The State of the Jews

My upcoming Australian Jewish News column:

In defense of Judge Goldstone, sort of

By Haviv Rettig Gur

Judge Richard Goldstone, the namesake of the report that convinced much of the world that Israel had indeed committed war crimes in Gaza, is getting a bad rap.

Not about the Goldstone Report, to be sure. That document, when you actually take the trouble to read it, is a collection of hearsay about Israeli brutality that fails to challenge the Palestinian witnesses but somehow still manages to conclude, unequivocally, that Israel violated the most sacred laws of human morality.

But, you know, that was last year. Water under the bridge.

Now, Judge Goldstone is facing a barrage of criticism in the Jewish world for his role as an enforcer of the law under the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Some details of his apartheid-era judicial rulings came to light last week in an expose published by Israel’s largest daily, Yediot Ahronot. The article blasted Goldstone for sentencing 28 blacks to death and enforcing – allegedly happily – the country’s racist laws, including jailing two young black men for possessing a video tape of a speech by an associate of Nelson Mandela and acquitting four police officers who had harassed a white woman believed to be sleeping with a non-white man.

For his part, Goldstone noted that he only sentenced two men to death, each time for a brutal murder, as was mandatory by South African law at the time, while the remaining 26 were failed appeals during his tenure on the Transvaal supreme court.

Reactions to the news came fast and furious. Jeffrey Goldberg commented that “this new report suggests not only that Goldstone is at best intermittently principled, but that he knew his old hanging-judge record would one day catch up with him.”

Alan Dershowitz declared that Goldstone’s defense that his death penalty convictions were in keeping with the law was not unlike that of the sadistic Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, continued the Holocaust theme by calling Goldstone’s response “sadly reminiscent of the long discredited so-called ‘Nuremberg defense’ – ‘l was only obeying orders.’”

On the facts, Goldstone probably has a stronger case than his detractors. His acquittal of the policemen, for example, was explicitly made because of errors in the legal proceedings against them. And even at his most egregious Goldstone’s death sentences are not different from the norm of some of the world’s strongest democracies even today. Japan, for instance, or the United States.

As South Africa’s former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson told me last week, Goldstone “was regarded by everyone who knew him as a liberal judge.”

It was Goldstone, Chaskalson noted, who in the 1980s declawed the infamous Group Areas Act by giving the courts discretion over the forced evictions of people living in the wrong racial districts.

So which is it? Is Goldstone the guilt-ridden former enforcer of legislated racism or a hero who once held the line against the worst offenses of a bad regime?

My answer: neither. He’s something much simpler. He’s a joiner.

Once, at the start of his career, Goldstone had to choose how he would behave in an immoral system. He chose to join it, and then by most accounts worked to correct it from within.

At the end of his career, he had to make that choice again. Once again, he chose to join. This time it was the UN Human Rights Council, which since its inception four years ago has devoted 82% of its censures to Israel alone and this year went to the trouble of praising Sri Lanka for defeating the Tamil Tigers in a war that cost 20,000 civilian lives.

In order for law to be the impartial arbiter of disputes, it needs certain fundamental institutions: the unbiased judge, an independent judiciary, a clear hierarchy of appeal, an elected legislature that assures that law emanates from the society to which it is being applied.

But the UN has none of these, because it is not in any sense a legal body. It is a political one that operates by mob rule.

Yet the effect of Goldstone’s report has been to attach the prestige of “law” to a non-legal public lashing of Israel commissioned by and for a political body already irredeemably prejudiced against Israel.

Goldstone himself insists that his report is not admissible as evidence in a court of law. It was merely “fact-finding,” he says. But who cares about the legal niceties when Goldstone himself seems to violate them in his report’s spectacularly adamant conclusions about Israel’s heinous violations of human rights law?

And so the question remains. Is he naïve? Or, as with apartheid, is he happily wielding a racist stick in the service of a higher cause?

Or maybe he’s still, as in his youth, simply a joiner.

Ultimately,the laws of war are an Israeli strategic asset.

That’s my take-away from a beautiful and heartbreaking description of war’s moral complexity published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Well worth the read:

Five years ago, a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.

This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.

