ISRAEL MATZAV: The education of R*I*C*H*A*R*D* G*O*L*D*S*T*O*N*E

The Jewish community is very small and the word is that Richard Goldstone is trying to make amends for his perniciousGoldstone Report due to his virtual excommunication from the Jewish community. The latest effort is an op-ed in the New York Times, in which Goldstone defends Israel from charges of apartheid. This passage made me wonder whether he gets it yet.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

So let me get this straight: Israel's rule in the West Bank Judea and Samaria is not “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group” only because we have "agreed in concept to the existence of a 'Palestinian state' in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank?" And every country that does not agree to cut off part of its land is promoting apartheid? And every ethnic group that decides it's entitled to a 'state' is a victim of
apartheid if it doesn't get that state? And were we one day to decide that we have had enough of the 'Palestinians' being unwilling to negotiate with us (and we all know why they are unwilling to negotiate with us), and we withdraw whatever offers of 'statehood' have been made, would we then be practicing apartheid?

Goldstone still has a lot to learn.

PM: Throw Goldstone Report into dustbin of history; Goldstone says report would be different if Israel had cooperated in probe, slams Hamas for intentionally targeting Israeli citizens.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called on the United Nations Saturday night to disavow the Goldstone Report alleging war crimes by the IDF in Gaza two years ago after its author said he had erroneously accused Israel of intentionally targeting civilians.

“The fact that [South African jurist Richard] Goldstone backtracked must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all,” Netanyahu said in a statement to the press.

RELATED: 
Comment: Goldstone the belated penitent
UN: Both sides need to do more to comply with Goldstone
Opinion: Vindication rather than condemnation

Israel had refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s fact-finding mission into its military operation in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead, and rejected the September 2009 report, which accused Israel and Hamas of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and suggested that the matter be referred to the International Court of Justice if Israel did not hold follow-up investigations into the matter.

Israel charged that the report, which focused largely on its actions in Gaza, was biased and flawed. But it has held investigations into Operation Cast Lead.

“Everything we said has proven true,” Netanyahu said on Saturday night.

“Israel did not intentionally harm civilians. Its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything,” he said.

The absurdity here, Netanyahu added, was that the UN Human Rights Council, the body that called for the report, had Libya as a member.

“It’s time to throw this report into the dustbin of history,” he said.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who held that post during Operation Cast Lead, said that Goldstone should send his new conclusions to the same international forums “in which he published his twisted and nonfactual report.”

“Only that way can there be a partial correction of the damage that was caused,” he explained.

Both Netanyahu and Barak spoke after Goldstone published an opinion piece in Friday’s The Washington Post in which he said: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Goldstone said the fact-finding mission’s allegations that Israel took actions which intentionally led to the death and injury of civilians, were based on the information available to him at the time.

Investigations conducted by the Israeli military into those incidents, which have been recognized by the UN, “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” Goldstone noted in particular the work of the UN Human Rights Council’s panel, which monitors compliance with the report and delivered its own assessment of the matter to the council in its March session.

As an example, Goldstone pointed to one of the most serious attacks his committee investigated, in which 29 members of the al-Simouni family were killed in their home, apparently because of an erroneous IDF interpretation of a drone image.

“An Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack,” he said.

“I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings aboutintentionality and war crimes,” Goldstone wrote.

He added he regretted Israel’s lack of cooperation with the report.

Goldstone defended his committee’s work by stating that it had never intended to “prove a foregone conclusion against Israel” and said that Israel had a right to defend itself, just like any other sovereign nation.

He also defended portions of the report, particularly those that accused Hamas of violations and which he said marked the first time that Hamas was investigated and condemned by the United Nations. His report has also demanded that Palestinians investigate their human rights violations in Gaza.

While Israel has investigated its actions, he said, Hamas has done nothing. He had hoped, Goldstone said, that his report would sway Hamas to halt its rocket attacks against Israel.

Instead those attacks have continued, he noted.

“I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted,” he said.

He called on the UNHRC to condemn Hamas rocket attacks against Israel and the Itamar attack, in which an Israeli couple and three of their children were killed.

IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu said Saturday that Goldstone should travel around the world and go country to country and newspaper to newspaper to try and repair the damage he caused Israel.

Benayahu said the IDF believed all along that it had operated in Gaza with a high moral standard, and that the military never deliberately target civilians.

