Lately in the New York Times, Ethan Bronner and Jennifer Medina offered a theory of Richard Goldstone’s change of heart that said that he was only trying to do for Israel what he had done for South Africa– truth and reconciliation– but that the powerful Israelis and their friends, including Goldstone’s own daughter, refused to take the medicine, so Goldstone had to backtrack. A friend had a smart response to it.
I found the Bronner story decent enough, but conventional, and glib. The South Africa explanation with the reconciliation fantasy doesn’t get us far really– sort of a movie-trailer version of human motives. If you watch any of his public appearances, Goldstone wasn’t like a man suffering torments or wondering if he would ever sleep again.
What Bronner and everyone else seems to miss is the compelling character–the majesty: sufficient to strengthen an already strong person–of the calling of Judge. It isn’t like other callings, and the people who go all the way in and are judges for life (as it were) “are not like you and me.”
To agree to head the commission, Goldstone had to have been shocked by what he heard about the Gaza onslaught. He didn’t expect the programmatic antagonism and state-compelled resistance to cooperation with which he was received by Israel, but he could have guessed there would be resistance, and he knew some of what he would find; he didn’t merely nurse the fantasy of starting a reconciliation process. He wanted to render a preliminary judgment about what had happened. And he aimed at that for the reason that is always sufficient to a Judge, i.e. the advancement of truth and justice. Remember the analogy he gave in his Yale lecture you reported: if ten murders are committed in the city and we only investigate one, that is admittedly imperfect and partial, but it is part of justice; one crime investigated, exposed, and prosecuted is better than none.
He seems to have been still in that understanding just a few weeks ago at the Stanford debate. I agree with you that some force or person intervened and we don’t know exactly what. But Bronner’s story–that Goldstone was unhappy with his role and near-despondent, all along, and just eventually broke–doesn’t convince me. It is corny. It doesn’t fit the man. And it suits, in a moderate, “human-interest” way, the purposes of Israeli propaganda.
But note: after the change in his op-ed, he changed most of the way back again. Here too an understanding of the mind of a Judge is helpful. The true adherent of the calling knows the worst sin of a person in his situation is to mistake sheer pride for the maintenance of justice. When, therefore, you learn facts that challenge or qualify your opinion, don’t be slow to admit them. That is the honest judge’s protection against pride. Goldstone went too far (and in some details, he went carelessly) in his partial retraction: the mention of Itamar, the phrase that could be read to say the whole report might have been different. But when he saw Yishai and Netanyahu jump on his statement as if it were an abject confession of error, he stepped back, took a second deep drink of humiliating corrective to pride, and resumed his balance as judge. That AP interview was hard hard hard for him; and nobody has entered into this fully: how strong must have been his original conviction to step into public view a second time, in that awkward way, and correct his own correction.
We’ll see about him–whether he’s going back to Jewish beginnings or going on as
judge after a peculiar interregnum. He is making a visit to Israel. He will be
asked to say many things…
