Goldstone Report Also Troubling for Anti-Israel Bias

While troubling in some of its findings, the recently released United Nations Goldstone Report on Israel’s recent strike in the Gaza Strip represents flawed methodology and one-sided bias against Israel.

The President of the U.N. Human Rights Council provided a commission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone with a mandate to “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

Instead of adhering to this mission, the report places unrelenting emphasis on the broader conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and uses the U.N. pulpit to score political points against Israel.

The commission reserves entire sections of the report to chastise Israel for limiting free movement within the West Bank and for clamping down on West Bank demonstrations. While relevant to the overall peace process, these concerns are only peripherally pertinent to the war on the Gaza Strip and have no place in a report whose scope focused purely on the events of this January and late last December.

Unfortunately, this pattern of disregarding a commission’s mandate to unabashedly attack Israel remains a staple in the methodology and tactics of international investigations on the Israel Defense Forces. Following the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the first Lebanon War, the MacBride Commission, established to investigate war crimes during a very narrow time-frame of only a few days, expanded its scope to include the entire war in Lebanon and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in general due to the panel’s belief that Israel attempts to “disperse the Palestinian population.” While the Israel-Palestine conflict was tangentially relevant, the MacBride Commission unilaterally expanded its mission to condemn Israel for human rights concerns well outside of the original framework of the inquiry.

Alongside the Goldstone Commission’s flawed scope, the report includes a one-sided assessment of human rights violations during the conflict. While the report comprises over a dozen chapters on inhumane acts committed by the IDF, the document only contains one chapter on the incessant rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into Israel. In 2008 alone, over 3,200 mortar shells and Qassam rockets bombarded southern Israel, a significant increase in attacks from previous years, according to GlobalSecuirty.org.

By failing to provide a proper context in the report, the Goldstone Commission clearly demonstrated its one-sided narrative of the facts.

Instead of admitting fault, the United Nations blamed Israel for the bias for failing to cooperate with the U.N. probe. However, representatives from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government claim that officials cooperated with the first U.N. envoy to the region headed by former Amnesty International chief Ian Martin.

The prevalence of two investigative commissions from the United Nations within six months remains another matter of concern regarding the infused anti-Israel sentiment on the world’s leading international body.

Regardless, the findings of the Goldstone Report include some disturbing accusations regarding the events of last December and early January. Masked as a legal and impartial investigative commission, the panel obtained significant international prestige and publicity. Some of the report’s findings should raise significant concerns regarding human rights violations by all sides in one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet today.

However, the veracity of these claims remains highly questionable due to the obvious bias by the commission that was eager to use the United Nations as a soapbox for smearing Israel as a human rights pariah.