The Gaza Goldstone Trap

The Times, The Times October 16, 2009

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David Aaronovitch

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All arguments about moral equivalence are mined with booby traps, none more than arguments about the Middle East.

Yesterday the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) began a two-day debate on the report to the UN Security Council by a panel chaired by Richard Goldstone. The former South African judge has been looking at Israel’s incursion into Gaza. The UNHRC is poised to recommend to the Security Council that unless Israel and Hamas agree to conduct “impartial and thorough” inquiries into their conduct during the Gaza conflict, indictments for “war crimes” should be brought against both parties at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Here are the problems with this. First, there is no equivalence between the actions of Israel in self-defence and those of Hamas in seeking to destroy it. Second, the UNHRC is not a credible forum. It is a kangaroo court. Like its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, it has failed to meet expectations as a watchdog over global human rights, instead becoming notorious for bloc voting and bias against Israel. And finally, the Goldstone report itself is imbalanced: it focuses on Israel’s faults rather than its right to protect itself.

Israel’s attacks last December and January exacted a dreadful toll, with more than a thousand Palestinian civilian deaths, including children, and the shelling of schools and UN aid distribution centres. This newspaper highlighted the illegal use by Israeli forces of white phosphorus in built-up areas of Gaza, inflicting horrific injuries.

But Israel was responding to a sustained barrage of rocket attacks by Hamas after its takeover of power in Gaza. It had no choice but to respond to these provocations. Hamas, backed and supplied by Iran, has rejected all attempts to persuade it to recognise Israel, instead relentlessly pursuing the destruction of the Jewish state in the interests of an intolerant and delusional pan-Islamic ideology. Unlike Israel, it consistently engages in the cowardly practice of using civilians as human shields.

Judge Goldstone takes Hamas to task for killing Israeli civilians and “seeking to spread terror” through rocket attacks on southern Israel. But he reserves his strongest language for Israel’s “disproportionate” use of force and its “deliberate targeting” of Palestinian civilians.

British officials in Geneva have indicated that Britain and other EU nations will abstain in today’s vote on Goldstone. They should instead vote against the report. What is at stake — apart from fairness — is the wider issue of Middle East peace at a time when the Obama Administration’s efforts to reopen talks are faltering. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has shown weak leadership while Hamas is still basking in its supporters’ admiration for obtaining the release of 20 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for nothing more than a video of Gilad Schalit, a captured Israeli soldier.

To endorse the Goldstone report would risk giving Hamas a further boost at Mr Abbas’s expense. The report is only on the table because Mr Abbas, who agreed to delay discussion of the report so as not to hold up the peace process, changed his mind after being criticised in the Arab world. He appears hesitant where Hamas appears resolute.

Rejecting Goldstone need not prevent Israel from holding its own inquiry into its conduct. Israel adheres to standards higher than those of its enemies. Its right to self-defence is not in question: what is at issue is how it exercises that right, and whether it does so in conformity with its own moral values. In launching an inquiry, it would challenge Hamas to do the same.

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