Israel Apologists Rattled By UN Report

The defenders of Israel at any cost choose to be blind to the siege, the bombs with white phosphorous, the slaughter and carnage of innocent civilians, infrastructure destroyed – all war crimes

By Paul J. Balles.
First Published 2009-09-25
Courtesy Of Middle-East-Online

Israelis and their Zionist supporters in the US are having temper tantrums over the latest UN Human Rights Council report on the attacks in Gaza. Judge Richard Goldstone, a South African war crimes prosecutor, led the investigating team.

"The Goldstone report is a kangaroo court against Israel, whose consequences harm the struggle of democratic countries against terror," laments Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, shifting blame from fact to fact-finder.

Ex-Moldovan nightclub bouncer, now Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman groans that the Goldstone commission investigating the Gaza war “did not give the facts a chance to confuse them".

Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit complains: "The UN must hold the US to the same standard as Israel," while Israeli journalist Amira Hass bemoans the fact that "the US does not have commissions of inquiry thrust upon it by the UN".

Israeli President Shimon Peres calls the report “a mockery of history” that “fails to distinguish the aggressor and a state exercising the right of self-defence”, insisting that it “legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death”.

Ha'aretz political columnist Yisrael Harel laments: "As a result of the destructive, toxic report of the United Nation's Goldstone Commission, from now on all of the haters of Israel will be celebrating anti-Semites."

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief Gabi Ashkenazi says the Goldstone "report is biased; our army is moral". He claims that the UN investigator ignored Hamas rocket fire, and the army did all it could to avoid harming civilians.

Across the Atlantic Richard Siderman, an American Jewish Committee voice for Israel in America, chimes in with smear tactics attempting to discredit Judge Goldstone. In the New York Times, he carps about the investigator's "disregard for Israel".

He then accuses the Human Rights Council of consistently demonizing Israel while letting other tyrants off the hook. Instead of considering the facts in the report, Siderman carries on with the old canard that Israel has suffered from rocket attacks by Hamas, overlooking the tanks, missiles, helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers of the IDF.

Siderman and his counterparts in Israel subscribe to the line that Israel can do no wrong. They refuse to acknowledge the role Israel played in turning Gaza into a blockaded, open-air prison camp.

The defenders of Israel at any cost, like Siderman, choose to be blind to the siege, the bombs with white phosphorous, the slaughter and carnage of innocent civilians, infrastructure destroyed – all war crimes.

Siderman even had the audacity to say how disturbing it was that "the Goldstone report has set a new standard for equating the behaviour of democratic nations and terrorists". He wrongfully accused Hamas of seizing control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority.

Richard Harris, Executive Director of the AJC, goes even further. Writing in The Huffington Post, he not only denigrates Judge Goldstone, who is himself a Zionist, but blatantly denies the established facts of what happened in Gaza.

Uri Avnery, Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, writes, “So why did the Israeli government boycott the commission? The real answer is quite simple: they knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach.”

George Orwell wrote: "In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

I would add that it’s the writer's responsibility to expose the "lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia", even to those who would prefer to keep their heads buried in the sand. As Rollo May said, "The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face."

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see pballes.com.