Gaza UN report: The U.S. and Israel vs. the truth
5 October 2009. A World to Win News Service. A recent report to the UN Human Rights Council on the Israeli invasion of Gaza makes accusations that are as grave as they are specific. The U.S. and Israel have responded like a bully who beats someone for filing assault charges against him.
The solemn and meticulous report documents facts that will enrage anyone who dares to think of Palestinians as human beings. The UN HRC mandated Richard Goldstone, a South African judge and former chief prosecutor of the international court for crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Rwanda, along with three other prominent international jurists, to lead an investigation into the military operations that were conducted in Gaza by both sides during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, and report their factual and legal findings.
Their account of the events begins: “The timing of the first Israeli attack, at 11:30 am on a week day, when children were returning from school and the streets of Gaza were crowded with people going about their daily business, appears to have been calculated to create the greatest disruption and widespread panic among the civilian population.” It documents repeated “direct attacks” on civilians with intent to kill, “reckless disregard” for civilian lives in general, and a campaign of deliberate destruction against food production and infrastructure designed to make life in Gaza miserable for a long time to come. All of these are very serious criminal offences under international law.
The four judges conclude, “While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”
Their report recommends that the UN Security Council demand that Israeli and Palestinian authorities themselves investigate the report’s accusations, and that failing a serious accounting and legal action against those responsible, that the Security Council ask the International Criminal Court in The Hague to open an investigation in view of trying the Israeli and Hamas leadership for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also raises the idea, at least hypothetically, that other governments could pursue those charges on their own under the doctrine of “universal jurisdiction” that requires individual countries to take legal action in the face of violations of the Geneva Conventions.
U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice reacted by declaring unequivocally that she would not allow the Security Council to discuss the matter. “The appropriate venue for this report to be considered is the Human Rights Council,” she said. (BBC, September 29, 2009) Then she proceeded to make sure that the HRC couldn’t consider it either, beating down an attempt to have the HRC vote on whether or not to endorse the report it had commissioned. Rather revealingly, Rice had nothing to say about the truth or falsity of the judges’ findings, only that her government was “reviewing carefully what is a very lengthy document.” Instead, she attacked the Human Rights Council’s decision to mandate the investigation in the first place, an act she labelled “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.” (Reuters, 17 September 2009)
The decision to commission the report was made before the U.S. rejoined the UN HRC earlier this year. When Obama had the U.S. take the HRC seat that Bush had spurned, some people hoped that this marked a change of American policy for the better. Rice, however, explained to the prominent blog Politicus that this would put the U.S. in a better position to fight “against the anti-Israel crap”. (4 April 2009) Washington’s approach to the Goldstone report is similar to Israel’s, which says it has done its own investigation of the 36 incidents that Goldstone documented but refuses to release the results or try to refute his conclusions because his investigation itself was illegitimate. It “was conceived in sin and is the product of a union between propaganda and bias”, as a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it. (Guardian, 16 September)
The UN HRC never even discussed the Goldstone report. It was scheduled to be on the agenda 2 October. At the last minute, the so-called Palestinian delegation to the UN HRC, constituted by the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, acting under “intense diplomacy” from Washington, abandoned their backing for the resolution to endorse the report they themselves had drafted. Palestinian Authority representatives pretended that this “startling shift” (New York Times, 3 October 2009) was no reversal in position, because the HRC can supposedly reconsider the matter when it next meets in March 2010. By then, the U.S., Israel and the other governments on the Council hope, the report’s explosive content may have somewhat dissipated.
The real reason for the Palestinian Authority’s “climbdown” was that the U.S. threatened to cut off its life support to the Palestinian Authority, which has bet its existence on the hope that it can make some sort of deal with Israel. (International Crisis Group analyst Robert Blecher, Guardian, 2 October 2009) The Israeli Prime Minister had threatened retaliation if the PA didn’t back off. He warned that approval of the report would be considered an attack on Israel, and that Israel does not distinguish between attacks with “grenades or bullets or words.” (NYT, 2 October)
Israeli diplomats had counselled the U.S. that if the idea that Israel committed war crimes was even given a hearing in the UN, the U.S. might face similar charges. An article in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaertz compared the accusation that Israel violated international law by killing civilians in Gaza with the American airpower massacre of scores of Afghan civilians in Kanduz last August, and the infamous massacre of villagers in My Lai during the U.S. occupation of Vietnam. The author’s point was not to condemn all such crimes but to argue that the U.S. had better take an unnuanced position and leap to the offensive against the Goldstone report. With that kind of U.S. support, “the IDF [Israeli army] and the government can emerge from the bunker to find that little damage has been done.” (16 September). The metaphor is apt: the U.S. serves as a military, political and economic rear base area for Israel because the Zionist state is a front-line bunker for American imperialist interests in the Middle East.
When the Palestinian delegation abandoned support for the motion on the report, Pakistan, the motion’s formal sponsor, representing various Arab and so-called “Islamic” countries on the HRC, withdrew it. Dropping the matter without discussion allowed the third world and European governments on the HRC to save face because they would no longer have to even pretend to care, let alone stand up to the U.S. Libya, for instance had promised what was billed as a “symbolic” discussion, but even that was avoided, to the general relief of all 47 HRC members, none of whom objected to the turn of events.
In the end, the U.S.’s blocking of any consideration of the Goldstone report was touted as a good thing for the Palestinians because it would enable Obama to extract some concessions from Israel in return. Of course, this has been the U.S. and Israel’s “good cop, bad cop” routine for decades, as even the slightest “concessions” Israel may consider making to the Palestinian Authority steadily shrink to all but insignificance. (Take the example of the Israeli settlements that, as the Goldstone report notes, are completely illegal under international law and now take up about 40 percent of the West Bank. Obama’s Washington is asking Israel to slightly slow down their expansion.)
As for the report’s condemnations of Hamas, while the report strives to be two-sided it cannot condemn both Israel and Hamas equally because reality won’t allow that.
It finds credible the figures that approximately 1,400 Palestinians died in the Israeli invasion, and gives specific examples of many civilians killed deliberately or through “reckless disregard” by Israeli bombs, white phosphorous shells and bullets. (The Israeli group B’Tselem released detailed research showing that out of 1,387 killed, 773 were civilians, including 252 people under the age of 16. BBC, 9 September 2009)
The Goldstone report says that during the invasion Palestinian rockets killed three Israeli civilians and a soldier, while the Palestinian rocket and mortar campaign during the three months before – the supposed justification for the incursion – caused no deaths. In previous years the Israeli army had fired ten times more projectiles into Gaza than vice-versa. The Palestinian use of suicide bombings had been suspended. Condemning Hamas for using inaccurate rockets that may hit civilians instead of military targets, the report argues, “When there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population. These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.” If this is an attempt to draw an equivalency between the two sides, it is not convincing. Further, there is absolutely no reason – for revolutionaries or anyone else – why opposition to Israeli crimes should be coupled with support for this reactionary Islamic fundamentalist organisation. The report points out that Israeli authorities provide air raid shelters only for Jewish settlements, not Palestinian villages in southern Israel also threatened by erratic rockets from Gaza. It makes a very clear case that Israel’s invasion of Gaza had nothing to do with protecting anyone’s life.
The report’s most important shortcoming lies with a basic assumption of its authors and the UN: that Israel has a right to exist. It follows the traditional UN position (before the U.S. was able to bring that international body closer to heel) that makes a distinction between Israel and “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (the West Bank and Gaza), as if Israel, too, were not built on occupied land from which most Palestinians were expelled. It assumes that Palestinians and Jews each have a “right to a country of their own.” While recognizing that Israeli law explicitly denies full rights to non-Jews, it does not draw the logical conclusion that the existence of a Jewish state is no more just than the existence of the white supremacist settler state in apartheid South Africa. This is the faulty premise that underlies its condemnation of Hamas for disrupting Israeli lives.
Goldstone has been described as “a dear friend of Israel” by a former Israeli Supreme Court justice. (Haaretz, 18 September 2009) His daughter Nicole told Israeli Army Radio, “My father took on this job because he thought he is doing the best thing for peace, for everyone and also for Israel.” Then she added, “It wasn’t easy. My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard.” (Haaretz, 16 September) Israeli attacks on Goldstone are so bitter in part because he identifies himself as Jewish, and therefore is seen as a traitor for being more loyal to the truth than to Israel. The Zionist doctrine attempting to identify all people of Jewish descent with a criminal state is a major source of today’s confused anti-Semitism and fodder for Islamic fundamentalist attempts to portray the struggle against Israel in religious and racist terms.
Goldstone and his team “saw and heard” 188 interviews, 10,000 pages of documents and 1,200 photos. Israel barred Goldstone from entering Israel, Gaza or the West Bank – UN members didn’t seem bothered by this extraordinary measure taken against one of the world’s premier international judges on an official UN mission – so he brought Palestinian and Israeli witnesses abroad. Some of the mission’s conclusions are given in a sidebar to this article. The most central one is this:
“The Mission is of the view that Israel’s military operation in Gaza between 27 December
2008 and 18 January 2009 and its impact cannot be understood and assessed in isolation from developments prior and subsequent to it. The operation fits into a continuum of policies aimed at pursuing Israel’s political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole. Many such policies are based on or result in violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Military objectives as stated by the government of Israel do not explain the facts ascertained by the Mission, nor are they congruous with the patterns identified by the Mission during the investigation.
“The continuum is evident most immediately with the policy of blockade that preceded the operations and that in the Mission’s view amounts to collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the Government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip.”
Israel’s target was “the people of Gaza as a whole.” The crimes happened not because of excesses or mistakes in the course of battle but because “the operations were premised on a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed not at the enemy but at the ’supporting infrastructure.’ In practice, this appears to have meant the civilian population.”
The U.S. is trying so hard to slander and squash this report because it documents Israeli crimes in Gaza in shocking detail, describes the illegality of not just particular Israeli army actions but the country’s basic strategy in this war and its approach to the Palestinians in general, and takes a firm stand against this as pertaining to the highest category of crimes. It undermines the U.S. and Israel’s legitimacy by tearing the cloak of international law and civilised standards they attempt to cover themselves with. This report is a contribution to exposing the naked power relations and violence on which the present world order stands, and, with the unfolding of events, the role of the UN itself as a fig leaf.