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Jewish Voice for Peace weighs in for the Goldstone Report (well-researched, fair-minded), for the Palestinian narrative, and against any move by the Palestinians to drop the Report at the UN for the sake of negotiations. It expresses "deep anger" at the Obama administration for supporting Israel in these matters... a good example of how Jewish "peace" groups adopt the belligerent tones of the Palestinians.

JVP Responds to the Goldstone Report

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, better known as the “Goldstone Report,” was presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday, September 29. The report recommends that the Security Council pass the issue to the International Criminal Court if Israel and Hamas do not make “good faith” efforts to investigate the allegations within six months.

The Palestinian Authority first shocked the world when it dropped its draft resolution before the UN Human Rights Council, in effect deferring the report until March of 2010. The PA did this under intense pressure from the Obama administration (1) and economic blackmail by Israel (2).

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Zunes is the Chair of Mid-East Studies at San Francisco U. He writes often for TIkkun. Here he goes over the Goldstone controversy, praises the author's bona fides (a good example of a positive ad hominem), criticizes the House Resolution, and demands an end to the "culture of impunity" from which Israel benefits. He takes the report as valid without any reservations and mentions Hamas only when insisting on the Report's even handedness (and when blames their and Hizbullah's existence on Israel's violations of human rights). The UN appears as having "special responsibility for human rights in territories under belligerent military occupation," and US resistance to having Israel's war crimes aired to the public, as an "assault on the human rights community."

Steven Zunes

Posted: October 8, 2009 05:19 PM

Huffington Post

On October 1, the Obama administration successfully pressured the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva to drop its proposal to recommend that the UN Security Council endorse the findings of the Goldstone Commission report. The report, authored by renowned South African jurist Richard Goldstone, detailed the results of the UNHRC's fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict. These findings included the recommendation that both Hamas and the Israeli government bring to justice those responsible for war crimes during the three weeks of fighting in late December and early January. If they don't, the report urges that the case be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecution.

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Goldstone's reply to House Resolution 867. I cannot find this anywhere officially on the web, but it has been cited at numerous blogs.

The Honorable Howard Berman
Chairman, House Committee on Foreign Affairs
The Honorable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
Ranking Member, House Committee on Foreign Affairs

October 29, 2009

Dear Chairman Berman and Ranking Member Ros-Lehtinen,

It has come to my attention that a resolution has been introduced in the Unites States House of Representatives regarding the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which I led earlier this year.

I fully respect the right of the US Congress to examine and judge my mission and the resulting report, as well as to make its recommendations to the US Executive branch of government.

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Ron Kampeas weighs the merits of House Resolution 869 condemning the Goldstone Report with Goldstone's response and comes out supporting Goldstone's corrections more or less.

Goldstone v. Ros-Lehtinen and Berman

By Ron Kampeas · October 30, 2009

We reported earlier this week the resolution that U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the senior Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives, introduced condemning the Goldstone report, and urging the Obama administration not to allow it to advance further.

(Quickie refresher: the U.N. Human Rights Council mandated a fact finding mission, led by Richard Goldstone, a noted pro-Israel human rights judge, to investigate alleged war crimes during last winter's Gaza war. Israel would not cooperate with the mission, saying the original mandate, by naming only Israel and assuming war crimes had been committed, was inherently biased. Goldstone addressed Hamas actions as well in his report and accused both sides of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.)

Ros-Lehtinen marshalled to her side the who's-who of House Middle East luminaries: The chairman, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and the chairman and ranking member of its Middle East subcommittee, Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.) respectively.

We briefed this, but I haven't had time until now to post the whole thing, and it's below the jump. Last I looked, it's garnered 114 co-sponsors (very good in a four-day period).

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Goldstone summarizes and defends his report to Bill Moyers. For two responses, see Avi Bell's and Maurice Ostroff's. To view the interview, go here.

October 23, 2009

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. There could not have been a more thankless job in the world this year than investigating allegations of war crimes between Israelis and Palestinians. You're about to meet the man who shouldered that task after others had turned it down. And sure enough, he is at the center now of a raging controversy.

Judge Richard Goldstone was born and raised in South Africa, where he came to prominence investigating the vicious behavior of white security forces during apartheid.

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Goldstone: My Mission - And Motivation

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1255694838474&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

My mission - and motivation

Oct. 18, 2009

Richard Goldstone , THE JERUSALEM POST

Five weeks after the release of the Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with its substance. It has been fulsomely approved by those whose interests it is thought to serve and rejected by those of the opposite view. Those who attack it do so too often by making personal attacks on its authors' motives and those who approve it rely on its authors' reputations.

Israeli government spokesmen and those who support them have attacked it in the harshest terms and, in particular my participation, in a most personal and hurtful way. The time has now come for more sober reflection on what the report means and appropriate Israeli reactions to it.

I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program. In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead.

AS A Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and received an evenhanded mandate to investigate all sides and that is what we sought to do.

