Phillip Adams' recent interview with visiting* US human rights lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under Obama, Michael Posner (The business of human rights, LNL, 23/5/16), managed to expose yet another example of the PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) phenomenon.
"In your affirmation speech to the Obama administration in 2009," asked Adams, "you said your vocation as a human rights lawyer had been shaped by the lessons of the Holocaust. What were those lessons?
Posner replied, "Well, my family... came from Europe, and on my mother's side, in Hungary, a number of my grandmother's siblings had been killed, and on my father's side, French Jews, had been involved in the Maquis, the underground... so I saw the horror of the human capacity for cruelty but also the resilience of the human spirit, the resistance, and that really influenced my decision."
OK, so Posner failed to answer the question, but, hey, who couldn't warm to a guy whose life's work was inspired by the French Resistance? So far, so good.
As the interview progressed, such egregious abusers of human rights such as China, Russia, Egypt, apartheid South Africa and Saudi Arabia came up for mention. But not Israel. Interestingly, it was Adams who raised the subject:
"We talked earlier about your work in Uganda and about the efficacy of economic sanctions, and yet you're not in favour of movements like Boycott Divestment Sanctions, BDS, which has been proposed against Israel over the occupation of Palestine."
"Yeah," responded Posner, "I don't believe that's the most effective way to make change there. I am absolutely committed to the notion of a negotiated settlement, a two-state solution. I believe very strongly, and I believe I was the first assistant secretary of the US to go to Israel. I went 5 times after the Gaza war, the Cast Lead war of 2009, to raise human rights issues. You've got to raise the issues. The need is real. Palestinian rights need to be respected, but I think these issues need to be negotiated by the Israelis and the Palestinians. They're obviously not doing it now but I think we need to keep reinforcing that rather than isolating Israel using boycotts."
Sound familiar? That's right, the stock standard Netanyahu line. In fact, the Israeli prime minister reiterated it only days ago:
"In a bid to head off the latest international initiative aimed at pressuring the parties to reach a Mideast peace deal, Israeli Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has offered to clear his calendar and sit down immediately for one-on-one negotiations with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas." (Netanyahu: Peace comes from direct negotiations, not from 'international conferences, UN-style', Patrick Goodenough, cnsnews.com, 25/5/16)
But apart from that, Posner's talk about his 2009 visits to Israel "to raise human rights issues" was less than honest.
Remember the UN's September 2009 Goldstone Report, which found that Israel's 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead against Gaza constituted "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and which accused Israel of war crimes?
In his definitive study of Operation Cast Lead, 'This Time We Went Too Far': Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion (2010), Norman Finkelstein records that Netanyahu condemned the Report as "a kangaroo court against Israel," that the US Israel lobby called it "rigged" and "deeply flawed," and that the Obama administration "quickly fell into line with the Israel lobby," with Assistant US Secretary of State for Democracy Michael Posner condemning it as - ahem - "deeply flawed." (p 136)
But there's more. We now have access to some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails, which reveal that:
"The State department devoted itself to, in its own words, 'deferring' UN action on Israeli war crimes, 'reframing the debate' about the atrocities, and 'moving away from the UN'... The messages, some of which are written by high-level State Department officials, expose the role of the US government in undermining the international response to the 2009 United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict, also known as the Goldstone Report... Publicly released Clinton emails reveal that the UNHRC, under heavy US pressure, postponed consideration of the Goldstone Report from October 2 until March 2010. While the UNHRC ultimately endorsed the report's findings on October 16, it took nearly 6 months for the body to urge the UN General Assembly and Security Council to refer the Gaza massacre to the ICC pursuant to 13(b) of the Rome Statute, which the US then blocked." (Deferring justice: Clinton emails show how State Department undermined UN action on Israeli war crimes, Jared Flanery & Ben Norton, salon.com, 20/11/15)
Integral to this process of neutering the Goldstone Report was our Assistant Secretary of State for HUMAN RIGHTS, Michael Posner:
"The State Department's attempts to 'defer' UN action on Israeli war crimes in Gaza are further evinced in a message from Michael Posner - a former assistant secretary of state who served as founding Executive Director of Human Rights First and is now a business professor at NYU. In a November 10, 2010 note, Posner discussed multiple trips he and US government officials took to Israel in order to discuss the Goldstone Report with the Israeli government. Posner revealed the US and Israeli governments worked together in order to 'reframe the public debate' around Israel's attack. He wrote: 'Our approach has been to offer our support and willingness to work with the Government of Israel to 'reframe the public debate' from defensive (responding to Goldstone or Flotilla reports and resolutions at the UN, etc) to a more productive narrative focused on the challenges of fighting an urban or asymetrical war. We are having productive, and generally positive preliminary conversations about a possible GOI white paper that would: 1) set the context, outlining the challenges in fighting an asymetrical conflict; 2) spell out the steps the IDF and other agencies have taken to address these challenges; and 3) identify ongoing challenges that Israel and other professional armies will need to address in the future'." (ibid)
[*To deliver the UNSW's Australian Human Rights Centre's annual lecture.]
