“Israel, while required like any other state to accept international scrutiny of its conduct with regard to compliance with international law, is entitled to insist that such conduct be judged fairly and without bias” [our emphasis].
Those were the words of Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the UN Human Rights Council Mission that investigated the conduct of Israel’s war against Hamas last January. He spoke them to the Jerusalem Post in July. His four-person commission delivered its report last week. To describe the document in mild terms: it is nasty. Its form may be legalistic, but its substance is sheer polemics.
The fairness and freedom from bias that Goldstone promised is Israel’s right to expect was – as is almost always the case in matters of international due process regarding the Jewish state – a chimera.
The report is a full-length mirror reflection of the sordid, malevolent body, the United Nations Human Rights Council, that commissioned it. The report accuses Israel of having committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity in the Gaza war. It also accuses Hamas of having committed war crimes. But the overwhelming thrust and obsessive focus of the report – consistent with the single-minded, obsessive focus of the commission’s mandate – was Israel. Indeed, it was because of that mandate that Canada and other countries, from the very outset, refused to support the work of the commission.
Among the outrageous findings of the commission was the statement that the Israel Defence Forces’ military operations “were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Israel’s assault, the report concludes, “was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole.”
The commissioners directed Israel to investigate the report’s findings. But in a grotesque, underhanded, kick to the groin, the commission gratuitously derided the ability of Israel’s judicial system to do so. Failure to adequately investigate the findings “in conformity with international standards,” the commissioners warned, could lead to prosecution of Israeli leaders and soldiers by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
And so on. The report is a wicked weave of anti-Israel rebuke.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly referred to the investigation as a “ a kangaroo court” and the report as “a prize for terrorism that would damage a democratic state’s ability to fight terror.”
President Shimon Peres called the report “a mockery of history that fails to distinguish between the aggressor and a state that exercises its right for self defence.”
It is difficult to understand Goldstone’s participation in this travesty. The cause of justice has been set back. The report perverts justice, as if the very notion of it regarding the right of the Jewish state to live sovereign and free in the Middle East is itself a despised idea.
Shame.
