This is a guest post by Jonathan Sacerdoti.
The Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs has released some new information that further undermines any remaining credibility that the Goldstone Report might still have. It concerns Col. (ret.) Desmond Travers, one of the four members of the UN Fact Finding Mission that produced the report. As the only former officer who belonged to Justice Richard Goldstone’s team, he was the senior figure responsible for the military analysis that provided the basis for condemning Israel for war crimes.
The Jerusalem Centre’s report casts light on four fundamental problems in Travers’ style of investigation, which reveal him be “an individual who is not qualified to take part in any serious fact-finding mission”. These four categories are summarised as follows (the report is worth reading in full as well):
1) Travers showed a fundamental bias against the Israel Defense Forces, especially in his questioning of Palestinian psychologists. He asked them,
how Israeli soldiers could kill Palestinian children in front of their parents.
Furthermore,
when he was asked about Hamas intimidation that affected the Mission’s inquiries, he replied that that there was “none whatsoever.” Yet the Goldstone Report itself noted in Paragraph 440 that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of Palestinian armed groups because of a “fear of reprisals.”
2) He reported false information about Israeli weapons systems, simply to suit his own prejudice:
Travers comes up with a story that the IDF had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could obtain a “thermal signature” on a Gaza house and detect that there were large numbers of people inside. Incredibly, he then suggests that with this information that certain houses were “packed with people,” the Israeli military would then deliberately order a missile strike on these populated homes. The primary technical problem with his theory is that Israel does not have UAVs that can see though houses and pick up a thermal signature.
3) He presents completely inaccurate data:
Travers rejects that Israel began military operations against the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008 as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. He bases this idea on a “fact” that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, there were only “something like two” rockets that fell on Israel. Israeli military sources found that there were in fact 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over three days alone–between December 16 and 18, 2008
4) He demonstrates a lack of professionalism in conducting thorough investigations. For example, despite Israeli photographic evidence of large amounts of weapons having been stored in Mosques (recently corroborated by Colonel Tim Collins, a British veteran of the Iraq War who visited Gaza for BBC Newsnight) Travers simply dismisses such breaches of International Law on the part of Hamas, absurdly claiming that,
Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion
But he also admits that,
the Mission only checked two mosques.
This is not the first time that the methods of the Goldstone investigation have been shown to be flawed. Many serious problems with the investigation’s process have been well documented already.
The mandate for the fact-finding mission was “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression” (my emphasis). This clearly predetermined that Israel had committed “violations of international human rights law” before the investigation even began.
And Travers is not even the first member of the four person UN fact finding mission to be revealed as unsuitable for the role. Professor Christine Chinkin, one of the other three members, had signed a letter published in the Sunday Times before the conflict in Gaza had even ended, clearly stating that she felt Israel’s actions there amounted to “war crimes”. How could a person who makes such a judgment before the war was even over be a fair and independent member of the mission investigating it?
Parts of the content of the Goldstone report are presented as facts, but are made up from information gleaned from NGOs which have a clear bias against Israel. They remain un-tested and unverified but are now given increased respectability by their presence in the report.
Furthermore, the UNHRC is hardly a balanced and fair body itself. It spends more time focusing on Israel (and passes more resolutions dealing with Israel) than on any other state in the entire world. This is obviously uneven and biased. Whatever one says about Israel and the rights and wrongs of its actions, there are far bigger human rights issues to be dealt with elsewhere. Does this mean Israel should be immune from scrutiny? Of course not, but why would this body concentrate so particularly on one nation instead of so many others committing brutal and huge-scale human rights violations? Perhaps because many of the member states of the UNHRC are among the world’s worst human rights violators. It is ironic that they should be judging Israel, and doing so under the guise of the UN, which lends them a false appearance of ‘impartiality’ and ‘fairness’.
How much more evidence do we need before the world will finally chuck out this harmful and deeply damaging report? It does nothing to progress the very complex situation in the Middle East, and works against all efforts towards resuming peace negotiations.
Perhaps now that 50% of the team whose job it was to investigate the conflict have been shown to be unsuitably biased for the job, it’s time for a new independent inquiry: one that investigates the violations of good sense, justice, and impartiality carried out by Goldstone and his ‘fact-finding’ missionaries.
