The U.S. State Department said Wednesday it is "concerned by some of the conclusions” in the United Nations Human Rights Council report, which strongly condemned Israel for alleged "war crimes" in the Operation Cast Lead campaign against Hamas terror last January.
The statement was the first official statement by a Western country following the report from the panel, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa.
Jewish groups, except for pro-Arab organizations such as B’Tselem, were almost 100 percent critical of Goldstone's heavy-handed criticism of Israel. "This is a report born of bias," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League. "What do you do with an initiative born of bigotry?"
The American Jewish Committee stated, “The Council has consistently demonized Israel, while giving a free pass to some of the world’s worst tyrants, from Sudan to Iran." The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) condemned the report “in the strongest possible terms” and called it “outrageous.”
The strongly pro-Israel group blasted Goldstone and his associates for issuing a document that “claimed to find no conclusive evidence that Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields in the fighting; copied major, politicized distortions of international legal norms habitually made by anti-Israel NGOs; falsely reclassified Hamas personnel as civilian police in order to indict Israel for legitimate assaults upon these forces; and invented non-existent legal obligations of which it then proceeded to find Israel in breach.”
It noted that the U.N. Human Rights Council established four years ago is dominated by dictatorial regimes, including those in the Arab world, and that it has ignored human rights abuses in other countries, such as Cuba, Liberia and Sudan.
The resolution mandating the investigation labeled Israel an “occupying Power...against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry said these terms precluded any objective probe and that Israel was deemed guilty of war crimes before the Goldstone Committee even began its work.
Israeli criticism was wall-to-wall, and even the usually anti-government Yediot Aharonot Hebrew-language newspaper editorialized, “The immediate, natural, almost instinctive reaction to the Goldstone Report on IDF war crimes is something like 'Go to hell' or a polite invitation to kiss our buttocks.”
The Yisrael HaYom (Israel Today) newspaper labeled the report as “classic, liberal-style anti-Semitism," and derided Goldstone: “What is better for the anti-Semites than a judge whose daughter lives in Israel?" the newspaper stated.
The European Jewish Congress called on the European Union (EU) to reject the report. “From its original mandate this commission has shown itself to be nothing more than an exercise in demonization of one nation, namely Israel,” EJC president Moshe Kantor said.
He warned, “This report places at risk any decent nation who wishes to fight and eliminate terror and will jeopardize the efforts of many European armies defending our continent around the world from the ravages of the ever-increasing terrorist threat. The placing of Hamas, listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union, on an equal footing with a democratic nation like Israel in the report is outrageous.”
In Goldstone’s home country, the Richmark Sentinel’s Lyndall Beddy scored Goldstone, writing, “There has never been ANY war where there were not atrocities on BOTH sides, which includes the Israel/Gaza conflict, and the civil war between the white democratic Nats and the black communist ANC in South Africa.
“When the news of the American atrocities of Mai Lai hit the press, the Americans were horrified. They could not understand how Americans could have acted like Nazi Germans. They appointed a young psychiatrist in the army to investigate the matter, and then buried his report for decades because they did not like his findings.”
Goldstone defended his report in an op-ed article in The New York Times Thursday: “In the fighting in Gaza, all sides flouted that fundamental principle,” he wrote. “Many civilians unnecessarily died and even more were seriously hurt. In Israel, three civilians were killed and hundreds wounded by rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas and other groups. Two Palestinian girls also lost their lives when these rockets misfired.”
However, he made no reference to the more than 11,000 rockets and mortar shells that Hamas fired on southern Israel and Jewish residents in Gaza, before the expulsion of the region's Jewish residents in the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza. Instead, he cited “disproportionate” counterterrorist attacks by Israel.
Goldstone admitted that “Hamas fighters at times mixed and mingled with civilians” but added, “That reality did not lift Israel’s obligation to take all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.”
Some of the extraordinary measures the IDF carried out in order to avoid harming civilians included dropping flyers written in Arabic on to cities, towns and villages and thousands of shekels' worth of direct phone calls from Israel to Gaza residents, telling them exactly when and where Israeli soldiers would attack and urging them to flee the area prior to the appointed time of battle.