<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[ei: Goldstone&#8217;s shameful&nbsp;U-turn]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><span class="text14">Ilan Pappe, <em>The Electronic Intifada,</em> 4 April 2011</span></p>
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<td><span class="text11">Judge Richard Goldstone in the Gaza Strip, June 2009. (UN Photo)</span></td>
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<p><span class="text14"><span class="content"><br />
&#8220;If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have  been a different document.&#8221; Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone&#8217;s  much-discussed op-ed in <em>The Washington Post</em>. I have a strong  feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the  original sentence ought to have read something like: &#8220;If I had known  then that the report would turn me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of  my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the  Goldstone report would never have been written at all.&#8221; And if that  wasn&#8217;t the original sentence, it is certainly the subtext of Goldstone&#8217;s  article.</span></span></p>
<p>This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a  year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character  assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past  destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was  shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC&#8217;s illegal  dealings with the State of Israel.</p>
<p>Already In October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a great love for  Israel&#8221; and &#8220;I&#8217;ve worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so&#8221;  (Video: &#8220;<a href="http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/10/04/gps.richard.goldstone.cnn">Fareed Zakaria GPS</a>,&#8221; 4 October 2009).</p>
<p>Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did  not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could  this love could not be at least weakened by what he discovered when  writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original  report.</p>
<p>But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the  campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by  the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel,  who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson&#8217;s bar  mitzvah in Johannesburg since &#8220;Goldstone caused irreparable damage to  the Jewish people as a whole.&#8221;</p>
<p>The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the  synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South  Africa&#8217;s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for  &#8220;doing greater damage to the state of Israel.&#8221; Last February, Goldstone  said that &#8220;Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not,&#8221; in an  interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report the  website of Israel&#8217;s Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded  much more.</p>
<p>Readers might ask &#8220;so what?&#8221; and &#8220;why could Goldstone not withstand the  heat?&#8221; Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities  and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a  powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing  Israel and its crimes.</p>
<p>Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and  allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However,  many seem unable stick to their more universalist inclinations for too  long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a  &#8220;self-hating Jew&#8221; with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a  real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position  to understand the power of this terror.</p>
<p>Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a  special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals  and bodies suspected of &#8220;delegitimizing&#8221; Israel abroad. In light of  this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to  Israel was not worth it.</p>
<p>We should have recognized that Goldstone was one of them when he stated  that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective,  &#8220;Zionist,&#8221; is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed.  You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid  state of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a  certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the  ideology and that policy. &#8220;I am a Zionist&#8221; is a declaration of loyalty  to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone Report. You can  either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against  humanity &#8212; if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>That this <em>mea culpa</em> has nothing to do with new facts is clear  when one examines the &#8220;evidence&#8221; brought by Goldstone to explain his  retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the  world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war  crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the  Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before  and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.</p>
<p>The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the  ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound  and maim as a collective punishment. &#8220;The Palestinians are going to   bring upon themselves a Holocaust,&#8221; promised Matan Vilnai, Israel&#8217;s  deputy minister of defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008.</p>
<p>There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an  internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases  suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that  is still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the  Israeli army that massive killings by Palestinians were a &#8220;mistake.&#8221;</p>
<p>Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of  Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by  &#8220;mistake.&#8221; So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate  mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report  on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing only on one of  dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be  new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is  his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this  bizarre and faulty article.</p>
<p>This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas  in the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes  that this would absolve him of Israel&#8217;s righteous fury. But he is wrong,  very wrong. Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article  until Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin  Netanyahu and of course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon  Peres commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to  move from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the  next in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do  it; but then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson&#8217;s bar  mitzvah as a retaliation.</p>
<p>Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were  quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli  and Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and  was described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often  fails to convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first western public  opinion that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his  report. Israel&#8217;s international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented  blow. He was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.</p>
<p>We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny  Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of  Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and  Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications  for Israel&#8217;s identity and self-image, and nature of the archival  material he unearthed.</p>
<p>Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be re-admitted to the tribe. He went very far with his <em>mea culpa</em> and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist:  suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another  ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least  this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.</p>
<p>Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that claimed, as Goldstone does in <em>The Washington Post</em> article, that Israel can only be judged by its intentions not the  consequences of its deeds. Therefore only the Israeli army, in both  cases, can be a reliable source for knowing what these intentions were.  Very few decent and intelligent people in the world would accept such a  bizarre analysis and explanation.</p>
<p>Goldstone has not entered as yet the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as  Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a  pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already  said that Goldstone is a &#8220;repentant Jew&#8221;) between annual meetings of the  AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists.  He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism &#8212; you  are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought  you had successfully left behind you.</p>
<p>Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing  the world&#8217;s respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its  friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be  Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in  Palestine.</p>
<p><em>Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European  Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most  recent book is</em> <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11628.shtml">Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel</a> <em>(Pluto Press, 2010).</em></p>
<p><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11895.shtml">Source: Electronic Intifada</a></p>
<h3>Related</h3>
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<li><strong>SPECIAL TOPIC : <a href="https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/israels-next-whitewash-of-another-zionist-massacre/">WHITE WASH WATCH | Goldstone’s Reconciderations on the Gaza Cast Lead Report</a></strong></li>
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