There are No Winners in War
Goldstone Mission Suppressed Evidence
2009/09/23 - Sadly, the Judge Goldstone led UN Fact-finding Mission to Gaza failed to step beyond the HRC's original prejudicial mandate: "to investigate the grave war crimes Israel committed in Gaza". An unprecedented consensus, 94% of Israeli Jews are deeply disappointed from the Mission's Report, even relative to the low expectations. Israel’s president, dovish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres called the report “a mockery of history”. An excellent Guardian article Goldstone's Sins of Omission is also blasting the UN Report.
The 574 page long Report published on 15 September may look like a serious document to the inexperienced reader. But attentive readers soon realise conspicuous major faults in the Report, and we'll add a serious procedural charge which in a true legal process would totally disqualify the Report. The Report is preoccupied with Israel and deals very briefly only with Hamas - when Goldstone had promised to investigate all parties. Another consistent fault is that, with Peres' words again, the Report "fails to distinguish between the aggressor and those acting in self-defense". The Report's Summary speaks about 3 Israeli dead from Hamas rockets, which would be true during the Gaza fighting. 14 more dead Israelis, hundreds maimed and tens of thousand civilians terrorized by the 6300 Hamas rocket attacks before Israel gave an ultimatum to stop it and finally fought back - are left out from the Report - because it would show who was the aggressor.
The Report's conclusions are worn out generalizations about war crimes possibly committed both by Israel and by Hamas. This is a false, cosmetic balance. Of course deviations from norms happen in every war, they happened also in the war against Nazi Germany on both side. What the main things are: who is the aggressor, who commits crimes systematically and who on the other side does its best to keep deviations at minimum. Who tries to tell the truth, with an independent press and legal system watching, and who lies systematically - about Jenin, the Al-Durra forgery, in Pallywood- and now about Gaza. Goldstone should know that the accusations against Israel are based mostly on Palestinian fiction, collected under the well-known "freedom of speech" of the murderous Hamas regime - while the accusations against Hamas, the unilateral aggressors for years, are based on facts. Goldstone's "balance" is, in Churchill's words: "evenhandedness towards the fire-fighters and the arsonists".
But our most serious charge is that the Goldstone Mission suppressed evidence. Take-A-Pen's 2 large Submissions to the UN mission are mentioned solely in the Report's Annexure and in a footnote. No sign that the mission read our Memoranda (Memorandum 1 and Memorandum 2) and used any word or hard evidence presented there; like IDF aerial photos and our analysis (see also below) demonstrating beyond doubt Hamas' systematic use of Protected Civilian Objects to hide and to fire rocket launchers. The same Mission which quoted tens of unsubstantiated pages by sources known of fierce anti-Israel bias, overlooked information and even hard evidence we and others submitted, if unfit for its predefined conclusions.
Judge Goldstone should now withdraw the Report and honestly correct at least its most blatant shortcomings before any use in the UN. Without this the best summary of the Goldstone Report is this Letter to the Editor: "Kafka's work of fiction now sees life"