– Edward Said
(This article is an excerpted version of an article appearing on the blog Wide Asleep in America). On the afternoon of November 3, 2009, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of House Resolution 867 (H.Res.867), a bill that urges both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the "Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict," referred to commonly as the "Goldstone Report."
In their successful effort to ( once again) shield the State of Israel from any and all scrutiny or criticism over its illegal use of collective punishment and excessive force against an imprisoned, impoverished, and defenseless civilian population, Congressional supporters of H.Res.867 sought to discredit the UN’s 575-page report of meticulously-documented human rights violations.
Goldstone’s impeccable and unimpeachable credentials cannot be overstated. Goldstone was responsible for uncovering and publicizing allegations of the extensive violence committed by Apartheid South African security forces, paving the way for subsequent investigations by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after South African democratization. He served as a judge for the Constitutional Court of South Africa, chairman of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and was a member of the International Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA), tasked to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals who had emigrated to Argentina. In 2004/5, he was a member of the Volker Committee investigation into the UN’s Iraq oil-for-food program.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that, according to a lecture Goldstone delivered in Jerusalem in 2000, he "believes bringing war criminals to justice stems from the lessons of the Holocaust," which he described as "the worst war crime in the world." In Goldstone’s view, the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the lessons learned by the international community in the wake of their discovery have "shaped legal protocol on war" and "constituted the basis for the concept of universal jurisdiction."
Not only this, but in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, his own daughter Nicole (once a resident of Israel) even described Goldstone, who is Jewish, as "a Zionist" who "loves Israel." Goldstone currently serves as a trustee at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the harrowing conclusions and reasonable recommendations of the UN commission were quickly denounced by many US officials, most of whom had not even read the report in its entirety; their smug derision of the dispassionate facts presented in the report made perfectly clear their intention to cover-up Israeli war crimes and, in so doing, legitimize and endorse Israel’s ongoing suppression, dehumanization, starvation, occupation, and slaughter of the Palestinian people.
US House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and Ranking Member Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), rushed to Israel’s defense. This is the same team that, almost two weeks into the Israeli bombardment, co-sponsored House Resolution 34
, a Pelosi-led non-binding declaration that "recogniz[ed] Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza" and "reaffirm[ed] the United States strong support for Israel."The resolution made no mention whatsoever to the crippling Israeli blockade, the devastating and ceaseless air and ground assaults by the Israeli military, or the fact that it was the IDF that had, in fact, broken the ceasefire in the first place. The resolution passed almost unanimously (390-5) on the very same day that the Palestinian death toll in Gaza reached 765, half of them children and women, with thousands more wounded, including hundreds in critical condition. As Congress affirmed its "vigorous support [of] and unwavering commitment" to Israel, municipal buildings, homes, and mosques in Gaza were shelled relentlessly by the Israeli military using US weaponry. Five days earlier, the Israeli Air Force had launched an attack on a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, killing over 40 people and wounding over 100 more.
The resolution itself neither addresses nor disputes any of the Goldstone Report’s actual findings or conclusions. Instead, via a series of deliberately misleading, factually inaccurate, and unrelated "whereas" clauses, it seeks to delegitimize the entire Fact Finding Mission as a whole, oftentimes personally attacking its members in an effort to show anti-Israel tendencies or bias. What the resolution actually amounts to is a repetition of Israeli propaganda and Zionist apologia masquerading as a legal and moral defense of indefensible Israeli military aggression.
The wide support it received in Congress demonstrates that the United States House of Representatives is determined only to promote human rights and international law with regards to how it relates to the protection of Israeli Jews and, in equal measure, proves its unequivocal and unabashed disregard, if not outright contempt, for the rights and lives of Palestinians.
The text of H.Res.867 is rife with blatant inaccuracies, decontextualized mischaracterizations, and a thorough lack of historical perspective. Many of these factual errors were addressed and corrected in a letter written by Judge Goldstone himself to two Congressional opponents of his report, Howard Berman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on October 29.
For instance, in one of its 33 "whereas" clauses, the House resolution claims:
Palestinian rocket attacks, in addition to Israeli military operations, were clearly included in this mandate. Additionally, had those who wrote and supported the House resolution actually read the contents of Goldstone Report rather than simply making things up, they would have been well aware that, in addition to Palestinian rocket attacks and their consequences being mentioned at length in the report’s Introduction, there is also an entire 20-page chapter (XXIV, p.346-366) entitled "The Impact on Civilians of Rocket and Mortar Attacks by Palestinian Armed Groups on Southern Israel," which practically begins with the following statement: "Since April 2001, Palestinian armed groups have launched more than 8,000 rockets and mortars from Gaza into southern Israel."
