JUDGE RICHARD Goldstone had become a figure of hate in Israel in the wake of the UN-commissioned report he chaired on the attack on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, in December 2008. It was claimed that the controversial report had became the cornerstone of an international campaign to delegitimise Israel.
Now, his personal retraction of one of the report's most serious findings, specifically conceding that Israel did not wilfully target civilians as a matter of policy, has been readily greeted in Israel. "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document", he wrote in the Washington Poston April 1st.
The Israeli government has called on the UN to shelve the whole report.
The UN, however, has not been asked by Goldstone himself to do so, and he appears to have acted without consulting others on the report team, not least former Irish Army officer Desmond Travers, who insists that “the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands”. In truth, even without the wilful killing claim, Israel and Hamas, both of which refused to co-operate with the inquiry or, in the case of Hamas, even to conduct their own inquiries, still stand accused of war crimes.
Goldstone’s clarification of the evidence is based, in part, on a follow-up UN report that draws on what he describes as Israel’s belated and slow investigations which point to operational failings rather than deliberate intent to kill. “The allegations of intentionality by Israel,” Goldstone writes now, “were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognised in the UN committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
Hamas remains accused by the report of wilful killing of civilians in its indiscriminate shelling of Israel. Unfortunately for Israel, it has still not adequately responded to questions over its failure to protect civilians, its disproportionate use of force in populated areas, of white phosphorus shells, of obstruction of ambulances, and of targeting of government buildings.