GLADSTONE REVISITED

HEAR HIM AT: http://www.unwatch.org/site/c.bdKKISNqEmG/b.5537773/k.291E/SelfDefense_is_not_a_Crime_of_War.htm

British Colonel: IDF Safeguarded Civilian Lives in Gaza
by Hana Levi Julian UK Colonel: IDF's Morals Highest

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) voted Friday to endorse the Goldstone Report that accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza -- but at least one British army commander fought hard to set the record straight.

Commander (ret.) Richard Kemp told the UNHRC that the IDF made a strong effort last winter to safeguard the lives of Gaza's civilians during its counter-terrorist operation.

"During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare," testified Colonel Kemp. "Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population."

The former commander of the British forces serving in Afghanistan listed his military credentials at the start of his testimony before the UNHRC vote endorsing the Goldstone Report.

The findings of the UN investigation into Israel's war against the constant Hamas rocket fire aimed at Negev residents may soon be used as evidence against Israel at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

The UN committee, led by retired South African jurist Richard Goldstone, concluded that Israel was guilty of committing war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, during Operation Cast Lead. The report also said the Hamas terrorists who control Gaza "may have" been guilty of war crimes as well.

But Commander Kemp had no doubt, testifying before the UN commission that voted Friday to endorse the report, that Israel had done its best to avoid harming any civilians. He told the commission that Palestinian Authority Arabs in Gaza who had spoken with the Goldstone commission may not have told the whole story -- or the true story at all.

"Hamas, like Hizbullah, are expert at driving the media agenda," he said. "Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents."

Commander Kemp noted that the international media and international human rights groups tend to have the "automatic, Pavlovian presumption... that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights" -- a challenge, he said, that the British do not face.

"The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over two million leaflets and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties," he said.

"During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza," Kemp reminded the commission. "To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks."

Commander Kemp acknowledged that civilians had been killed, but pointed out that "war is chaos and full of mistakes." He added that Israel was not the only country to face such a situation: "There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes."
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PA Official: We Have No 'Hard Evidence' of Israeli 'War Crimes'

by David Lev

(IsraelNN.com)

In an interview, PA Justice Minister Ali Al-Khashan said that 'we do not have any documentation for the Israeli crimes.'

A Palestinian Authority official has admitted that while the PA has been urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to pursue war crimes charges against IDF troops, the only evidence the PA has been able to supply is the Goldstone panel's report, which was approved by the United Nations Human Rights Commission last week.

PA Justice Minister Ali Al-Khashan said Saturday that anyone expecting quick action by the court on the alleged Israeli war crimes needed to "have patience," because "we do not have any documentation for the Israeli crimes." He said that the PA was hoping to join the ICC in order to more easily pursue cases against Israel, and that such membership would give the PA "the ability to confront with peaceful follow-up the revelation of Israeli war crimes."

"The Goldstone Report set out mechanisms [leading to the prosecution of Israeli war criminals], and the Human Rights Council set out mechanisms that clarified those steps," Al-Khasham said. "Now the PA is carrying out those steps."

In order to join the Court, the PA must adopt the Rome Statute, which forms the basis in international law for the ICC. In order to become a member of the court, nations or entities (such as the PA) must agree to allow the Court to prosecute its citizens, and to voluntarily turn them over to international authorities for trial and punishment.
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GOLDSTONE BACKTRACKING?

But what of Richard Goldstone himself? In addition to his disappointment with the UNHRC resolution, his report's credibility was further undermined in an interview he gave to The Forward, where he stated:

If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven. I wouldn't consider it in any way embarrassing if many of the allegations turn out to be disproved.

Writing in The Sunday Times, R.W. Johnson says:

Goldstone's behaviour will not surprise those who have followed his career. As a student in South Africa he took the anti-apartheid side and many expected him to do the same as a lawyer, for a small cadre of liberal lawyers were crucial to the defence of the regime’s political opponents. Instead, Goldstone kept his head down and avoided annoying the apartheid government, devoting himself to commercial cases. Then, as the political situation changed, so did Goldstone. Entrusted by President de Klerk with a commission to investigate the causes of violence, Goldstone turned up damning evidence against the apartheid regime but refused to investigate the ANC's armed wing. ...

Throughout his career, Goldstone has been accused of cutting corners because of ambition, and critics say his Gaza commission has set a new low. That a Jewish judge, barred from entering Israel for accepting a commission biased against the state, should write a report based largely on interviews with Hamas which panders to anti-Zionist (even anti-Semitic) opinion seems unbeatable.

