gideon levy on haaretz about the goldstone report: The Golda Wars.

my favorite line: David fired Qassams at Goliath, Goliath responded fiercely. You can also call a match between Mike Tyson and a 5-year-old boxing, but the proportions, oh the proportions.

Goldstone on Goldstone: "Nothing proven" (Arlen Specter, anyone?). Read it and weep (for real, this is deadly serious stuff):

Goldstone’s findings themselves have, meanwhile, been left largely unexamined. The 36 specific incidents he focuses on in his report paint a disturbing picture of an Israeli army purposefully targeting unarmed civilians. But the facts of the report are built mostly on testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses, which have received little scrutiny or verification. Critics also call attention to parts of the commission’s work that they say was sloppily done, without sufficient cross-examination and double checking of information. Alternative interpretations of the incidents described are not considered, let alone fully explored.

Israel’s decision to refuse to cooperate with the Goldstone Commission as it was doing its work—a decision questioned even by some critics of the report—doubtless played a role in this. Tellingly, in an interview with the Forward on October 2, Goldstone himself acknowledged the tentative nature of his findings.

“Ours wasn’t an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission,” he said, sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office at Fordham University Law School, where he is currently visiting faculty. “We made that clear.”

Goldstone defended the report’s reliance on eyewitness accounts, noting his mission had cross-checked those accounts against each other and sought corroboration from photos, satellite photos, contemporaneous reports, forensic evidence and the mission’s own inspections of the sites in question.

For all that gathered information, though, he said, “We had to do the best we could with the material we had. If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.”

Goldstone emphasized that his conclusion that war crimes had been committed was always intended as conditional. He still hopes that independent investigations carried out by Israel and the Palestinians will use the allegations as, he said, “a useful road map.”

Just unbelievable. Anyone with a shred of curiosity about this should, indeed must, read the whole piece.
http://www.forward.com/articles/116269/

only nine Israeli soldiers died

Israeli soldiers themselves testified that they were ordered to keep Israeli casualties down at all costs

Once again, for all his talk of even handedness on the Israeli/Palestinian circular firing squad, Obama steps in on the side if Israel. Not really supprised, just pissed we have another moral equivocator as Pres..

The United Nations Human Rights Council today passed a report that finds that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during the Israeli invasion last December

Israel now needs to investigate its army's behavior itself.

The UN vote demonstrates that it can no longer operate in the Palestinian areas with impunity. As the old phrase goes, "the whole world is watching."

Steve Clemons is in Jordan:

I have been repeatedly told that in the eyes of the Arab world, "Netanyahu won. Obama lost. Abbas lost."

They say that for a while Israel was showing a softer side, rolling back inspection points and harassing Palestinian workers and commuters to a lesser degree -- but things have reversed now.

One person told me that there are now checkpoints around Nablus -- and there hadn't been in a really long time. "These Nablus check points are brand new -- and no one is saying anything about them."

It is true that the US has committed war crimes in virtually every field of combat, and to a limited extent you will always find aberrant soldiers, or guards, who enjoy humiliating, torturing and killing others, either combatants or civilians - and to such soldiers, there is no distinction.

However, the conduct of the IDF in Gaza was extraordinary in its ferocity, no matter that pro-Israelis vehemently insist otherwise. Most of these voluble deniers have never been in uniform, never mind been professional soldiers.

The killing of hundreds of defenseless children in Gaza, was uniquely evil and grotesque, given that the military conscripts who killed were the grandchildren of survivors of the Holocaust in which six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and disabled - were murdered, just 70 years ago.

The ONLY valid reason to kill 300 children, or ANY children, is if those children posed a distinct and immediate threat to the life of the soldiers who killed them.

Those who carried out the killings have the option to present evidence that they were indeed under such threat of death and that they killed in genuine self-defense. To date, the IDF has declined to produce any evidence or to co-operate in the UN investigation.

It is NOT sufficient to claim that these killings were carried out because other armies have killed civilians.

The world needs evidence. Israel has claimed to be the 'only democracy in the Middle East'. Now is the time to fulfill that claim. Israel has claimed to have the 'most moral army in the world'. NOW is the time to prove that statement.

Otherwise, those responsible for gratuitously killing women, children and other civilians, must be brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague to be proved innocent or guilty of war crimes.