“The same morals and Jewish conscience that led us during the operation and our subsequent investigations should lead Judge Goldstone to look in the mirror and realize that it is time to share his feelings with the world,” the IDF spokesman said.

Benayahu said that the IDF made some mistakes during the operation and has investigated all of them.

He warned, however, that Hamas and Hezbollah were already establishing their military infrastructure inside population centers and that the world needed to be prepared for the consequences in the event of a future war with Israel.

“We knew how to locate the mistakes even before we heard the name Richard Goldstone.

We did this for Israel and the Jewish people, and not for the world,” he said.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Channel 2’s Meet the Press that he was not surprised by Goldstone’s statements.

“We had no doubt that the truth would come out eventually,” said Lieberman.


Goldstone actually came to the same conclusions that the two follow-up committees to the Goldstone committee came to, he said, namely that Israel’s court system acted objectively and professionally in investigating allegations of war crimes.

In addition, both Goldstone and the follow-up committees agreed that Hamas had done nothing to address allegations of war crimes or human rights violations that the Goldstone report accused them of during Operation Cast Lead.

Lieberman also expressed satisfaction with the fact that Goldstone recognized the anti- Israel bias of the UN Human Rights Council.

When asked if he believed, given Goldstone’s comments, that Israel should have been more cooperative with Goldstone’s fact-finding mission, Lieberman said that Israel did not want to set a precedent of international bodies interfering in the government’s internal decision-making process.

Comment: Goldstone the belated penitent; By alleging, unfoundedly, that we were an immoral enemy, the sanctimonious judge put all of our lives at greater risk. By DAVID HOROVITZ

Yom Kippur has evidently come early this year for Richard Goldstone.

He couldn’t quite bring himself, in his Friday article “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes,” to write, “I have sinned, forgive me.”

RELATED:
Goldstone: Israel didn't target civilians
Netanyahu: Throw Goldstone Report into dustbin of history

But the astounding piece in The Washington Post by the Jewish justice, who presided over the Goldstone Report that accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, represents nothing less than an apology to Israel.

“If I had known then what I know now,” he writes in the first extraordinary paragraph of his mea culpa, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

How dramatic the about-face. And how terrible that it was necessitated.

How tragic, that is, that Goldstone so misplaced his moral compass in the first place as to have produced a report that has caused such irreversible damage to Israel’s good name. Tragic least of all forthe utterly discredited Goldstone himself, and most of all for our unfairly besmirched armed forces and the country they were putting their lives on the line to honorably defend against a ruthless, murderous, terrorist government in Gaza.

The “if I had know then what I know now” defense Goldstone invokes to try to justify his perfidy is typically flimsy, of course.

Sanctimonious even now, Goldstone complains about Israel’s “lack of cooperation with our investigation.” But as he knows full well, Israel could not possibly have formally cooperated with his inquiry, which had been constructed by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council with the precise intention of blackening Israel’s name, legitimizing its enemies and curtailing its capacity to defend itself in future conflicts – such as the one Israel may have to fight quite soon if the current upsurge in Hamas rocket fire continues.

To have formally subjected itself to examination by his committee and the institutionally biased UN Human Rights Council that had formed it – a bias which Goldstone now acknowledges in his article – would merely have given his work greater purported credibility.

Notwithstanding that absent formal cooperation, however, the truth about what happened in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 – the truth that Goldstone now disingenuously claims to have discovered only after he filed his malicious indictment of the IDF and of Israel – was readily available to him at the time.

Israel did informally make the necessary information available to his committee in the shape of detailed reports on what had unfolded. And open sources, honestly evaluated, left no doubt that Hamas was the provocateur, that Hamas was deliberately placing Palestinians in harm’s way, that Hamas was lying about the proportion of combatants among the Gaza dead. Open sources also left no doubt that the IDF – far from deliberately targeting civilians; the bitter accusation at the heart of Goldstone’s report – was doing more than most any military force has ever done to minimize civilian deaths, even as it sought to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and pick out the terrorists who had been firing relentlessly into Israel’s residential areas.

Only now, 18 months after he submitted his incendiary accusations against Israel, has Goldstone brought himself to acknowledge what a fair-minded investigation would have established from the start – that the IDF emphatically did not seek to kill civilians in Gaza. As he puts it in the simple phrase that should reverberate inside every foreign parliament and every human rights organization that rushed to demonize Israel: “Civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Risibly, Goldstone asserts that his report’s “allegations of intentionality by Israel 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.”

