This is Desmond Travers, Colonel Desmond Travers, on Democracy Now last week speaking about the Goldstone Report, which he co-authored. He’s brilliant on describing the Israeli assault and on why Goldstone’s reconsideration has not caused him to reconsider, for an instant. But I’m excerpting below, from the transcript, two statements unrelated to Gaza that Travers makes. Shows his breadth as a human being, shows that a man who comes to these ideas on his own could not accuse Israel of war crimes without some serious basis for doing so. By the way when he spoke of the Queen to me, Travers emphasized that the Irish resistance had killed her own cousin.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you received any pressure to recant the report?
COL. DESMOND TRAVERS: I’ve been subject to highly selective misrepresentation of my words. I’ll give you an example, if you’ve got time, yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sure.
COL. DESMOND TRAVERS: I’ve been criticized for comments I’ve made about the Israeli military, and I felt those comments were merited. But I also lived in Israel, and—as my family did. And my family were subjected to rocket fire from Lebanon. And, in fact, on one occasion, a rocket impacted about 60 meters from where we lived. And my wife and four children had to bear the consequences, because they were not Israeli citizens, so they didn’t have the shelter systems available to them that the Israeli citizens had. And I remember reflecting on the fact that I had signed up as a military officer to take risk, but they hadn’t signed up to take risk; they simply had signed up to accompany their father or their husband. And I made this comment, and I said, “With that experience behind me, I absolutely reject the idea of anybody firing rockets into another country, and in this case, firing into Israel.” That has never been referenced by any spokesperson from a particular position. But everything else I’ve said criticizing the actions of certain military elements in Gaza has been repeated ad nauseum, and selectively so. So I’m presumed to be prejudiced….
AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Desmond Travers, you’re Irish. Talk about the significance of this trip. Some have called it the most significant trip in—well, no one has been there—what, is this the first trip of—
COL. DESMOND TRAVERS: In a hundred years.
AMY GOODMAN:—British royalty in a century?
COL. DESMOND TRAVERS: Yeah, and it’s the first trip by British royalty into the Republic of Ireland other than her son visiting some years ago. It’s a hugely important event for us in Ireland, and for the Irish and for Britain. There’s no doubt about it. In fact, the day prior to her address there, I’d just like to remind you that she came to our Garden of Remembrance, where the principal monument there is a monument to acknowledge the dead, the fallen Irish, who usually fell fighting Britain or seeking Irish independence. And I must say, many of them made life extremely unpleasant for the British administration.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds, I hate to tell you.
COL. DESMOND TRAVERS: Right. So, she presented—put a wreath at that monument, and she bowed. Monarchs don’t bow. And to bow towards your enemies is an extraordinarily magnanimous gesture, and is one that we should take cognizance of when we’re talking about conflicts elsewhere in the world, especially in the Middle East.