Showing posts with label Richard Goldstone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Goldstone. Show all posts
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Sunday, April 10, 2011
The Unforgiven
And cast ye the unprofitable servant [of Zion] into outer darkness: there shall be weeping...
"Yom Kippur, it has been said, has come months early for Richard Goldstone, the South African former judge who reported for the United Nations on the 2008-09 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas. According to Israel and other critics, Goldstone's 2009 report was always destined to be biased, and those fears were realised when it accused not only Hamas, but also Israel, of committing war crimes. The controversial report has been seized upon ever since to demonise Israel as a malicious aggressor. Now, in a staggering volte-face published in the United States last week, Goldstone effectively has admitted he was wrong. The Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur is about recognising past wrongs and repenting, but in this sorry case no amount of repenting will repair the damage done." (Editorial, Israel has its day of atonement, The Australian, 5/4/11)
... and gnashing of teeth:
"Judge Richard Goldstone is expected to stand trial for libel following his retraction of his Operation Cast Lead report, in which he accused Israel of war crimes. Knesset Member Danny Danon (Likud), currently in the United States, has enlisted the help of a number of Jewish-American attorneys who agreed to file a lawsuit against the South African judge at no charge. A petition will be filed with a New York District Court next week, in which the plaintiffs will demand a formal apology and a symbolic financial compensation for the State of Israel. A second lawsuit may be filed in an Israeli court if Goldstone arrives in Israel... 'The Goldstone report is the 2010 version of a blood libel. The twisted image Goldstone painted of the State of Israel caused damage, is still causing damage and will continue to damage Israel and its citizens for years to come. A public apology published in every country might lessen the harm already done', Danon explained. (Goldstone to face libel suit, Attila Somfalvi, ynetnews.com, 7/4/11)
"Yom Kippur, it has been said, has come months early for Richard Goldstone, the South African former judge who reported for the United Nations on the 2008-09 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas. According to Israel and other critics, Goldstone's 2009 report was always destined to be biased, and those fears were realised when it accused not only Hamas, but also Israel, of committing war crimes. The controversial report has been seized upon ever since to demonise Israel as a malicious aggressor. Now, in a staggering volte-face published in the United States last week, Goldstone effectively has admitted he was wrong. The Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur is about recognising past wrongs and repenting, but in this sorry case no amount of repenting will repair the damage done." (Editorial, Israel has its day of atonement, The Australian, 5/4/11)
... and gnashing of teeth:
"Judge Richard Goldstone is expected to stand trial for libel following his retraction of his Operation Cast Lead report, in which he accused Israel of war crimes. Knesset Member Danny Danon (Likud), currently in the United States, has enlisted the help of a number of Jewish-American attorneys who agreed to file a lawsuit against the South African judge at no charge. A petition will be filed with a New York District Court next week, in which the plaintiffs will demand a formal apology and a symbolic financial compensation for the State of Israel. A second lawsuit may be filed in an Israeli court if Goldstone arrives in Israel... 'The Goldstone report is the 2010 version of a blood libel. The twisted image Goldstone painted of the State of Israel caused damage, is still causing damage and will continue to damage Israel and its citizens for years to come. A public apology published in every country might lessen the harm already done', Danon explained. (Goldstone to face libel suit, Attila Somfalvi, ynetnews.com, 7/4/11)
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Not For the Faint of Heart
"While the investigations published by the Israeli military have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that [Palestinian] civilians [in Gaza] were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy." ('If I knew then, what I know now': Israel did not target civilians in Gaza, Richard Goldstone, washingtonpost.com/Sydney Morning Herald, 4/4/11)
So, to invoke the military euphemism for bloody murder, His Honour seems to believe that those civilians were simply collateral damage, and that Israel is therefore off the hook as far as their deaths are concerned. But I'm afraid it's not that simple. As Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann points out:
"There is... another element of contemporary warfare that might be equivalent to terrorism, and that is 'collateral damage'... The critics... spare no effort to show that the US and Israel do, in fact, willfully kill innocent civilians. But it is not easy to show this, because you can't get inside people's heads: how do you prove their claimed intentions are not their real ones?... However, the issue is not whether a distinction can be made between collateral damage and terrorism; it is rather whether this distinction has moral importance. The answer depends on a further distinction: there is more than one kind of 'collateral damage'. One kind of collateral damage is, in important ways, morally distinct from terrorism. The other is not.