In truth, the only reasonable conclusion that an honest investigation could possibly have drawn – given the evidence available, given the Hamas track record and given the IDF’s moral tradition – was that Israel had not intentionally killed Palestinian civilians. But, again, his was no honest investigation.

Unfortunately, Goldstone’s “reconsideration” will not garner a thousandth of the publicity or have a thousandth of the impact that his original, baseless accusations against Israel drew. Governments – including, to what should be their abiding shame, self-styled friends of Israel in Europe and beyond who failed to vote against this report – will not rush to deliver the apology they owe our government and our soldiers.

They will not rush to recalibrate their policies.

They will not now rush to issue statements expressing their confidence in Israel’s capacity to properly investigate allegations of misdoings by its military, even though the man who had previously given cover for their criticisms has now reversed himself and penned an article endorsing Israel’s processes for self-investigation.

The statesmen and the NGOs that savaged us, using the Goldstone Report as their “proof,” will not now, prompted by Goldstone’s reversal, ratchet up their criticisms of Hamas. They will not now express their outrage at the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to exploit the Goldstone Report to harm Israel – a key milestone on the PA’s road toward international recognition for a unilateral declaration of statehood.

They will not now demand that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas abandon his current effort to negotiate “unity” with Hamas, a terrorist group avowedly working for the destruction of Israel and, as Goldstone now writes, “purposefully and indiscriminately” targeting Israel’s civilians.

They should, but they will not. They have moved on now.

Israel’s guilt has long-since been “established.” And no matter that the man who certified it has belatedly internalized the gravity of the big lie he helped facilitate.

Nor either, pitifully, will the media organizations that so hyped the baseless allegations of Israeli war crimes now allocate similar broadcast-topping coverage and front page space to Goldstone’s belated exoneration of Israel. It will be a surprise, indeed, if we see the world’s most resonant newspapers following Goldstone’s lead and penning texts acknowledging that their reports and their analyses and their expert opinion pieces were wide of the mark.

And we had best not hold our breath, either, for Israel’s own internal critics – including certain widely cited newspapers and so-called watchdog groups that amplified the allegations of deliberate killings of civilians, and that so often seem to want to believe the very worst about Israel in the face of all reasonable evidence to the contrary – to emulate the judge’s shift.

The hollow Goldstone now writes that “I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”


Given that “history of bias” at the council, one can only wonder, yet again, why Goldstone consented to do its dirty work for it, to such devastating effect.

His duplicitous investigation has had a toxic effect everywhere on the second battlefield – in diplomatic and legal forums, in the media, on university campuses, in global public discourse. He poisoned Israel’s name.

And on the real battlefield, he gave succor to our enemies, encouraging them to believe that they could kill us not with mere impunity, but with active international empathy and support.

He alleged that we were an immoral enemy, and thus he put all of our lives at greater risk.

An apology just isn’t good enough. The very least he owes Israel is to work unstintingly from now on to try to undo the damage he has caused.

Yom Kippur came early this year for Richard Goldstone. His show of penitence has come far too late.

Richard Goldstone recants. What price the Israel witch-hunt now? by Melanie Phillips

In an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone has now admitted that his infamous report was wrong. Having fuelled the blood libel that in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza Israel had targeted civilians and possibly had committed crimes against humanity, he now says that, as a result of the final report of the UN committee of independent experts and other evidence that has emerged since his report was published, he accepts that

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy

and further states that

if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire. There was ample evidence that Hamas was deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way. There was ample evidence that Hamas does not operate under the rule of law or uphold human rights. There was ample evidence that Israeli rules of engagement required the IDF to avoid hitting civilians wherever possible. There was ample evidence that Israel always investigates allegations of misconduct made against its soldiers and holds them to acount under the rule of law. Yet Goldstone, having accepted the poisoned chalice from the UN Human Rights Council to subject Israel to a show trial whose verdict preceded the evidence (despite his protestations that he modified this odious remit), chose to believe the propaganda put out by Hamas and its proxies among NGOs with a long track record of malevolent hostility to Israel.

