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Goldstone U-turn on war crimes as Israel requests dropping of UN Gaza report


On the basis of Goldstone's about turn on the Gaza war in which he now claims in a Washington Post article that 'civilians were not deliberately targeted as a matter of policy', the Israelis are asking for the Goldstone Report to be withdrawn. What has led Goldstone to change his mind on the matter?

He draws attention to the case of the al-Simouni family. Twenty nine members of the family were wiped out by IDF shelling. An investigation is underway by the IDF but no report has so far emerged. Goldstone describes this delay as 'frustrating' but then goes on to say, with no evidence to support his position, that"
While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.
This is an incredible leap of faith given the extremely poor record of the Israeli military in disciplining or prosecuting its soldiers. It would appear the harassment, slurs and threats aimed at Goldstone have had an effect on his commitment to pursue justice. See the pertinent excerpt from the Washington Post article below:
We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy. more
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