Richard Goldstone told Newsweek magazine in a May 27th interview that he “doubts” Israel will ever launch another “Operation Cast Lead”-type assault because of the ramifications of his report. Goldstone told Dan Ephron that Israeli military lawyers are “on notice more than they were. If it achieves nothing else, I think it’s worth that.”
We can only hope that Goldstone is right. But how many more “Operation Mini Cast Leads” (as Gideon Levy put it) will there be?
The Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla has vindicated Goldstone’s report and his central claim that Israel used disproportionate force and deliberately attacked civilians in the Gaza assault—just as Israel, albeit on a much smaller scale, did in the massacre aboard the flotilla.
Israel is now facing another international, United Nations-led independent investigation of the events that led to the killing of at least 9 people and the injury of dozens more aboard the Mavi Marmara. The U.N. Human Rights Council lopsidedly passed a resolution today that authorizes “an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international law, including international humanitarian aid and human rights law, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian assistance.”
The resolution passed with 32 countries voting in favor, 9 abstaining, and 3 voting against: the United States, Canada and Holland.
Once again, the United States has proven that it’s on the wrong side of history.
The U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Council said that the U.S. opposed the resolution because “it creates an international mechanism before giving the responsible government the opportunity to investigate the incident itself."
What a joke.
Israel has already had ample opportunity to investigate themselves after the Goldstone report called for independent, impartial investigations, but they have failed. Here’s an excerpt from an April 2010 Human Rights Watch report titled “Turning a Blind Eye: Impunity for Laws-of-War Violations during the Gaza War”:
Israel has failed to conduct credible investigations into policies authorized by senior levels of the country’s political and military leadership that may have led to violations of the laws of war.
There’s nothing more to say. This time won’t be different. The Obama administration is completely out of touch with reality.