Over at the clown rodeo, formally known as the Human Rights Council, there is disappointment. Richard Goldstone is miffed:

Richard Goldstone condemned the U.N. Human Rights Council for endorsing his report while ignoring his findings on Hamas war crimes. The Human Rights Council voted 25 to 6 Thursday to endorse the report and recommend that other U.N. bodies heed its recommendations. The report recommends that Israel and authorities in the Gaza Strip prosecute fighters for alleged war crimes committed during last winter’s Gaza war and, should that not happen within six months, for the U.N. Security Council pursue such prosecutions. The Human Rights Council resolution cites only Israel.

The United States, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine voted against the resolution. The beacons of human rights that voted in its favor include Russia, China, Argentina, and Egypt. This is the “international community” in all its glory. This is the gang from whom the Obami hope to obtain consensus on a range of issues, from global warming to terrorism to Iran. Well, we see the sort of consensus that emerges when the community gathers for a pow-wow – it is inevitably anti-Israel.

Expecting anything better from the UN and especially the Human Rights Council (which Obama rejoined after the Bush administration had withdrawn) is foolish.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/130581

RE: "This is a significant blow to the Netanyahu government. It has attacked both the Goldstone report and Goldstone himself with unusual virulence..." - MJR

GOLDSTONE FACEBOOK GROUP
> Name - Richard J. Goldstone: Integrity Personified
> Category - Common Interest, Beliefs & Causes
> Description - A group for individuals who admire and respect Justice Goldstone.
> LINK - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=152832719154

The list of countries that voted FOR the Goldstone report to be accepted, represents substantially more than 50% of the entire global community of 6.5 billion.

Not a majority opinion to be ignored or treated lightly, and that global entity demands answers.

In favour (25): Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia.

Basically, among democratic governments in Latin America, only Mexico abstained. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua all have government with good human right records (one can quibble about "transparency" etc.)

In Asia, only Japan and South Korea abstained, and they were at cross currents of "we do not care" and our diplomatic influence, and I do not see why we should automatically snicker at India, Indonesia and Philippines.

In Africa, the split between supporting countries and abstaining shows among abstainers such "beacons of democracy" as Gabon and Burkina Faso, while supporting Ghana and South Africa both have good record on democracy and human rights.

In North America, one of the opposing countries is infamous for running secret torture programs in which people were vanishing without trace.

About 30 years ago, campaigns like Gaza were not unique, although followed by considerable oprobrium. In 1981, guerillas (who we would today call terrorists) attacked representatives of the legal government of El Salvador. In response, by American-trained Atlacatl Battalion killed more than 1000, what was later called El Mozote massacre, after one of the wiped-out villages. Afterwards, I do not really recall ANY government (apart from Israel) doing shit on such a scale. With possible exception of some infernal civil wars in Africa.

Tactics deployed to hurt Israel inevitably cause collateral damage. It's a good thing that the United States, and a handful of European countries, have opposed the referral of Israel to a war crimes tribunal, but they aren't doing enough (and, of course, France and Great Britain absented themselves from the vote). They would do more, I think, if they understood that Israel represented a kind of test run for a uniquely nefarious idea. Israel may find itself in the docket soon, but the U.S., and Britain, and other Western democracies that are battling Islamist terror, may soon find themselves in similiar straits. Who could seriously argue that what happened in Gaza was unique? Talibs hide behind civilians in Afghanistan, and often those civilians get killed. It's only a matter of time before David Petraeus, or Bob Gates, find themselves under attack from the same forces that want to punish Israel for trying to defend itself from a state-sponsored terror group seeking its elimination.
http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/

That, of course, is the strategy. Try to persuade the international community that Israel's war is their war. That way, they fight your wars, and pay for them.

But the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has no commonality whatsoever with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea, ETA, the BNP in Britain or any other dissident groups.

The problem that the international community has with Israel is unique. There is no other country in the world that is armed by the US to suppress an indigenous population of millions who have at least an equal right to the land. Why America allows its legislature to be controlled by the pro-Israel lobby is inexplicable to non-Americans.

The state of Israel was originally envisaged to be a minority, autonomous, Jewish enclave running an agrarian economy within a greater Muslim land and in co-operation with its neighbors. Fast forward 60 years and we have an expansionist and belligerent Jewish state that demands hegemony in the Middle East and has been allowed by a succession of colluding American administrations since LBJ to build a massive secret nuclear arsenal outside of the NPT that is not subject to any regulation from the IAEA.

No! Israel is unique in very many ways and its wars are not our wars. It is not fighting international terrorism, but it is the focus and excuse for it.