Israel The Israeli government issued an initial 32-point formal response to the fact-finding mission's report on 24 September 2009. The response listed a series of what it argued were serious flaws and biases in the report, finally concluding that the report perverts international law to serve a political agenda. (
See below.) Also in October 2009, Israel pressured the Palestinian president to postpone asking for a UN vote on the Goldstone report.
Yuval Diskin, head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service, met in
Ramallah with President Mahmud Abbas and informed him that if Abbas refuses to ask to postpone the UN vote on the Goldstone report then Israel will turn the
West Bank into a "second Gaza": the Shin Bet chief told Abbas that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote, Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the Palestinian Authority and threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier in 2009. said the mission's report "makes a mockery of history".
Israeli President Shimon Peres said that the report "makes a mockery of history" and that "it does not distinguish between the aggressor and the defender. War is crime and the attacker is the criminal. The defender has no choice. The Hamas terror organization is the one who started the war and also carried out other awful crimes. Hamas has used terrorism for years against Israeli children." Peres also stated that "the report gives de facto legitimacy to terrorist initiatives and ignores the obligation and right of every country to defend itself, as the UN itself had clearly stated." He added that the report "Failed to supply any other way for Hamas fire to stop. The IDF's operations have boosted the West Bank's economy, liberated Lebanon from Hezbollah terror and allowed Gazans to resume normalcy. The Israeli government withdrew (from Gaza) and Hamas began a murderous rampage, firing thousands of shells on women and children – innocent civilians, instead of rebuilding Gaza and caring for the population's welfare. (Hamas) builds tunnels and used civilians and children to shield terrorists and hide weapons."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "The Goldstone Report is a field court-martial, and its findings were prewritten. This is a prize for terror. The report makes it difficult for democracies to fight terror." On another occasion, Netanyahu said that the report ignored
Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the
Palestinian rocket attacks that preceded the war. He also warned world leaders that they and their anti-terror forces could be targets for charges similar to those in the report. At the
United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu called the report biased and unjust, asking: "Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists? We must know the answer to that question now. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace."
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said: "The Goldstone Commission is a commission established with the aim of finding Israel guilty of crimes ahead of time, [the commission] was dispatched by countries in which the terms 'human rights' and 'combat ethics' are unknown" He added that "the IDF was forced to deal with the lowest form of terrorists that set themselves the goal of killing women and children [by] hiding behind women and children. The state of Israel will continue to protect its citizens from the attacks of the terrorists and the terror organizations, and will continue to protect its soldiers from hypocritical and distorted attacks."
Preliminary analysis by Israel The
Government of Israel issued a 32-point preliminary analysis of the report, titled "Initial Response to Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza Established Pursuant to Resolution S-9/1 of the Human Rights Council". The main arguments in the analysis were the following. The analysis concludes that the report claims to represent international law but perverts it to serve a political agenda; that it sends a "legally unfounded message to states everywhere confronting terrorism that international law has no effective response to offer them", and that it signals to terrorist groups "that the cynical tactics of seeking to exploit civilian suffering for political ends actually pays dividends".
Palestinian National Authority Following the postponing of the vote on the resolution in UNHRC, the
Palestinian National Authority came under heavy criticism for agreeing to defer the draft proposal endorsing all recommendations of the UN Fact Finding Mission. Several Palestinian human rights organizations, condemning the PA's action, issued a statement under the title "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied". Abbas agreed to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report following a confrontational meeting with
Yuval Diskin, head of the Israeli
Shin Bet security service. Hamas officials in Gaza demanded Abu Mazen's resignation for supporting the postponement of the vote at the UN Human Rights Council.
Mahmoud al-Zahar said that Abbas was guilty of "a very big crime against the Palestinian people" over the PA's conduct at UNHRC. Eleven Palestinian human rights organizations, including two based in Israel, called on the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza to investigate Palestinian violations of international law allegedly committed during the Gaza War. Alleged violations include Palestinian attacks on civilians in Israel and instances of internal repression, such as
summary executions in the Gaza Strip and arrests and torture in the West Bank. The letter asked to launch investigations before the 5 February deadline. The authors of the call said that for PLO efforts to have the report endorsed by the UN to be of lasting value, the Palestinian authorities must take action to implement its recommendations.
