In Israel, Goldstone's Gaza war retraction triggers 'earthquake' of vindication

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Mr. Goldstone, who headed a panel of the United Nations Human Rights Council that made the accusations in more than 500 pages worth of reports in 2009, wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece published Friday that Israeli inquires into the reports' allegations have made it clear that its army didn’t intentionally target Gaza civilians. He shifted criticism to the militant Islamist group Hamas for "heinous" acts of shooting rockets at Israeli cities and for refusing to investigate itself.

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"The most serious of accusation was that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli United Nations Ambassador who debated Goldstone in 2009. "It was like a blood libel for the Israel Defense Force, and contributed directly to the global effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. This is an important turning point."

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Those who are anti-Israel have been pointing at this report for nearly two years and now it comes out that the judge at the head of the report has now repudiated the findings and is now pointing blame where it truly belongs... at Hamas in the Gaza Strip...

I'm not sure this was an actual retraction, being that the report always underlined that Israel didn't cooperate, and that he was forced to make his recommendation with a huge hole in the data, due to this. Now that Israel has conducted such investigations (as the report recommended) it's clear they did not target civilians, as a matter of policy. Also, it never acted as if it was a judiciary, deciding guilt (so there is nothing to retract), and continuously outlined that they were only making recommendations for the need to hold a real investigation that could establish such

from Goldstones op-ed piece: "Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank. We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing. "


"As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted."

Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes - The Washington Post