The Goldstone Report fails to analyze or investigate controversial document
Readers looking for an objective analysis of the Goldstone Report will have to keep waiting.
Perhaps more than any other document, the Report has provoked considerable controversy in Israeli-Palestinian discourse since its publication in September 2009. Led by Judge Richard Goldstone and officially called the “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict” between Israel and Hamas in January 2009, the document has deepened divisions and mistrust between those who supported and opposed Israel’s actions during the war.
Supporters of Israel’s actions dismissed the report as an inherently biased account that falsely accuses the Israeli Defense Forces of war crimes they did not commit. Opponents of the Israeli operation—called Cast Lead—praised the document as an accurate representation of Israeli misdeeds.
Those hoping for a less polemicized debate over the 500-page report would perhaps welcome a collection of scholarly essays explaining and analyzing the document’s findings. A new release from Nation Books proposes to do just that. The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict claims in its introduction to offer “nuance to a document that has been too often misunderstood.”
But the main problem with The Goldstone Report is its total lack of nuance. Two of its editors, Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss, run the anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss (the third editor is Lizzy Ratner). The book contains an abridged version of the document, a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu entitled “A Call to the Community of Conscience,” an introduction by Naomi Klein called “An End to Israeli Exceptionalism” and eleven essays in response to the Report’s findings. All but one of those pieces agree almost unequivocally with Goldstone’s findings, providing little to no criticism of the document and—like the report—giving Israel the bulk of the blame for the war’s toll.
Several essays condemn the hardship inflicted by Israel on Palestinians during Cast Lead while spending little time on Hamas’s actions during the war. Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, condemns the actions of Israel—which he calls the “Occupying Power”—since the beginning of the Second Intifada while failing to mention Hamas’s human rights abuses. Similarly, Archbishop Tutu questions the nature of Hamas’ actions, calling them “likely war crimes and possible crimes against humanity” (my emphasis). This lack of firmness against Hamas places the entire blame on Israel while excusing Hamas’s desire to destroy the Jewish state.
Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi goes even further, portraying Israel as a timeless villain and the Palestinians as eternal sufferers. He writes that Israel has garnered support through “decades of propaganda stressing Biblical roots of the modern Zionist enterprise.” Whereas the Palestinians “are the main victims of the conflict” in the Middle East, Israel has perpetrated a “series of prolonged, vivid and photogenic crises”—none of which Khalidi fully analyzes—that negate its right to self-defense.
Some pieces avoid the contents of the report altogether, instead basing their arguments on pathos. A personal account by Palestinian journalist Laila el-Haddad mentions the Goldstone Report only twice. Former congressman Brian Baird diverts attention from the report by infusing his essay with sentimental accounts and non-sequiturs: “People come up with rationales for everything though. They say, Hamas turned ambulances into car bombs, that’s why the Israelis are so careful. So therefore a completely innocent person can’t hold their child’s hand while they die of brain cancer?” Baird seems to value a theoretical moment of distress over very real acts of terrorism. Did this supposed situation even take place?
Only one essay, “The Goldstone Illusion” by Moshe Halbertal, criticizes any element of the Goldstone Report. Halbertal, a professor at the New York University School of Law and Hebrew University, notices that in the Report, “there is no mention of Hamas’s role and its ideology as reflected in its extraordinary charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocidal killing of Jews.” But the subsequent piece, Jerome Slater’s “The Attacks on the Goldstone Report,” attempts to refute Halbertal’s claims. Slater claims to cite a “wealth of evidence,” but his principal sources include biased organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which has a reputation for criticizing Israel.
To be sure, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing government does deserve some criticism for its attitude toward Gaza and the settlements. In her essay, Ms. Magazine editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin faults Netanyahu for declining any further investigation into the tragic events that transpired during the Gaza War. But like many of the other contributors to The Goldstone Report, Pogrebin takes her argument a few steps too far, writing that the entirety of Israeli civil society has “coarsened” in the wake of Cast Lead, and that “Jews who claim to espouse Jewish values” should be more “conscience-stricken” about what occurred in Gaza.
Victims exist on both sides of this conflict, and both Israel and Hamas must respond to their critics. But it is foolish to assume that Israel is entirely to blame for what happened during the Gaza War. By taking that view, The Goldstone Report fails in its stated purpose. Having far outshot the realm of nuance, the book has failed to elucidate the countless misconceptions surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In fact, it has only made them worse.
Sam Kerbel is a senior at Columbia University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Current, the school’s journal of contemporary politics, culture and Jewish affairs.
