(Saks is associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.)
Business Day South Africa – 26 July 2010
HAVE the recent findings of an Israeli military investigation vindicated those of last year’s United Nations (UN) factfinding mission into the Gaza conflict? If so, should the South African Jewish communal leadership now “beg forgiveness” of Judge Richard Goldstone for its treatment of him for heading up that commission? Allister Sparks evidently thinks so.
In his opinion piece ( The chief rabbi owes Judge Goldstone an abject apology, July 21), Sparks depicts the good judge as a courageous and decent man, who braved the wrath of his community to do what was right.
With even Israel now allegedly having endorsed the Goldstone commission’s findings, Sparks calls on Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, on behalf of his co-religionists, to bow his head and apologise to him.
What immediately demolishes Sparks’s presumptuous moralising is the reality that the findings of the Israeli investigation do not vindicate the Goldstone commission at all.
There is a vast difference between identifying and condemning individual cases of misconduct by members of the military on the one hand, and making sweeping allegations of war crimes being implemented as a matter of policy by an army as a whole.
The findings of the Goldstone commission fall very much into the latter category. This is no surprise, since the fundamentally politicised and prejudiced nature of its brief, with its classic “verdict first, trial afterwards” nature, made a complete mockery of the judicial process.
Charged with the task of gathering evidence of Israel’s predetermined guilt by the lamentably misnamed UN Human Rights Council, a body notorious for its record of blatant anti-Israel bias, the members of the commission went about their task with enthusiastic zeal.
Their eventual findings went way beyond identifying a few egregious cases in which Israel’s actions violated the laws of war, instead concocting a lurid picture of a brutal rampage by an all-powerful military juggernaut against helpless and innocent civilians.
That this depiction is not merely exaggerated but entirely contrary to reality is borne out by the observations of, among others, Col Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
Speaking from the point of view of a soldier with extensive combat experience, he said: “I do not think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civil casualties and deaths of innocent people than the Israeli Defence Force is doing in Gaza.”
Kemp’s expert analysis, which was predictably ignored by the Goldstone commission, underlined the realities of the Gaza conflict, and of the nature of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict as a whole.
The objective facts demonstrate how Israel strives to minimise civilian casualties. By contrast, the Palestinians seek to maximise them.
Israeli soldiers guilty of harming civilians, whether deliberately or negligently, are put on trial and appropriately punished. Palestinian militants who succeed in killing Israeli civilians are feted and honoured throughout their society.
It does not take a military expert to predict what the consequences would be if Israel, with its powerful modern army, adopted the Hamas tactic of deliberately killing and injuring as many civilians as possible.
A few hours of such a strategy would result in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries.
That the Palestinian death toll in the Gaza incursion was a tiny fraction of this, despite three weeks of intensive fighting in heavily built up civilian areas, is clear testimony to how careful Israel was to minimise harm to non-combatants.
Of those civilian deaths and injuries that nevertheless occurred, how much lower would these have been had Hamas militants not used the general Palestinian population as human shields, something Hamas spokesmen openly boasted about? (This testimony was dismissed by the Goldstone commission, which further ignored video evidence clearly showing Palestinian terrorists firing rockets from civilian areas, including schools.)
That there were isolated cases of Israeli soldiers being guilty of human rights violations is nothing remarkable.
Under the intensive pressure of armed conflict, particularly when the enemy bases itself amongst civilians, it is practically inevitable that certain individuals — sometimes deliberately, more often simply negligently — will act inappropriately.
These actions should not be condoned, and must be dealt with by the military authorities concerned. Israel has done this in the aftermath of the Gaza incursion, just as it follows up every allegation of misconduct on the part of its military. Such procedures are absent on the Palestinian side.
The procedural and substantive flaws that make the Goldstone investigation and report so much of an aberration are too numerous to adequately go into here, but at least several more can be noted.
The untested allegations of Hamas officials are readily accepted as established fact, whereas Israeli testimonies regarding self-defence and efforts to limit casualties are pooh-poohed, or ignored completely.
The whole issue of background and context is likewise characterised by differential treatment.
More than 100 pages of the report present a detailed history of alleged Israeli human rights violations since 1967, evidently to “contextualise” (and thereby even justify) Palestinian violence, yet no such contextualisation is given in respect of Israeli actions.
Thus, the report fails to disclose that the reason for the blockade of Gaza was a direct result of Hamas’s refusal to abandon its primary aim of destroying Israel. Not for nothing has the Goldstone report been described as a “legal and moral travesty”, one that affects not just Israel but attacks the very right of any civilised nation to defend itself against enemies who use civilians as human shields, while having no scruples against targeting civilians themselves. The real question is why someone of Goldstone’s stature became involved in the whole process in the first place.
Had it not been for Goldstone’s involvement, it is likely that the conclusions of the fact-finding mission would have been even more biased against Israel. At least his report included a condemnation of the firing of missiles at Israeli population centres, and a call for Hamas to conduct an appropriate investigation into this.
However, this very limited moderating influence Goldstone exercised was not enough to offset the very considerable harm he did merely by participating.
This was eloquently expressed by South African Zionist Federation chairman Avrom Krengel in a meeting between Goldstone and the Jewish communal leadership in May this year: “Without your credentials as a Jew and pre-eminent human rights jurist, this report would have lacked all credibility and would have failed to gain any traction. Your involvement in this mission and report has le d to potentially devastating consequences for Israel and the Jewish people.”
Ultimately, though, this whole affair goes beyond Goldstone the individual and how he is now seen by most of the Jewish community he has so unfortunately alienated.
At bottom, it represents just one more instance of the institutions of international peacekeeping and justice being cynically hijacked by Israel’s enemies as a way of demonising and delegitimising the Jewish state. That Goldstone should have lent his august name to so infamous a process remains a mystery. One wonders if he realises the harm he has done — to Israel and to the cause of international justice he was once thought to epitomise.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=115964
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