From just a quick look at the 575 pages of the report designed to establish what happened in Gaza in the 2008-
Every year, the UN devotes two thirds of its resolutions on human rights to condemn Israel.
2009 war, it is clear that the Commission set up by the United Nations during the ninth special session of the Human Rights Council in January 2009 was not at all interested in truth, but only in still another criminalization of Israel. The UN embodied, once again, an example of moralistic Palestinism that exploits the guilty feelings of the contemporary world to delegitimize the West. And it practically aims at the physical and institutional death of the Jewish State.
Every year, the UN devotes two thirds of its resolutions on human rights to condemn Israel; its General Assembly has already echoed with the anti-Semitic speeches of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and now it is proceeding with another version of the same thing by Judge Richard Goldstone, who is actually a Jew with a daughter who lives in Israel.
Let us proceed step by step. Israel attacked only because it was pushed into a corner by thirteen thousand missiles that have fallen on its territory since the year 2000. It asked so many times for the UN to stop Hamas after completely withdrawing from Gaza. But this terrorist organization aims at destroying all (all) Jewish people in the world and it is financed by Iran. In fact, it went on pursuing its task. Israel's appeals to the UN were received with a yawn similar to the one from Goldstone in front of Sderot citizen Noam Bedein, when Bedein testified before the commission on the suffering of people from his country.
Secondly, the report consistently refers to international law - whose lies will be mentioned later - and does not speak about Hamas' crimes. In fact, it does not link the war with the repeated bombing of Israel. Only Israel is to blame, and so it was right from the start; so much so that even anti-Israel people like the UN Commissioner Mary Robinson, the organizer of the Durban conference of 2001, refused to participate in the Committee, considering it "not balanced". It is evident instead that the main violators of the Geneva Convention are those who fight by shooting civilians, by strategically using their women and children as human shields, and by dressing their fighters as civilians. Hamas, in this case.
And so, Goldstone does not answer the question facing the contemporary world on how to fight in situations beyond the Geneva Convention. For example, as described by Lorenzo Cremonesi in the Corriere, terrorized people were obliged to protect Hamas men; they were kept prisoners in their homes, as human shields in schools, hospital, ambulances, etc. Goldstone condemns Israel for having fought in a situation of great difficulty in which its civilians were at stake. He forgets that the Hamas headquarters was located in the basement of the Shiba Hospital and that Israel did not touch it. The hospital was cynically used by the worst terrorists in the world.
Where did Goldstone obtain his information? He accused Israel of voluntarily hitting civilians and claimed around 1,200-1,400 deaths. Can this information be verified? The answer is that the report is full of conscious lies. The Commission was set up by people like Law Professor Christine Chinkin, who had "categorically rejected" Israel's right to self-defense before the survey. She already called Israel an "aggressor and perpetrator of war crimes".
As a study by Gerald Steinberg's NGO-Monitor points out, if we closely look at the sources consulted, we find that many cannot be identified. The others are simply the most politicized anti-Israeli NGOs: B'Tzelem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. They are mentioned 70 times, the Palestinian organization Al-Haq, 30 times, and so on.
The assumption that civilian places and people were intentionally hit is fraught with factual mistakes. For example, Abdullah Abdel Hamid Muamar, 22 years of age, who was killed, was defined by the Palestinian Center as "a student" and therefore a civilian. Also Human Rights Watch, another favorite source, defines him as an innocent victim. But according to a publication by the Al-Kassam Brigades, Muamar was a member of Hamas. He appears on an Arab website holding a Kassam rocket. According to a survey by the Israeli army, 564 victims were armed members of Hamas, 100 belonged to the Islamic Jihad. Members of Fatah, who were also present, were not counted.
The policemen of the Hamas regime, identified as civilians, accounted for 84% of the Hamas security mechanism. Among them was Muhammad El-Dasuqi, a member of the Resistance Committee, who was probably one of the terrorists who attacked an American Embassy convoy in 2003. The attack against the UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was initially described as a massacre, while later this was denied - according to some local sources, the school was not hit at all. The Israeli army targeted an adjacent facility sheltering Hamas militants.
These examples show that Goldstone has accepted the notion that those who do not wear a military uniform are victims. But this does not work. In general, according to data from the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya, as reported by the journalist Ben Dror Yemini, around 63%-75% of the victims of the Gaza war were killed because they were involved in the war: about 900 people and, unfortunately, civilians used as human shields have to be added to that statistic.
Hamas is, indeed, truly responsible for war crimes.
The above article was originally published in Il Giornale on 17 september 2009 and available on www.fiammanirenstein.com.
