In the Washington Post the other day,
Lally Weymouth interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu. The first page of the interview was on the subject of the Goldstone commission report. Netanyahu was emphatic.
Q: What did you think of the Goldstone report?
A: I thought there were limits to hypocrisy but I was obviously wrong. The so-called human rights commission accuses Israel that legitimately defended itself against Hamas of war crimes. Mind you, Hamas didn’t commit just one type of war crime. It committed four. First, they called for the destruction of Israel, which under the U.N. Charter is considered a war crime — incitement to genocide; secondly, they fired deliberately on civilians; third, they hid behind civilians; and fourth, they’ve been holding our captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, without access to the Red Cross, for three years.
And who gets accused of criminal behavior at the end of the day? Israel that sent thousands of text messages and made tens of thousands of cellular phone calls to Palestinian civilians [to warn them to evacuate]. This inversion of justice is patently absurd.
The next answer is also of note:
People here appear to feel the Goldstone report is very unfair, but some have called for an internal inquiry. What is your position?
We’ve had 26 allegations investigated. Not because of the U.N. decision but because this is our procedure. We’ve investigated people for wrong behavior. We’ve put people on trial in the past because we’re a functioning democracy. We’ll do it in this case too. But what the Goldstone report actually accuses Israel of is deliberately targeting civilians, which is patently false.
Recall Goldstone’s own assessment of his report:
For all that gathered information, though, he said, “We had to do the best we could with the material we had. If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.”
Goldstone emphasized that his conclusion that war crimes had been committed was always intended as conditional. He still hopes that independent investigations carried out by Israel and the Palestinians will use the allegations as, he said, “a useful road map.”
He recalled his work as chief prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia in 1994. When he began working, Goldstone was presented with a report commissioned by the U.N. Security Council based on what he said was a fact-finding mission similar to his own in Gaza.
“We couldn’t use that report as evidence at all,” Goldstone said. “But it was a useful roadmap for our investigators, for me as chief prosecutor, to decide where we should investigate. And that’s the purpose of this sort of report. If there was an independent investigation in Israel, then I think the facts and allegations referred to in our report would be a useful road map.”
Before Goldstone convened his commission, did he ask to review the proceedings of the Israel investigations and see if they met his standard? (That’s a rhetorical question. He did not; he assumed that Israel was incapable of handling such matters fairly.) He simply proceeded from the assumption that Israel did not carry out any adequate investigations. In other words, despite the mantle of righteousness that he wraps himself in, Goldstone assumed Israel’s guilt. His goal, then, was not to investigate Israel, but to convict it. (This wasn’t the only instance where Goldstone blurred the law to support his foregone conclusions.) This presumption of guilt is a good reason for Israel not to launch any investigations of its own based on Goldstone’s report.
There’s a lot more to the interview (via memeorandum) and well worth reading.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