MEDIA REACTION

Does your local media get it? The Washington Times does:

There is no moral equality between Hamas and Israel any more than there is between al Qaeda and the United States. Yet under the Goldstone logic, terrorists and sovereign states are identical. The incidental, unintentional civilian deaths Israel caused during the Gaza conflict are condemned as war crimes; the widespread and intentional Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians are basically ignored. The Goldstone model makes it impossible for civilized states to strike effectively against the world's barbarians who are fighting a shadow war against decency that views innocent noncombatants as both legitimate targets and useful shields.

The consequences of the Goldstone Report will affect Israel in the media and diplomatic sphere for the foreseeable future. Be prepared to take action by writing to your local media outlet, pointing out the both the flaws in the Goldstone Report and the dirty politics and anti-Israel bias of the UN and the Human Rights Council.

Check out Understanding the Goldstone Report and also read HonestReporting's Special Report - The Goldstone Report: Rewarding Palestinian Terror - for more information. We are continuing to update the Further Resources section at the bottom of that communique as more resources become available.
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* OCTOBER 19, 2009, 9:34 A.M. ET

Israel, the U.S. and the Goldstone Report
Joining the U.N. Human Rights Council was a mistake Obama should correct.
By JOHN BOLTON

The U.N.'s Human Rights Council (HRC) voted overwhelmingly on Friday to endorse the recommendations of the lopsidedly anti-Israel Goldstone Report. The report, named for former South African judge Richard Goldstone, who chaired the underlying investigation, concluded that Israel's 2008-2009 military campaign against the terrorist group Hamas was actually aimed against Gaza's residents as a whole. Thus it was an illegitimate exercise of "collective punishment," an extraordinarily amorphous legal concept.

The report alleges numerous specific human rights violations by both Israel and Hamas. But by attempting to criminalize Israel's strategy of crippling Hamas, the report in effect declared the entire antiterrorism campaign to be a war crime. Mr. Goldstone recommended that Israel and the Palestinians should each conduct their own investigations, failing which the Security Council should refer the entire matter to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution.

In the month since the report's release, it has roiled the Middle East peace process. An Israeli spokesman said "it will make it impossible for us to take any risks for the sake of peace," perhaps foreshadowing Israeli withdrawal from negotiations while the report remains under active U.N. consideration.

The HRC resolution endorsing the report's recommendations repeatedly lacerated Israel, leading Mr. Goldstone himself to cringe, saying he was "saddened" the resolution contained "not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report." A U.S. State Department spokesman conceded that the adopted text "went beyond even the scope of the Goldstone Report itself."

The U.N. General Assembly created the HRC on March 15, 2006, to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, which had spent much of its final years concentrating on Israel and the U.S. rather than the world's real human rights violators. The Bush administration voted against establishing this body and declined to join it, believing, correctly, that it would not be an improvement over its predecessor. President Barack Obama changed course, and the U.S. won election to the HRC in May. Mr. Obama argued that engagement would be more effective than shunning the HRC and attempting to delegitimize it.

The Goldstone Report thus provides a stark test of Mr. Obama's analysis. Predictably, the administration blamed the report's underlying mandate and its stridently anti-Israel tilt on America's earlier absence from the HRC when the investigation was authorized and launched. Yet the new administration's diplomacy had no discernible impact on the HRC's disgraceful resolution.

Twenty-five of the HRC's 47 members voted for the resolution (including Russia and China), six voted against (Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine and the U.S.), and 11 abstained (Japan, South Korea and several European governments among them).

Five didn't vote at all, including Great Britain and France. Press reports indicated that London saw its inaction as a "favor" to Israel, a position simultaneously inexplicable and gutless. It is hard to know just how much real politicking the Obama administration did before this vote, but the loss of key allies is telling.

The Goldstone Report has important implications for America. In the U.N., Israel frequently serves as a surrogate target in lieu of the U.S., particularly concerning the use of military force pre-emptively or in self-defense. Accordingly, U.N. decisions on ostensibly Israel-specific issues can lay a predicate for subsequent action against, or efforts to constrain, the U.S. Mr. Goldstone's recommendation to convoke the International Criminal Court is like putting a loaded pistol to Israel's head—or, in the future, to America's.

Mr. Obama has now met the new HRC, same as the old HRC, thus producing a "teachable moment," a phrase he often uses. Quasi-religious faith in "engagement" and the U.N. has run into empirical reality. When the administration picks itself up off the ground, it should become more cognizant of that organization's moral and political limitations.

Although it will be hard for Mr. Obama to swallow, the logical response to Friday's debacle is to withdraw from and defund the HRC. Otherwise the Goldstone Report will merely be the beginning, next time perhaps with Washington as its unmistakable target.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
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Please see the article below, an opinion piece published in yesterday's New York Times by Robert L. Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, who sharply criticizes the organization he created for "helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state."

October 20, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN

AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group's critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them - through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag - and the millions in China's laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world - many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch's Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch's criticism.

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare."

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.

Robert L. Bernstein, the former president and chief executive of Random House, was the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998.