Even now, in this purported mea culpa, Goldstone does not take responsibility for the Big Lie he helped perpetrate with such terrible consequences in putting rocket-fuel behind Israel’s delegitimisation as a pariah in the eyes of the world. Instead, he blames his false conclusions upon Israel’s refusal to co-operate with his inquiry.

So for the second time, he is again blaming Israel for its own victimisation – first at the hands of Hamas, and now at his own hands.

Ludicrously, he now says that his report’s

allegations of intentionality by Israel 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.

The protestation that he had no alternative but to believe Hamas is quite astounding. Hamas is a terrorist organisation with a solid track record of lies, distortions and ‘Pallywood’-style fabrications as a strategy of aggressive warfare.  Israel, the victim of that aggression, has a solid record of telling the truth. Yet Goldstone chose to believe the Hamas version of events. Nor was this all. As he says in the Washington Post:

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel....

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts....Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Can you believe this? He appears to have expected genocidal aggressor Hamas to behave in a civilised fashion by investigating its alleged abuses -- while he chose to throw the book at its democratic victim, Israel. And now the most he will acknowledge is that expecting Hamas to do so

may have been a mistaken enterprise.

By his own admission, the man stands revealed as at best an abject idiot and at worst a moral and judicial bankrupt. His report blackened Israel’s name for defending itself against existential attack; encouraged its attackers to ratchet up their onslaught safe in the knowledge that the international community now had official confirmation that Israel was morally beyond the pale; put Israeli civilians, along with Israel’s very survival, at increased risk by helping delegitimise Israel as a global pariah; and fuelled the pressure on Israel not to defend its civilians by military means against the attacks which have relentlessly increased in audacity and scope.  

Regardless of its manifest moral and intellectual inadequacies, however, his recantation carries inescapable consequences. All those who have used Goldstone’s report as a basis for their own delegitimisation of Israel now also stand revealed as having endorsed one of the worst officially sanctioned international falsehoods in history. All their attacks on Israel which relied upon Goldstone’s report are now shown to be equally baseless and discredited. Any future such attacks which use this report as an authority will be demonstrably false and malicious. The UN should now declare the Goldstone report null and void. Any less will make it knowingly and demonstrably party to a travesty of justice.

But of course, like all previous blood libels against the Jews, the poison this one has injected into the global bloodstream has no antidote. The damage is done – and no amount of self-serving recantations by Richard Goldstone will undo the terrible harm he has done.

Goldstone is gone -- but NYT steps into the anti-Israel breach

Richard Goldstone has confessed his sins against Israel by retracting his infamous UN report which falsely accused Israel of "war crimes" by deliberately targeting civilians during the 2008-2009 Gaza war.

But in the upside-down reporting of Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, Goldstone remains an "esteemed South African judge" (April 3 edition) and Israel still is saddled with a "tarnished international image" (April 4 edition).

Thus does the Times hammer away at the victim of a blood libel even after the libeler has retracted his gross lies, while treating the victimizer (i.e. Richard Goldstone) with kid gloves.

In his second-day story about Goldstonegate, Bronner leads off as follows: 

"Israel grappled on Sunday with whether a retraction by a United Nations investigator regarding its action in the Gaza war two years ago could be used to "rehabilitate its tarnished international image."

As far as Bronner is concerned, Israel's "tarnished image" is a given, an objective fact -- not a subjective perception in the eyes of the New York Times and other Western media intent on maligning the Jewish state.  Of course, Bronner and the Times do their utmost to help tarnish Israel's image.  So we are confronted with a prefect circular rationale for painting Israel as a pariah state.  Even after Goldstonegate, the Times continues its barrage of anti-Israel pieces so as to keep tarnishing Israel's image.  It's journalism's version of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The latest example:  Bronner writes that during Israel's three-week "invasion of Gaza" to halt rocket fire against Israeli communities, Israel "killed up to 1,400 Palestinians and lost 13 of its own."  This, of course, is the Bronner way of tarnishing Israel's image by creating a false impression of a massively disproportionate Israeli response -- a higher than 100-to-1 ratio of Palestinian-to-Israeli fatalities.

For starters, Bronner gins up the Palestinian total.  Painstaking Israeli research placed the number of Palestinian fatalities at fewer than 1,200.  But far more significantly, Bronner fails to report that most of the Palestinian fatalities were terrorist operatives belonging to Hamas and other terror groups.  And that's not just according to the IDF, but also according to Hamas.  Both sides agree that most Palestinian fatalities were combatants -- "militants," "fighters," "activists" in the parlance of the Times.

