UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

• Establishment of Mission

UNHRC

Mandate

Judges

Israel’s refusal to Participate

UNHRC

On April 3, 2009, four months after the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (December 27, 2008-January 1, 2009), the UNHRC appointed (former) Chief Justice of South Africa, Richard Goldstone the head of a "Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict." The Goldstone Fact-Finding Mission was controversial from the start.  It was commissioned by the UNHRC, an organization, headed and manned by representatives from nations who are systematic violators of their own people’s human rights, and whose hypocritical obsession with condemning Israel to the exclusion of all other human catastrophes is a matter of justifiable satire.

Mandate

The mandate the UNHRC developed is a matter of great importance.  Judge Goldstone explicitly claims he took the position as head of the FFM because they had changed the mandate to be more "even-handed." Originally it specifically targeted Israel, and, in its language, anticipated a verdict of guilty.  The accusations that Hamas had used human shields, fired from among civilians at civilians, dressed as civilians, used ambulances and hospitals—all of which are war crimes and which helped explain civilian casualties, were not on the agenda for examination at all.  With so one-sided a mandate, even Mary Robinson, who presided over one of the most vocal anti-Israel assemblies of the new century – Durban, August 2001 – refused to head the commission.

Richard Goldstone accepted with a request that the range of the inquiry be enlarged to include Hamas’ behavior, and, in appointing Goldstone and other members of the Mission, the Council President rephrased the charge in accordance with Goldstone’s request. However, the President never requested nor received any UNHRC approval for the change; the “revised” mandate was never legally binding; and the Report reflects the original mandate in almost every aspect of its approach – from its framng narrative, to its selection of evidence and witnesses, to its harsh conclusions.

Choice of Judges:

Further controversy surrounded the choice of judges, three of whom – Goldstone, Travers and Jalani – signed an Amnesty International petition, stating they were “shocked to the core” by events and calling for a war crimes investigation, a call some found disturbingly one-sided.  The fourth member, Christine Chinkin, signed an even more openly hostile public letter to the Sunday Times, in the midst of the fighting and long before any investigation could take place, in which she and her co-signers accused Israel of acting “contrary to international humanitarian and human rights law” and committing “prima facia war crimes.”

Chinkin’s inclusion in the committee prompted a group of Australian lawyers and UN Watch to request Chinkin’s removal on the basis of expressed bias.  The request was denied, and Chinkin defended herself by falsely claiming that her Sunday Times letter did not address international humanitarian law and human rights law and instead addressed only jus ad bellum. Even Goldstone admitted that, if this were a real tribunal and not a “Fact-Finding Mission,” her participation would be problematic.  A group of Canadian lawyers and British lawyers and academics wrote formal protests.


Israel’s Refusal to take part:


Israel’s refusal to take part in the inquiry, even refusing Goldstone entry to Gaza through, was based on these issues, in particular the The Mandate of the Mission and its composition and conduct. The decision remains controversial to this day, with Goldstone claiming that Israel's participation would have changed the results significantly in its favor, and others challenging his counter-factual version of history.

• Human Shields

• Civilian Casualties

• Inflation of civilian count: The PCHR civilian count was systematically inflated by designating Hamas members, as civilians and including the  hit on the first day.  This may be in part because Hamas systematically tries to downplay and hide its own casualties. A systematic search at Hamas and other Jihadi websites revealed that 348 of those listed as civilians were, in fact, listed as members of these groups.

• Definition: many organizations, including B’tselem, used a severely restrictive definition of combatant, so that even Hamas militants who were not actually in the act of firing on the Israelis.  As a result, one comes out with statistics that make no sense: among the category of children (under 18) most likely to be involved in fighting (11-18), more than three times as many boys were killed as girls, and for 18-29, four times as many (whereas, were they randomly killed civilians one would expect, as with children under 11, similar numbers for both sexes).

• Police: Both the Palestinian sources and B’tselem count the police as civilians.  But the vast majority (78%) of policemen killed during Operation Cast Lead were members of terrorists groups whose exploits are detailed at the Al Izzadin al Qassam Brigades website. The Goldstone Report takes pains to define the police force as purely civilian, despite the ignoring evidence that proves otherwise and characterizing Israel's initial airstrikes at the Hamas police stations as an unjustified attack on civilians.

• Perspective: Even if one accepts the PCHR’s figures, a 1:3 ratio of military to civilian casualty rate may seem high, but in comparison with other cases of warfare conducted in urban areas, it’s among the lowest ratio on record.  The recent US-led drone attacks on Pakistan there has been a 1:15 ratio (50 combatants to 780 civilian dead).  According to the British military expert Richard Kemp (whom Goldstone chose not to hear:

I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.

The Goldstone Report came out with civilian statistics that resemble closely those of the NGOs – Palestinian, Western and Israeli.  They took no account of the volume of hard evidence that undermined those numbers, and they drew the same severe conclusions about Israeli recklessness as had their sources.  Indeed, one might argue that the civilian statistics the Goldstone Report adopted play a key role in their most serious charge: that Israel targeted civilians and therefore that they may well be guilty of crimes against humanity.

For a review of all the material and a list of "civilian" combatants, see Elder of Ziyon, "More of those civilians killed in Gaza"

For an interactive site with all the links to the Jihadi sites, see Casualties of truth: how the PCHR lies about the casualties of Cast Lead.

• Incitement/Dehumanization

• Self-Regulation

• Ad Hominem

There are two kinds of ad hominem: the conventional attack on an argument by attacking the reputation of the author, and the less frequently identified inverse ad hominem, where one supports an argument by invoking the good reputation of the author.  Neither are necessarily fallacious -- one can reasonably trust or mistrust a source based on past performance.  But in the case of the Goldstone report, both these arguments must receive close scrutiny.  Supporters consistently dismiss criticism by claiming that the attack on Goldstone is ad hominem when, as in the case with this site, most criticism focuses first, and above all, on substantive arguments; and, at the same time, consistently defending the report not by an analysis of its content or reasoning, but by an appeal to Goldstone's sterling reputation.  We contend that, once one has systematically explored the pervasive flaws of the Report, the question arises: What happened to Goldstone?  How did a man known for his courage and fairness end up becoming the chief architect of such a travesty of justice?  Our argument runs ab re [absurdo] ad usque hominem ipsum: from the deeply flawed argument to a questioning of the judgment of the man who articulated it himself.
The Goldstone report explicitly and implicitly adopts a narrative that reflects Palestinian claims: sequence of events the "explain" the "blockade," the military incursions into Gaza including the reasons for Operation Cast Lead, the status of Gaza as "Israeli-occupied," consistently promote the chronologically challenged contention that Hamas firing at Israeli populations is a response to Israeli aggression.  Here we examine the cases where the Report makes such determinations of narrative causality and consider their validity.