
Richard Goldstone has changed his mind about the Gaza war. Should we? Goldstone is the South African judge who served as head of a panel appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council to look into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel's 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza. The report reached the damning conclusion that "disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy" on Israel's part. On this score, Goldstone has recanted. Writing in the Washington Post on April 1, he now says that Israel's own investigations "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."
Human rights groups and others who embraced the Goldstone report were unfazed. Writing in the Huffington Post, Media Matters' M. J. Rosenberg dismissed the change of heart as an "edit." In the Guardian, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that his organization had never accepted the claim of intentional targeting, and pointed out -- as others have -- that Goldstone did not retract many serious allegations against Israel, including "the indiscriminate use of heavy artillery and white phosphorous in densely populated areas."
That's true. It's also true that Israel has been dilatory -- and Hamas contemptuously indifferent -- about investigating its own behavior in Operation Cast Lead, as the Gaza invasion was called. But the difference between "deliberate policy" and unintended outcome is no mere edit. Goldstone does not state whether he now thinks that Israel was recklessly indifferent to that outcome or, as the Israelis themselves say, had little choice but to respond to Hamas's tactics in ways that caused civilian deaths and the massive destruction of property and livelihoods. This is no small difference. If it's the latter, the war in Gaza was an unavoidable tragedy. If it's the former, the war was an avoidable tragedy, and many of the alleged acts constitute war crimes.
This is not the place to re-litigate an endlessly litigated report. My own view, which I expressed in an essay in World Affairs Journal a year ago, is that the report made a strong case that "Israel pursued a policy of disproportionate destruction" of property, but not of "wanton killing." But the deeper question the report raised, I wrote, was, "Can Israel fight Hamas -- or can any state fight such an adversary -- without the means that the Goldstone Report insists that international humanitarian law prohibits?" Gabriela Shalev, Israel's former U.N. ambassador, has said that Goldstone's change of heart proves that "there is no way to deal with this terror other than the same way we did in Cast Lead."
I doubt that Goldstone would endorse that view; and even some Israeli supporters of Cast Lead have conceded that Israeli soldiers may have committed terrible acts, including "cold-blooded murders" of civilians. And Israel's destruction of Gaza's meager economic capacity, as documented in the Goldstone Report, is of a piece with its longstanding policy of depriving the area of basic economic goods in the hopes of discrediting Hamas in the eyes of the Gazan people (a policy that hasn't succeeded so far, and isn't likely to).
But if Israel didn't set out to kill civilians, then critics have to show that it could have ended the threat of further attacks from Gaza without using means, such as the shelling of urban areas, that were bound to cause significant civilian deaths -- without exposing Israeli soldiers to dangers that no responsible commander would permit. That's not an easy case to make. Even if you remove the reckless acts and the isolated crimes, Israel might still have killed many hundreds of civilians in the course of ending the threat from Gaza.
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