Goldstone’s investigation

The central point in Israel’s criticism of the Goldstone report — the 574-page U.N. investigation of conduct during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza last January — is on clear display in an Op-Ed in Thursday’s New York Times by the report’s author, Richard Goldstone.

Israel, which refused to cooperate with the investigation because it believed the fact-finding mission’s mandate to be inherently biased (the U.N. Human Rights Council tasked it last February with probing "grave" Israeli "violations of human rights"), charged after the report’s release this week that it fails to recognize the distinctions between a democratic state of laws and the terrorist group bent on its destruction.

This is evident in Goldstone’s Op-Ed. He writes:

• "In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle… [that] in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm."
• "Our fact-finding team found that in many cases Israel could have done much more to spare civilians without sacrificing its stated and legitimate military aims. It should have refrained from attacking clearly civilian buildings, and from actions that might have resulted in a military advantage but at the cost of too many civilian lives. In these cases, Israel must investigate, and Hamas is obliged to do the same. They must examine what happened and appropriately punish any soldier or commander found to have violated the law."
• "Unfortunately, both Israel and Hamas have dismal records of investigating their own forces. I am unaware of any case where a Hamas fighter was punished for deliberately shooting a rocket into a civilian area in Israel — on the contrary, Hamas leaders repeatedly praise such acts. While Israel has begun investigations into alleged violations by its forces in the Gaza conflict, they are unlikely to be serious and objective."
• "Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law. Western governments in particular face a challenge because they have pushed for accountability in places like Darfur, but now must do the same with Israel, an ally and a democratic state."

It’s almost as if a space alien landed on planet Earth and, in the blink of his cycloptic eye, issued a judgment.

Leaving aside for the moment the absurd comparison between Israel and Darfur, Goldstone’s call for Hamas to investigate its attacks on Israeli civilians is a thinly veiled attempt to show impartiality that, in the end, only makes a mockery of his own conclusions. Killing Israeli civilians is one of Hamas’ central objectives. This is the group that organized suicide squads and dispatched its members to blow themselves up on Israeli buses in Tel Aviv, in hotel lobbies in Netanya and at restuarants in Jerusalem. This is a group that has spent much of the last eight years lobbing thousands of rockets at Israeli homes in Sderot, Ashkelon and other nearby towns with the aim of terrorizing the local Israeli population. This is a group that remains committed in word and deed to Israel’s destruction.

Goldstone claims to hold Hamas to the same standards to which he holds Israel, and his call for a Hamas probe is of a piece with that. What it actually does, however, is put Israel in the same category as Hamas.