Goldstone and 1701

Today’s NYT reports Israel Poised to Challenge a U.N. Report on Gaza :

Israel, which had refused to cooperate with the investigation, at first dismissed the report as unworthy of attention. But the government quickly found that the world took it quite seriously and found itself accused of premeditated war crimes. It now considers fighting that charge a priority.

“We face three major strategic challenges,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently. “The Iranian nuclear program, rockets aimed at our civilians and Goldstone.”

The rebuttal will be given to United Nations officials in the coming weeks and its contents will remain under wraps until then.

Overall the report isn’t bad. A couple of paragraphs, I think are especially good.

Maj. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, the Israeli military advocate general, said in an interview that those assertions went beyond anything of which others had accused Israel.

“I have read every report, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Arab League,” he said at his desk in the military’s Tel Aviv headquarters. “We ourselves set up investigations into 140 complaints. It is when you read these other reports and complaints that you realize how truly vicious the Goldstone report is. He made it look like we set out to go after the economic infrastructure and civilians, that it was intentional. It’s a vicious lie.”

Another senior military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity following regular military practice, said that neither the military command structure nor the government wanted to invade Gaza in December 2008, but felt that the continual rocket attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians forced their hand. The war, he said, followed the least aggressive of three contemplated routes — conquer Gaza and occupy it again as was done in the West Bank in 2002, retake Hamas’s weapons supply routes and hold them to dry out the organization’s arsenal, or attack the Hamas military and state infrastructure and leave. It was the third that occurred.

However, there are a few omissions that are worth mentioning. Bronner reports:

The report stated that “the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces.” It added that Israel waged “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

However this goes beyond anything Goldstone could possibly know. While he quotes Gen. Mandelblit in response, it behooved Bronner to point out that Goldstone didn’t prove his allegation that Israel’s attack was “deliberately disproportionate” something that’s unknowable; he simply made the reckless charge.

Goldstone himself acknowledged that his conclusions would not stand up in a court of law. So while Bronner gets bogged down in the minutiae of whether Israel’s response accords with the requirements of the Goldstone report, he doesn’t observe the implication: Goldstone presumed Israel guilty.

At the end of the article Bronner observes that even Israeli critics of the IDF think that Goldstone was unfair.

While many here think that the Goldstone report failed to expose of the practices of Hamas, they are more concerned about their own army’s conduct. Still, virtually no one in Israel, including the leaders of Breaking the Silence and the human rights group B’Tselem, thinks that the Goldstone accusation of an assault on civilians is correct.

“I do not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure,” said Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem. “It is not convincing. But every incident and every policy has to be checked by an independent body because the military cannot check itself. They need to explain why so many people were killed.”

It’s a shame that Bronner didn’t also mention that some people have been investigating that very thing, though not in the way the B’Tselem spokeswoman means.

Here’s Elder of Ziyon:

Even though I haven’t been spending too much time lately on looking for more dead Gaza “civilians” who were actually terrorists, other people (notably PTWatch) has been diligently digging through Arabic websites and we keep adding to the list.

As of right now, we have identified 358 terrorists who were categorized as “civilians” by the PCHR. Add together the rest of the police and the “militants” that PCHR counted, and we have 667 dead Gazans who were legitimate targets, quickly closing in on half of the dead not being civilians.

So many were killed because they were legitimately targeted combatants or civilians victimized by Hamas operating nearby. The work Elder of Ziyon did was based on informaitonn that was publicly available that any reporter or human rights investigator had access to; had they been so inclined.

Finally, while only tangentially related the Washington Post is reporting (via memeorandum) that Hezbollah’s rearming since 2006 is quite extensive.

The United Nations is confident that the dense presence of its troops in the comparatively small area is helping lower the risk of conflict and minimizing Hezbollah’s ability to move weapons across southern Lebanon, but analysts in Lebanon and Israel say the U.N. mission is almost beside the point.

In other words, if Israel is again forced to go to war against Hezbollah, the UN will have been responsible for allowing an intolerable threat to grow on Israel’s northern border.

If the UN which passed resolution 1701 is “besides the point” when it comes to enforcing that resolution to protect Israel, why should any branch of the UN be trusted to judge Israel’s compliance with international law? Furthermore, Israel’s response to Goldstone as opposed to Hezbollah’s disregard of 1701 points to another problem with the UN and international law in its current state: international law applies to those countries who take it seriously, but it can be disregarded by those who don’t with no real consequence.

Crossposted on Yourish