On January 5, 2009 during the height of the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, a poll in a Daily Kos diary asked: "Is Israel ‘Torturing’ the People of Gaza?" Of 266 respondents 51% agreed with the statement that "Israel is ‘torturing’ the people of Gaza to get Hamas to stop firing missiles." Now after nine months, 188 interviews, 10,000 documents, and 12,000 photographs and videos, a UN report by South African judge Richard Goldstone confirms that early appraisal. The report states that Israel’s operations
..were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population...the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole...[Israel] committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.
The Goldstone report has been met with stunning near-unversal rejection—by Israel, by the United States, and even, lo and behold, by the Palestinian Authority itself. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked world leaders to reject the Goldstone report saying it could affect their own efforts to deal with terrorism in their own lands. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice expressed serious reservations about many of the recommendations in the report. And most amazingly of all, the Palestinian Authority itself withdrew its support for sending the report on to the General Assembly. This last rejection by President Abbas appeared to many Palestinians as a kind of "et tu, Brutus" moment – because at the very instant when it appeared that the Goldstone report would finally bring Israel before the international bar of justice, their own elected leader bowed to U.S. pressure and withdrew his support.
The Goldstone report did not discount the suffering of Israeli citizens of Sderot who for years have been on the receiving end of Hamas rocket attacks. The report labeled these rocket attacks as war crimes, and also possible crimes against humanity. But most of the report focused on the overwhelming disproportionate use of force by the state of Israel against the civilians of Gaza, the very point that prompted that original diary back when bombs were still bursting in air. It was in those early days when the first shocking reports from the major media were coming in about infants found still alive, snuggling up to mothers who had been dead for days. It was snippets like this from the New York Times:
A tank shell landed outside the home of a family in Jabaliya, northeast of the city, killing eight members of the same family who were sitting outside, hospital officials said, bringing the death toll to more than 820. Nearly half of the dead were reported to be civilians.
Or it was the words of a pretty teenage Gazan girl, maybe 14 years old, weeping bitterly in an al-Jazeera video. She caught her breath long enough to say:
I’m crying for the children of Gaza that have been thrown in the street. We have nothing to do with this. We don’t fire rockets. We don’t know what this war is about. Why should children be forced to drink dirty water? Why (sic) did we do wrong? Where is everyone?
Her question still begs for an answer: Where is everyone? Where are the people who believe in human justice? Where are people who will still oppose at least the most flagrant war crimes, the most blatant crimes against humanity? Where are the people who will stand up for innocent children and for civilians slaughtered in well-planned abbatoirs of hatred? Shall we all like Pilate wash our hands, and turn away from justice, perhaps in order to busy ourselves with higher pursuits like peacemaking?
Goldstone, a "Jewish South African judge noted for his farness," defended his report in an op-ed in the New York Times saying
"Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law. Western governments in particular face a challenge because they have pushed for accountability in places like Darfur, but now must do the same with Israel, an ally and a democratic state. Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy."