The Goldstone Report and the allegations against Israel

The Goldstone Report was flawed from its inception and its adoption by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) only serves to highlight the bias of this organisation which has been evident in so many of its actions.

Last week, the UNHRC endorsed the Goldstone Report by a vote of 25-6. The United States, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine opposed the resolution, while Britain and France declined to vote. Russia, China, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ghana, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Zambia were among those that voted in favour of the resolution.

In the most ironic of outcomes, Richard Goldstone distanced himself from the UNHRC Resolution, even prior to its endorsement. Goldstone told the Swiss Le Temps newspaper "This draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Israel. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done.”

To The Jewish Daily Forward, Goldstone acknowledged that “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.”

From the outset, the terms of reference for mandating the Goldstone Report were flawed and biased to say the least. Mark Regev, international spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in Melbourne last week that “The Goldstone Report was born in sin”.

When in January 2009 the HRC decided to “… dispatch an urgent, independent…fact-finding mission” it erred in its facts, labelling Israel “the occupying Power … particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip …”

Israel does not occupy the Gaza Strip. Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling 21 settlements and uprooting more than 8,000 civilians.

“Occupation” is the same excuse terrorist Hamas has given for eight years as it continues to fire rockets and mortars at Israeli communities Sderot, Ashkelon and throughout the entire western Negev region.

In truth, the only Israeli in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip today is Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists in a cross-border raid on June 25, 2006, held against his will and denied access to the Red Cross for 1,216 days.

Not even one western country member of the Human Rights Council supported the establishment of the mission empowering Goldstone to “fact-find”.

In addition, a number of prominent human rights champions were approached by the HRC to take on this so-called “fact-finding mission”, including Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu. They all declined because the results condemning Israel were a foregone conclusion.

While the mandate of the UNHRC is to shine a spotlight on human rights atrocities around the world, it habitually functions as a highly politicised body, with its membership including some of the nations with the worst track record of human rights violations.

The council has been widely criticised both within the UN and externally, including by Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. On November 29, 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticised the Human Rights Council for "disproportionate focus on violations by Israel" while neglecting other parts of the world such as Darfur, which had what he termed "graver" crises.

Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson has expressed regret for what she called the council's practice of "adopting resolutions guided not by human rights but by politics".

As outlined by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director General Gal, the new UNHRC has passed more than 25 resolutions about Israel: more than all of the resolutions devoted to other countries, combined. Out of the nine UNHRC special sessions devoted to specific countries, five have been dedicated to the state of Israel and four to the rest of the world; that is to the 191 nations on earth.

Not surprisingly, Israel declined to participate in Goldstone’s investigation in an official capacity, although it did not stand in the way of its citizens affected directly by thousands of Hamas rocket attacks. Noam Bedein of the Sderot Media Centre who was in Melbourne just a few months ago speaking on the effect of rocket attacks on Sderot’s children and Dr Mirela Siderer from Ashkelon, disfigured after a rocket attack on her clinic, both testified to the investigation.

The “fact-finding” continued from Geneva to the Gaza Strip, where Goldstone conducted public hearings in Gaza. Given Hamas’ brutal and violent rule, these kangaroo courts were a set-up. For any Gazan to publicly speak out against Hamas shooting rockets from their house or child’s school, as was evidenced daily during Operation Cast Lead, would most certainly result in death. Witnesses could not be expected to be able to speak freely and the process could only bring one outcome: total and utter condemnation of Israel. The total lack of impartiality in the resulting Goldstone Report was most evident in its pages: of the 575 pages of the report just a few were about Hamas attacks on Israel. Such limited reference to Hamas terrorism has tainted the entire report and its process.

Dr Siderer, who travelled to Geneva following the reports release, publicly challenged Richard Goldstone for ignoring her testimony.

Palestinan President Mahmoud Abbas originally agreed that time was needed to examine the report and that it should be revisited in March 2010. When Abbas recently u-turned on sending the report to the UN Human Right Council for yet another anti-Israel resolution, it was only for political reasons - pressure from inside his own Fatah party and Hamas.

Yesterday Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu signalled the need to change the laws of war, to deal with the “expansion of terrorism in the world”. The Goldstone report and the subsequent resolution to the UN effectively disempowers nations from defending their own citizens in the face of ongoing terrorist attacks.

The Goldstone Report failed in two critical ways: it legitimised and rewarded a terrorist regime, while undermining chances to kick-start peace negotiations, most recently the fledgling tripartite meetings between United States President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

How can Israel possibly be expected to move forward in these circumstances?

Fair-minded and rational individuals, indeed all democratic nations, should be more than alarmed at the consequences of the UNHRC endorsement. The UNHRC resolution undermines and endangers Israel’s very basic right to defend its citizens from terror. The ramifications will be global. The international community should now be carefully considering what this means for other western nations defending their citizens from terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Terrorists cannot be afforded the right to self-defence. Anything less is an absolute human rights failure.