Bronner, however, lumps combatant and non-combatant Palestinian fatalities in one big, exaggerated total so as to hide the fact that the IDF went to extraordinary lengths to spare civilian lives by dropping leaflets and usingtelephone calls to warn Gazans to say out of combat zones.  No other military in the world has shown such solicitude for keeping civilians as safe as possible -- the very opposite of Bronner's false intimation.

While Goldstone may have bowed out as a discredited fact-finder, Bronner is not about to call it quits in looking for ways to besmirch Israel.  Goldstone may have repudiated his own report, but "human rights organizations say that much of it remains valid," Bronner insists

So he turns to B'Tselem, an Israeli self-described human rights group dedicated like Bronner to tarnishing Israel's image, which asserts that "There is still the need for an independent and effective inquiry into our conduct there."  Rest assured, Bronner and B'Tselem, both of whom exploited the discredited Goldstone Report to a fare-the-well, will find other news pegs to keep besmirching Israel.

As for the Palestinian reaction to Goldstone's retraction, Bronner treads ever so softly.  There's no mention that both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank are furious with Goldstone's repudiation of his libelous report.  Bronner instead devotes only one paragraph -- the very last one -- to an interview with Mohammed al-Ghoul, the Hamas justice minister in Gaza, who states that there was nothing to investigate in the first place because shooting rockets at Israeli civilians was "a right of self-defense of the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli invasion and mass killing of Palestinians."

Palestinian propaganda served up uncritically by Ethan Bronner and the New York Times.  Just another way to tarnish Israel's image.

Dear Mr. Goldstone: Six months until Kol Nidre, by David Suissa

Dear Mr. Goldstone:

You really screwed up. You screwed up so badly that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic says you contributed, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state.

The deliberate killing of innocent civilians is the equivalent of murder. As far as accusations go, that’s about as low as you can go. Your report accused Israel of a lot of things, but that accusation was the most lethal: targeting innocent civilians.

Now you write that you were wrong. Israel is not the war criminal she was made out to be. It was Hamas that targeted innocent civilians, not Israel. Well, like Goldberg says, “it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.”

Remember, this was no ordinary blood libel. This was an official indictment bearing the stamp of approval of the closest thing we have to a global legislative body — the United Nations. Thanks to this stamp of approval, Israel’s enemies have feasted on Israel’s good name like vultures on a carcass.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the campaign to delegitimize Israel, as well as the flourishing BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement that is turning Israel into a pariah state. Sadly, much of the ammunition for these movements has come from the Goldstone report — the same report you now have repudiated with a phrase that might go down in Jewish infamy: “Civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

I wonder what went through your mind as you wrote those words: “Why did I rush to judgment? Should I have paid more attention to the hundreds of thousands of Israeli leaflets and phone calls that warned civilians, and to the preliminary Israel Defense Forces reports and other publicly available information that contradicted our conclusions? Should I have put Israel’s behavior in the proper context of defending its people after years of Hamas rockets? Should I have been more skeptical of sources I knew were unreliable?”

A friend told me over Shabbat that I should cut you some slack because you had the courage to eat your words in public after getting “new information.” That’s fine, but another friend told me a parable that made him somewhat less forgiving.

It’s the story of a man who goes to his rabbi to ask for forgiveness because he spread malicious rumors about him. The rabbi instructs him to take a feathered pillow and a knife, go to a nearby forest and slice open the pillow. When the man returned, the rabbi said to him, “Now go try to retrieve all those feathers.”

Now, go try, Mr. Goldstone, to “retrieve” all the damage your report inflicted on Israel. Frankly, your recanting last week only made your original sin that much more painful. At a time when Israel was already under siege by a large part of the world, the last thing it needed was a character assassination by one of its own.

Because you know Israel well, and you knew how so many past accusations of Israeli “massacres” have been proved false (see Jenin), I’m sure you had your doubts about the veracity of the charges in the report. Because you are an international jurist, intimately familiar with the anti-Israel bias in the human rights chambers of the world, I’m sure you could have anticipated the vermin that would rain on the Jewish state if a Zionist jurist formally accused it of targeting innocent civilians.

