So called Israeli war crimes in Gaza is just a lie, a pressure tactic used by its enemies to force Israel to agree to self-destruction.
This is the only issue: Palestinian right of 7 millions Arabs to "return" to Israel is non-negotiable. Palestinians demand that Israel agree to self-destruction, and they get mad that Israel refuses to oblige, and progressive Jews like MJ don't provide enough cover for Obama to help them with their goals.

It has been clear at all stages of the negotiations that this process aims to eliminate the core issue of the Arab/Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice: the Palestinian refugees and their rights of return and restitution. In fact, elimination of these central Palestinian/Arab demands form the center-piece of both Israeli and US policies. It is also no secret that during the so-called “Oslo Peace Process” these policies have employed insidious tactics in order to nullify these rights altogether. Such tactics include attempts to substitute the return and restitution of the refugees with monetary compensation; to reduce the number of those entitled to exercise these rights from over 7 million Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons to a tiny minority, including so-called “hardship cases” that would be arbitrarily defined by Israel; to suggest that the refugees return to homes located in the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority; and other humiliating “trade offs” whereby Palestinians are expected to surrender the right of refugees to return to homes, lands and properties of origin in exchange for other rights and demands, such as self-determination, borders, the reclamation of Jerusalem and removal of the illegal settlement-colonies. The Palestinian leadership has rejected such degrading bargaining tactics in previous negotiations, notably those known as the second Camp David summit and the Clinton initiative. The late President Yasser Arafat rejected these tactics, and he was made to pay for that with his liberty and his life.

http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=7&id=199

"So called war crimes is just a lie ..."

Using human shields and terrorizing the civilian population IS A WAR CRIME and there is no doubt that those responsible will be brought to justice before the ICC. If not this year then next year, eventually they will face charges, and in the meantime they have to sleep at night with the images ..

1892. Allied to the systematic destruction of the economic capacity of the Gaza Strip, there appears also to have been an assault on the dignity of the people. This was seen not only in the use of human shields and unlawful detentions sometimes in unacceptable conditions, but also in the vandalizing of houses when occupied and the way in which people were treated when their houses were entered. The graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans, all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.

1893. The operations were carefully planned in all their phases. Legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign. There were almost no mistakes made according to the Government of Israel. It is in these circumstances that the Mission concludes that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.

This administration doesn't much care if Abbas is percieved as their puppet; unlike MJ, they already KNOW that he's a placeholder for the real martinet-of-choice, "Sammy" Fayyad.

Ynetnews:

Report: Clinton pressured Abbas not to support Goldstone Report Published: 10.02.09, 11:20 / Israel News US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to ask him not to support the content of the Goldstone Report, which investigated Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. She claimed that doing so would widen the gaps between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, according to a report on Al-Jazeera's website. According to the report, Abbas was under immense pressure from Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who spurred him to withdraw the PA's consent that the report be adopted by the UN. (Roi Kais)

From Marc Lynch's excellent post on this subject:

Whatever gains made by Fatah after its Bethlehem conference and by Fayyad with the announcement of his agenda for a Palestinian state are likely to be washed away in this deluge. The credibility of the Hamas narrative about the PA's collaboration with Israel and unrepresentative nature will be strongly enhanced. And it will not help Salam Fayyad establish authority that he has been fingered by some sources as the person directly responsible for the decision.

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/04/pa_paying_the_price

What were our policymakers thinking?

They were probably thinking that if Israel is punished for Gaza then the world community might get a taste in its mouth for punishing larger miscreants, like the US for example, which is at least a hundred times worse than Israel. Like in Fallujah, for example, as recounted in this news report: More than 83 percent of Fallujah's 300,000 residents fled the city, Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, staffers with the American Friends Service Committee, reported in AFSC's Peacework magazine. Men between the ages of 15 and 45 were refused safe passage, and all who remained - about 50,000 - were treated as enemy combatants. . .

I happen to find the Goldstone report execrable for reasons too numerous and complicated to list here. However, I admit that I was taken aback by Abbas' move - and am still scratching my (balding) pate trying to figure out why. The idea that he's simply a dupe doesn't cut it for me. There has to be something in it for him, no? Maybe this provides some explanation (then again, maybe it's just damage control):

If Israel does not soften its positions on the peace process, the Palestinian Authority will resume pushing to get the Goldstone report moved to the Security Council, and thence to the International Criminal Court, an associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Haaretz Tuesday.

Abbas' associate said that not only the U.S., but also Britain and China vehemently opposed the PA's original motion. And since all three have veto power in the Security Council, referral to the Security Council would have accomplished nothing except to antagonize three major powers, he explained.

Several Arab states also urged Abbas to withdraw the motion, after they too, came under pressure from Washington, he said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119360.html

And for all the commenters so excited that Abbas has been discredited while Hamas strengthened, thank you for revealing your true colors. Hint, it's not about peaceful co-existence.

What were our policymakers thinking?

The West has a natural, inalienable right to kill people in the Rest.

It's a very simple principle, and it must be defended at ALL cost. Once you understand this principle, a lot of what happens in the world becomes much easier to understand.

Principles rate higher that strategic concerns. Whereas strategies are advanced with a lot of careful thinking, principles are defended, come hell or high water, from the gut.

Propping up Abbas's Judenrat is an important strategic concern of the US. But defending the right of the White Man to kill the unworthy and the unwashed is the fundamental principle of our great civilization.

Asking the President of the US to let a Western Government stand trial for dropping bombs on dark and poor people is like asking the Chief Rabbi of Israel to eat pork.

"But defending the right of the White Man to kill the unworthy and the unwashed is the fundamental principle of our great civilization.

