April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the
ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound and
maim as a collective punishment. "The Palestinians are going to bring upon
themselves a Holocaust," promised Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy minister of
defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008.
There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an
internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases
suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that is
still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the Israeli
army that massive killings by Palestinians were a "mistake."
Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of
Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by "mistake." So
29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate mistake? Only
ideological commitment could base a revision of the report on an internal
inquiry of the Israeli army focusing only on one of dozens of instances of
unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be new evidence that caused
Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the
Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article.
This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas in
the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes that this
would absolve him of Israel's righteous fury. But he is wrong, very wrong.
Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article until Israeli
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of
course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon Peres
commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to move
from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the next
in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do it; but
then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah as
a retaliation.
Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were
quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli and
Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and was
described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often fails to
convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first western public opinion
that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his report.
Israel's international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented blow. He
was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.
We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny
Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of
Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and
Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications for
Israel's identity and self-image, and nature of the archival material he
unearthed.
Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be re-admitted to the
tribe. He went very far with his mea culpa and re-emerged as an extreme
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist: suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and
promoting the idea of another ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that
direction too; or at least this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.
Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that
claimed, as Goldstone does in The Washington Post article, that Israel can
only be judged by its intentions not the consequences of its deeds.
Therefore only the Israeli army, in both cases, can be a reliable source for
knowing what these intentions were. Very few decent and intelligent