Summary
The report of the U.N. fact-finding mission chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone into the 2008-2009 Gaza war, quoted extensively in Makdisi’s Epilogue (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.372-376).
Details
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The mission concluded the plan was directed “at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole”, and that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and 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” (PDF p.372-373).
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Legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning and operational stages; “There were almost no mistakes made according to the Government of Israel” (PDF p.373).
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On rules of engagement: “the repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians appears to the Mission to have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers, as described by some of them, and not the result of occasional lapses” (PDF p.374).
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On soldiers’ graffiti in Palestinian homes: slogans including “Death to the Arabs”, and Meir Kahane praised as right, “all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population” (PDF p.375).
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On status: “exclusive benefits reserved for Jews [in the occupied territories] derive from the two-tiered civil status under Israel’s domestic legal regime based on a ‘Jewish nationality,’ which entitles ‘persons of Jewish race or descendency’ to superior rights and privileges, particularly in land use, housing, development, immigration and access to natural resources, as affirmed in key legislation” (PDF p.375-376).
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Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the inquiry, dismissing it as “unfair” and “unbalanced”, and insisted its soldiers, officers and politicians would never be held accountable (PDF p.374).
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In September 2009 Mahmoud Abbas bowed to U.S. and Israeli pressure and withdrew official Palestinian support for the report — necessary for a U.N. resolution referring it to the Security Council, for example toward a war-crimes tribunal — then hastily reversed the decision in the face of popular outrage (PDF p.380-381).
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Falk’s lawfare post uses the report as the interface between the Legitimacy struggle and the “lawfare” backlash: it reinforced Palestinian contentions of victimisation in Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008–January 18, 2009) and drove Israel’s leaders to fury against Richard Goldstone and the findings (PDF p.30).
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Falk also criticises the report from the other side: it condemned Hamas’s rockets “in a typically decontextualized manner” and “also was silent as to the nature and extent of a Palestinian right of resistance” (PDF p.49).
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The Gaza headnote: the report’s recommendations were never implemented, and its chair “actually backed away from the most incriminating finding implicating Israel in the deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, a conclusion that the other three members of the UN inquiry commission refused to withdraw” (PDF p.72).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Richard Goldstone, Gaza, Apartheid, Dahiyeh Doctrine, Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Lawfare, Legitimacy struggle