In a surprising about-face, the former head of a UN fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict has recanted his former indictment against Israel and exonerated the Jewish state of having committed “crimes against humanity” in the January 2009 campaign against the radical-Islamic Hamas movement in the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean. Writing in an open letter in the Washington Post over the weekend, Richard Goldstone stated that had he “known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” In Israel, which likes to pride itself in having the “the most virtuous army in the world”, the relief and vindication was palpable. The country was outraged a year and a half ago when the Goldstone report had accused them of having intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians during the war that had cost the lives of more than 1100 Gazans. In Gaza and Ramallah however, Goldstone’s surprising change of heart caused outrage, and fear that an exonerated Israel would be more likely to embark on a new military campaign against Hamas.

For Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Goldstone’s letter represented an unexpected windfall at a time when his international standing has hit rock bottom. A lack of progress on the diplomatic front, his hard-liner image, and his relentless warnings of the Iranian menace are threatening to turn Israel into a Pariah. He now pounced on Goldstone’s letter with alacrity, asking the world to delegate the original report “to the dustbin of history” because “everything we said has proven true.” On Sunday, he instructed his ministers to devise an international campaign to reverse the diplomatic fallout the report had caused. Israel had been suspicious of the undertaking of the UN Human Rights Council from the start, since enemy states like Libya seemed only too happy to divert from their own dismal human rights record by putting it on the spot. Jerusalem later refused to cooperate with the mission. When the report came out, its findings were a diplomatic disaster. Israel had, just like Hamas, purposefully targeted civilians, it claimed, used them as human shields and mistreated them.
Judge Goldstone has now ruefully retracted these harsh accusations, in large part, so he writes, because of the findings of a follow-up committee headed by New York judge Mary McGowan Davis. She had found that, while “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza, the de facto authorities [in Gaza] (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.” Not only that: While Israel constantly updates its procedures to harm fewer civilians, Hamas continues to pound Israeli population centers. As to the death of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, with hindsight Goldstone concludes that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Palestinians rejected Goldstone’s assertions, some like Islamic Jihad leader Ahmad Al-Mudallal, claimed they resulted “from pressure exerted on him by the Zionist lobby”. Others refuted that the letter bore any relevance: “The report is not the private property of Goldstone, as it was co-authored by him and a group of international judges”, said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza. Therefore, he had no right to change its conclusions.

© 2011 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable