UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

• MSNM

 

One can hardly underestimate the role of the mainstream news media (MSNM) in shaping our perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  With the exception of those who come here, we rely almost entirely on the images and stories that our news media report to get a sense of what is "happening on the ground."  In the case of Operation Cast Lead, this impression was so rapid and forceful that it led to major demonstrations in the streets in support of Hamas by people who had no way of knowing what was going on.  The Times of London letter signed by Christine Chinkin and, among others, Richard Falk, before the hostilities ceased, passed judgment on Israel based entirely on impressions from the news media.

Almost every story that the MSNM covered in detail -- The UN School in Fakhoura, the Samouni family in Zeitoun, the Abd Rabbo family -- as well as its data -- civilian casualty counts -- has been the object of extensive controversy and criticism from the start.  The Goldstone Report primarily reasserted and reaffirmed the initial reportings (the first draft) of the news media.  Any reader of that report needs to have a grasp of the controversies surrounding the MSNM's reporting, both in general and in detail.

 

• NGOs

 

The role of the human rights NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in producing the Goldstone Report can hardly be exaggerated.  In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, they flooded the field with studies condemning the IDF for its actions, accusing Israel of war crimes, and getting extensive coverage. According to one study, over 70% of the Report's content comes from these earlier studies which, it almost seems, the authors cut and pasted to make their report.

 

For a very long time, human rights NGOs have delivered information to the MSNM and benefitted from a "halo effect" of trustworthiness for good causes.  It was only after the explosion of anti-Zionism at Durban, and the central role of NGOs, including Western and US NGOs, in that explosion, that some began to look more closely at what was happening both in the organizations and in their publications.  The most foremost of these, NGO Monitor, has discovered a disturbing pattern whereby liberal organizations dedicated to fighting for human rights in despotic and authoritarian societies, were hijacked by radical ideologues who used human rights as a weapon with which to increasingly criticize democratic societies.

 

In closely reading and criticizing the work of these "human rights" NGOs, the Monitor's head, Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University, has aroused the ire of those he criticizes, and who, by and large, rather than respond to his criticism, prefer ad hominem arguments about how he defends Israel right or wrong.  Many of the articles here come from his workshop; let the careful reader judge their quality of attention to detail and consistent analysis.

 

See also,

Gerald M. Steinberg, "The Centrality of NGOs in the Durban Strategy" Yale Israel Journal, Summer 2006

• UNWRA

The United Nations Works and Refugee Agency (UNWRA) played a key role in shaping the news from Gaza.  UNRWA is the single most important provider of food and aid in the Gaza Strip, and its workers and offices are deeply imbedded in Palestinian culture.  Despite sharing the "halo effect" of the NGOs, the history of this institution, established and funded for helping Palestinian refugees alone, offers a troubling view of incumbency, corruption and complicity in maintaining the plight of the very people they are funded to serve.  The tale of how they affirm and amplify a Palestinian narrative that demonizes Israel and protects Hamas from criticism -- the Goldstone pattern -- has yet to be laid out carefully.

 

UNWRA partakes in a larger culture of Human Rights within the UN that targets Israel more than any other country, by some measures, more than the entire rest of the world.  This unhealthy obsession seems to be a function of the moral hypocrisy at work in the UN.  In many ways there is an extensive overlapping of Human Rights NGOs and UN Human Rights activity: they share the same paradigms, the same language, and in many cases, the same goals.  Goldstone, member of the board of Human Rights Watch and head of the UNHRC special mission to Gaza embodies just such a symbiosis.

 

The two main sites that chronicle the moral disarray of the UN and the weaponization of its "human rights" discourse are:

 

Hillel Neuer's UN Watch

Anne Bayefsky's Eye on the UN (with a special section on Goldstone)

 

Following the details of UN discourse and action helps understand the more bizarre qualities of the Goldstone Report.

 

• Palestinian Handlers

 

Perhaps the single most powerful and subterranean impact on the kind of information that becomes available to groups like the MSNM, the NGOs and Fact-Finding missions like the Goldstone, are the Palestinian handlers.  Handlers (also fixers) are key players anywhere there is an asymmetric conflict: locals with indispensable local knowledge and connections, they provide interviews, places to visit, and, perhaps most importantly, protection from the various and numerous sources of hostility that might threaten any outsider in areas where no tradition of press freedom and protection of the right to dissent exist. The dependence of Western sources on these fixers, and the lack of attention from those so dependent on the possible political agendas of those fixers, constitute one of the most important, and largely unaddressed, problems facing honest journalism.