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission's mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. Our mission obviously could only consider and report on what it saw, heard and read. If the government of Israel failed to bring facts and analyses to our attention, we cannot fairly be blamed for the consequences. Those who feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its cause.

Israel missed a golden opportunity to actually have a fair hearing from a UN-sponsored inquiry. Of course, I was aware of and have frequently spoken out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and especially by the Human Rights Council.

I did so again last week. Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were shut out.

As I stated in response to a recent letter from the mayor of Sderot, I believed strongly that our mission should have been allowed to visit Sderot and other parts of southern Israel that have been at the receiving end of unlawful attacks by many thousands of rockets and mortars fired at civilian targets by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza. We were prevented from doing so by, what I believe, was a misguided decision by the Israeli government.

In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works. These are not military targets. I have not heard or read any government justification for this destruction.

OF COURSE the children of Sderot and the children of Gaza have the same rights to protection under international law and that is why, notwithstanding the decision of the government of Israel, we took whatever steps were open to us to obtain information from victims and experts in southern Israel about the effects on their lives of sustained rocket and mortar attacks over a period of years. It was on the strength of those investigations that we held those attacks to constitute serious war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

The refusal of cooperation by the government of Israel did not prevent us from reacting positively to a request from Gilad Schalit's father to speak personally to our mission at its public session in Geneva. No one who heard his evidence could fail to have been moved by the unspeakable pain of a parent whose young son was being held for over three years in unlawful circumstances without any contact with the outside world and not even allowed visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The mission called for his release.

Israel and its courts have always recognized that they are bound by norms of international law that it has formally ratified or that have become binding as customary international law upon all nations. The fact that the United Nations and too many members of the international community have unfairly singled out Israel for condemnation and failed to investigate horrible human rights violations in other countries cannot make Israel immune from the very standards it has accepted as binding upon it.

Israel has a strong history of investigating allegations made against its own officials reaching to the highest levels of government: the inquiries into the Yom Kippur War, Sabra and Shatila, Bus 300 and the Second Lebanon War.

Israel has an internationally renowned and respected judiciary that should be envy of many other countries in the region. It has the means and ability to investigate itself. Has it the will?

The writer led the UN-mandated Gaza Fact-Finding Mission established to investigate alleged crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead earlier this year. The mission released its 575-page report last month.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1255694838474&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

[ Back to the Article ]

Goldstone responds to criticism in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. The Post printed two responses, one by Alan Baker, and one by Danny Ayalon. For blogposts, see fisking at Augean Stables.

From the Jerusalem Post:

My mission - and motivation

Oct. 18, 2009

Richard Goldstone ,

THE JERUSALEM POST

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Goldstone participated in a conference call with rabbis very sympathetic to his cause. Much material to ponder.

A conference call with Judge Goldstone

If you pay any attention at all to the Middle East, you know about the Goldstone Report, the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. (You can read the report in full here, which I recommend doing rather than taking anyone else's word for what it actually says.)

What may be most remarkable about the report is not its heartbreaking findings, but the ways in which the United States and Israel have colluded to bury it. (For more on this, read Rabbi Brian Walt's post at Ta'anit Tzedek entitled Israel and U.S. Collaborate to Bury Goldstone Report. While I'm at it, I can also recommend "It's so sad that a respected member of the tribe would bash Israel so unfairly", posted on Rabbi Walt's own blog.) In the words ofRabbi Brant Rosen, in his op-ed A Call to Moral Accounting:

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Kevin John Heller, The Inevitable Attack on the Goldstone Commission, Opinio Juris, 14/9/09

The Inevitable Attack on the Goldstone Commission

by Kevin Jon Heller Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias. I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC’s decision to appoint Richard Falk a Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

The Goldstone Commission, however, is a different kettle of fish entirely. Justice Goldstone is, to put it mildly, one of the most eminent international lawyers in the world — a judge for nine years on the Constitutional Court of South Africa; the first Chief Prosecutor of the ad hoc Tribunals; a member of the international panel appointed by Argentina to investigate Nazi activity in the country since 1938; the chairperson of the international inquiry into Kosovo; and so on. He is also Jewish and a trustee of Hebrew University in Israel. So it is difficult to plausibly maintain that he is biased against Israel — particularly given that one of his first acts after being appointed by the HRC to investigate Operation Cast Lead was to publicly announce that he would not abide by HRC Res. S-9/1’s indefensible request to limit the fact-finding mission to Israel’s war crimes, but would investigate Hamas’s war crimes, as well.

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Goldstone Commission reports on Gaza-war war-crimes

Posted by Helena Cobban
September 15, 2009 12:13 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Human rights , Obama presidency , Palestine 2009 , United Nations

The Goldstone Commission, appointed in April by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that were committed during last winter's Gaza war, has now presented its findings to the Council.