United Nations The UN high commissioner for human rights,
Navi Pillay, endorsed the report and supported the call on Israel and Hamas to investigate and prosecute those who committed war crimes. UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon urged "credible" investigations by both sides into the conduct of the Gaza conflict "without delay".
Governments and regional organizations United States Ambassador
Susan Rice, the U.S. permanent representative to the UN, said: "We have very serious concerns about many recommendations in the report" State Department spokesman
Ian Kelly said: "Although the report covers both sides of the conflict, it focuses overwhelmingly on Israel's actions," adding that Goldstone opted for 'cookie cutter conclusions' about Israel's actions, while keeping 'the deplorable actions of Hamas' to generalized remarks'. The United States pledged to stand by Israel in the fight against the Goldstone report. U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told the Security Council that whereas the U.S. had "serious concerns" about the report's "unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations and its sweeping conclusions of law, it also took the allegations in the report seriously and encouraged Israel to conduct serious investigations. A presidential advisor on Middle East policy told a group of American Jewish leaders in November 2010 that the U.S. government was committed to curbing actions by the UN on the Goldstone Report.
Shelley Berkley of Nevada and
Eliot Engel of New York wrote in a joint statement: "Israel took every reasonable step to avoid civilian casualties ... It is ridiculous to claim that Israel did not take appropriate actions to protect civilian populations."
Naomi Klein stated that instead of proving its commitment to international law, the United States is smearing the "courageous" report.
House of Representatives resolution On 3 November 2009, the
United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution, H. Res. 867 (344 for, 36 against), calling the report irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy. Howard Berman, one of the cosponsors of the resolution, expressed several concerns: HRW also maintained that the House resolution "has factual errors and would help shield from justice the perpetrators of serious abuses – both Israeli and Palestinian".
Europe • The
European Parliament passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone report in March 2010. The resolution called on the bloc's member states to "publicly demand the implementation of [the report's] recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes". • The French foreign ministry called the facts revealed by the report "extremely serious" and deserving of utmost attention. The French UN Ambassador
Gérard Araud urged both sides to initiate "independent inquiries in line with international standards". • Sweden's foreign minister
Carl Bildt said he supported the report, and called Israel's refusal to cooperate with the investigation a mistake. Bildt characterized Goldstone as a person with high integrity and credibility, and called his report worthy of consideration. At the time of Bildt's statement, Sweden held the rotating
Presidency of the Council of the European Union. • At the UNHRC, Switzerland commented favourably on the impartiality of the findings in the 575-page report. The Swiss ambassador called on Israel and Hamas to conduct independent investigations into the allegations of war crimes. He also called for an independent expert panel to oversee legal procedures on both sides. • Turkey, which held a seat in the
Security Council until the end of 2010, has voiced support for discussing the report to the Security Council. Turkish prime minister
Tayyip Erdoğan called for "accountability" and said that guilty parties should be identified and face necessary sanctions. He also accused Israel of raining "phosphorus bombs ... on innocent children in Gaza". • In an interview with an Israeli radio station, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, John Sawers, supported the findings of the report and called for both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate its conclusions. During the UN Security Council's meeting, he said, "the Goldstone Report itself did not adequately recognize Israel's right to protect its citizens, nor did it pay sufficient attention to Hamas's actions." Nevertheless, he further stressed the concerns raised in the report, which he said cannot be ignored. • Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen said both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must investigate war crimes allegations, saying "there can be no impunity for serious human rights violations both on the Palestinian and the Israeli side". Verhagen also urged Israel to halt building settlements in the West Bank, calling the practice a serious obstacle to peace, which "will have to stop". • As reported in
Haaretz in April 2011, Labor Party Secretary-General Hilik Bar said that Norway's Foreign Minister
Jonas Gahr Støre told him that Norway will reconsider their support for the report in light of Goldstone's recantation.
