Goldstone Recants Read Online Free Page A

avows that his goal is to apply evenhandedly the laws of war to state and non-state actors. It is unlikely however that this admirable objective will be advanced by his double standards.
    Goldstone now rues his “unrealistic” hope that Hamas would have investigated itself, while his detractors heap ridicule on his past naiveté. How could a terrorist organization like Hamas have possibly investigated itself? Only civilized countries like Israel are capable of such self-scrutiny. Indeed Israel’s judicial record is indisputable testimony to this capacity.
    The Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din found that, although thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed during the second intifada, only five Israeli soldiers were held criminally liable and not a single Israeli soldier was convicted on a murder or manslaughter charge, and that 80 percent of the investigations of violent assault by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in 2005 were closed without criminal indictments.
    The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem found that in the decade following the outbreak of the first intifada 1,300 Palestinians had been killed yet only 19 Israeli soldiers were convicted of homicide, and that for the period 2006-9 “a soldier who kills a Palestinian not taking part in hostilities is almost never brought to justice for his act.”

     
    IT IS CLEAR that Goldstone did not publish his recantation because “we know a lot more today.” What Goldstone calls new information consists entirely of unverifiable assertions by parties with vested interests. The fact that Goldstone cannot cite any genuinely new evidence to justify his recantation is the most telling proof that none exists.
    What then happened?
    As already noted, ever since publication of the Mission’s Report, Goldstone has been the object of a relentless smear campaign. Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz compared him to Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, while the Israeli ambassador to the United States castigated his Report as even worse than “Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers.”
    Goldstone was not the only one who came under attack. The U.N. Human Rights Council appointed the eminent international jurist Christian Tomuschat to chair a follow-up committee mandated to determine whether Israeli and Hamas officials were investigating the allegations in the Goldstone Report. Deciding that Tomuschat was insufficiently pliant, the Israel lobby hounded and defamed him until he had no choice but to step down.
    Many aspects of Goldstone’s recantation are perplexing.
    Goldstone has the reputation of being very ambitious. Although he was savaged after publication of the Report, the tide began to turn in his favor this past year.
    In Israel the newspaper Haaretz editorialized that it was “time to thank the critics for forcing the IDF to examine itself and amend its procedures. Even if not all of Richard Goldstone’s 32 charges were solid and valid, some of them certainly were.” In the United States, Tikkun magazine honored Goldstone at a gala 25th anniversary celebration. In South Africa distinguished personalities such as Judge Dennis Davis, formerly of the Jewish Board of Deputies, publicly denounced a visit by Alan Dershowitz because, among other things, he had “grossly misrepresented the judicial record of Judge Richard Goldstone.”
    It is puzzling why an ambitious jurist at the peak of a long and distinguished career would commit what might be professional suicide, alienating his colleagues and throwing doubt on his judgment, when the tide of public opinion was turning in his favor.
    Throughout his professional career Goldstone has functioned in bureaucracies and has no doubt internalized their norms. Yet, in a shocking rupture with bureaucratic protocol he dropped his bombshell without first notifying his colleagues on the Mission or anyone at the United Nations.
    It is as if Goldstone feared confronting them beforehand because he knew