This time we went too far by Norman Finkelstein

Author:Norman Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

People should know who has committed what crimes. This will show what is the truth and what is the untruth and the poison will come to the surface. Just now people only make guesses while the poison works within.

Mahatma Gandhi (14 April 1947)1

In April 2009 the president of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed a “fact finding mission” to “investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”2

Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was named head of the Mission. The Mission’s original mandate was to scrutinize only Israeli violations of human rights during the assault on Gaza, but Goldstone made his acceptance of the job conditional on broadening the mandate to include violations on all sides. The council president invited Goldstone to write the mandate himself, which Goldstone did and which the president then accepted. “It was very difficult to refuse...a mandate that I’d written for myself,” Goldstone later observed.

Nonetheless Israel did not cooperate with the Mission on the grounds of its alleged bias.3 In September 2009 the longawaited report of the Goldstone Mission was released.4 It was a searing indictment not just of the Gaza invasion but also of the ongoing Israeli occupation.

The Goldstone Report found that much of the death and destruction Israel inflicted on the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza was premeditated. The assault was said to be anchored in a military doctrine that “views disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals,” and was “designed to have inevitably dire consequences for the non-combatants in Gaza.”5 The “disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians” were part of a “deliberate policy,” as were the “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.”6 Although Israel justified the attack on grounds of self-defense against Hamas rocket attacks, the Goldstone Report pointed to a different motive. The “primary purpose” of the economic blockade Israel imposed on Gaza was to “bring about a situation in which the civilian population would find life so intolerable that they would leave (if that were possible) or turn Hamas out of office, as well as to collectively punish the civilian population,” and concomitantly the invasion was “aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support.”7 The Report concluded that the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.

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