What a week. The Goldstone Report isn’t going away, it’s sticking with us. This great editorial in the LA Times observes that the Goldstone Report was so powerful as to “help reframe” the Israeli-Palestinian debate around the world. And the editorial includes this reflection on the Samouni family attack and the other important charges in the document:
Now, however, Goldstone says that the shelling was “apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image” and that an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack.
Goldstone’s flip-flop is fascinating but mystifying, and his explanation is utterly insufficient. Deliberately killing civilians is a crime of war under international law. If civilians die, by contrast, as “collateral damage” in a legitimate operation against a legitimate military target, that’s a very different thing — a horrible and tragic but sometimes unavoidable reality of armed conflict. At the very least, Goldstone needs to offer substantially more explanation than was available in his brief op-ed article. If he honestly believed his initial assertions but now has been persuaded as a result of Israel’s follow-up investigations that he was wrong, then he ought to make the world aware of the facts that changed his mind. (While he’s at it, he might let us know whether it was perhaps irresponsible to have made such sweeping assertions in the first place.)
On the other hand, “intentionality” is only one of the allegations in the Goldstone report. What are we to make now of all the other charges? What about the charge that Israel’s military applied “disproportionate force,” and that it failed to “take all feasible precautions” to avoid and minimize loss of civilian life? How about the allegations of “unlawful and wanton” destruction of property, not justified by military necessity? What about the victims denied access to ambulances and medical care? Are we to throw all of these serious charges out the window as well, or just the ones that suggest that Israel intentionally targeted civilians?