Regarding actions undertaken by the armed forces of the State of Israel, the report states,

The Mission found that, in the lead up to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade amounting to collective punishment and carried out a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip. During the Israeli military operation, code-named "Operation Cast Lead," houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed. Families are still living amid the rubble of their former homes long after the attacks ended, as reconstruction has been impossible due to the continuing blockade. More than 1,400 people were killed during the military operation.

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Helena Cobban finds the Goldstone report thoroughly documented and logically consistent. She specifically cites the discussion of al Fakhoura.

Goldstone's careful documentation & argument

Posted by Helena Cobban
October 6, 2009 10:53 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Israel-2009 , Palestine 2009 , United Nations

I've had the chance to be reading more of the report of the Goldstone Commission Report (PDF). It's 425 pages long, so not an easy or light read!

But I've been very impressed with the thoroughness of both the documentation and the argumentation in the report. Goldstone and his team are very professional and careful investigators of atrocities. He, of course, got his first experience of doing such work when he was investigating allegations of serious wrongdoing by the security forces in his native South Africa in 1989-90. There, too, his investigation was hampered by serious non-cooperation from the state authorities and he was subjected to some fairly vile slurs mobilized by the state's propaganda apparatus... But he persisted; and his report opened a chink of understanding among many White South Africans who until then had preferred to turn a blind eye, into the actions the Apartheid-era security forces took against their non-White compatriots, allegedly on their behalf...

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Hamas calls for Israeli leaders to be tried over Gaza

AFP/File – Palestinian Hamas leader Ismail Haniya delivers the weekly Friday prayers sermon at a mosque in Beit …

Wed Sep 16, 5:04 am ET

GAZA CITY (AFP) – The Hamas rulers of Gaza on Wednesday called for Israeli leaders to be put on trial after a UN report accused both the Jewish state and Palestinian militant groups of war crimes.

"The UN report constitutes irrefutable proof that the Zionist occupier committed crimes against humanity," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement following the release of the report into Israel's war in Gaza at the turn of the year.

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The day after releasing his report, Goldstone defended it against Israeli charges of bias:

"I certainly have every confidence that any reasonable person would regard the report as being even-handed, and looking into all relevant allegations on all sides," Goldstone said, countering continuous allegations that he set out to blame Israel from the beginning. I think that's for objective people to judge," he added...

He emphasized that the Israeli criticism was not substantive which, he deduced, they had not read. Israel's substantive response came ten days later. As of yet, Goldstone has yet to respond.

UN's Goldstone tells Ma'an: Israel has yet to deny our findings

Published today (updated) 16/09/2009 14:09

Richard Goldstone, Gaza City [MaanImages]

Washington - Ma'an - Despite its outrage, Israel has not disputed any single allegation contained in a bombshell United Nations report released on Tuesday, according to its author, Richard Goldstone, in an interview the same day.

"There hasn't been any attempt thus far to deal with the contents of the report at all," insisted the former South African justice, who was appointed to head the UN Human Rights Council's investigation of the assault last winter that left some 1,400 Palestinians dead by mid-January.

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Goldstone rejects bias charges over UN Gaza report

The head of the UN commission that issued a damning report on the Gaza war this week on Thursday rejected Israeli criticism that it was biased from the start.

"I deny that completely," Judge Richard Goldstone said in remarks broadcast on Thursday on public radio, a replay of an earlier interview with Israeli television.

"I was completely independent, nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made," he said.

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Goldstone report: Israel's failings

A U.N. report finds war crimes in last winter's fighting; now Israel must be held accountable.

By George Bisharat

September 18, 2009

Will Israel's decades-long impunity from international law finally come to an end? That is the question facing the international community in the aftermath of the just-released Goldstone report.

Richard Goldstone, formerly a supreme court justice in South Africa and chief prosecutor in the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, headed a four-person United Nations mission investigating both Israel and Hamas for possible war crimes during Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip last winter. The mission conducted 188 interviews and reviewed more than 300 reports, 10,000 pages of documents, 30 videos and 1,200 photographs. The Israeli government barred the group from entering Israel or the Gaza Strip (it reached Gaza, ultimately, through Egypt). By contrast, Palestinian authorities, both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, cooperated with the mission. The 575-page report concluded that both sides committed war crimes before, during and after the intense fighting in December-January.

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Uri Avnery on the Goldstone report on the Gaza war

IS THERE no limit to the wiles of those dastardly anti-Semites?

Now they have decided to slander the Jews with another blood libel. Not the old accusation of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood for baking Passover matzoth, as in the past, but of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza.

And who did they put at the head of the commission which was charged with this task? Neither a British Holocaust-denier nor a German neo-Nazi, nor even an Iranian fanatic, but of all people a Jewish judge who bears the very Jewish name of Goldstone (originally Goldstein, of course). And not just a Jew with a Jewish name, but a Zionist, whose daughter, Nicole, is an enthusiastic Zionist who once “made Aliyah” and speaks fluent Hebrew. And not just a Jewish Zionist, but a South African who opposed apartheid and was appointed to the country’s Constitutional Court when that system was abolished.

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