We’ve been saying for weeks that the Goldstone Report is being quietly embraced inside the American Jewish community, and yesterday Alan Dershowitz confirmed our hunch. In a piece posted at the neoconservative Hudson Institute site, he writes, “There is a politically motivated effort underway to rehabilitate the tarnished reputation of Richard Goldstone,” and then he goes after our book on the report and specifically Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s essay, which was published in the Forward: “The Un-Jewish Assault on Richard Goldstone.”
The reason that people are embracing Goldstone– he’s never needed rehabilitation– is twofold: many American Jews recognize that what happened in Gaza two years ago was wrong, and many of them are ashamed by the “sludge” campaign, as Pogrebin said, that was unleased against one of the most respected judges in the world. It’s no wonder the Forward ran her piece. Pogrebin is a writer of impeccable liberal credentials, and she wrote in anguish:
[American Jews] should be deeply conscience-stricken by the possibility, just the possibility, that the Israeli army committed atrocities in Gaza. Yet many in our community are still vilifying the judge…
The smearing of Goldstone still throbs– remember, he was almost barred from his own grandson’s bar mitzvah during the turmoil over his groundbreaking report– because he is a beloved/revered figure in legal circles. A sober, softspoken man who did as much as anyone to undo apartheid in South Africa by nullifying the hateful Group Areas Act and then leading a commission that steered that country through a transition to democracy without major violence, Goldstone was then called on by the U.N. in the 90s to lead international tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In Gaza, he tried more than anything to do truth-and-reconciliation, to let victims, including Ziyad al-Deeb, the student whose legs were “truncated” as he put it in a mortar attack on a crowded neighborhood, to tell their stories so as to humanize them to the other side. Goldstone is a person of stupendous accomplishment: he has done more than anyone to try to establish the rule of international law in the wake of World War II’s slaughters.
Pogrebin was enraged by the slanders of this great man, and that’s why she wrote her essay. Don’t kill the messenger, she implored the Jewish community.
The truth is, many holier-than-thou Jews violated several Jewish laws and traditions by politicizing Goldstone’s grandson’s sacred rite of passage, by causing pain to a man and his family, and by dumping verbal sludge on a fellow Jew whose only crime was to pursue justice and demand that Israel live up to its founding principles. Yet Israel’s fanatical defenders won’t let up on Goldstone until he is irreparably destroyed.
And what does Dershowitz do in his latest piece? Well, just what Pogrebin deplored: more ad hominem attacks. First he refers to Goldstone as a Zionist– which Goldstone is– then calls him “a purported Zionist.” What does that kind of innuendo mean? Dershowitz repeatedly brings up Goldstone’s role as a judge in apartheid South Africa, when he ordered whippings and capital punishment for blacks. True; as Naomi Klein writes in the introduction to our book, Goldstone was “required to enforce the country’s brutal discriminatory laws,” and he did. But those actions are minor when you compare them to his achievements in helping to end that system.
Dershowitz saves the worst for his closing. He questions whether Goldstone is a “mensch” and then lays out legalistic conditions for Goldstone’s “rehabilitation,” including the complete renunciation of his report. The ugly tone of this language and implicit invocation of a Jewish jury to hear these charges is reminiscent of the “herem,” or excommunication fiat by rabbinical authorities. It reminds us that not long ago Dershowitz referred to Goldstone as a “moser,” a traitor to the Jewish people. He later recanted that statement, but clearly he still regards Goldstone as a traitor. People of conscience everywhere will be offended by this crude attack.
P.S. Yes, I’ve bypassed Dershowitz’s substantive claim, that a recent statement by Hamas minister Fathi Hamad about the number of Hamas members killed by Israel somehow undercuts human-rights reports that most of the 1300-1400 people killed were not combatants. Dershowitz once again elides the difference between Hamas’s civilian followers and combatants, as if the hundreds of policemen slaughtered were combatants. We’ll get to that. We authored the book in the hopes of prompting a wider discussion of its importance and look forward to serious minded discussions of it in a variety of forums. For now, it was important to go after the pernicious tactics of personal demonization Dershowitz seems to feel free to engage in.