…

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

The question is important and well-portrayed, but I don’t think it’s entirely relevant to Israel’s situation. For one thing, the IDF has succeeded in repeatedly defeating its nonconventional enemies without great civilian casualties on either side. (30,000 of some of the best-trained infantrymen on Earth were fighting in densely-populated Gaza for a whole month, and even Hamas says that fully a third of the Palestinian dead were its fighters, who were operating at the time from within populated neighborhoods. If civilians were the target, as Goldstone and Hamas claim, then the IDF is rather frighteningly incompetent.)

But there’s another reason to obey the laws of war, besides the simple demonstration that you can still win while obeying them: for Israel’s adversaries, civilian dead are a weapon of great strategic significance. In fact, Hamas has no other strategic lever over Israel than forcing it into killing Palestinian civilians by targeting Israel’s own civilians. Neither act is tolerable for Israel politically and internationally, so creating this catch-22 – utterly ignored by Goldstone, incidentally – is the essence of Hamas’ strategy.

You can only de-incentivize Hamas’ particularly vicious brand of warfare by exacting a price for aggression without “giving” them Israeli or Palestinian civilian deaths.

With this thinking, a scrupulous adherence to the laws of war is not just morally important, but strategically advantageous.

Maybe that’s why the IDF, for all the criticism it faces abroad, has actually done better in avoiding civilian deaths than similar armies fighting in places like Helmand or Fallujah.

Amnon Rubinstein is one of Israel’s greatest legal minds, a former MK, minister of education, Israel Prize laureate, law school dean, bestselling novelist and, most importantly, the author of the most important parts of Israel’s nascent constitution – the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.

He is also in many respects my intellectual grandfather, the teacher of my teachers.

So it is with pride that I share this: a translation of Amnon’s piece in the September 23 edition of the Israeli business daily Globes that encapsulates beautifully the near-unanimous Israeli perspective on Goldstone.

(Maybe, with The Economist, Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit and Amir Oren, Irwin Cotler and even David Landau all fundamentally opposed to Goldstone, maybe there really is a problem with Goldstone…)

Goldstone’s Unconscious Humor
By Amnon Rubinstein

It is not true that the Goldstone report is exclusively anti-Israeli. After having established that Israel is guilty of crimes against international law and (possibly) humanity, after advocating punishing it with an arsenal of all conceivable sanctions, it also chides the Palestinians for some inappropriate measures taken by them.
First, there is Hamas. Goldstone does not let them go Scot free. Thus he blames the Hamas for a grievous offense:

“The mission remains unconvinced that any genuine and effective initiatives have been taken by the (Gaza) authorities to address the serious issues of violation of international human rights in the conduct of armed activities by militant groups in the Gaza strip.”

This refers to the shelling of southern Israel from Gaza in the eight years preceding Operation Cast Lead. But what does Goldstone have in mind when he chides the Hamas for not taking genuine and effective initiative against the militants who do not adhere to international human rights law? Does he refer to their failure to petition the local High Court of Justice to issue a writ of mandamus against the militants? Or does he have in mind the fact that the Hamas Solicitor General has failed to issue an indictment against the offending militants?

Judge Goldstone rebukes the Hamas again for their treatment of Fatah ‘affiliates.’ Goldstone finds that “such actions” – i.e. killing the Fatah detainees – “constitute serious violations of Human Rights or the Palestinian Basic Law.” Again, one may ask: what went wrong here? Did the Hamas Supreme Court of Justice ignore the Palestinian Basic Law? Where was the Hamas attorney-general? Goldstone is not content with slapping Hamas’ wrist, he also reprimands the Palestinian authority:

“The Palestinian Authority continues to discharge a large number of civil and military service employees, or suspend their salaries, under the pretext of “non-adherence to the legitimate authority” or “non-obtainment of security approval” on their appointments, which has become a pre-requirement for enrollment in public service”. In effect, this measure means the exclusion of Hamas supporters or affiliates from public sector appointment…. The Mission is of the view that the reported measures are inconsistent with the Palestinian Authority’s obligations deriving from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Palestinian Basic Law.”

In other words, the PA is obliged, by international humanitarian law, to employ those who want to unseat them.

This surely is an uncontrollable outburst of surreal humor but it pales in comparison with another outburst.
Goldstone, after quoting heavily from Ha’aretz, Israeli jurists, B’tzelem and other Israeli human rights NGO’s, states:

“…the Mission received allegations that sources of criticism of actions by Israel during and following the military operations of December 2008-January 2009 from inside Israel were subjected to attempted or actual repression, and that the rights of freedom of association and expression for individuals and groups had been violated. In this regard, concerns were also raised about the denial of access to the media and to human rights monitors prior, during and after the military operations in Gaza.”

The humor stems from the fact that the evidence of this repression was given by Israelis – including those who addressed Goldstone’s committee. Israeli NGO’s who complained about this repression of dissent appear almost daily – loud and clear – in Israeli newspapers and state-owned radio and television.

For some obscure reason, there is no parallel finding about suppression of dissent by Hamas. Indeed, the report should have a sub-heading – Eyeless in Gaza – lifted from John Milton and Aldous Huxley.

* * *

The humor stops where the report alleges actions of wanton brutality and killings by Israeli soldiers; even if only partially true, these cases should be a reason for sleepless nights for every law-abiding, humane Israeli. The IDF authorities state that they have investigated these allegations and, except for one case of looting, found no evidence of such war crimes. However, it is the opinion of this author that due to the severity of the allegations and the number of Palestinian civilians killed in the operation, Israel should re-investigate these thirty-plus cases and that this reinvestigation should be conducted by an independent body headed by an acting or retired judge of the Supreme Court. Such a body should be empowered to see army documents and make recommendations. This step is vital not because of Goldstone’s ludicrous report, replete with its instances of unconscious humor, but because we, Israelis, must be doubly sure that no crimes were perpetrated by our soldiers. We should not be “eyeless in Gaza.”

Attached in full, the speech Judge Richard Goldstone will give later today at the HRC. Analysis and – probably – complaints to follow later in the day.

United Nations Fact Finding Mission
on the Gaza Conflict

Statement by Richard Goldstone on behalf of the Members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict before the Human Rights Council

Human Rights Council 12th Session – 29 September 2009

Check against delivery

Mr. President,
(Madame High Commissioner)
members of the Council,
ladies and gentlemen

My colleagues and I are here today to present to the Council the final report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

Since the release of the advance version of the report two weeks ago, we have witnessed many attestations of support, but also a barrage of criticism towards our findings as well as public attacks against the Members of the Mission.

We will not address these attacks as we believe that the answers to those who have criticised us are in the findings of the report.

I have, however, to strongly reject one major accusation levelled against the Mission; the one that portrays our efforts as being politically motivated.

Let me repeat before this Council what I have already stated on many occasions:

We accepted this Mission because we believe deeply in the rule of law, humanitarian law, human rights, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.

We accepted with the conviction that pursuing justice is essential and that no state or armed group should be above the law. Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during any conflict will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice.

We accepted out of a deep concern for the hundreds of civilians who needlessly died and those who suffered injury and dislocation of their lives.

We accepted because we believe that the perpetrators of serious violations must be held to account.

We do not claim to be immune from error. After the release of the report we have received a number of comments from people who are sincerely interested in the truth.

We have considered them and where relevant redressed inaccuracies in the final version of the report which is today before you.

We regret that the response to date of the Government of Israel avoids dealing with the substance of the report.

Mr. President

As you all know, the Mission was established in April of this year with the mandate to investigate “all violations of International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza from 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009, whether before during or after”.

Ambassador Uhomoibhi and I announced the establishment of the team at a press conference in April and he brought the mandate of the Mission before this Council in June.

The mandate of the mission was to look at all parties: Israel; the Palestinian Authority; Hamas, which governs Gaza; and armed Palestinian groups.

Soon after its establishment the Mission was faced with one of its major challenges: the decision of the Government of Israel not to cooperate with it and its implicit refusal to give us access to Gaza, the West Bank and to southern Israel.

We decided not to allow this lack of cooperation to prevent the Mission from discharging its mandate.

The Mission is grateful to the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt for having facilitated its entry into Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

The Mission also wishes to express its gratitude to many, without whose assistance its task would have been impossible to fulfil.

It would be difficult to name all of them here. We attempt to do so in the acknowledgement section of the report.

We wish, however, to pay our respect to the many civil society organisations, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Israel and elsewhere, which – often under difficult and challenging circumstances – continue to play a crucial role in upholding the universal principles of human rights.

We would respectfully suggest that this Council should recognize and support these organizations.

The first field visit by the Mission Members was conducted in the Gaza Strip from 1-5 June 2009, during which we held meetings, conducted interviews with victims and witnesses and visited the sites of incidents.

The Members of the Mission were in Gaza again from 26 June to 1 July, during which time we continued our investigations and held the Mission’s first round of public hearings. Mission staff maintained a presence in Gaza until early July.

Members of the Mission also travelled to Amman, Jordan, from 1 to 4 July to interview witnesses and meet with people and organizations from Israel and the West Bank.

As part of its investigation process, the Mission held a second set of public hearings. In the two rounds of public hearings, 38 witnesses, victims and experts gave testimony.

The aim of holding the hearings publicly was to give a voice to those who had direct experiences and expertise that related to the mandate of the Mission.

The Mission reviewed reports produced by various organizations and institutions as well as submissions on matters of fact and law relevant to its inquiry.

The Mission consulted with a wide range of interlocutors. They included victims and witnesses, Palestinian, Israeli and international NGOs, United Nations and other international organizations, community organizations, human rights defenders, medical and other professionals, legal and military experts, authorities and other sources of reliable information relevant to the Mission’s mandate. These interlocutors were both within and outside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.

The Mission conducted 188 individual interviews, reviewed over 10 000 pages of documentation and viewed some 1200 photographs, including satellite imagery and video-tapes.

The Mission was supported by an outstanding Secretariat provided by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). We are grateful to the High Commissioner for providing this support, without which the Mission could not have carried out its mandate.

In making findings of fact, we relied primarily on our own evaluation of the people who spoke to us and from what we saw with our own eyes.

We relied on reports from others where they corroborated the views we had formed.

The exception to that approach was in respect of some facts relating to the West Bank and to Israel in light of the refusal by the Israeli Government to allow us into Israel or to visit the West Bank.

On 15 September the Mission released an advance version of its report.

Mr. President
Members of the Council

Our report is before this Council for its consideration. Allow us, however, to focus the Council’s attention on a number of points.

Let me immediately say that the report reflects the unanimous views of all four of its members.

For practical reasons, the Mission decided for the most part to restrict its fact finding to the period from 16 June 2008 to 31 July 2009. The 16th June 2008 was the date on which a cease fire between Israel and Hamas came into effect.

The Report contains an analysis of 36 specific incidents in Gaza as well as a number on the West Bank and in Israel.

In Chapter XI of the Report, for example we detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.

You will find details of the other 35 incidents in the Report. Some of them relate to the use by the Israel Defense Forces of human shields in violation of an earlier ruling by the Israel Supreme Court outlawing such conduct.

The Mission investigated in some detail the effects on the civilian population in Southern Israel of the sustained rocket and mortar attacks from Palestinian armed groups in Gaza. We detail the suffering of victims and the highly prejudicial effects of these acts on the towns and cities that fall within the range of the rockets and mortars.

The Mission decided that in order to understand the effect of the Israeli military operations on the infrastructure and economy of Gaza, and especially its food supplies, it was necessary to have regard to the effects of the blockade that Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip for some years and has been tightened since Hamas became the controlling authority of Gaza.

The Mission found that the attack on the only remaining flour producing factory, the destruction of a large part of the Gaza egg production, the bulldozing of huge tracts of agricultural land, and the bombing of some two hundred industrial facilities, could not on any basis be justified on military grounds. Those attacks had nothing whatever to do with the firing of rockets and mortars at Israel.

The Mission looked closely and sets out in the Report statements made by Israeli political and military leaders in which they stated in clear terms that they would hit at the “Hamas infrastructure”.

If “infrastructure” were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of IHL built up over the last 100 years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets.

These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.

The Government of Israel has a duty to protect its citizens. That in no way justifies a policy of collective punishment of a people under effective occupation, destroying their means to live a dignified life and the trauma caused by the kind of military intervention the Israeli Government called Operation Cast Lead. This contributes to a situation where young people grow up in a culture of hatred and violence, with little hope for change in the future.

Finally, the teaching of hate and dehumanization by each side against the other contributes to the destabilization of the whole region.

Mr. President
Members of the Council

Let me come to some of the recommendations.

The Mission debated long and hard on whether this was a case, like Darfur, where the Security Council should consider referring the situation both in Israel and Gaza to the International Criminal Court.

