Legal lightweight

Judge Richard Goldstone was greeted at Yale University with an article in the Yale Daily News written by Noah Pollak and Adam Yoffie that made short work of his commission’s report:

Goldstone accepted a mandate from this council to investigate Israel, and only Israel, over its attack last year on the internationally-recognized terrorist group Hamas. The report he produced is a perversion of human rights and international law. It treats Hamas’ allegations with meticulous credulity, but Israeli claims with flippant skepticism. It is riddled with factual errors and twisted accounts of the war. The members of Goldstone’s staff have long histories of anti-Israel political activism. The report makes frequent and unsupported editorial declarations against Israel and included testimony from residents of Gaza who feared retaliation from Hamas. Justice Goldstone himself has admitted that nothing in the report would be admissible as credible evidence in a court of law.

However the Pollak/Yoffie op-ed was rather mild in comparison with the treatment Goldstone would receive from Richard Landes in recounting Goldstone’s talk later.

Perhaps the single most striking feature of the talk was its staggering superficiality. Goldstone might have a reputation (at least among those familiar with his report) for being biased, but not for being a lightweight. And yet in the less than forty minutes of his formal lecture, at no point did one get the impression that one was listening to a trained legal mind, much less a brilliant one. Most of the lecture could have been written by an undergraduate who combined entries at Wikipedia on International Law, Nuremberg Trials, Geneva Convention, and Rome Treaty, with a warmed over version of “war is not the answer,” and “why can’t we all just get along and follow the law?”

Landes’s account is, at once, entertaining and disturbing. Entertaining because Goldstone’s superficiality and acute sensitivity come accross in Landes’s telling. Disturbing because of the authority international organizations have invested in this man.

To sum up Goldstone’s defense of his report, Goldstone relies on “I hold Israel to a higher standard.” This is, of course, baloney. First of all “higher” implies a comparison. But there’s no comparison. Take a look at Elder of Ziyon’s Goldstone Wordle and see if you can find “Hamas.” Goldstone’s commission studiously avoided any serious scrutiny of Hamas.

Additionally a review of the Goldstone report finds the commission passing military judgments on the IDF’s conduct and attributing bad faith to Israeli policies. It is not the sign of holding Israel to a higher standard but of showing contempt for Israel. Israel, to Goldstone and his accomplices, had no business defending its citizens. Goldstones effectively held Israel to an impossible standard.

Not that this should be surprising, as the Goldstone Commission report is the logical outgrowth of a UN resolution passed in 1970. In “How the PLO was Legitimized,” the late Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote:

Step by step the new doctrine was codified in the General Assembly. In 1970, with U.S. and Western support, the General Assembly adopted the “Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Nations” which further expanded the rights of “peoples” and restricted those of states by providing, inter alia, that “all peoples have the right freely to determine without external influences their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, and every state has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter.”

Moreover: “Every state has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peopIe … of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against resistance to such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and receive support, in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter” (emphasis added).

With this declaration, the General Assembly, more clearly and unambiguously than ever, took the position not only that “peoples” had rights superior to those of member states, but that states resisting the rights of “peoples” could themselves become a “threat to peace.” The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the “sovereign inviolability” of states to the struggle of “peoples” against “colonialism” and put impor-
tant new restrictions on the right of states to self-defense.

To read these paragraphs is to understand the warped premises of the Goldstone report.

Finally, at the end of his account, Landes asks rhetorically:

Why didn’t Goldstone investigate whether Hamas used Shifa as a HQ?

Of course, Goldstone didn’t need to investigate this. The New York Times reported on this.

On Monday, Dr. Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

This was publicly available proof of an Israeli charge of a violation of international law committed by Hamas. But Goldstone wasn’t interested. His report was not a legal document but a political one. That’s why the justification of his work was so superficial. He didn’t need to justify it legally. And since it was a political document, the Goldstone report was successful as it accomplished its purposes of convicting and condemning Israel.

Crossposted on Yourish.