Last week Richard Goldstone wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he appeared to distance himself from some of the conclusions of a UN inquiry into 'Operation Cast Lead', Israel's Dec 2008 - Jan 2009 assault on the civilian population of Gaza.
I have a response to Goldston'e op-ed, which was both very damaging and widely misrepresented, up on Le Monde Diplomatique. A couple of paras:
If the scope of the Goldstone retraction is more limited than Israel’s defenders have claimed, its persuasiveness is more doubtful than many of Israel’s critics have conceded. To justify his about-face Goldstone gestures towards unspecified new information that, he maintains, would have altered the report’s findings had it been made available to him at the time. Clearly that will not do, not least given that much information has emerged since the publication of the report that supports and corroborates its central findings.
[...]
Goldstone justifies his reliance on internal Israeli investigations by citing a recent report by a UN Committee of independent experts, which he implies found Israel’s investigations credible. If this were true it would be remarkable. Human rights organisations have long decried the Israeli military’s “culture of impunity” in which “[s]oldiers who kill Palestinians... are almost never held accountable, even if the circumstances raise a grave suspicion that they acted criminally”. In fact the UN Committee report finds that while Israel has devoted “significant resources” to investigations, the investigations themselves are structurally flawed. It notes, for example, that Israeli inquiries have not examined “allegations... related to the nature, objectives and targets of the Israeli military in that conflict”. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticised them on similar grounds.
We are forced to conclude along with John Dugard, former UN Special Rapporteur and chair of the Arab League inquiry into ‘Cast Lead’, that Goldstone’s op-ed “fails to disclose any information that seriously challenges the findings of the Goldstone Report”, since “there are no new facts that exonerate Israel”. The findings of the Goldstone Report were supported by over 500 pages of evidence and reasoning. Moreover they were corroborated by independent investigations carried out by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Dugard commission, all of which reached similar conclusions. To imagine that Goldstone’s flimsy op-ed can poses a serious challenge to this cumulative mass of documentation is to demonstrate a disregard for basic standards of evidence.
Read the whole thing, if you are so inclined, here.
Update: see the Tip Jar for recommendations on further reading.