I went to the Rabbis for Human Rights conference in New York this week, and my chief impression was that the Jewish community is warming up to the Goldstone Report 15 months late. Maybe this is the effect of the boycott movement, which is a bridge too far for the J Street Jews who dominated the conference– but what I saw was a growing awareness that Israel has exhibited contempt for others’ judgment of its actions and that the community effort to shut down the Goldstone Report a year ago only enhanced Israel’s isolation from all norms of conduct (filling the sails of the boycott movement).
Let me get to my data: On a panel about international law, Dinah PoKempner of Human Rights Watch and the Council on Foreign Relations said that while flawed, the Goldstone report was very good and generic, not unlike many other such international reports, and that of course Judge Goldstone was a leader of the effort to establish international human rights law. But: “the Jewish community and the Israeli government mobilized and it was very difficult to get anyone to talk about it in a sane and rational way.” Goldstone was demonized, she said, using traditional tools of charges of antisemitism and self-hatred. And meantime the Israeli efforts to comply with international law (as the U.N. demanded) have fallen short. The chief army prosecutor in Israel had his house defaced by graffiti.
Steven Gerber of Rabbis for Human Rights chimed in. He pointed out that “a number of extremely prominent human rights organizations and NGO’s came out with extremely critical reports” about Gaza that were little different from Goldstone’s report. And Gerber too said with disdain, “The US Government and certain groups mobilized” against Goldstone. From the audience, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb spoke of the most horrifying part of that mobilization: the attempted bar mitzvah shunning of the judge.
At the next panel I went to, an appealing young rabbi named Rachel Goldenberg said that she had spent a lot of the “capital” she has with her synagogue’s board to speak out in support of the Goldstone Report in her Yom Kippur sermon. This at a shul in Middletown, Connecticut. And Goldenberg also said that she is about to give a report to her congregation on an October visit to Israel and occupied Palestine. (Though, yes, she noted that her congregants would generally prefer to fight antisemitism than get involved with the poor Palestinians and their problems.)
Straws in the wind? Maybe; but that’s my stock in trade, and I see the left side of the Jewish community shedding its defensiveness around Goldstone. Yes, I have a vested interest in such an opening; I am part of a team putting out a book on the Goldstone Report in the new year (which you should buy here). But I tell you the Jewish community is softening. There is a growing recognition of the terrible direction that Israel is headed. While I was at the conference, Peace Now issued a bold (for it) statement saying that the world’s response to the Mt. Carmel fires in Israel shows that Europe is not trying to delegitimize Israel. No, racial discrimination is against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And if a speaker had denounced Goldstone at the rabbis’ conference, as Reform leader Eric Yoffie denounced Goldstone at J Street last year, he would have been denounced loudly in turn. In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw Yoffie sitting there at the PoKempner-Gerber panel on international law. The two panelists stood up for Goldstone, and he said nothing.
