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By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
April 14, 2011
Goldstone's report had been the most important contributor to the demonization campaign waged against Israel in recent years
Seismic events shake the world. The turmoil in the Arab world has taken attention from one shock that has yet to play itself out. Let's call it The Goldstone Fault. Its consequences have been as grievous as a 7.0 earthquake.
In the aftermath of Israel's assault on Gaza and its
Now, sensationally, Goldstone has himself disavowed the most critical charge of his report. In an op-ed in the
Goldstone acknowledges that he and his colleagues didn't really have solid evidence when they wrote that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians. He now says that any civilian deaths were inadvertent in the usual fog of war.
Deliberately killing civilians is a war crime, but it is different if civilians are killed during a legitimate operation against a legitimate military target. Tragic though it always is, this "collateral damage" is accepted as an unavoidable reality of armed conflict. The parallel in the civil law definition of crime is that there must be two components: actus reus, that is, the act itself; and mens rea, the intent to commit the act. Goldstone has now concluded that there was no such criminal intent to kill civilians as he originally charged. In effect, then, the core of his earlier indictment has collapsed. Furthermore, the
The judge's first error -- blunder would not be unfair -- was to accept loaded terms of reference from the
Nothing there about the rocket attacks by
This was a war that never would have happened if thousands of rockets and mortar shells, an estimated 12,000 of them, had not been launched at the state of Israel from Gaza by
In the perennial rush to condemn Israel, it was largely overlooked that Israel unilaterally ended its occupation in Gaza in 2005. It removed the settlers and the settlements and left behind the only viable business there, a series of greenhouses that could have been used by the residents to create a flourishing economy. Instead,
Many of the rockets that continued to rain on Israel barely missed schools, hospitals, and civilian apartment complexes. As the rockets increased in frequency, without any international rebuke or even appeal to the terrorists, what was Israel to do? It warned and warned, and when it received no response except more rockets, it began a military operation. No democracy could allow an enemy whose charter calls for its destruction to fire rockets at its children without any military response. Even then Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged this when he visited Sderot in the Negev in 2008 and said, "I don't think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens."
What's more, the Goldstone Report basically ignored the fact that
How could an army with such a policy be accused of deliberately killing civilians, as the Goldstone Report on Gaza alleged? No other army in the world had taken the steps that Israel adopted to protect civilians.
What of the attacks on mosques that were alleged? The militarization of mosques has been a practice used across the Middle East in recent years. In Gaza, mosques were used to launch rockets and store Kassam and Grad rockets. Witness that when Israel struck these facilities, there were secondary and tertiary explosions from the weaponry stored within.
Using mosques for their war was only one of many ruses by
The list goes on and on. Yet the Goldstone Report did not blame
The report discounted the testimony of the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Macedonia, Col. Richard Kemp. As Kemp put it: "Many missions that could have taken out
All true and verifiable. Yet the U.N. report placed no responsibility on
Paradoxically, during the conflict, the IDF processed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. As Kemp noted: "To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks." Israel was sending about 100 trucks every day loaded with grain, humanitarian aid, and other goods into Gaza, something which I personally witnessed.
The Goldstone Report, in effect, rescinded Israel's right of self-defense against
Yes, now Goldstone has withdrawn his central concern and stated that Israel did not intentionally harm civilians, but his original report nourished a campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and label it as a war criminal. The mission relied on heavily partisan and highly selective information supplied by anti-Israel groups such as
What Goldstone accomplished was to persuade much of the world that Israel would purposely kill civilians. Now he acknowledges that Israel has looked into every charge of war crimes, all 400 or so of them, incident by incident; punishment was issued in those few (three) that went outside the rules of war as set by Israel which adhered to a morality in battle that the Western world respects.
The 21st century is trying to cope with a new form of warfare in which terrorist groups launch attacks against "enemy" civilians from behind the shield of "friendly" civilians. To distinguish combatants from noncombatants is a tremendously difficult challenge in this kind of war, particularly when
Asymmetrical world wars in which terrorists and insurgents deliberately conceal themselves among civilians are the story of 21st-century armed struggle. There are no easy answers to resolve the moral dilemmas they pose. The United States sends drones after terrorists in Pakistan when it finds them in range, but what happens if this exposes civilians to injury or death, which has occurred a number of times. Was that disproportionate?
Let's remember that civil law holds murderers who hide behind human shields responsible for the deaths of those human shields. When the police accidentally kill a hostage held by a criminal, it is the hostage-taker, not the police officer, who is guilty of homicide. That is the appropriate analogy for what went on in Gaza. How could Goldstone ignore the massive evidence of Israeli efforts to comply with international humanitarian law in order to reduce civilian casualties?
Nobody can expect Goldstone's newly found contrition to change the Muslim world's position on the IDF and Israel. It should, however, influence public opinion-makers in civilized countries that have increasingly fallen under the influence of the anti-Israel poison that has been trickling in from the "human rights" groups and other radical left-wing and fringe groups that accord no "human rights" to Jews. They joined forces with radical Islamic groups and sought to delegitimize the nation of Israel and undermine its just right to defend itself against a terror that continues even after Israel had evacuated every centimeter of occupied territory in Gaza.
The Goldstone Report became the most important contributor to the demonization campaign waged against Israel in recent years. Quite simply, he was duped. Only now does he praise unequivocally the investigations carried out by the IDF. The Goldstone Report was the equivalent of a modern-day Dreyfus trial for the state of Israel. It was a disguised effort to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel as the home of the Jewish people.
Goldstone has recanted his false accusation of wrongdoing by Israel. His admission, properly reported, should push back the tide of anti-Israel propaganda based on his conclusions. Will it? The original accusations may live on, but his admission of error should never be forgotten.
Richard Goldstone Recants His Report Attacking Israel is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
Available at Amazon.com:
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Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (The Contemporary Middle East)
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Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century
Dining With al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East
Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy
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