Asia and Africa • A Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had voted in favor of the report "in the hope of protecting the human rights of the people in the occupied Palestinian territories and to promote the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace process." Chinese members of parliament told a visiting delegation of the Israeli Parliament officials in Beijing that China will oppose discussing the Goldstone Commission's report at the UN Security Council and allowing the document to serve as a basis for lawsuits against Israel at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The Chinese parliamentarians stressed that the UNHRC had the necessary tools to look into the report without the involvement of other institutions. •
Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, referred to the report when calling for legal action against the Israeli leadership saying, "The perpetrators of the Gaza war should stand before [an] international war crimes tribunal." • The Nigerian ambassador to the UNHRC, Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, said that he Council should not dilute its efforts by vilifying the Fact-Finding Mission members and parts of the report – no useful purpose would be served by compounding the human rights situation in the region through sheer rhetoric or failure to act. He said, "The implementation of the report was crucial to addressing the pernicious issues of impunity and accountability". • On behalf of the
Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Pakistani Ambassador Zamir Akram welcomed the fact-finding mission and thanked them for presenting a comprehensive and objective account. Discussing responding to allegations of war crimes, he said, "it was now the time for action; words needed to be converted into deeds."
Human Rights Watch called the report a significant step toward justice and redress for the victims on both sides, and called on the
Security Council to implement the report's recommendations. Israeli human rights group
B'Tselem, along with eight other Israeli human-rights NGOs, stated that they "expect the Government of Israel to respond to the substance of the report's findings and to desist from its current policy of casting doubt upon the credibility of anyone who does not adhere to the establishment's narrative". At the same time, leaders of B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence think that the Goldstone accusation of an assault on civilians is incorrect. The executive director of B'Tselem criticized some aspects of the report, particularly "very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses", such as lack of condemnation of mosques' misuses or human shielding, as well as supposedly sweeping conclusions regarding Israel. Yael Stein, research director of B'Tselem, said that she does not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure, which she found unconvincing. At the same time, she urged to check out every incident and every policy by an independent body, because in her view the military cannot check itself and it has to be explained why so many people had been killed.
UN Watch criticized Goldstone's report methodologies that allegedly dismissed or ignored much of the evidence provided in Israeli Government report from July 2009 on the one hand and on the other hand endorsed unquestionably testimonies by Gaza officials. Representatives of
Simon Wiesenthal Center made similar charges.
Journalism The
Financial Times (UK) called the report balanced and criticized attacks on Goldstone. It argued, however, that Israeli objections to the UNHRC were on strong ground, stating, "council members from
Libya to
Angola hide behind the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from their own records of serious human rights abuse."
The Independent wrote that Israel should open a parliamentary investigation after the model of the
Kahan Commission to look into its actions in Gaza. The paper wrote, "Strong democratic nations are able to scrutinise their own behaviour, even in times of conflict. It is time for Israel to demonstrate its own democratic strength."
The Economist (UK) denounced the report as "deeply flawed" and detrimental to the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process, arguing that it was tainted by anti-Israel prejudice in the UNHRC. In particular,
The Economist chastised the mission for saying there was little or no evidence showing Hamas endangered civilians by basing themselves around schools, mosques and hospitals, and claimed that instead, the charge was supported by many reports in the public domain.
The Times (UK) criticized the report as "provocative bias" and described as dangerous and unreasonable the moral equivalence drawn in the report between Israel and Hamas.
The Times praised Israel for quietly continuing to conduct its own investigation into the conflict despite the report, and concluded that Israel "is an accountable, democratic, transparent nation, and fighting to remain one amid challenges that few other nations ever have to face".
The Washington Post wrote that "... the Goldstone commission proceeded to make a mockery of impartiality with its judgment of facts. It concluded, on scant evidence, that "disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy" by Israel. At the same time it pronounced itself unable to confirm that Hamas hid its fighters among civilians, used human shields, fired mortars and rockets from outside schools, stored weapons in mosques, and used a hospital for its headquarters, despite abundant available evidence".
The Wall Street Journal criticized the report, calling it a "new low" in United Nations bias on Israel-related matters. WSJ wrote that the commission's members "were forced to make some astonishing claims of fact" in order to reach some of their conclusions. In particular, WSJ criticized the report's claim that the Gaza police force was a "civilian" agency and its inability to establish Palestinian use of mosques for military purposes despite evidence to the contrary.