"Suppose, for instance, some naval battle in which a destroyer is sunk in shallow water. After the fighting is over, divers inspect the vessel and are horrified to discover it carried several dozen civilians... who were being transported to safe exile in a nonbelligerant country. This is unexpected collateral damage: no one imagined... this terrible but also terribly unusual circumstance.
"But when the Americans - or for that matter the Israelis - speak of collateral damage, they are not speaking of the unexpected kind. On the contrary, they know with certainty - the commanders, the soldiers, the decision-makers - that civilians are in the firing line and that they will be killed... This is expected collateral damage, innocent deaths that no reasonable person could fail to expect.
"Expected collateral damage involves knowingly killing innocent civilians. Terrorism involves intentionally killing civilians. The conceptual difference is discernible, but the moral difference is too academic even for an academic... An example will make this plain. Suppose Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him over in her SUV. She knows he goes to a movie at the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows full well, some of the people standing behind him and in front of him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they will be killed. She executes her plan. According to most legal codes, she is guilty of homicide; not only of Jack, but of anyone else she kills. It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental. Certainly to the dead it doesn't matter that she did not intend to kill them, but only decided to perform an action that she knew would kill them. If this difference doesn't matter, neither does the difference between terrorism and expected collateral damage." (The Case Against Israel, 2005, pp 160-162)
Nor is His Honour being entirely honest with us in this matter. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:
"'If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document'. Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: 'If I had known then that the report would turm me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all'. And if that wasn't the original sentence, it certainly is the subtext of Goldstone's article.
"This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal dealings with the State of Israel.
"Already in October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, 'I've got a great love for Israel' and 'I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so' (Video: 'Fareed Zakaria GPS.' 4/10/09)
"Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could this love not be at least weakened by what he discovered when writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original report.
"But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel, who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar mitzvah in Johannesburg since 'Goldstone caused irreparable damage to the Jewish people as a whole'. The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for 'doing greater damage to the State of Israel'. Last February, Goldstone said that 'Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not', in an interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report on the website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded more.
"Readers might ask 'so what?' and 'why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?' Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes. Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable to stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a 'self-hating Jew' with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror.
"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of 'delegitimising' Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it.
"We should have recognised that Goldstone was one of them when he stated that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective, 'Zionist', is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed. You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the ideology and that policy. 'I am a Zionist' is a declaration of loyalty to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone report. You can either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity - if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.
"That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the 'evidence' brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.
"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 of 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 on only 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 readmitted 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 people in the world would accept such a bizarre analysis and explanation.
"Goldstone has not yet entered the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a 'repentant Jew') between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism - you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you.
"Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine." (Goldstone's fateful U-turn, The Electronic Intifada, 4/4/11)
So, to invoke the military euphemism for bloody murder, His Honour seems to believe that those civilians were simply collateral damage, and that Israel is therefore off the hook as far as their deaths are concerned. But I'm afraid it's not that simple. As Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann points out:
"There is... another element of contemporary warfare that might be equivalent to terrorism, and that is 'collateral damage'... The critics... spare no effort to show that the US and Israel do, in fact, willfully kill innocent civilians. But it is not easy to show this, because you can't get inside people's heads: how do you prove their claimed intentions are not their real ones?... However, the issue is not whether a distinction can be made between collateral damage and terrorism; it is rather whether this distinction has moral importance. The answer depends on a further distinction: there is more than one kind of 'collateral damage'. One kind of collateral damage is, in important ways, morally distinct from terrorism. The other is not.
"Suppose, for instance, some naval battle in which a destroyer is sunk in shallow water. After the fighting is over, divers inspect the vessel and are horrified to discover it carried several dozen civilians... who were being transported to safe exile in a nonbelligerant country. This is unexpected collateral damage: no one imagined... this terrible but also terribly unusual circumstance.
"But when the Americans - or for that matter the Israelis - speak of collateral damage, they are not speaking of the unexpected kind. On the contrary, they know with certainty - the commanders, the soldiers, the decision-makers - that civilians are in the firing line and that they will be killed... This is expected collateral damage, innocent deaths that no reasonable person could fail to expect.
"Expected collateral damage involves knowingly killing innocent civilians. Terrorism involves intentionally killing civilians. The conceptual difference is discernible, but the moral difference is too academic even for an academic... An example will make this plain. Suppose Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him over in her SUV. She knows he goes to a movie at the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows full well, some of the people standing behind him and in front of him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they will be killed. She executes her plan. According to most legal codes, she is guilty of homicide; not only of Jack, but of anyone else she kills. It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental. Certainly to the dead it doesn't matter that she did not intend to kill them, but only decided to perform an action that she knew would kill them. If this difference doesn't matter, neither does the difference between terrorism and expected collateral damage." (The Case Against Israel, 2005, pp 160-162)
Nor is His Honour being entirely honest with us in this matter. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:
"'If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document'. Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: 'If I had known then that the report would turm me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all'. And if that wasn't the original sentence, it certainly is the subtext of Goldstone's article.
"This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal dealings with the State of Israel.
"Already in October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, 'I've got a great love for Israel' and 'I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so' (Video: 'Fareed Zakaria GPS.' 4/10/09)
"Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could this love not be at least weakened by what he discovered when writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original report.
"But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel, who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar mitzvah in Johannesburg since 'Goldstone caused irreparable damage to the Jewish people as a whole'. The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for 'doing greater damage to the State of Israel'. Last February, Goldstone said that 'Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not', in an interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report on the website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded more.
"Readers might ask 'so what?' and 'why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?' Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes. Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable to stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a 'self-hating Jew' with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror.
"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of 'delegitimising' Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it.
"We should have recognised that Goldstone was one of them when he stated that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective, 'Zionist', is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed. You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the ideology and that policy. 'I am a Zionist' is a declaration of loyalty to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone report. You can either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity - if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.
"That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the 'evidence' brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.
"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 of 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 on only 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 readmitted 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 people in the world would accept such a bizarre analysis and explanation.
"Goldstone has not yet entered the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a 'repentant Jew') between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism - you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you.
"Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine." (Goldstone's fateful U-turn, The Electronic Intifada, 4/4/11)
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Goldstone: Damage Control
"The Goldstone Commission Report is a grave blow to the State of Israel on 3 significant fronts: diplomacy, media and the military-legal spheres," warns Israeli analyst Ron Ben-Yishai on ynetnews.com (quoted in The Australian Jewish News, 25/9/09).
