MONTREAL — Even though the contentious, 574-page Goldstone report will percolate within United Nations (UN) and activist circles for a few years, it’s unlikely to result in Israel going before the International Criminal Court (ICC), predicts Hillel Neuer, director of the Geneva-based UN Watch.
From left, UN Watch director Hillel Neuer, accepts a JNF Golden Book Certificate from JNF Montreal president Wendy Spatzner, event chair Michele Chemie Cale, Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem adult education chair Maxine Jacobson, and JNF speakers’ committee chair Richard Levy. [Howard Kay photo]
“Will it go to the ICC? I think not,” Neuer told an audience of about 200 earlier this month at Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem.
The report, which outraged Israel and much of the Jewish world, was commissioned by the controversial UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an agency of the UN that’s located across the street from UN Watch in Geneva. The report was subsequently endorsed by the UN Security Council.
In it, retired South African judge Richard Goldstone and his commission accuse Israel of war crimes and deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead,” a massive three-week assault last winter against Hamas targets in Gaza as a response to eight years of shelling civilians in southern Israel.
The outrage was especially pronounced because Goldstone is Jewish and was a respected human rights advocate.
Neuer said the report could go back to the UN Security Council in the face of Israel’s refusal to launch its own inquiry – the report recommended it should do this, or be at risk of facing the ICC – but “you just don’t have nine [out of 15 votes necessary]” to bring the case before the ICC.
In any case, the United States would almost certainly veto any such effort, he said. Alternatively, Neuer said the report could go back before the UN General Assembly in an effort to “keep it alive,” trigger “national” lawsuits against Israel in individual countries, or the Geneva Convention could address it when signatories meet in the future. All in all, “the report will be very much alive for the next few years,” Neuer said.
In his talk, Neuer heaped discredit on the UNHRC, which he said continues to have 80 per cent of its resolutions focus on and denounce Israel, a country – ironically, he noted – whose creation was supported not only by the UN itself but by renowned Universal Declaration of Human Rights authors John Humphries and René Cassin.
Sadly, he said, the UN has now become “public enemy number 1 of human rights,” its agenda controlled by the so-called non-aligned bloc of nations composed of some of the worst dictatorships on the planet.
Neuer charged that the Goldstone commission was tainted from the start.
Even Mary Robinson, once the UN’s commissioner on Human Rights, refused the offer to head the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict out of concern over the UNHRC’s bias against Israel, Neuer said.
Goldstone has repeatedly said he agreed to take the job only after his mandate was “changed” to include investigating possible human rights violations by all sides. But Neuer said that, legally, the mandate “never changed at all,” since that would have entailed the UNHRC officially changing it. That never happened, Neuer said. The UNHRC was “silent, and silence and acquiescence do not change anything. The mandate was never changed.”
Neuer also took issue with several other aspects of the commission. Its membership was not “diverse,” as Goldstone has insisted, but rather its members were of like mind in pronouncing – even before facts were established – how “shocked” they were by what was happening in Gaza. “Why did they never say how ‘shocked’ they were [by the shelling of] Sderot over eight years?”
Christine Chinkin, a professor at the London School of Economics and a commission member, declared even before the commission’s work got underway that Israel had committed “war crimes” in Gaza.
“This was before seeing a shred of evidence,” Neuer said.
The report that finally emerged was “mostly dedicated to accusing Israel of war crimes,” with “some” criticism of Hamas. “It was not balanced, quantitatively or qualitatively,” Neuer said.
He did not dismiss the possibility that incidents might have occurred during the Gaza conflict that involved civilians dying unnecessarily – because “things happen,” he said – but a “significant” part of the report “adopts a Palestinian and even Hamas narrative,” such as the charge that Israel “deliberately planned to terrorize the civilian population,” while only paying scant attention to the fact that Hamas embeds itself with the population.
Mission fact-finders, Neuer contended, used Hamas testimony with no contrary views presented.
Neuer’s appearance was co-sponsored by the Jewish National Fund as part of its Dinner and Learning series, and by the synagogue.