Military commentators Colonel
Richard Kemp, former commander of
British forces in Afghanistan, addressed the UNHRC in October 2009, speaking on behalf of
UN Watch. He said that Hamas is "adept at staging and distorting incidents" and asserted that during the conflict the Israel Defense Forces "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare" and that Palestinian civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas' way of fighting, which involved using human shields as a matter of policy, and deliberate attempts to sacrifice their own civilians. He added that Israel took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, aborted potentially effective missions in order to prevent civilian casualties, and took "unthinkable" risks by allowing huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza during the fighting. Goldstone stated that Kemp was not interviewed "because the report did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas".
Legal commentators Writing in the
Financial Times Italian Jurist
Antonio Cassese who was the first President of the
International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia argued that critics of the report were relying primarily on
ad hominem and
strawman attacks. He argued that "critics have given inaccurate descriptions of the report's findings" and that "those who claim the mission's mandate was biased against Israel seem to have ignored a significant fact: Justice Goldstone, whose mission was initially asked to look into alleged violations only by Israel, demanded—and received—a change of mandate to include attacks by Hamas." Furthermore, he argued that many critics of the report "have launched personal attacks on Justice Goldstone's character" and some critics have even gone as far as labeling Goldstone, who is Jewish, "an 'anti-Semite' of a kind who 'despise and hate our own people'". Former
Canadian Minister of Justice,
Attorney General of Canada, former president of the
Canadian Jewish Congress and former Director of the Human Rights Program at
McGill University Professor
Irwin Cotler called the inquiry "inherently tainted", agreeing with Mary Robinson and Richard Goldstone that its original mandate was "deeply one-sided and flawed" prior to being broadened, and stating that the UNHRC is "systematically and systemically biased against Israel". He opposed the report, which he regarded as "tainted". At the same time, he is in favor of establishing an independent inquiry into the Gaza war, saying that Israel would set a precedent if it creates such an inquiry that according to his best knowledge "no other democracy" had.
Princeton professor emeritus of international law
Richard Falk, appointed in 2008 by the
United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to serve as a
United Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967", endorsed the report as "an historic contribution to the Palestinian struggle for justice, an impeccable documentation of a crucial chapter in their victimization under occupation". Writing in
Electronic Intifada, Falk further commented that the report appeared to him to be "more sensitive" to Israel's contentions that Hamas was guilty of war crimes, and that the report in many ways "endorses the misleading main line of the Israeli narrative". Falk was critical of charges that the report, or the UNHRC, were biased and inferred that such criticism amounted to an attempt to "avoid any real look at the substance of the charges".
York University scholar of human rights and humanitarian law Professor
Anne Bayefsky said that the report, which claims to be a human rights document, never mentions the racist,
genocidal intent of the enemy, which Israel confronted after years of restraint. She added that the report relies on testimonies from witnesses speaking under circumstances that gave rise to "a fear of reprisals" from Hamas should they have dared to tell the truth.
Nigel Rodley, professor of law at
University of Essex said the report "painstakingly documents" a large number of violations by Hamas, PA and Israel, and carefully provides evidence to back them. He explains that because the report focused on the loss of life, and because overwhelming majority of lives lost were Palestinian lives at the hands of Israel, it is natural for the report to give that more attention.
Harvard law professor
Alan Dershowitz wrote that the problem with the report is what its composers willfully and deliberately refused to see and hear. He said that the commission ignored easily accessible videotapes that show Hamas operatives routinely firing rockets from behind human shields, and the report dismissed eyewitness accounts published by reputable newspapers and admissions by Hamas leaders regarding Hamas military activities.
University of Toronto professor of law
Ed Morgan wrote in
the Toronto Star that in dealing with the alleged use of human shielding of the Gaza civilian population by Hamas, the report "put its head in the sand", saying merely that "[t]he mission notes that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of or conduct of hostilities by the Palestinian armed groups". The article also criticized the way the committee dismissed first-hand evidences from IDF soldiers implying that mosques were used as launching points for Hamas attacks and as weapons storage facilities. Professor
Daniel Friedmann, who served as the
Justice Minister of Israel during the
Gaza War, criticized what he called the "reinterpretation" of evidence unfavorable to Hamas. As an example, he cites the statement of the Hamas police force spokesman saying that "police officers received clear orders from the leadership to face the [Israeli] enemy". He says that the committee uncritically accepted the explanation that the intention was that in the event of an invasion, the police would continue to uphold public order and ensure the movement of essential supplies. Writing in the
JURIST, Laurie Blank of Emory Law's International Humanitarian Law Clinic and Gregory Gordon of the
University of North Dakota School of Law said that the Goldstone Report's major flaw is that it fails the law. In their view, the Report incorrectly claims Israel disproportionately attacked civilians by relying on information gathered after the fact and discounting contemporaneous Israeli intentions or actions and the surrounding circumstances; the Report unjustly accuses Israel of a disproportionate response to eight years of Hamas's attacks, unfairly presenting
Operation Cast Lead as disproportionate overall; the Report treats Israel and Hamas disproportionately by holding them to different standards, merely suggesting that Hamas's actions "would constitute" legal violations.