The Mission is highly critical of the pusillanimous efforts by Israel to investigate alleged violations of international law and the complete failure by the Gaza authorities to do so in respect of the armed groups. That notwithstanding the Mission came to the conclusion that both Israel and the Gaza Authorities have the ability to conduct open and transparent investigations and launch appropriate prosecutions if they decide to do so.

We therefore recommended that the Security Council should require Israel to report to it within six months, on the investigations and prosecutions it is carrying out with regard to the violations referred to in this Report and any others that may come to its attention.

The Mission recommends further that the Security Council should set up a body of independent experts to report to it on the progress of the Israeli investigations and prosecutions. The committee of experts should similarly report on investigations and prosecutions undertaken by the relevant authorities in Gaza with regard to crimes committed by the Palestinian armed groups.

In both cases, if within the six month period there are no good faith investigations conforming to international standards, the Security Council should refer the situation or situations to the ICC Prosecutor.

The Mission was concerned at the use made by the Israeli army of certain munitions and especially white phosphorous, flechettes and certain heavy metals such as tungsten. Their use is not presently banned by international law.

The Mission has recommended that the General Assembly should promote an urgent discussion on the future legality of the use of these munitions.
As appears from the Report the manner in which those munitions were used in Gaza caused unacceptable and unnecessary human suffering as well as environmental damage – not only in Gaza but probably also in southern Israel. The situations arising from the latter should be monitored by the United Nations.

Since the issue of the advance copy of the Report it has been rejected in vehement terms by the Government of Israel. The call for transparent investigations has been rejected. The Government of Israel wishes to restrict its investigations to secret inquiries by the Military investigating itself. That would clearly not satisfy the legitimate expectations of the many victims of the Israeli military operations.

A word about accountability. It has been my experience in many regions of the world, including my own country, South Africa, that peace and reconciliation depend, to a great extent, upon public acknowledgement of what victims suffer. That applies no less in the Middle East. It is a pre-requisite to the beginning of the healing and meaningful peace process.

The truth and accountability are also essential to prevent ascribing collective guilt to a people. Many people in Gaza deplore the firing of thousands of rockets at civilians in Southern Israel and the terror that it has caused to innocent children, women and men. And many in Israel, Jews and Palestinians, deplore the actions by the Israel Defense Force that caused unjustifiable civilian deaths and injuries on a very large scale. They do not approve of the damage to the food and commercial infrastructure of Gaza that will take many years to repair.

Support for many of the recommendations contained in the Report has come from Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

People of the region should not be demonized. Rather their common humanity should be emphasized.

It is for this reason that the Mission came to the conclusion that it is accountability above all that is called for in the aftermath of the regrettable violence that has caused so much misery for so many.

The Mission calls upon the HRC to accept the Report and adopt its recommendations.

Mr. President

Now is the time for action.

A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long.

The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence. Time and again, experience has taught us that overlooking justice only leads to increased conflict and violence.

In conclusion, may I say that the Mission hopes that the substance of this report will be used to strengthen initiatives for peace in the region. The mission is convinced that the international community must confront the realities highlighted in this report and that by doing so find a meaningful basis for the pursuit of peace and security for all the people of the region. Only in that way will the human dignity and security of these people be realised.

By appointing this Fact Finding Mission, the Human Rights Council raised expectations for action and for justice: we call on the Council and on the international community as a whole to take up our recommendations so those expectations will not have been raised in vain.

Thank you.

Geneva, 29 September 2009

Okay, we promised no more Goldstone. But this is important.

Judge Goldstone himself has weighed in on the debate in today’s Jerusalem Post. He concludes with this:

The recognition of the humanity of all people – the recognition of Israel by Hamas and the recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination – are both pre-requisites for peace. And I still nurture the hope that the facts contained in the Report of the Fact-Finding Mission will assist, even in a small way, to finding a peaceful way forward in the Middle East.

The people of the region have waited all too long for that.

It’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out – the automatic psychological blindness to Palestinian rejection. Palestinian self-determination was at the center of a generation-long Israeli culture war, complete with a murdered prime minister. And all polls show that the Left won the argument about Palestinian rights.

What has prevented peace and compromise – and destroyed the Left even as its basic idea was becoming widely accepted – is the second half of Goldstone’s equation: “the recognition of Israel by Hamas,” or by the Palestinians generally. Even moderate Palestinians, buoyed in part by international documents such as Goldstone’s report, continue to believe Israel is an illegitimate bastard-child of colonialism. Compromise is thus automatically a kind of betrayal.