Ben-Yishai's piece is as you'd imagine from a Zionist source ("The report is a boon for terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and has implications that affect the ability of western powers to fight global Jihad terrorism...") but the following paragraphs caught my attention:
"We can debate now whether the Israeli government was right to decide not to cooperate with the commission. It is possible that had Israel cooperated, it could have prompted a more balanced report, and more importantly, it could have dragged on the discussions to the point of blurring the impression of the operation in public opinion." Dragging on the discussions until the world has lost interest. Now ain't that the Israeli way!
"All hope is not lost if the campaign [of damage control] is managed intensively and with determination on 3 fronts simultaneously - the diplomatic theatre, the media front, and the military-legal area - while enlisting all the support Israel can get from the United States and from European states. These countries surely realise the Goldstone report will directly hurt their military interests as well." Is this where Major General Molan (see last post) comes in?
Ben-Yishai's piece is as you'd imagine from a Zionist source ("The report is a boon for terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and has implications that affect the ability of western powers to fight global Jihad terrorism...") but the following paragraphs caught my attention:
"We can debate now whether the Israeli government was right to decide not to cooperate with the commission. It is possible that had Israel cooperated, it could have prompted a more balanced report, and more importantly, it could have dragged on the discussions to the point of blurring the impression of the operation in public opinion." Dragging on the discussions until the world has lost interest. Now ain't that the Israeli way!
"All hope is not lost if the campaign [of damage control] is managed intensively and with determination on 3 fronts simultaneously - the diplomatic theatre, the media front, and the military-legal area - while enlisting all the support Israel can get from the United States and from European states. These countries surely realise the Goldstone report will directly hurt their military interests as well." Is this where Major General Molan (see last post) comes in?
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Operation Get Goldstone
Why has retired Australian Major General Jim Molan, "chief of operations of the Iraq multinational force in 2004-05," suddenly chimed in with USrael's campaign against Judge Richard Goldstone and his report on Israel's war crimes in Gaza? (UN's bias blinds Gaza: It's outrageous to insist that only the West must comply with the laws of war, The Australian, 2/10/09)
Is it because Goldstone has reached the legally uncomfortable conclusion (for Israel) that "Israel was guilty of directing its military operations, at least in part, 'at the people of Gaza as a whole'," and Molan, the perpetrator of Operation Fury (the brutal 2004 assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah) is concerned that if his findings ever translate into war crimes trials against the Israeli perpetrators of Operation Cast Lead, he might one day find himself on a similar sticky wicket? His admission that "I probably never will convince those who have on occasions publicly, ignorantly and incorrectly associated me with war crimes," a reference no doubt to Australian academic Chris Doran's J'Accuse, The reality of Australia's collateral damage in Iraq (onlineopinion.com.au, 4/8/08), could be adduced to support such a view.
Although Molan is at pains to portray himself as one who has had to "tread through [the] legal and moral minefield [laid by those who drafted the laws of war] while acting as an agent of the statesman who has an obligation to act," the reality of Iraq trips him up. Only a faithful servant of the USraeli Empire could seriously characterise George Bush as a statesman with an obligation to act. Everybody else knows that the mugging of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression (unauthorised by the UN Security Council) to effect regime change, but dressed up as a defence against the imminent threat to all and sundry of (non-existent) WMDs.
Goldstone, on the other hand, is portrayed merely a "commentator," one who, unlike the statesman, never has to bear the burden of protecting his citizens, and his report is lamely dismissed (dare I say publicly, ignorantly and incorrectly?) as "an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices."
Molan's lament is that, while we (USraelis) have clean hands, our enemies fight dirty: "Our adversary in Iraq consistently ignored all humanitarian law as well as the laws of war, particularly the blatant abuse of medical facilities and places of worship. Our adversary's major strategy was to blow the arms and legs off innocent women and children at times calculated to fit the needs of the world's media networks. This was an immorality of strategy that was breathtaking... Despite the nature of our enemy, we realised that our right to injure even our enemy was limited."
