[THS] Robert Fisk: Israel Should Pay Attention to a Man of Justice

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090930_israel_should_pay_attention_to_criticism_from_its_own_people/

Israel Should Pay Attention to a Man of Justice
Posted on Sep 30, 2009

The site of conflict: Rising smoke is seen in the Gaza Strip after an Israeli airstrike on
Dec. 28, 2008.

By Robert Fisk

This article was originally published in The Independent.

I met Judge Richard Goldstone at The Hague at the height of the Bosnian war, a
small, dapper man whose belief in the righteousness of justice shone through his
every word.

As head of the War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia, he pursued the blood-
drenched gangsters of the Balkans – Croat Catholic, Bosnian Muslim, Serb Orthodox –
with Nuremberg-like persistence. He believed that one day even Slobodan Milosevic
would be brought to book. I doubted this. But he was right, as they say, and I was
wrong. He was Jewish – and not afraid to talk of his hatred of apartheid in his native
South Africa – and I thought he was a fine man.

So would he be pissed on by the Israelis when he investigated the crimes of the
winter war in Gaza? Or would Israel – just this once – desist from its usual venom for
all critics if this great jurist produced a report that blamed Israel as well as Hamas for
crimes against humanity? Not because he was Jewish. Not because he drew the
sword of justice on behalf of the UN. But because he was a patently decent and fair
man. “I accepted with hesitation my United Nations mandate,” he wrote last week,
“because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle
that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected
from harm.”

Not a hope, of course. Israeli investigations of the Gaza war, its government officials
announced, were “a thousand times” fairer than the Goldstone investigation – a
preposterous claim, given Israel’s constant inability to conduct fair inquiries of its own
– and that his mission “gave legitimacy to the Hamas terrorist organisation”. The
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that 1,387 Palestinians were killed in the
Gaza war, more than 770 of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis were killed, four by their
own troops, three of the others Israeli Arabs. Goldstone bitterly condemned Hamas
for firing at civilians – from civilians areas of Gaza – but Chapter 11 of his report, for
example, found that Israel shelled a house in which Palestinian civilians had been
forced to gather, intentionally bombed a hospital with white phosphorous shells, shot
civilians who were waving white flags and refused to allow wounded to be evacuated.

But no, Israel – as unwilling to accept criticism as Hamas – which, typically and
cynically, washed its own dirty hands of the report, even though it murdered at least
40 suspected Palestinian collaborators while killing only six of its military enemies –
wouldn’t face up to Goldstone’s conclusions, wouldn’t accept that the casualties of
this monstrous war were disproportionate. Israel’s response wasn’t disproportionate.
It never was.

This nonsense is unworthy of a grown-up nation. For not long before the Gaza war,
Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli army northern commander, defined his doctrine very
carefully. “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which
shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction
 This isn’t a
suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.” No wonder the world
watches, amazed, at Israel’s response to Goldstone’s conclusions. And the United
States – which, of course, once defined Hiroshima as “a military base” – was either
silent or took Israel’s side. Barack Obama’s UN ambassador, Susan Rice, condemned
the Goldstone investigation with the pathetic (and, again, typical) remark that “our
view is that we have to remain focused on the future”.

But these things come by the bucketful. Take the Toronto Film Festival that ended
this week. A group of eight actresses, actors and activists objected to the festival for
embracing a city-to-city spotlight with Tel Aviv just a few months after the Gaza
slaughter, accusing the Canadian organisers of helping to wash Israel’s image after
the bloodbath. They weren’t trying to boycott the Israeli films at the festival – and by
the way, I urge readers to watch the Israeli film Lebanon, filmed almost entirely
inside a tank, when it comes your way – and five of the eight letter-signers were
Jewish, one an Israeli.

It mattered not, of course. They were accused of trying to organise a racist boycott,
abused as hypocrites, censors and – since slanders are now part of the grammar of
Israel’s so-called supporters – anti-Semites. Naomi Klein, one of the most brilliant of
North America’s journalists, was abused in Canada’s National Post (“the strange,
enduring rage of Naomi Klein”), thus cementing the paper’s role as Canada’s version
of the Jerusalem Post.

But there was just one little hiccup for the protesters and their letter. I noticed Jane
Fonda’s name among them. Fonda? Remember little Jane when she outraged her
friends by visiting North Vietnam during America’s own disproportionate war in
South-east Asia? Tough little Jane, we thought then. But I went back to my files
(paper, of course) and discovered that doughty Jane turned up in Lebanon in 1982
when Israel was besieging Beirut – with plenty of white phosphorous shells falling
among civilians, of course – to entertain the Israeli soldiers whose war was to claim
17,000 lives. According to Yediot Ahronot (4 July 1982, if readers want to check it
out), she “expressed her identification with Israel’s struggle against Palestinian
terror
”, later announcing her “unqualified support for Israel”, attributing protests at
the invasion to “anti-Semitism”. (Please read Al-Hamishmar of 5 December 1982.)

Years later, she turned up in Egypt to marvel at the temples of Luxor, but refused to
take questions from me on her enthusiasm for the 1982 Israeli invaders. But then,
bingo, up she pops in Toronto. Until last week, when she said she’d signed the letter
“without reading it carefully enough
 some of the words in the protest letter did not
come from my heart
 Many (Israeli) citizens now suffered from post-traumatic stress
disorder
” The letter did not “hear the narratives of both sides” and could be
“inflammatory”.

Ye gods! With Jane as a friend, you don’t need enemies. But given her previous
behaviour and now this grovelling backtrack, you have to admit that the Toronto
protesters must have some right on their side. Like Judge Richard Goldstone.