Comments (0)Goldstone Report’s Ugly Politics
October 2, 2009Dr. Robert O. Freedman
Special to the Jewish Times
The recently released report of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on last winter’s war between Israel and Hamas, which was chaired by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, condemns both Israel and Hamas for “war crimes” and possibly “crimes against humanity.”
However, the bulk of the blame in its 575 pages is on Israel. Why the clear bias?
• The UNHRC’s long-term bias against Israel, both now and previously as the U.N. Nations Commission on Human Rights;
• the context of the Israeli invasion of Gaza; and
• the dynamics of military combat in urban areas against guerrilla forces.
UNHRC’s History: The UNHRC, originally formed to protect human rights, has instead chosen to single out Israel. Despite an estimated 400,000 civilians killed in Sudan’s Darfur region and tens of thousands more killed in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan, the UNHRC regularly castigates Israel for human rights violations; other countries killing civilians during armed conflicts escape condemnation.
The reason is that the UNHCR has become politicized; it is yet another battlefield in the Arab-Israeli conflict with Palestinians and other Arabs constantly bring charges against Israel.
With human rights violators such as China, Cuba, Russia, Malaysia and Egypt as UNHCR members, it is not surprising that politics dominates the Council’s discussions.
By 2006 the UNHCR’s anti-Israeli bias had become so bad that the then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan criticized it for “disproportionate focus on violations by Israel” while neglecting areas in “graver” crisis.
Neither that nor a similar statement one year later by the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had much effect. So it is not surprising that a UNHCR organized investigatory commission would have an anti-Israeli bias.
Reinforcing the commission’s anti-Israel bias is that a top investigator, Marc Garlasco, was revealed as a collector of Nazi memorabilia while another, Christine Chinkin, had accused Israel of war crimes as the fighting was ongoing in January 2009.
Gaza War’s Context: The Goldstone Report concentrates on a number of cases where it accuses Israel of “disproportionate” force and “deliberately targeting civilians” — both violations of international law.
Missing was a detailed analysis of why Israel invaded Gaza. After suffering no fewer than 8,000 rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza since 2001 and a sharp escalation of attacks after Hamas unilaterally terminated a six-month cease fire in December 2008, Israel chose to invade Gaza; the attacks were making life in the Jewish state from the Gaza border to Beersheba unbearable as civilians were regularly forced to flee to shelters.
Under such circumstances, an impartial commission might well have found Israel’s military response justified self-defense. However, the Goldstone Commission was far from impartial.
Urban Warfare: Urban areas are among the most difficult to wage war, especially against guerrilla forces often hiding among civilians. There were numerous pictures and reports of Hamas fighters firing rockets from Gazan civilian areas .
Any commander leading his troops into combat has two central tasks — successfully completing his mission and protecting his soldiers. In the Gaza fighting, with Hamas fighters hiding in houses and with fortified positions near schools, each Israeli commander faced a very difficult choice — destroying the enemy with tank or artillery fire, or risking increased casualties among his own troops in close-in combat.
However, a larger moral issue not covered in the Goldstone report is which side bears the greater moral onus: Hamas, which deliberately fired mortars and rockets at Israeli civilians, or Israel, which sought to suppress such fire by invading Gaza and in the process killed Palestinian civilians, albeit not deliberately as the Goldstone report alleges.
Given the evident bias of the UNHCR, it is difficult to give its report on the Israeli-Hamas war much credence. Whether the decision of the Obama administration to rejoin the UNHCR — the George W. Bush Administration had boycotted it — will change the dynamics of future UNHCR investigatory commissions, or even the debates on the council, are very open questions.
Dr. Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor Emeritus at Baltimore Hebrew University and is currently Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.