So our side upheld international law, eh? Not according to UK playwright (Fallujah) Jonathan Holmes: "The siege of Fallujah, carried out by US armed forces upon a mainly civilian population, contravened 70 individual articles of the Geneva Conventions... Those in command have chosen to drive a tank through a century and a half of delicately crafted regulations on the treatment of those involved in conflict." (Fallujah: Eyewitness Testimony from Iraq's Besieged City, 2007, p 113)
Our right to injure (now there's a human right for you!) even our enemy was limited, Molan claims. If so, how does Molan explain away the evidence that his bovver boys shot wounded Iraqis or left them to die in agony, denied them access by medical personnel, shot up ambulances, imposed collective punishment on civilians, shot those who raised white flags, deprived them of food and water, expelled them, and yes, used white phosphorus and napalm? Yes, that's right, just like in Goldstone's Gaza!
And what of that charge of blatant abuse of medical facilities? Holmes is unequivocal: "There is no evidence of a Fallujan hospital being used as a site of resistance, nor of any arms being found within one..." (ibid, p 122) There is, however, evidence of blatant abuse of medical facilities by Molan's mob: "One of my colleagues, Dr Saleh Alsawi, he was speaking so angrily about them. He was in the main hospital when they raided it at the beginning of the siege. They entered the theater room when they were working on a patient... he was there because he's an anaesthesiologist. They entered with their boots on, beat the doctors and took them out, leaving the patient on the table to die." (Dahr Jamail, quoted in Holmes, p 121)
Our enemy, "be they al-Qaida or Hamas" - Molan has no problem lumping the Iraqi resistance, Hamas, and al-Qaida together - "deliberately commingl[es] his fighters with civilians" and so "violates its obligation to protect [them]." "It should not complain," therefore, "when inevitably, athough regrettable, civilian casualties result." But that's no defence, because even if it were true, "[t]he presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character." (Article 50 of the 1977 Protocol) And what are the facts here anyway? An Amnesty International (AI) report issued in July found "no evidence to support repeated claims from the Israeli military that the Hamas government was using civilians as human shields during the war." (Amnesty: Israeli troops used children as human shields, antiwar.com, 1/7/09) It did, however, "cite an instance in which Israeli troops forced multiple families of civilians, including children, to remain in a house they turned into a sniper nest, 'effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk'." (ibid) But then Molan's bound to be as dismissive of AI as he is of Goldstone.
The following admission should come as no surprise: "I probably do not need to state for most readers that as a soldier who has run a war against an opponent not dissimilar to Hamas, facing problems perhaps similar to those faced by Israeli commanders, my sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis." And he continues, with this little conceit, "[H]aving stated my prejudice, I think I may be more honest than Goldstone, who seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so."
Honest? Jeeesus! If it's honesty you want, compare Molan's transparent apologetics with the genuine honesty of a military predecessor (in a 1933 speech) - the US Marine Corp's Major General Smedley Butler:
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is all about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6% over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100%. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has 'finger men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations, and a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912... I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
It'll be interesting to see whether Molan's dip into pro-Israel propaganda is a one-off. Watch this space...
Is it because Goldstone has reached the legally uncomfortable conclusion (for Israel) that "Israel was guilty of directing its military operations, at least in part, 'at the people of Gaza as a whole'," and Molan, the perpetrator of Operation Fury (the brutal 2004 assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah) is concerned that if his findings ever translate into war crimes trials against the Israeli perpetrators of Operation Cast Lead, he might one day find himself on a similar sticky wicket? His admission that "I probably never will convince those who have on occasions publicly, ignorantly and incorrectly associated me with war crimes," a reference no doubt to Australian academic Chris Doran's J'Accuse, The reality of Australia's collateral damage in Iraq (onlineopinion.com.au, 4/8/08), could be adduced to support such a view.
Although Molan is at pains to portray himself as one who has had to "tread through [the] legal and moral minefield [laid by those who drafted the laws of war] while acting as an agent of the statesman who has an obligation to act," the reality of Iraq trips him up. Only a faithful servant of the USraeli Empire could seriously characterise George Bush as a statesman with an obligation to act. Everybody else knows that the mugging of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression (unauthorised by the UN Security Council) to effect regime change, but dressed up as a defence against the imminent threat to all and sundry of (non-existent) WMDs.
