Justice Richard Goldstone dropped a bombshell last week by appearing to repudiate parts of the 2009 report that bears his name.
The 575-page report, compiled under United Nations mandate by Goldstone and three highly esteemed experts, investigated 36 incidents during Israel's 2008-2009 assault on the Gaza Strip, including allegations of indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, illegal use of white phosphorous, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure. The team concluded that Israel had launched "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."
In response, Israel and its supporters shot the messenger. Justice Goldstone, although an admirer of Israel, suffered withering attack and ostracism. Leaders of his own South African Jewish community threatened to picket his grandson's bar mitzvah, should he attend. Still, for 18 months he stood his ground, publicly affirming the accuracy of the report. Now that he has buckled, Israeli politicians are crowing. Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that "Everything we said was proved true," and demanded that the United Nations retract the Goldstone Report in whole.
There is no ground for that. The report is an officially approved United Nations document, and Goldstone is but one among four authors.
MORE...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/06/ED4O1IRBFD.DTL