Other Noam Shalit, father of Israeli soldier
Gilad Shalit held captive by Hamas, urged the UN to take all possible measures to implement the Goldstone report's recommendations on the status of his son. The Goldstone report calls for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit and, while Shalit is in captivity, for access to him by the
International Committee of the Red Cross. Residents of southern Israel who testified before the commission regarding
Palestinian rocket attacks on the region said that their testimonies were largely ignored.
Noam Chomsky argued that the Goldstone report is biased in favour of Israel since the report failed to question Israel's contention that it was acting in self-defence. Chomsky stressed that the right to self-defence requires that peaceful means are first exhausted before resorting to military force, something Israel "did not even contemplate doing". The
Trades Union Congress (TUC), the main federation of trade unions in the United Kingdom, "welcomed" the findings of the report.
J Street, a Liberal Jewish lobby in the United States, called on Israel to establish an independent state commission of inquiry to investigate the accusations detailed in the report.
Richard Landes, who also maintains the "Understanding the Goldstone Report" site, published in the December 2009 volume of the Israeli
MERIA Journal critical analyses of the Goldstone report. Landes argued that the report fails to investigate seriously the problem of Hamas embedding its war effort in the midst of civilian infrastructure in order to draw Israeli fire and then accuse Israel of war crimes; the report is credulous concerning all Palestinian claims, contrasted with a corresponding skepticism of all Israeli claims; the report harshly judges Israel for war crimes, contrasted with its resolute agnosticism concerning Hamas intentions. Landes concluded that Goldstone actually participates in Hamas' strategy, which, according to Landes, encourages the sacrificing of their own civilians. In an interview on the independent U.S. news broadcaster
Democracy Now,
Norman Finkelstein questioned the way the report judged the events in Gaza based on the
laws of war, saying that Gaza did not meet the criteria of a war zone, calling it instead a "massacre". He went on to say that there was no fighting in Gaza, and referred to quotes from the testimonies of the Israeli soldiers published in the report by NGO
Breaking the Silence. Concerning the substance of the report, Finkelstein says the Goldstone report is in-line with reports compiled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the findings that Israel had targeted civilians and the Palestinian infrastructure.
Yaniv Reich and
Norman Finkelstein have commented that Goldstone's statement does not contradict the findings of the report, specifically pointing out that the report did not claim the existence of an explicit policy of targeting civilians.
Mission members' responses to criticism Goldstone dismissed accusations of anti-Israel bias in his report as "ridiculous" and invited "fair minded people" to read the report and "at the end of it, point out where it failed to be objective or even-handed". Goldstone said that the United States, for example, had failed to substantiate its charges that the report was biased. In an interview with
Al Jazeera, Goldstone challenged the Obama administration to identify the flaws the U.S. said it has found in the report.
Alan Dershowitz in his analyses of the Report responded that as of January 2010 Goldstone had generally refused to reply substantively to credible critics of the Report and declined Dershowitz's offer to publicly debate Goldstone about its contents. Goldstone referred to his experiences of South Africa to reject Israeli PM Netanyahu's arguments that the report would make peacemaking more difficult, saying, "truth-telling and acknowledgement to victims can be a very important assistance to peace." Travers' statement regarding the use of mosques was challenged by a researcher at JCPA Colonel (res.) Halevi. Halevi said that the use of mosques as munition storage was supported by photographs of weapons seized in the Salah a-Din mosque in Gaza City during the operation, and the committee did not explain why it chose to disregard the information completely. ==Subsequent developments==