Richard Goldstone is a fraud. Find and read:
GOLDSTONE : A CRITIQUE OF SELF-APOTHEOSIS by Ayal Rosenberg.

He basically chews out Goldstone for being a willing partner in apartheid South Africa.

haaretz.com/ha...

My point is simply that all of the bandwith is going to beating up on Goldstone, and I can agree with your every criticism and it doesn’t help in addressing the report. I suspect many informed people in other countries are prepared to agree that the UN has long had it in for Israel, but are not satisfied that this bias disposes of the Gaza controversy. In my own work, experience shows that judges really aren’t interested in defenses based on the other guy’s bias. They get that, they’ll even assume it arguendo– but they want substantive approaches to the issues.

At some point all of this leeches over into mere stubbornness and changing-the-subject. One infers that Israel can’t bear giving an inch of legitimacy, or the slightest appearance of it, to the UN, Goldstone, the human rights community, etc. The ambient emotions aren’t producing smart policy.

Re Noam’s point, I think it’s also problematic to announce, as you do, that the IDF cannot possibly have engaged in the conduct Goldstone describes. I hope official Israel avoids such comment. Very few countries, and perhaps only two– the US and Israel– deploy the world’s most advanced and lethal munitions on a regular basis in urban settings, against unscrupulous foes. The history in this country, dating back at least to Lt. Calley, counsels humility and the need to expose the military’s conduct to the world’s scutiny. This is not weakness, but its opposite.

The use of overwhelming force in highly populated environment, for any period of time, will have tragic outcomes, as the high civilian casualties in Gaza show. Let’s take a deep breath and examine what happened.

But I have every reason to be outraged by some of his unserious answers yesterday. Commando raids? There were 8 years of rockets that Israel couldn’t stop. You can bet there were commando raids during that time. Information unavailable? No, it was readily available. Etc.

It’s not an ad hominem attack to ask how a person conducting an investigation could ignore information that’s sitting right there. Nor is it when asking an investigator who openly admits that his witnesses were intimidated and who admits that one party was “shrewd” in its game handling of his investigation. These are valid and serious queries considering the seriousness and implications of his charges.

Please read this last paragraph and try to address it. I’m not asking to hear another fan in the stands tell us how, in hindsight, Israel should have done this or that. I think over time some serious questions and issues have been raised about this investigation. Goldstone may have decided to put himself out there to promote and defend his findings, but that doesn’t mean that he gets a pass.

Perhaps heaping abuse on Goldstone’s character is of interest in a Jewish-insidery sort of way. But it’s beside the point, and Israel’s friends do the country no service by making this controversy about him.

Israel not hvaing cooperated with Goldstone, and in the absence of a credible, independent investigation of his allegations, your post and the apologist commentary it exemplifies comes across as changing the subject. Attacking Goldstone for “immature petulance” is no way to respond to the very serious charges he made. Something far more substantive than what you and others offer is required.

The clock is ticking. Where’s the independent investigation? Where’s the point-by-point treatment of the specifics of Goldstone’s report?

Here’s more or less what you wrote:

Noam – more than anything it seems to me that you can’t even consider the possibility that a biased investigation mandated by a tarnished UN body that singles out one country while ignoring far worse activities by other countries is not the way to learn about alleged Israeli war crimes.

Dore Gold’s point was that aside from the army, the AG, the government and the High Court all have the ability to investigate whether something went wrong here. As you must know, the IDF handed the results of its investigations to Mazuz. The IDF also claimed no knowledge of 11 of the 36 incidents mentioned by Goldstone and is currently investigating them. Is it possible they are covering up? Yes. Is it possible they committed war crimes? Very possibly, since this is an unconventional war and sometimes things go very wrong in wartime. However, does the IDF resemble the military which is described in the Goldstone Report? Maybe you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge what we all know: the IDF is not even remotely close to the army described there.

(btw, asking the IDF to investigate itself is a joke. the army is known for its cover-ups)