 selected writing Israel & the Goldstone Report: Report for Rustbelt Radio
Rustbelt Radio is Pittsburgh Indymedia's weekly radio program featuring news from the grassroots, news overlooked by the corporate media. Rustbelt Radio is broadcast live from WRCT studios every other Monday at 6 PM on 88.3 FM in Pittsburgh, and the program airs again on WRCT every Tuesday morning at 9AM. Rustbelt Radio can also be heard weekly on the following stations: WNJR-Washington 91.7FM, WIUP-Indiana 90.1 FM, WOBC Oberlin 91.5FM and online at radio.indypgh.org. COPYRIGHT: USE AS NEEDED WITH CREDIT Related Links TRANSCRIPT Following “Operation Cast Lead”, Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip in late December 2008/early January 2009, the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council established a fact finding mission to look into both Israel and HAMAS’ conduct during the hostilities. The mission was to be led by Justice Richard J. Goldstone, a lifelong Zionist Jew with deep personal ties in Israel, a former judge of the post-Apartheid Constitutional Court of South Africa, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the chair of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo, the co-chairperson of the International Bar Association’s International Task Force on Terrorism, and a member of the independent UN committee to investigate the Iraqi Oil for Food program. Justice Goldstone serves as a director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights. For many years he served as governor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and in the United States has been a visiting professor at the New York University, Fordham, and Harvard law schools. Following an investigation through much of 2009, the final report of what was known as the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict” was released on 15the September 2009 and adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 3rd, whose resolution was overwhelmingly passed with 114 in favor, 18 against, and 44 abstentions. Israel, which had refused to cooperate with the UN fact finding mission, responded angrily to the report’s publication and set about undermining the report’s legitimacy, and mobilizing its allies to support its position. Last week, mandated by the UN General Assembly, Israel submitted its official report in response. Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestine Territories, explained what made the Goldstone Report a particularly hot-button issue, at an October 6th, 2009 lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington DC: “Why the hysterical response? Netanyahu devoted a significant portion of his General Assembly speech to attacking the Goldstone report. The [Israeli] Minister of Defense [Ehud] Barak said this was a great gift to terrorists by imposing legal restrictions on the use of force against terrorists. [...] The President of Israel, Shimon Peres, called the report a mockery of history... This question of why was Israel so upset by the Goldstone report has to do mainly with the degree to which for the first time there is a serious proposal that Israeli military and political leaders should be held accountable for the criminality of their occupation policies and their use of force.” Speaking at New York’s Yeshiva University on November 10th, Israel’s UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev bemoaned Israel’s low status with the majority of United Nations member countries and wasted no time explaining her position on the report: “I said that this report was conceived in hate and executed in sin. Conceived in hate and executed in sin. Why? First of all as mentioned, this mandate that created the fact finding mission from the start prejudged Israel’s guilt without even mentioning our right to self defense. The mandate itself mentioned something like ‘alleged war crimes at the time of Israel’s Cast Lead operation’.” In fact, the mandate said no such thing. The official mandate from the United Nations was: “to investigate all violations of international human rights 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.” After misrepresenting the brief of the fact-finding mission, Ambassador Shalev set about attacking the messenger, beginning with mission member Professor Christine Chinkin, who had signed a letter in the British Times newspaper together with other leading experts in international law following the first two weeks of Israel’s assault: “Justice Goldstone had a debate with a former ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold... and they were debating and at that debate Justice Goldstone—at Brandeis University—admitted that if his report would come before a court of law it would be disqualified for a few reasons, one of them being that his team—at least one member of his team—was prejudiced. Professor Chirkin [sic] from the UK... at the time of the Cast Lead operation sent a letter to the London Times where she accused the Israeli army—our army—of war crimes and denied the right of Israel to self defense.” Goldstone said no such thing at the November 5th event at Brandeis: “She signed a letter together with other leading international lawyers in the United Kingdom in which she said that this was aggression. And it was a technical issue. The International Court of Justice held that an Occupying Power cannot act in self defense. The consequence would be that it would be a police action. And that was the statement that Professor Chinkin made and the letter added that Hamas had committed war crimes in sending rockets and mortars into Israel. [...] It wasn’t a judicial investigation and, as I said at the time if our fact finding mission was even a quasi judicial, let alone a judicial inquiry, I think that Professor Chinkin would have had no option but to recuse herself. The issue we were looking at was how military force was used and that was an issue on which she didn’t commit herself at all.” While the text of the January 11th letter Professor Chinkin signed frankly stated that HAMAS was committing war crimes by firing homemade rockets with no guidance systems—and therefore no way of ensuring the rockets hit military targets—at Israeli towns, it only ever used the phrase in relation to Israel when describing Israel’s blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel—all of which the letter characterized as “prima facie war crimes”. The phrase “prima facie”, literally translated as “at first face”, is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a matter appears to be self-evident from the facts. Perhaps the most vicious of Ambassador Shalev’s demonizations of Goldstone and the other members of the fact-finding mission was her assertion that HAMAS manipulated the report: “Justice Goldstone himself, in his report—or the people that wrote the report, I am sure that these 575 pages were not just written just by Justice Goldstone but by the other members of his team—they made sweeping conclusions without having any testimony except for the one-sided testimony that was brought to them by the HAMAS people or by people that were escorted by the HAMAS. They [HAMAS] were going with the team in Gaza and were feeding them with their own facts, the way that they saw it.” Goldstone had already addressed this early-surfacing and opt-repeated accusation from the Israeli government when speaking at Brandeis University: “We chose the 36 incidents very carefully and there—let me say—there is absolutely no truth in the fabricated allegation that came out that we were ‘given these incidents by HAMAS.’ We chose the incidents. Nobody ‘gave’ them or ‘suggested’ them to us. That would—I hardly need add—have been completely unacceptable to me and the other members of the mission.” During her Yeshiva University talk, Ambassador Shalev regularly put words in Justice Goldstone’s mouth, repeatedly claiming that he “admitted” various wrongs in the report when the publicly-accessible video released by Brandeis tells the opposite story. She claimed that Goldstone avoided the issue of modern armies having to deal with urban terrorism by “selectively” choosing incidents that appeared in the report: “Even more so, Justice Goldstone admitted that they deliberately selected incidents to avoid the dilemmas—which are dilemmas—of confronting threats in civilian areas. This is the new, the modern warfare.” In fact, the extremely pedantic, often tedious 575-page report does anything but. As Goldstone explained at Brandeis, the 36 incidents that the report focused on were incidents that were obviously and clearly problematic under international humanitarian war, and therefore merited further legal investigation: “The one attack that certainly affected me was an attack on a mosque in Gaza City—a three-year-old mosque—during a service. And they were attacked by a missile fired by IDF ground forces. The missile came through the front door of the mosque, killed some 21 people, and injured many more. There was no question of secondary explosions, and therefore no question of ammunition being kept there, but—even if it was—there is no basis in law that—assuming in favor of the attackers, that there was ammunition being kept there—you don’t mortar shell it during a service. Do it at night if you want to, if you want to bomb that mosque for any reason. And that hasn’t been explained... at all. It’s that sort of incident that screams out, that cries out, for investigation in Israel and why shouldn’t they do that? [...] The other example was the bombing and complete demolition of schools...” Ambassador Shalev made an unfortunate foray into the issue of human shields, falsely claiming that the Goldstone Report did not address alleged HAMAS war crimes and—grotesquely—feigning concern for the Gazan civilian population: “The Gazans... which are really in a bad situation. I mean it is not easy for them. This is the place where they live. [...] And the HAMAS is using them for human shields.” The text of the Goldstone Report addresses this accusation forthrightly: The significance of these allegations is twofold. First, the alleged conduct might constitute a violation by the Palestinian armed groups of their obligation of care to prevent harm to the civilian population or the prohibition against the deliberate use of civilians to shield from military activity. Ambassador Shalev’s raising of the issue of armed combatants using civilians as human shields—a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—was unfortunate as the Goldstone Report did find evidence that Israel had used this prohibited tactic: Civilians were used as human shields by the Israeli armed forces on more than one occasion in one of the three incidents. Taking account of other incidents in which the Mission has found this to have happened, it would not be difficult to conclude that this was a practice repeatedly adopted by the Israeli armed forces during the military operation in Gaza. In what would be comical, if we were not talking about a massive Israeli-created tragedy, a daily-deepening humanitarian catastrophe, and a professional and courageous attempt for the nations of the world to bring Israel to account—led by an undeniable friend of Israel—Ambassador Shalev claimed that Goldstone himself admitted that you can’t apply international law in these kinds of situations, and even went as far as suggesting it should be changed to take into account Israel’s special situation: “Goldstone himself—Justice Goldstone himself—admits that this reality of terror activity is very comlicated and you cannot apply the old norms of international law and the laws of war to this situation... We need to look how to change international law—but this is something for the future—in order to face these challenges.” Goldstone has stated: “I think it’s sad and—of course—I think it’s really clutching at straws because international law cannot be changed because one party doesn’t like the rules.” On 3 November 2009, the US House of Representatives voted to reject the findings of the Goldstone report by a vote of 344 to 36. Only a few congresspersons spoke in opposition to the resolution, which Goldstone himself addressed in an October 29th letter to Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Reading Goldstone’s devastating point-by-point rebuttal of every single clause in the resolution, it becomes clear that the sponsors of the resolution and representatives voting against it had not read the report. As Goldstone has stated: “I would say the overwhelming majority of the critics haven’t read the report. What proves that I think is that the level of criticism doesn’t go to the substance of the report.” Of the handful of members of Congress who spoke against the resolution, the Democratic representative of Ohio, Dennis Kucinich summed up the frustrations of many around the world about the one-sided and self-defeating role that the United States was taking in working to bury the Goldstone Report: “Today, we journey from Operation Cast Lead to ‘Operation Cast Doubt’. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist. The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone report to fix responsibility to all parties to war crimes—including both HAMAS and Israel—may as well be called the down is up, night is day, wrong is right resolution.” This report was prepared with original research together with raw audio from a variety of nonprofit, independent and corporate media organizations including the United Nations, C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera English, Brandeis University, and the Palestine Center. 
more from this section  • RNC 8 back in court for hearings (Monday, May 10th, 2010)  • Pittsburgh G-20 Legal Update: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, March 15th, 2010) • The 2010 Olympics and Repression of Independent Media: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, February 15th, 2010) • Israel & the Goldstone Report: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, February 1st, 2010) • Egypt and Gaza: Report for Rustbelt Radio (Monday, January 18th, 2010) • Press Release: G-20 Summit Leaves Pittsburgh, Questions About Freedom In America In Its Wake (Sunday, September 27th, 2009) • From St. Paul to Pittsburgh: Citizen Media is Not a Crime (Monday, September 21st, 2009) |
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