I’m also sure you have had more than a few sleepless nights since then. Why? Because I do believe there is a piece of your heart that loves Israel, that believes in Israel and that now cries for Israel because of the damage you have inflicted upon her.

While you can never undo that damage, there is, however, something you can undo: the report itself. Given your deep knowledge of international law, with all its arcane rules and procedures, if anyone can formally retract the report or officially amend it, it is you.

It won’t be easy. It will take time. You will be going up against the many enemies of Israel, those who dream of turning the Jewish state into an illegal enterprise, those for whom the Goldstone report is the gift that keeps on giving — their private little gold mine rich with never-ending ammunition against the hated Zionist entity. They won’t let you take away their gold mine that easily.

But I have confidence you can do it. I have seen how you can be dogged and relentless in front of intense opposition. I have seen how when you put your mind to something, nothing can stop you, not even your own people. I have seen you go the distance.

Now go the distance on this one, Mr. Goldstone. Put the Goldstone report where it belongs, in the delete button of history. You can replace it, amend it, retract it or do whatever you feel will do justice to the truth. You may not undo the damage, but you might stanch some of the bleeding — not just in Israel’s name, but in yours, as well.

You have about six months until Kol Nidre. 

SWC: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon: Retract the Goldstone Report

September, 2009: Israel's objective…was "to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population...” – The Goldstone Report Oct/Nov, 2009: United Nations Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly promote accusations that Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza.

April 2011:

 “…civilians were not intentionally harmed… If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”   – Judge Richard Goldstone

Judge Richard Goldstone has now retracted the most damaging points of The Goldstone Report.Written for the United Nations Human Rights Council, it charged that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians, implying the Jewish State was guilty of 'crimes against humanity.' The Simon Wiesenthal Center is calling on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to immediately take action.

Just as Secretary-General Ban commended Goldstone for his leadership and independence when he authored the Report, today, we urge the UN Chief to:

1. Make a public statement endorsing Goldstone’s retraction of the Report

2. Call on UN Human Rights Council Chief Navi Pillay and UNHRC members to block any further action based on the erroneous charges in what is now seen by the author as a fundamentally flawed document

3. To inform members of the UN General Assembly of Judge Goldstone’s retraction of the libel that Israel targeted Gaza's civilians during the 2009 war with Hamas

The Goldstone Report generated a tidal wave of anti-Israel sentiment and fueled anti-Israel campaigns from the European Union to Church groups to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) efforts on campuses worldwide.

The big lie that the Israeli military acted like Nazis has now been retracted. The UN spread that libel and only the UN can retract it.

Support the Work of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

Saar Debates Galon Regarding Goldstone Retraction

WSJ: Mr. Goldstone Recants Now the U.N. author says he didn't have the facts when he accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza

Regrets, Richard Goldstone has a few, if you can believe it. The principal author of the U.N. Human Rights Council's notorious "fact-finding mission" report on the Gaza war of 2008-09 now concedes he didn't have enough facts when he equated Israel with Hamas in deliberately targeting innocents.

The South African jurist delivered his mea culpa in a Washington Post op-ed that is astonishing for its self-justifying apologetics. In his September 2009 report, Mr. Goldstone and his U.N. comrades took 575 pages to denounce Israel for "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and that Israeli soldiers should be held criminally liable for prosecution in international courts. Hamas endorsed the report and the Financial Times praised it as "balanced" and "damning" in regard to Israel.

Now, Mr. Goldstone says, "If I had known then what I know now," his report "would have been a different document." What revelations have since come his way?

Well, it turns out that Israel didn't deliberately target innocents, and that its military and courts are doing a thorough and conscientious job of investigating cases in which civilians in Gaza were accidentally killed. Oh, and he now regrets that "that there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza" to investigate its own acts of terror in aiming hundreds of missiles at Israeli cities.

We would welcome this apologia if we didn't think a jurist of Mr. Goldstone's stature should have known the difference between a democracy like Israel with a history of investigating its own failings under the rule of law, and a self-avowed terrorist state like the one Hamas runs in Gaza. "Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel," Mr. Goldstone now concedes in stating the obvious, which at least proves he wants to retain a shred of his former reputation.

As our friends at the New York Sun note, Mr. Goldstone should now have the decency to retire from public life.

