UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

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.