NY Times [As it is]
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: October 22, 2009
Richard Goldstone, the lead author of a United Nations report that found evidence of war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during last winter’s Gaza
war, challenged the Obama administration in an interview broadcast
Thursday to explain what it has called serious concerns about his
report.
In the interview on Al Jazeera,
Mr. Goldstone, a South African jurist, said that the official American
response to the 575-page report had been ambivalent. The Obama
administration, he said, “joined our recommendation calling for full
and good-faith” domestic investigations of the alleged crimes in both
Israel and Gaza, “but said that the report was flawed.”
“But I
have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the
report that they have identified are,” Mr. Goldstone said. “I mean, I
would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are.”
He added, “Of course I’m concerned and would like to engage with the Obama administration, at least informally.”
The report found evidence that some Israeli soldiers had intentionally killed Palestinian
civilians during the three-week conflict in violation of the laws of
war. It described the Israeli military assault on Gaza as “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.”
It
also said there was evidence that the Palestinian militant rocket
attacks on towns in southern Israel constituted war crimes.
The
report’s recommendations were officially endorsed last week by the
Human Rights Council in Geneva, which has forwarded the document to the
United Nations General Assembly and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The United States joined five European nations in voting against the
resolution that endorsed the report, and Israeli officials have lobbied
hard to discredit it.
“People generally don’t like to be accused
of criminal activity, so it didn’t surprise me that there was
criticism, even strong criticism, and it has come from both sides,” Mr.
Goldstone said in the interview. “But I do regret the extremes to which
some of the criticism has gone and the fact that it has been so
personalized.”
He then lashed out at his detractors, saying,
“I’ve no doubt, many of the critics — I would say the overwhelmingly
majority of the critics — haven’t read the report. And, you know, what
proves that, I think, is the level of criticism doesn’t go to the
substance of the report. There still haven’t been responses to the
really serious allegations that are made.”
Obama administration
officials have made more detailed criticisms of the report, usually
contending, as did Douglas M. Griffiths, the American delegate to the
Human Rights Council, that it was unfair to Israel.
Explaining
his vote against endorsing the report, Mr. Griffiths said that, “While
Justice Goldstone acknowledged Hamas’s crimes, in examining Israel’s
response sufficientweight was not given to the difficulties faced in fighting this kind of enemy in this environment.”