Judge Richard Goldstone: 'Never Mind'

This is as shocking as it is unexpected: the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, who excoriated Israel for allegedly committing premeditated crimes against civilians in Gaza -- contributing, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state --  now says, well, Israel didn't actually set out to target Palestinian civilians, unllike Hamas, whose plainly-apparent goal was to murder Israeli civilians.

It is not clear, reading Goldstone's mea culpa in The Washington Post, that he fully understands the consequences of his work:

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and "possibly crimes against humanity" by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying -- its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel 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 recognized in the U.N. 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.

Well, I'm glad he's cleared that up. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.

Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Reportwould have been a different document.
The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”
Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.
The allegations of intentionality by Israel 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 recognized in the U.N. 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.
For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I have always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess, with the benefit of hindsight, commanders making difficult battlefield decisions.
While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.
Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants).
As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.
Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank. We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.
Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.
In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.
I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts. Our report has led to numerous “lessons learned” and policy changes, including the adoption of new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas. The Palestinian Authority established an independent inquiry into our allegations of human rights abuses — assassinations, torture and illegal detentions — perpetrated by Fatah in the West Bank, especially against members of Hamas. Most of those allegations were confirmed by this inquiry. Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.
The writer, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, chaired the U.N. fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

In Israel, Goldstone's Gaza war retraction triggers 'earthquake' of vindication South African Judge Richard Goldstone's recent retraction of accusations of Israeli war crimes during its war with Hamas in Gaza two years ago is still rippling throughout Israel.

Israel has reacted with a sense of vindication since South African Judge Richard Goldstone retracted accusations of Israeli war crimes during its war with Hamas in Gaza two years ago.

Mr. Goldstone, who headed a panel of the United Nations Human Rights Council that made the accusations in more than 500 pages worth of reports in 2009, wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece published Friday that Israeli inquires into the reports' allegations have made it clear that its army didn’t intentionally target Gaza civilians. He shifted criticism to the militant Islamist group Hamas for "heinous" acts of shooting rockets at Israeli cities and for refusing to investigate itself.

The Goldstone report was widely seen in Israel as unjust and aimed at isolating the Jewish state as a pariah while negating its right to defend itself from rocket attacks. And although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the United Nations to consign the report to the "dustbin of history," it isn’t likely to be forgotten any time soon.

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Palestinians who had encouraged the UN to refer the report to its judicial arm accused Goldstone of caving in to pro-Israel pressure over the report. Israeli commentators, meanwhile, called the South African justice’s article a "PR coup" and an "earthquake."

"The most serious of accusation was that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli United Nations Ambassador who debated Goldstone in 2009. "It was like a blood libel for the Israel Defense Force, and contributed directly to the global effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. This is an important turning point."

Fresh Gaza incursion brewing?

Mr. Goldstone’s retraction comes at a time when rising violence in Gaza and southern Israel has prompted talk in Israel of a need to repeat Israel’s offensive against Hamas that was the focus of the report.

Two weeks ago, the sides traded attacks in the worst spate of violence since the 2008-2009 war, in which some 1,400 Gazans were killed. The March 22 killing of four civilians by an errant Israeli mortar shell showed that the narratives of the two-year-old war haven’t changed: the Palestinians accused Israel of targeting civilians while Israel accused militants of cynically using non-combatants as shields.

While Israeli officials rushed to claim victory on Sunday, analysts expressed doubt it would spur any greater sympathy for Israel by the international community in a future conflict.

"It’s more of a moral triumph than something that changes the relations between Israel and the UN or between Israel and the international community,’’ said Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli columnist for the Jerusalem Post. "The United Nations is a body with an instinctive tendency to investigate Israel and to blame Israel, and I don’t think that that tendency will be different because of [Goldstone's] change of heart."

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A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Sunday that the Palestinian Authority will still press for international efforts to prosecute war crimes from the Gaza war.

Despite Israel’s vilification of the Goldstone inquiry – it sees the UN Human Rights council as anti-Israel – its army has responded to criticism of its handling of non-combatants.

Newspaper commentators said the number of misconduct inquiries would not have been as large had it not been for international pressure. Combat units now have Arabic speaking officers to liaise with civilians and humanitarian agencies.

"We have learned lessons. The process of debriefings, inquiries, and investigations, ultimately lead to these things," says an Israeli security official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Did [the Goldstone report] contribute? I’m sure it has."

Head of U.N. Panel Regrets Saying Israel Intentionally Killed Gazans

The leader of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of its report — that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians there.