Goldstone, on the other hand, is portrayed merely a "commentator," one who, unlike the statesman, never has to bear the burden of protecting his citizens, and his report is lamely dismissed (dare I say publicly, ignorantly and incorrectly?) as "an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices."
Molan's lament is that, while we (USraelis) have clean hands, our enemies fight dirty: "Our adversary in Iraq consistently ignored all humanitarian law as well as the laws of war, particularly the blatant abuse of medical facilities and places of worship. Our adversary's major strategy was to blow the arms and legs off innocent women and children at times calculated to fit the needs of the world's media networks. This was an immorality of strategy that was breathtaking... Despite the nature of our enemy, we realised that our right to injure even our enemy was limited."
So our side upheld international law, eh? Not according to UK playwright (Fallujah) Jonathan Holmes: "The siege of Fallujah, carried out by US armed forces upon a mainly civilian population, contravened 70 individual articles of the Geneva Conventions... Those in command have chosen to drive a tank through a century and a half of delicately crafted regulations on the treatment of those involved in conflict." (Fallujah: Eyewitness Testimony from Iraq's Besieged City, 2007, p 113)
Our right to injure (now there's a human right for you!) even our enemy was limited, Molan claims. If so, how does Molan explain away the evidence that his bovver boys shot wounded Iraqis or left them to die in agony, denied them access by medical personnel, shot up ambulances, imposed collective punishment on civilians, shot those who raised white flags, deprived them of food and water, expelled them, and yes, used white phosphorus and napalm? Yes, that's right, just like in Goldstone's Gaza!
And what of that charge of blatant abuse of medical facilities? Holmes is unequivocal: "There is no evidence of a Fallujan hospital being used as a site of resistance, nor of any arms being found within one..." (ibid, p 122) There is, however, evidence of blatant abuse of medical facilities by Molan's mob: "One of my colleagues, Dr Saleh Alsawi, he was speaking so angrily about them. He was in the main hospital when they raided it at the beginning of the siege. They entered the theater room when they were working on a patient... he was there because he's an anaesthesiologist. They entered with their boots on, beat the doctors and took them out, leaving the patient on the table to die." (Dahr Jamail, quoted in Holmes, p 121)
Our enemy, "be they al-Qaida or Hamas" - Molan has no problem lumping the Iraqi resistance, Hamas, and al-Qaida together - "deliberately commingl[es] his fighters with civilians" and so "violates its obligation to protect [them]." "It should not complain," therefore, "when inevitably, athough regrettable, civilian casualties result." But that's no defence, because even if it were true, "[t]he presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character." (Article 50 of the 1977 Protocol) And what are the facts here anyway? An Amnesty International (AI) report issued in July found "no evidence to support repeated claims from the Israeli military that the Hamas government was using civilians as human shields during the war." (Amnesty: Israeli troops used children as human shields, antiwar.com, 1/7/09) It did, however, "cite an instance in which Israeli troops forced multiple families of civilians, including children, to remain in a house they turned into a sniper nest, 'effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk'." (ibid) But then Molan's bound to be as dismissive of AI as he is of Goldstone.
The following admission should come as no surprise: "I probably do not need to state for most readers that as a soldier who has run a war against an opponent not dissimilar to Hamas, facing problems perhaps similar to those faced by Israeli commanders, my sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis." And he continues, with this little conceit, "[H]aving stated my prejudice, I think I may be more honest than Goldstone, who seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so."
Honest? Jeeesus! If it's honesty you want, compare Molan's transparent apologetics with the genuine honesty of a military predecessor (in a 1933 speech) - the US Marine Corp's Major General Smedley Butler:
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is all about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6% over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100%. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has 'finger men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations, and a 'Big Boss' Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912... I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
It'll be interesting to see whether Molan's dip into pro-Israel propaganda is a one-off. Watch this space...
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