UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

From Trevor Norwitz's Open Letter, a discussion of the selection process of incidents to investigate which systematically sought out incidents that featured almost exclusively cases of Israeli aggressors and Palestinian victims.

Your Selection of Incidents to Investigate

A closely related point is your Mission’s selection of which matters to investigate and which to ignore. Your Mission investigated 36 incidents in Gaza and stated that it “considers that the report is illustrative of the main patterns of violations.” (17) Since virtually all of these incidents were cases involving Israeli actions and Palestinian casualties or damage, it is clear that the “pattern of violations” that interested you most were those where Israel could be condemned.

As discussed above, the efforts you made to find the relevant facts underlying the operation left much to be desired. Very little effort was made to investigate the behavior of Hamas and the other “Palestinian armed groups”: did they direct attacks at civilian targets? Did they use civilians as human shields? Did they hide weapons in civilian buildings like mosques, schools and hospitals? You do not even raise as a possibility the question of whether Hamas and the other “Palestinian armed groups” intentionally drew fire towards civilian objects to score public relations victories (I do not believe in their wildest dreams they ever expected the PR and strategic windfall that you have awarded them), although this appears to be a central element of their moqawamma (“resistance”) strategy. I understand that seeking those facts was difficult – the people you were talking to would not talk about that (because of both bias and intimidation) and the people who would talk about it (the Israelis) refused to talk to you – but that should not relieve honest fact-finders of their obligation to try find the facts. Reviews by others of the video [p. 7] clips of interviews with Palestinian witnesses posted on your website suggest that you did not even press witnesses for answers to these questions19. Instead you simply relied on the absence of countervailing evidence to validate the “facts” reported to you by those biased and intimidated witnesses.

On a few occasions, you accepted the “possibility” that there might be another side to the story that you “could not entirely discount,” that is, that there may have been inappropriate actions on the Palestinian side. For example: “The Mission finally notes that it cannot entirely discount the possibility that Palestinian civilians may have been killed as a result of fire by Palestinian armed groups in encounters with the Israeli armed forces, as argued in a submission to the Mission, although it has not encountered any information suggesting that this was the case.” (361)

“[W]hile the Mission would not rule out the possibility that there might be individuals in the police force who retain their links to the armed groups, it believes . . .” (417) “[T]he Mission accepted, on the basis of information in the reports it had seen, the possibility of mortar attacks from Palestinian combatants in the vicinity of the school.” (444) The Mission cannot discount the possibility that Palestinian armed groups were active in the vicinity of such [United Nations] facilities.” (483)

However these matters were never investigated to the point of ascertaining whether they amounted to war crimes or whether they justified the Israeli actions under investigation.

For the most part, you were satisfied simply to state that you were unable to make any determination regarding these matters: “The Mission is unable to make any determination on the general allegation that Palestinian armed groups used mosques for military purposes.” (484) “On the basis of the investigations it has conducted, the Mission did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used by the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities . . .” (485) “On the basis of the information it gathered, the Mission found no indication that the civilian population was forced by Hamas or Palestinian armed groups to remain in areas under attack from the Israeli armed forces.” (486)

On other occasions, where the evidence of bad behavior on the Palestinian side was so clear you could not deny it or profess ignorance, you proceed – astonishingly – to justify it or explain it away.

Example: Firing rockets from civilian areas: “[T]he Mission finds that there are indications that Palestinian armed groups launched rockets from urban areas . . . Palestinian armed groups do not appear to have given Gaza residents sufficient warning of their intention to launch rockets from their neighbourhoods to allow them to leave and protect themselves against Israeli strikes at the rocket launching sites . . . Given the densely populated character of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, once Israeli forces gained control of the more open or outlyingareas during the first days of the ground invasion, most – if not all – locations still accessible to Palestinian armedgroups were in urban areas.” (480)

In other words, you explain and even seek to justify Hamas’ actions endangering civilians because it would have been dangerous for it to fight Israel otherwise.

Another example:

Booby trapping houses: “From the information it gathered, the Mission does not discount the use of booby traps by the Palestinian armed groups. The Mission has no basis to conclude that civilian lives were put at risk, since none of the reports records the presence of [p. 8] civilians in or near the houses that were allegedly booby-trapped.” (482)

Your willingness to accept a “no-harm-no-foul” defence for booby trapping civilian houses is as telling as your reluctance to find improper intentions on the Palestinian side.

These few examples (of the many more that could be cited) should suffice to demonstrate that your Mission chose only to investigate one side of the conflict (Israel), and made its findings based on evidence presented by only one side one the conflict (the Palestinians).

Your Characterization (and Extension) of Your Mission

HRC Resolution S-9/1, that “very lopsided unfair resolution” (again, those are your words) which was introduced by Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan and passed by many of the world’s most repressive regimes, established your “fact-finding mission” to gather evidence to support their determination that Israel had violated the human rights of the Palestinian people. When you agreed to head the Mission, to your credit you insisted to the President of the HRC that your Mission be authorized to look at violations on all sides.20 It is therefore very surprising that you made so little effort to find the facts relating to violations on the Palestinian side, as described above. Equally surprising is how you chose to characterize your Mission and even broaden its scope in certain respects, all of which appear to have the purpose and most certainly had the effect of heightening criticism of Israel. It is interesting that even the terminology in which you chose to cast your allegations against Israel is more extreme that that used in the “very lopsided unfair resolution,” which spoke in terms of human rights violations but did not talk about “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity.” That phraseology with all of its evocative connotations for the Jewish people is all yours.21

Seeking Political Impact Rather than Truth.

Instead of viewing yourselves as a fact-finding mission, with the specific purpose of uncovering the truth, you chose to characterize yourselves as a victim-oriented mission: “The Mission gave priority to the participation of victims and people from the affected communities.” (22). “The Mission has made victims its first priority and it will draw attention to their plight . . .” (136)

As I noted to you in my earlier letter, such a victim-focused investigation is not an appropriate method for establishing the facts in a conflict such as this. There are undeniably more victims on the Palestinian side of the conflict but “draw[ing] attention to their plight” is not a fact-finding objective. It is a political objective. In some cases, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which appears to have been, at least in part, the model for your proceedings, that may be appropriate and very laudable.

However that is not the job of a fact- finding mission in the midst of an ongoing political conflict. The question that the honest fact finder should be trying to answer is not how can I “draw attention to their plight,” but whose victims arethey? It is clear from your Report, and apparently from the videotaped interviews which your Mission has published (22), that you were far more concerned about effects than causes, and not asking enough of the right questions.