This is the wisdom behind Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian recognition of the legitimacy of a Jewish state: The double-talk of negotiating and delegitimizing has undermined Palestinian peacemakers among their own people. How could it do otherwise? How can you negotiate while assuring your own people the other side is evil?

Perhaps, Judge Goldstone, you should take your own advice about judging the sides equally – not based on an artificial assumption of mutual fault, but on the merits of each side’s efforts at peacemaking and reconciliation.

Back from the holiday vacation – a bit late – with another piece on Goldstone, hopefully the last. The report has come and, like other well-meaning but misguided efforts at Mideast peacemaking, it has pretty much gone. Only we Mideasterners remain to pick up the pieces of the latest silliness.

In the report’s wake, perhaps the most fascinating perspective yet comes from David Landau, former editor-in-chief of Ha’aretz, who sits on the far-left of the Israeli political spectrum and is convinced Israel did, indeed, step over the line in Gaza.

In the New York Times, he cuts right to the point, explaining why the left-wing Ha’aretz has been as troubled by Goldstone as the rest of Israeli media.

Here’s a hint: The Goldstone Report’s accusation that the Israeli government is stifling dissent in the country is based on the following proof: The vast majority of Israelis approved of the Gaza operation.

Landau’s piece is a good reminder of the damage that can be done by ignorance and by the human tendency to reinvent morality to suit one’s prejudices.

Here it is in full. It’s short:

ISRAEL intentionally went after civilians in Gaza — and wrapped its intention in lies.

That chilling — and misguided — accusation is the key conclusion of the United Nations investigation, led by Richard Goldstone, into the three-week war last winter. “While the Israeli government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercises of its right to self-defense,” the report said, “the mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

The report has produced a storm of outraged rejection in Israel. Politicians fulminate about double standards and anti-Semitism. Judge Goldstone, an eminent South African jurist and a Jew, is widely excoriated as an enemy of his people.

The report stunned even seasoned Israeli diplomats who expected no quarter from an inquiry set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which they believe to be deeply biased against Israel. They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians.

Israelis believe that their army did not deliberately kill the hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, who died during “Operation Cast Lead.” They believe, therefore, that Israel is not culpable, morally or criminally, for these civilian deaths, which were collateral to the true aim of the operation — killing Hamas gunmen.

It is, some would argue, a form of self-deception.

When does negligence become recklessness, and when does recklessness slip into wanton callousness, and then into deliberate disregard for innocent human life?

But that is the point — and it should have been the focus of the investigation. Judge Goldstone’s real mandate was, or should have been, to bring Israel to confront this fundamental question, a question inherent in the waging of war by all civilized societies against irregular armed groups. Are widespread civilian casualties inevitable when a modern army pounds terrorist targets in a heavily populated area with purportedly smart ordnance? Are they acceptable? Does the enemy’s deployment in the heart of the civilian area shift the line between right and wrong, in morality and in law?

These were precisely the questions that Israeli politicians and generals wrestled with in Gaza, as others do today in Afghanistan.

It is possible, and certainly arguable, that the Israeli policymakers, or individual Israeli field commanders in isolated instances, pushed the line out too far.

But Judge Goldstone has thwarted any such honest debate — within Israel or concerning Israel. His fundamental premise, that the Israelis went after civilians, shut down the argument before it began.

This is regrettable, for the report could have stirred the conscience of the nation. Many Israelis were dismayed at the war’s casualty figures, at the disparity between the dozen deaths on the Israeli side and the thousand-plus deaths, many of them of noncombatants, in Gaza.

Many Israelis were profoundly troubled by this arithmetic even though they supported Israel’s resort to arms in the face of incessant violation of their sovereign border by Hamas’s rain of rockets.

Judge Goldstone could have contended that just as Israeli leaders themselves have frequently called off pinpoint assassinations of terrorists because civilians were in the line of fire, so too they should have refrained from bombing and shelling Hamas targets in Gaza when that bombing and shelling was bound to exact a large civilian toll.

By approaching the Gaza war, and his report, from this perspective, Judge Goldstone could have opened debate and prompted reflection in Israel. Instead, by accusing Israel — its government, its army, its ethos — of deliberately seeking out civilians, he has achieved the opposite effect.

David Landau was the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from 2004 to 2008.