It’s finally happened. After being pummeled and bashed, defamed and defiled for nearly 18 months, the name “Richard Goldstone” has finally been demoted to joke status in Israel. And the joker was none other than a Supreme Court justice, one of the 14 people most responsible for guarding the sanctity of law in Israel.
Here’s the set up. Yesterday, Yesh Gvul, Israel’s most prominent conscientious objector group, petitioned the country’s Supreme Court to declare General Yoav Galant “unworthy” of his appointment as the IDF’s new chief of staff. Their argument: the good general is suspected of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead.
Galant, for those who don’t remember the name, was the architect of Israel’s 22-day invasion of Gaza. As head of the Southern Command, he was the one who planned and directed Cast Lead and argued for even more aggressive action – a role that should, by many accounts, among them the Goldstone Report, have opened him up to prosecution for war crimes. In Israel, however, it earned him a promotion to the post of chief of staff of the Israeli military.
All this might be cruel joke enough, but yesterday Justice Asher Grunis took the laughs even farther when he offered this quip after refusing to entertain Yesh Gvul’s petition against Galant: ”Perhaps we should appoint Judge Goldstone as the next IDF Chief of Staff?”
Never mind that Goldstone’s legal judgment was respected enough to earn him the position of chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. And never mind that the whole purpose of his report on the Gaza Conflict was to try to assert the rule of law over the brutality of war, to say that war (and those who inflict it on others) is not above the law. When the very people charged with protecting our laws become the first to deride them, there’s really not much left to do, but cry.
Lizzy Ratner is the co-editor of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