After exhaustively documenting the impact of these rocket attacks, including Israeli fatalities, physical injuries, psychological trauma, mental health, damage to property, the impact on the right to education and on the economic and social life of affected communities (both Israeli and Palestinian within southern Israel), the Mission states that "There is no justification in international law for the launching of rockets and mortars that cannot be directed at specific military targets into areas where civilian populations are located" and concludes that because these rockets cannot be aimed at specific targets, "one of the primary purposes of these continued attacks is to spread terror," an act which it explicitly states is "prohibited under international humanitarian law." (A/HRC/12/48, p.365)
…From the facts available, the Mission finds that the rocket and mortars attacks, launched by Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, have caused terror in the affected communities of southern Israel and in Israel as a whole. Furthermore, it is the Mission’s view that the mortars and rockets are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, respectively. This indicates the commission of an indiscriminate attack on the civilian population of southern Israel, a war crime, and may amount to crimes against humanity. These attacks have caused loss of life and physical and mental injury to civilians and damage to private houses, religious buildings and property and have eroded the economic and cultural life of the affected communities." (A/HRC/12/48, p.366) (emphasis mine)
The resolution and its supporters repeatedly refer to the Goldstone Report as "one-sided," referencing comments made by both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice, whocalled its initial mandate "unbalanced, one sided and basically unacceptable." However, as Goldstone himself explains, "the House resolution fails to mention that notwithstanding my repeated personal pleas to the Government of Israel, Israel refused all cooperation with the Mission. Among other things, I requested the views of Israel with regard to the implementation of the mandate and details of any issues that the Government of Israel might wish us to investigate," continuing,
So what was Congressman Berman’s response? "Justice Goldstone is correct. The Government of Israel decided not to cooperate with the Mission, based on its biased mandate, as well as the UNHRC’s long history of anti-Israel bias. I find that position, at the least, understandable."
The Mission found that Israeli operations, in many cases, constituted "an assault on the dignity of the people" and included not only "the use of human shields and unlawful detentions sometimes in unacceptable conditions, but also in the vandalizing of houses when occupied and the way in which people were treated when their houses were entered. The graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans, all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population." ( A/HRC/12/48, p.407)
Because the Israeli government has consistently claimed that all phases of "Operation Cast Lead" were thoroughly and extensively planned, that legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign, and that, according to the Government of Israel, almost no mistakes made during the planning or operation itself, the Goldstone Report concludes that "what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was 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."
Clearly, these revelations are far too damning for the US Congress, which funds the Israeli military apparatus to the tune of $3 billion each year and provides devastating weaponry with which to slaughter Palestinians by the hundreds, to bear and therefore must be buried. With this in mind, it is all too obvious that H.Res.867 is meant to be a distraction from the truth; it is a deliberate and disingenuous deflection of well-documented, substantiated, and widely corroborated evidence of Israeli war crimes that, in its reflexive self-righteousness, reveals itself to be no more than a study in double standards, moral relativism and selective outrage.
As such, the resolution and its uncreative backers in the House, resorted to obvious repetitions of hasbara in a well-coordinated effort to silence all criticism of Israeli actions, cover-up evidence of Israeli war crimes, and condone any and all military aggression, invasion, and occupation – no matter how illegal, inhumane, or truculent – committed by any so-called "democracy" in the name of "self-defense."
When the resolution made it to the floor of the House Congress members from all over the country lined up to lend their vocal support to Reps. Berman and Ros-Lehtinen and the resolution. They all basically said the same thing: that the wicked, blood-lusting terrorists of Hamas used Palestinians as human shields and that a victimized, peace-loving, democratic Israel, via the findings of the Goldstone Report, is being unfairly condemned for merely acting out of self-defense.
Ros-Lehtinen, in her defense of H.Res.867, called the Goldstone Report a "575-page hatchet job" that "persecut[ed] Israel for defending herself," claiming that the Mission "disregarded evidence that Hamas and other such groups in Gaza used innocents as human shields and deliberately launched attacks from schools, from hospitals, from mosques." ( Congressional Record H12234 11/3/09
)By the time these statements were made, Judge Goldstone had already addressed them thusly: "It is factually incorrect to state that the Report denied Israel the right of self-defense," he wrote in his letter to Berman. "The report examined how that right was implemented by the standards of international law."
Not only does the United States House of Representatives not accurately represent the views of the American people, let alone those of the rest of world, it is – unequivocally – no home to morality.
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