Your honour is taking an injudicious kick at Israel

Judge Richard Goldstone’s condemnatory report on Israel’s actions in Gaza has been dismissed as hopelessly one-sided by neutral observers — The Economist, for example, denounced the report’s “wilful blindness”. Goldstone’s “thimbleful of poison” has, it says, made the peace process all the harder.

Many Jews outside Israel ask how Goldstone, himself a Jew, could lend himself to such an obviously biased mission mandated by the notorious United Nations human rights council, itself full of human rights violators.

Goldstone’s behaviour will not surprise those who have followed his career. As a student in South Africa he took the anti-apartheid side and many expected him to do the same as a lawyer, for a small cadre of liberal lawyers were crucial to the defence of the regime’s political opponents. Instead, Goldstone kept his head down and avoided annoying the apartheid government, devoting himself to commercial cases. Then, as the political situation changed, so did Goldstone. Entrusted by President de Klerk with a commission to investigate the causes of violence, Goldstone turned up damning evidence against the apartheid regime but refused to investigate the ANC’s armed wing.

When the ANC won its first election Goldstone was given a seat in the Constitutional Court. Heedless of the fact that the doctrine of collective guilt has been the basis of anti-Semitic campaigns down the ages, Goldstone urged all whites to apologise for their collective guilt. The court showed itself extremely deferential to the new ANC government so that when millions of voters (mainly from minorities supporting the opposition) were excluded from the franchise by a technical change in ID documents, the court took the government’s side.

Goldstone’s fame as an icon of political correctness led to his appointment as prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Goldstone was a man in a hurry. “They told me at the UN in New York: if we did not have an indictment out by November 1994 we wouldn’t get money that year for 1995,” Goldstone admitted. “There was only one person against whom we had evidence. He wasn’t an appropriate first person to indict ... but if we didn’t do it we would not have got the budget.”

Indeed, it was so inappropriate that the judges in the Hague passed a motion severely censuring Goldstone. When Goldstone left the tribunal only one confession had been recorded and one trial completed.

He is part of a concerted effort to push important cases to international courts. Goldstone is keen to play a judicial or prosecutorial role on a world stage. Thus he has argued that the Darfur crisis should go before an international court, as should Robert Mugabe for crimes against humanity. He also argued that Saddam Hussein should have been handed to an international court since Iraqi courts weren’t good enough and even that the 9/11 masterminds should be sent before an international court because US courts would be perceived as biased. No doubt the lawyer who judges Osama Bin Laden will become a world celebrity.

Similarly, he has recommended any cases of Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza go before an international court.

Throughout his career, Goldstone has been accused of cutting corners because of ambition, and critics say his Gaza commission has set a new low. That a Jewish judge, barred from entering Israel for accepting a commission biased against the state, should write a report based largely on interviews with Hamas which panders to anti-Zionist (even anti-Semitic) opinion seems unbeatable.

Perhaps the best way to understand the Israeli (and Jewish) rage against Goldstone is to put the situation in comparative perspective. Imagine that in 1936 a judge from the British Commonwealth had accepted a commission from the Anglo-German Friendship Society to examine possible human rights violations suffered by the Sudeten Germans. On the face of it this would be unobjectionable. What, after all, could be wrong with Anglo-German Friendship? Like the UN human rights council, it sounds fair. And of course there were some human rights violations to talk about. But the fact is that the friendship society was full of Nazi sympathisers and anyone who accepted its commission would know in advance that they were providing propaganda material for Hitler to help him justify his ultimate invasion of Czechoslovakia — on which he was already decided.

This is what fuels the rage against Goldstone, not the minutiae of the wrongs suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza. The accusation is that by accepting this commission Goldstone knew that whatever he found would be used by Israel, and that he should not have lent himself to such an exercise. These are indeed bitter accusations, as one might expect in a holy war. It remains to be seen whether, this time, Goldstone has gone too far.