission. It is therefore worth returning to the original report. The retracted allegation refers to the attack which killed 22 members of the Samouni family, who, following instructions from Israeli soldiers, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun. But there are 35 other incidents that Goldstone’s team investigated. It found seven cases where civilians were shot leaving their homes waving white flags; a direct and intentional attack on a hospital which may amount to a war crime; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; nine attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chickens farms, sewage works and water wells – all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. The key paragraph of the report states: “The Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility.” On the Samouni killings it states that even if it amounted to an operational error and the mission concludes that a mistake was made, “state responsibility of Israel for an internationally wrongful act” would remain. All of this still stands, as does the charge that Hamas’s rockets deliberately targeted Israeli civilians.
Clear to one side the superheated flak of the debate today. It arises from Israel’s current international isolation, of which the Gaza operation formed only a part. It is now said that the Goldstone report became the cornerstone of a campaign to delegitimise Israel. None of this is relevant to what happened in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, events which led to the deaths of 1,396 Palestinians, 763 of whom, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, were not taking part in hostilities when they were killed. The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was “deliberately disproportionate” and intended to “punish, humiliate and terrorise”. That charge stands unanswered. Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly state policy. Shooting the messenger is always easier than dealing with the message itself. This time, the messenger had the grace to shoot himself. It does not change what happened in Gaza, nor what will happen the next time war breaks out.