MORE ON GOLDSTONE

Marty Peretz on Goldstone - Tel Aviv Journal: Richard Goldstone Recants a Blood Libel

Goldstone was crystal clear in his Washington Post disavowal of the report’s accusations of intentional killing by Israel of non-Hamas Palestinians: “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” Hamas’s rockets, by contrast, “were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.” Here is the judge’s pathetic confession: “If I had known then what I know now, the ‘Goldstone Report’ would have been a different document.” But why didn’t Goldstone and his fellow judges know? Well, for one thing, two of his three companions on the U.N. Human Rights Council judicial panel on Gaza—Christine Chinkin of the London School of Economics and Hina Jilani, a Pakistani jurist—had already condemned Israel even before the hanging court had been formed. And Richard Falk, the Council’s designated rapporteur on these issues, has been nothing less than an enemy of the Jewish state for decades. You don’t believe me? Google Falk and Israel. There will be no surprises. Anyway, the Council endorsed the report by a margin of 25 to 6. Were you surprised by that?

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There should be many shamed faces in the crowd. The foreign high priest of the Palestinian cause is Desmond Tutu, who, like his rival Jimmy Carter, finds no charge against Israel too preposterous to leave to, well, the gagasphere. But they have neither been heard from on Goldstone nor explained their silence. The Financial Times, which is the most consistent and hyperbolic critic of Israel in the United Kingdom, initially went bananas in praise of the “Goldstone Report.” It has now welcomed the jurist’s mea culpa, but reiterated its criticism of Israel. Human Rights Watch? Ditto. Stephen Walt, Juan Cole, John Esposito, Naomi Klein, Michael Lerner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, J Street (which peddled the report door-to-door on Capitol Hill): I predict that not one of them will come clean. As is the case with the Israeli “peace left”: not Peace Now, not the New Israel Fund, not B’tselem, not Agudah Lezchuyot Haezrch. And not Ha’aretz, either. They have too much invested in Goldstone’s original lie.