Richard Goldstone, an esteemed South African jurist who led the panel of experts that spent months examining the Gaza war, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Postthat Israeli investigations into the conflict “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

“If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

His article, which was posted on The Post’s Web site on Friday night, follows a report submitted two weeks ago by a committee of independent experts led by Mary McGowan Davis, a former New York judge, that said that Hamas had not conducted any internal investigations of its own but that Israel had devoted considerable resources in looking into more than 400 accusations of misconduct.

Mr. Goldstone’s article fell like a bomb in Israel, where many people considered the 2009 publication of the Goldstone report as one of the most harmful events in recent years. It was viewed as offering spurious justification for damaging accusations, which Israelis considered to be part of a campaign to delegitimize the state and label it as a war criminal.

“We face three major strategic challenges,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year, “the Iranian nuclear program, rockets aimed at our citizens and Goldstone.”

On Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu called on the United Nations to retract the entire Goldstone report. “Everything we said has proven to be true,” he said. “Israel did not intentionally harm civilians. Its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything.”

“The fact that Goldstone backtracked,” Mr. Netanyahu added, “must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all.” The Goldstone report documented numerous examples of the mistreatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers, and he did not back away from those findings in his article in The Washington Post.

Efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone by telephone and e-mail on Saturday were unsuccessful. Farhan Haq, a deputy spokesman for the United Nations, said it was up to member nations to decide whether to re-evaluate the report.

Israel carried out its military campaign after years of rocket fire by Palestinian militants in Gaza against southern Israel. As many as 1,400 Gazans were killed during the three-week offensive in December 2008 and January 2009, including hundreds of civilians. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

During the invasion, graphic images of human suffering were broadcast around the world, and after the fighting ended, the United Nations Human Rights Council asked Mr. Goldstone, who is Jewish, to head an investigation into Israel’s actions. He said he would do so on the condition that he could broaden his mandate to include Hamas’s conduct as well.

Israel considers the Human Rights Council to be deeply hostile to its interests and refused to cooperate with Mr. Goldstone or allow him into Israel to carry out his work.

He said in The Washington Post article that the restrictions hampered his efforts, although he added that the council’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”

He and his investigators spent weeks in Gaza under Hamas’s auspices. The panel’s report said that the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza — a flour mill, sewage plant, chicken coops, water wells, a cement plant and about 4,000 homes — and the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants could only be understood as intentional.

The report also said 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.”

In his Washington Post article, Mr. Goldstone retracted that assertion, saying, “The allegations of intentionality by Israel 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.”

Now, he said, Israeli investigators had presented evidence “that civilians were not intentionally harmed as a matter of policy.”

Israel had tried in the past year and a half to counter the Goldstone report. In January 2010, Israel sent a 40-page letter to the United Nations defending the credibility of its internal military investigation into the army’s conduct during the war. In July, the Israeli military said it had indicted a number of officers and soldiers for their actions in the Gaza war. The army said in a statement that the chief military prosecutor had decided to take disciplinary and legal action in four separate cases, including against a staff sergeant accused of deliberately shooting at least one Palestinian civilian who was walking with a group of people waving a white flag. It was a case that was included in the Goldstone report.

In addition, the chief military prosecutor ordered a criminal investigation by the military police into an airstrike on a house that killed 29 members of the Samouni family in Zeitoun, a district of Gaza City.

Mr. Goldstone referred to that case in his article, saying that a commander had apparently misread a drone image and that an officer was still under investigation in the matter.

The report by Ms. Davis, the former judge, was more critical of Israel than Mr. Goldstone acknowledged in his article. “Given the scale of this undertaking, much remains to be accomplished,” she wrote, “we noted that a number of investigations reportedly remain open.”

In addition, she noted, “there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead,” which was Israel’s name for the military operation.

In February, a group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups asked the United Nations Human Rights Council to take further action on the Goldstone report’s findings to ensure justice for the war’s victims.

The Goldstone report upset not only the government in Israel but also many on the left who said the harsh critique made it impossible for them to raise other concerns.

After the report, Mr. Goldstone was ostracized by Jewish communitites in South Africa and elsewhere, even though he had long expressed devotion to Israel. A year ago, there was an attempt to bar him from his grandson’s bar mitzvah in Johannesburg, although he was able to go.