April 8, 2011

Last week, Judge Richard Goldstone who authored the  Goldstone Report on the 2008-2009 Gaza war, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published last Friday that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”  In the op-ed, he admitted the history of bias against Israel by the UN Human Rights Council.  He also said that independent investigations by the Israel Defense Forces show that Israel, unlike Hamas, did not intentionally, as a matter of policy, target civilians. Israel’s investigations into its own soldiers who allegedly deviated from Israel’s military ethics code stands in stark contrast to Hamas’s refusal to investigate its own actions. Hamas minister Mohammed al-Ghoul said that there is nothing to investigate because shooting rockets [into Israeli communities and cities] is a “right of self defense.”  Goldstone admitted that he operated under a misguided hope that Hamas-a terrorist group-would investigate its own actions. In response to Goldstone's retractions, the Israeli government has called on the United Nations to cancel the report.