Listening to Justice Goldstone

The African World

 

Listening to Justice Goldstone

 

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.,

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor

Black Commentator

October 29. 2009

 

http://www.blackcommentator.com/348/348_aw_justice_goldstone.html

 

On Friday night I was completely engrossed in an

interview conducted by Bill Moyers of Justice Richard

Goldstone [Click here for the transcript of the

interview: http://tinyurl.com/yllft94.]

 

Justice Goldstone, a Jewish South African with

impeccable credentials as an international human rights

advocate and investigator, was charged by the United

Nations with the task of conducting an investigation

into allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes

which took place at the time of the Israeli invasion of

Gaza in December 2008.  The result, a report adopted by

the United Nations Human Rights Council this past week,

while finding war crimes committed by both sides,

represented a stinging indictment of the activities of

the Israeli military in its attack on the Gaza.

 

Moyers, an outstanding interviewer, posed tough

questions to Goldstone, many of which were derived from

criticisms of Justice Goldstone by anti-Palestinian

forces for alleged bias.  In fact, a clip of Israeli

Prime Minister Netanyahu addressing the United Nations

(played during the show), made such charges quite

explicit.  Justice Goldstone never wavered.  A

committed Zionist and long-time friend of Israel,

Goldstone described the Israeli behavior in no

uncertain terms as an act of collective punishment

against the people of Gaza for having elected Hamas

(the Islamic resistance movement) in the first place.

 

The executive summary of the report (the report itself

is more than 500 pages) is extremely compelling.  Drawn

from interviews conducted by Justice Goldstone's

committee, the report paints a picture of what one can

only be described as barbaric vengeance on the part of

the Israelis.  The supposed reason behind the attacks

lay in the firing of rockets at Israeli communities by

Palestinians from Gaza.  While the firing of rockets

against civilian targets is understood internationally

to be a war crime, the Israeli government had been

manipulating the situation against the Gaza for some

time, conducting a blockade and, in fact, breaking the

truce that had been agreed to with Hamas.  In that

sense, the Gaza invasion seemed to be a logical

extension of the behavior of the Israeli government to

neutralize Hamas.  It was also consistent with the sort

of behavior one observed when Israel conducted its

aggressive war against Lebanon in 2006, destroying

civilian targets, e.g., airports, and using cluster bombs.

 

On Friday night Justice Goldstone was absolutely

steadfast in his commitment to the conclusions of his

report.  This has been striking not just in his

responses to Moyers' questions on Friday night, but

also in terms of his responses to criticisms in the

immediate aftermath of the release of his report.

While many people with less courage would have

retracted their report or, at least, segments of their

report, Goldstone stood firm and absolutely unapologetic.

 

The issuing of the Goldstone report, and its adoption

by the UN Human Rights Council, is another signal that

something is changing with regard to attitudes towards

Israeli aggression and the Israeli occupation of the

Palestinian territories.  Try as anti-Palestinian

pundits might, it has been very difficult to debunk the

report.  Had the chair of the investigating committee

been someone more closely identified with the

Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the

Israeli allegations of bias might have had greater

international weight.  In the case of Goldstone's

report, such charges simply did not/do not pass the

straight face test.  Even the United States, with the

shameful criticism of the Goldstone report by

Ambassador Susan Rice, could not identify one factual

error in the report or one concrete reason that would

support a notion of alleged bias.

 

The Goldstone report needs to be popularized.  While

most people will not read its 500+ page analysis, the

gist of the report needs to be broadly circulated.  It

is a condemnation of the horrific approach that the

Israeli government has taken, not only towards Gaza,

but towards the entirety of the Occupied Territories.

As such, it must be used as another argument as to why

economic, political and military support for the

Israeli government and its Occupation needs to be halted.

_____________

 

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher,

Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy

Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica

Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis

in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice

(University of California Press), which examines the

crisis of organized labor in the USA