Goldstone Recants by Norman Finkelstein Page B

Boston Globe that the Goldstone Report “must be rebuffed by all those who care about peace”; alleged in an address to the American Jewish Committee that Hezbollah was one of the Report’s prime beneficiaries; and reckoned in the New Republic that the Report was even worse than “Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers.”
    Former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi dismissed the Goldstone Report as “biased and unbalanced,” while IDF senior legal advisor Avichai Mendelblit derided it as “biased, astonishingly extreme, lack[ing] any basis in reality.”
    The Jerusalem Post editorialized that the Goldstone Report was “a feat of cynical superficiality” and was “born in bias and matured into a full-fledged miscarriage of justice.” Former Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau lamented that the Report’s “fundamental premise, that the Israelis went after civilians,” eliminated any possibility of “honest debate.” Settler movement leader Israel Harel deemed the Report “destructive, toxic” and misdirected “against precisely that country which protects human and military ethics more than the world has ever seen.”
    BACK IN THE U.S. the usual suspects rose (or sunk) to the occasion of smearing the message and the messenger. In a posting on Commentary ’s website Max Boot dismissed the Goldstone Report as a “risible series of findings,” and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton opined in the Wall Street Journal that “the logical response to this debacle is to withdraw from and defund” the Human Rights Council.
    Elie Wiesel condemned the Goldstone Report as not only “a crime against the Jewish people” but also “unnecessary,” ostensibly because “I can’t believe that Israeli soldiers murdered people or shot children. It just can’t be.”
    Harvard’s Alan M. Dershowitz alleged that the Goldstone Report “is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists”; that it recalled the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and was “biased and bigoted”; that “every serious student of human rights should be appalled at this anti-human rights and highly politicized report”; and that Goldstone was “a traitor to the Jewish people,” an “evil, evil man” and—he said on Israeli television—on a par with Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele.
    The “essence” and “central conclusion” of the Goldstone Report, according to Dershowitz, was that Israel had a “carefully planned and executed policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians for mass murder”; that Israel’s “real purpose” was “to target innocent Palestinian civilians—children, women and the elderly—for death.”
    In fact Dershowitz conjured a straw man: the Goldstone Report never said or implied that the principal objective of Israel’s attack was to murder Palestinians. If the Report did allege this, it would have had to charge Israel with genocide—but it didn’t.
    ONE MIGHT WONDER why the Goldstone Report should have triggered so much vituperation in Israel and set off a global diplomatic blitz to contain the fallout from it. After all, the Goldstone Mission’s findings were merely the last in a long series of human rights reports condemning Israeli actions in Gaza, and Israel has never been known for its deference to U.N. bodies.
    The answer however is not hard to find. Goldstone is not only Jewish but—in his own words—a “Zionist” who “worked for Israel all of my adult life,” “fully support[s] Israel’s right to exist” and is a “firm believer in the absolute right of the Jewish people to have their home there.”
    Goldstone has also claimed the Nazi holocaust as the seminal inspiration for the international law and human rights agenda of which he is a leading exponent. Because of Goldstone’s credentials, Israel could not credibly play its usual cards—“anti-Semite,” “self-hating Jew,”