For a region better known for its hardheaded insistence on contrarian views than for accommodating compromise and hindsight, Richard Goldstone’s public retraction was quite unusual: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document”, admitted the report’s chief author in a piece published by the Washington Post. The South-African Judge was the head of a panel commissioned by the United Nations to investigate the conduct of Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority during Operation Cast Lead, better known as the war in Gaza in the beginning of 2009.

At the end of lengthy discussions, the committee headed by Goldstone published harsh accusations against Israel and Hamas alike: Both, so it stated, had intentionally targeted civilians during the war, it stated, demanding both sides perform criminal investigations against the perpetrators. Now, Goldstone has ruefully retracted some of his harsh accusations against the Jewish State, leaving several lessons to be learned.

Winston Churchill once claimed that he only believed the statistics he had doctored himself. Numbers can be misleading. Operation Cast Lead, as Israel coined the war in Gaza, cost the lives of more than 1100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. These unbalanced figures sufficed for many who wanted to determine who had been the greater villain in this war, and its main culprit. This simplistic argument has now been refuted by Goldstone. The very man who equated between a Western style democracy and a terror organization has now learned that the two are no moral equivalent. Israel has invested efforts to investigate and improve on its performance, while Hamas “has done nothing”, except arming itself with more missiles to strike Israeli cities with, of course. Goldstone could have reached this conclusion earlier, had he only compared the figures provided by both Hamas and Israel concerning the number of fighters killed. Both belligerents spoke of approximately 700 killed. If these numbers are indeed true, then Israel’s army would have reached to what amounts to the lowest rate of collateral damage in the history of urban warfare, even if the price exacted from Gaza’s civilians remains painfully high.

Goldstone’s retraction should teach humility to anyone dealing with the news streaming out of the Middle East nowadays. Even a committee of experienced judges was misled by mere facts, as the tragic circumstances of the death of 29 members of the Simouni family illustrate. In the report, their fate served as a prime example for Israel’s supposedly intentional killing of Gaza’s civilians. Now Goldstone admitted this conclusion was false. The army committed a fatal mistake, not a war crime.

But if a panel of carefully deliberating judges can err so patently, how often must journalists and readers be wrong when they reach conclusions at the spur of a moment, with only a fraction of the resources and the time of a UN investigative committee at their disposal? Only the right context turns a series of facts into meaningful analysis. But in today’s Middle East, facts and frameworks are rarely sufficiently clear.

The newest upheaval in Syria is a good example: In a land of 22 million inhabitants, should 63, or more than 160, dead protesters be considered many or relatively few? Are 2000 demonstrators in a police state the beginning of a popular uprising or the end of a fringe movement? Are we being duped by youtube- and facebook-experts who cater to sensation-hungry media, or are we witnessing a revolution about to unseat another dictator?

These questions spring up all over the region: In Libya, the West supports a coalition of forces barely understood in the, so far unproven, hope that their behavior will prove to be more ethical than their predecessor. In Bahrain, Yemen and Egypt the outcome and nature of the revolutions remain unclear. Only retrospect can provide definitive answers. Until this hindsight is available, one should not rush one’s judgment.

© 2011 Gil Yaron - Making the Middle East Understandable