Soccer Dad

All that glitters isn't goldstone

Isabel Kershner writes about Israel's response to the Goldstone report. In Israel rejects call for Gaza Inquiry.

Early on, Kersher quotes Shimon Peres:

Reflecting a broad consensus in Israel, the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, also harshly criticized the report, calling it "a mockery of history" for failing "to distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right for self-defense." Mr. Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, added that the report "legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death."

That Peres is no right winger, makes the statement even more effective.At the end, she focuses on two reactions:

"The whole body of international law is based on army against army," said Gerald M. Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University and a leading force in Israel against what some here consider the politicized nature of human rights discourse. "What is a civilian? They used to be people who don't wear uniforms and are outside the military. But if you have Gaza or Southern Lebanese guerrilla forces who don't wear uniforms, who are illegal combatants, when is it a legitimate target?"

Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University who has been highly critical of the Gaza operation, said: "Goldstone should have acknowledged that this asymmetry creates a disadvantage for the state. It places a great strain on our political system. Israel has an extremely difficult time staying democratic in the ruthlessly hostile environment of the Middle East. Comfortable governments in the West cannot begin to understand the plight of a country that went through nine wars."

During the years when Hamas sent thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, the United Nations human rights bodies did not put together an investigation or issue a condemnation, Professors Steinberg and Ezrahi, and other experts, said, doing so only after Israel retaliated. In addition, officials here said, Israel's attack on Gaza was part of its need to deter Iran and its proxies and could not be looked at in isolation.

That last paragraph captures the real problem. The whole point of the investigation wasn't to uncover war crimes but to prevent Israel from defending itself. The presence of Christine Chinkin on the commission was not accident. She wrote explicitly that Israel has no right of self defense.

If this were a real court process, and not a façade based on a political mandate from the inherently biased United Nations Human Rights Council, both Goldstone and Prof. Christine Chinkin would have been disqualified from participating. As UN Watch noted in its 28-page legal brief to the UN, Chinkin's bias was reflected in statements that "categorically rejected" Israel's right to self-defense against rocket attacks from Gaza and accused Israel of "aggression" and "prima facie war crimes." But without any due process, this brief was simply dismissed.

I wish that Kershner had written about a case or two where it could be shown that Goldstone used flawed methodology or was hypocritical. One other problem with the article is that she gave Hamas spokesman, Ahmed Yousef a chance to respond with no rebuttal. However his claim that the rockets fired from Gaza were fired in self defense is so laughable, perhaps, no rebuttal was needed.

The Times though, gave Goldstone the op-ed space to defend himself, Justice in Gaza. After explaining that he hesitated accepting charge of the commission, he writes:

...I accepted because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.

In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle. Many civilians unnecessarily died and even more were seriously hurt. In Israel, three civilians were killed and hundreds wounded by rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas and other groups. Two Palestinian girls also lost their lives when these rockets misfired.

In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.

If Goldstone believes that Israel failed to protect civilians adequately, I suggest that he read this observation from Edward Luttwak early in the war against the terror group Hamas:

Consider: According to Gaza sources, until the ground fighting started some 25% of the 500 dead were innocent civilians. The Israelis claimed that 20% of the casualties from the aerial attack were civilians. Either way, this was an extremely accurate bombing campaign. (Even in the 1991 and 2003 U.S. air campaigns against Iraq, when most of the bombs were already precision-guided, gross targeting errors killed many civilians.)

A targeting accuracy of 75% -- by the lowest estimate -- cannot have been merely obtained by overhead photography from satellites or reconnaissance aircraft, because few Hamas objectives were classic "high-contrast" targets such as bunkers or headquarters. Most targets were small groups of people in nondescript civilian vehicles that blend in with traffic, or inside unremarkable buildings. Nor could telephone intercepts have yielded much intelligence, because all Palestinians know that the Israelis have long combined voice recognition with cellular-grid location in order to aim missiles very accurately at single vehicles in traffic, or even at individuals standing about with their cellphones switched off.

And the Israeli military concluded after the war that roughly half of those killed were documented members of Hamas.

According to the IDF, more than 600 of the dead have been identified as members of a militant organization. This includes the police officers who were killed in an attack on their academy's graduation parade on December 27, the first day of the operation.

A total of 309 are described as "uninvolved," meaning they have been confirmed as innocent civilians. Another 320 are described as "unaffiliated," which means the IDF has not yet determined whether they have any affiliation with a militant group. Finally, 14 fatalities were members of Fatah whom Hamas executed during the fighting.

Of the 309 innocent civilians killed, 189 were children under the age of 15. Palestinians describe anyone under 18 as a child.

(For more on the inflation of civilian casualties you must read Elder of Ziyon.)

These are not proportions that are possible if force is used indiscriminately. This really renders the premise of the commission moot.

There are also specific problems with Goldstone's report such as a failure to use a standard he himself used in Yugoslavia, relying on contradictory testimony or a demonstrated failure to understand international law.

But Goldstone's claim:

The issue is deeply charged and politically loaded. I accepted because the mandate of the mission was to look at all parties: Israel; Hamas, which controls Gaza; and other armed Palestinian groups.

is demonstratably false. As Irwin Cotler observed:

Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson stated that "the resolution is not balanced because it focuses on what Israel did, without calling for an investigation on the launch of the rockets by Hamas. This is unfortunately a practice by the Council: adopting resolutions guided not by human rights but by politics. This is very regrettable." Asked to head up the mission before Goldstone, Robinson refused.

The mandate of the commission was to find fault with Israel. Goldstone isn't honest enough to admit it. Sure he issued cursory condemnations of Hamas, but the main focus of his report was second guessing Israeli commanders in the field. As Col. Kemp wrote:

It is often overlooked in media and human rights groups' frenzies to expose fault among military forces fighting in the toughest conditions. The fourth is preventing or minimising casualties among your own soldiers. There will frequently be times when a military commander must make a snap judgement between the safety of his own troops and that of other people.

Human nature dictates that he will often choose his own men. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. And there is more to it even than the commander's human nature and loyalty to his men. For soldiers to follow their commander into combat - at any level, but especially at the point of battle - they must trust him.

How many soldiers want to die, be blinded, burnt, or have their arms, legs or faces blown off? No soldier will trust, or follow, a commander who is profligate with his men's lives.

Let us not forget that these calculations, judgements and decisions are not taken in an air conditioned office or from the safety of a rearward military headquarters. The commander must weigh these things up in altogether different circumstances.

Goldstone is protesting too much. The errors in his commission's report cannot be ascribed to carelessness but to a premeditated blood libel against Israel.

Posted by SoccerDad at September 17, 2009 5:32 AM