Asking the President of the US to let a Western Government stand trial for dropping bombs on dark and poor people is like asking the Chief Rabbi of Israel to eat pork."

The EU is not subject to the US principle stated above. Europe is a very much larger trading block that will eventually bring the perpetrators of the Gaza killing fields to justice. It may take time, but Olmert and Barak will face a court. In the meantime a small voice in their heads will remind them each night of the lives they violently ended as they played God over those three blood-drenched weeks, just 10 months ago, in their orgy of death and destruction amongst a civilian population.

They will not sleep well in the years ahead, just as another does not sleep.

The Israeli government - and the lobby here - went into full "shoot the messenger" mode, attacking Goldstone rather than addressing the incidents described in his report.

Actually, MJ, that's not true. I read many criticisms of the report and all addressed its substances. As for Goldstone himself, the prevailing view was bafflement that a respected jurist would lend his name and credibility to such a blatant witch-hunt.

In fact, you can take a look at the Israeli Foreign Ministry response to the report here. http://www.mfa.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/FC985702-61C4-41C9-8B72-E3876FEF0ACA/0/GoldstoneReportInitialResponse240909.pdf
As an educated commentator, I would hope you've seen it already. Tell me where it attacks Goldstone personally? You can't. Because it doesn't.

Here are some bits from the introduction:

1. The Report of the Fact-Finding Mission established pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution S-9/1 was instigated as part of a political campaign, and itself represents a political assault directed against Israel and against every State forced to confront terrorist threats.

2. In the eyes of the authors of the Report, Israel's operation in Gaza had nothing to do with the 12,000 rockets and mortars fired by Hamas over eight years on towns and villages inside Israel, nor with the fact that close to one million Israeli citizens had to live their lives within seconds of bomb-shelters because they were in range of Hamas attacks. Nor, in their view, did it have anything to do with the smuggling of weapons and ammunition to terrorist groups through hundreds of tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border. Indeed, neither the right to self defense nor the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip are even mentioned in the Report.

3. Rather, the Report advances a narrative which ignores the threats to Israeli civilians, as well as Israel's extensive diplomatic and political efforts to avoid the outbreak of hostilities. In this narrative self defense finds no place – Israel's defensive operation was nothing other than a "deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population"

4. In support of this vicious and unfounded assertion, the Report has no qualms about bending both facts and law. In the spirit of the one-sided mandate it was given by the HRC resolution, and the clearly stated political prejudices of some of its Members, of the Mission carefully selected its witnesses and the incidents it chose to investigate for clearly political ends. Yet even within this self-selected body of evidence, the Report engages in creative editing, misrepresentations of facts and law, and repeatedly adopts evidentiary double standards, attributing credibility to every anti-Israel allegation, and invariably dismissing evidence that indicates any wrongdoing by Hamas.

5. The Report repeatedly downplays or ignores the reality of terrorist threats, and the complexity of the military challenges in urban warfare. It also goes far beyond its mandate as a fact-finding mission, making legal and judicial determinations of criminal wrongdoing, even in the absence of crucial information.

Why Did We Pressure Palestinians To Deep Six Goldstone Report?

I don't see what the mystery is. Seems pretty clear to me. The Palestinian amabassador to the U.N. said why, very directly and clearly, to the New York Times:

The Americans argued that pushing the report now would derail the Middle East peace process that they are trying to revive, diplomats said.

"We don't want to create an obstacle for them," Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said by telephone from Geneva, where the Human Rights Council is based. "We want to get a strong resolution to deal with the report in a good manner to get a benefit from it."....

What's a mystery is why your narratives so often depend on suggesting people are lying, often twisting others' words right in front of everyone's eyes to somehow prove "the lobby" is directing everything. That's what you tried to imply about Obama's AIPAC speech, too, and other things he has said about Israel and Iran, etc. Consider that sometimes some people are saying what they mean. Especially Obama, his record is actually pretty strong on that front, better than with most politicians.

It's so clear that the current interaction with Iran is a shake up in the region that, depending on how it goes, may offer an opportunity for progress with the IP issue, in dealing with one of Israel's favorite bogeymen in the area. They keep yelling that nobody cares and isn't doing anything about it, well, now they are.

To have the Security Council talking about Israel as a past war criminal at the same time sort of ruins the whole zeitgeist, it would make them dig in their heels as they always do when a large number of countries are attacking them as evil. Talking about spilt milk is not the way forward, even if one thinks the spilt milk unjust. And any smart negotiator in any situation would seek to have the parties involved stop talking past grievances. A classic question for peace negotiators to use is almost always: do you want peace or do you want retribution?

mythbuster said... And in about 10 years, there will be no part of the West Bank left to build a Palestinian state and we will be told that removing 500,000 Isareli Jews would amount to ethnic cleansing.

I think this type of low-end jostling by both sides has been the plan for both sides for a long time.

The Israelis want to create a larger country and defensible borders through settlements. They pulled out of Gaza because it wasn't really defensible. They push into the West Bank because there is land and valuable water resources.

The Palestinians want to take over Israel though "the right of return". It's also why they keep screaming about access to Israel's economy, rather than attempting to build one of their own. The more people they can get over the border, the better chance they have of eventually taking over through shear numbers.

In this type of warfare, and make no doubt that it is a type of warfare, Israel happens to have the stronger position, in no small part because of long-term U.S. support. The best deal that the Palestinians could have reasonably hoped for was flushed by Arafat.

I think the most likely outcome is that Israel will eventually throw their hands in the air (dramatically, of course), say they give up, extend the wall a bit, and determine the borders of a highly ghettoized Palestine. When the Palestinians lob rockets, Israel will return fire, making the Palestinian territory near the border a scorched no-man's land.