The other night the New School held a panel to bash the Goldstone Report on legalistic grounds. It is a mystery to me why a school known for its leftwing heritage would, when a landmark moral document is under attack by government officials, convene such a panel; and I blame the usual suspects, in a word– New York Establishment identification with Israel.
The panel was dominated by David Kretzmer, a law professor at Hebrew University who is still listed as a chairman of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. He had an irritated tone and after conceding that Gaza was troubling, kicked the Goldstone report around the room for half an hour. He said that Goldstone assumed things were planned when they had happened in the fog of war. He said that Goldstone had repeatedly slighted evidence that Hamas fighters had used civilian locations for cover. He said that Goldstone had ignored a report that Hamas leaders had hunkered down in the basement of El Shifa hospital.
Goldstone’s methodology appalled Kretzmer. He seemed angered that Goldstone had permitted himself to condemn Israeli actions outside the war frame: before the conflict in Gaza, and in the West Bank. "He called [his allegations] legal findings. What kind of burden of proof is being adduced?" Was it merely probable that the events had happened? Or likely? Or beyond a reasonable doubt?
Kretzmer accused Goldstone of "bias:" "There were two directly opposing narratives of this conflict. The mission itself was in absolutely no position to decide which narrative was the accepted narrative." The report was "removed from the reality as perceived by the vast majority of the public in Israel, that Israel was faced with this barrage of rockets."
Kretzmer was obviously in that reality himself, and seemed to defend the Israeli attack as proportional to those attacks. He said that the warnings that the Israelis dropped were effective and meaningful (in a place half the size of NYC, where there was nowhere to flee to). He said that Gaza is not occupied territory (when Israel controls 90 percent of the border and everything going in and out and the air space and sea too and it fires on farmers harvesting lettuce within a kilometer of the fence)…
The next speaker was from Human Rights Watch, Fred Abrahams, and said that Goldstone was "an incredibly important document" and was in agreement with several Goldstone’s findings, including the finding that Israel targeted at least 15 civilians when they were waving white flags. But Abrahams went with the flow, and he also ran down the report as flawed in many ways, chiefly on evidentiary grounds.
The third speaker, Ruti Teitel, a distinguished scholar of transitional justice, is a friend of mine, and she also trashed the report. She said that it was hurt by two large flaws: it cites a "melange" of legal frameworks–wartime humanitarian law on the one hand, and non-wartime human-rights law, say in the West Bank, on the other–and it cites varying standards of factfinding–including a standard Goldstone once expressed, that he’d seen things with his own eyes. To say that you’ve seen something with your own eyes and not to cite a standard of proof is "very problematic" in light of 21st century factfinding standards, Teitel said.
While admitting that Israel/Palestine is not her area, Teitel also had political problems with the report. She wondered why Goldstone would suggest that Gaza was occupied, and Hamas was not in control of the territory, when the whole point of international efforts right now is the two-state solution. So she exalted the "peace process" without seeming to recognize that the peace process has been going on for more than 20 years with only more Israeli expansion to show for it, and Palestinians have been promised a state for 62 years with Kosovo, Izbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bangladesh etc to show for it.
The panel demonstrated the difference between law and morality. The Goldstone Report is a moral outcry, Enough! It seemed that only one panelist had even been in Gaza since the war: Fred Abrahams. And Abrahams was the only one who seemed actually upset by the Gaza onslaught.
It is really amazing that the New School would hold such a panel and not allow someone to argue the other side, to stand up for Goldstone. That’s a disgrace. This is the reason that I had pushed for Norman Finkelstein to be on the panel. He’s been to Gaza, he’s about to publish a book on the massacre, he saw with his own eyes the destruction of factories that Kretzmer questioned–Kretzmer, who reflects the fearful hunkering down that is taking place today inside Israeli society, among even left-liberals who are afraid that the state’s legitimacy is under attack.
The panel basically accepted Kretzmer’s message: we had to respond some way. But any reasonable person seeing Gaza and observing the horrifying imbalance of forces and the inability of the people to escape and the wanton destruction of industry and government buildings is disturbed by what has happened and seeks an end to Israel’s impunity. This is why Goldstone wrote what he did. It is why Europe is up in arms, it is why the American Jewish community is fracturing on the left over Gaza, it is why good progressives like Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Alisa Solomon have been so outspoken; and it is why Medea Benjamin and Naomi Klein have thrown themselves into the issue.
There was no sense of that moral urgency in the panel, only in the restless audience. It took the first questioner, a tall older man, to scold the panel for not talking about the inhumane blockade, for not recognizing the persecution of an entire population that lies behind it.
Abrahams said, "We have called it collective punishment."
Why wasn’t this the thrust of the panel? Why when Goldstone is being undermined by the American government and the Israelis too is a panel convened to showcase an Israeli’s angry response to Goldstone? No, moderator Nehal Bhuta cut off first that questioner when he persisted, and then all questions after three or four. Bhuta was afraid of the audience and had warned us that the speakers were "sober." The audience wasn’t in that kind of mood, and who can blame them?
