• Goldstone is the chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR).
• IHRJ’s Middle East Project to “establish a ‘shared history’ that will acknowledge a set of accepted historical facts” is being conducted in partnership with a Palestinian NGO, the Arab Thought Forum (ATF).
• The ATF’s narrative consists of demonizing language: “The Palestinian Holocaust is unsurpassed in history...the ugliest crime of modern times.”
• ATF employs terms such as “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “collective punishment,” while promoting the boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign.
• Judge Goldstone’s role in this process, as with his connections to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, reinforces the criticism of his report on the Gaza conflict.

AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

• The NGO network actively promoted the Goldstone inquiry, supported claims of a “balanced” mandate, and attacked Israel for not cooperating. In turn, Goldstone bolstered NGO credibility by relying on their publications, ignoring biases and false claims, praising their “high professional standard,” and defending them against “repression” from the Israeli government.
• The report includes more than 500 direct citations from politicized NGOs that lack credibility, as well as 120 references to or citations from UN agencies, such as OCHA, which often repeat NGO claims.
• The reliance on statements, publications, and submissions from highly politicized and biased NGOs is inconsistent with the claim to have conducted a “fact finding mission.” By adopting the flawed methodologies and false claims from the NGOs, Goldstone renders his entire report and its conclusions invalid.
• Conflicts of Interest: Goldstone and other members of the commission have close links to HRW, Amnesty International, PCHR and other politicized NGOs. Staff researchers Sareta Ashraph has been involved with pro-Palestinian NGOs and “lawfare” campaigns.
• Goldstone, following many NGO publications, ignored the international legal prohibition against incitement to genocide, and the evidence submitted that included many examples of Hamas and Iranian incitement against Jews.
• The report cites to a PCHR report condemning the closing  of Hamas “humanitarian organizations” as a “flagrant violation of the right to association.”  This is in direct opposition to the international legal obligation to fight terrorism and its financing.
• The report duplicates HRW and other NGO allegations regarding the Abed Rabbo family, describing family members as “credible and reliable witnesses.” In contrast, NGO Monitor found more than 14 different recorded versions of the family’s story.
• The radical NGO affiliations of some witnesses were hidden.  For instance, Jonathan Pollak, referenced on 5 occasions, is a leader of Anarchists Against the Wall, and has ties to the International Solidarity Movement which provokes violent confrontations with the Israeli military.

Lozowick & Durkin Disagree