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One consequence of running around today is that I missed Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s spittle-inflected rant about the Goldstone report in TNR. (I’m also dismayed that my former colleagues, so heavily reliant on two-word pun headlines, missed their opportunity to run with "Goldstone Creamery," but never mind that.) The report, in case you missed it, found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes before and during Operation Cast Lead. But while the Obama people have their problems with it, they don’t quite say… what’s the word for it…
…more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis.
Yes, that’ll do. Needless to say, Goldstone does not for a second portray the Jews as Nazis, nor does he portray Israel as a Nazi state. ("Israel is correct that identifying combatants in a heavily populated area is difficult, and that Hamas fighters at times mixed and mingled with civilians," he actually writes in the New York Times. "But that reality did not lift Israel’s obligation to take all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians." These vile non-sequiturs are entirely the concoction of Oren, who I used to think of a real scholar. (His book Power, Faith and Fantasy is on my bookshelf at work.) By Oren’s reasoning, there is simply no wartime atrocity that Israel could commit that could be confronted truthfully, and so the outcome of his argument is to erode the intellectual constraints that all nations need to keep from committing such crimes. It’s thinking like this that will doom Israel.
Perhaps most tragically ironic of all, Oren concludes by writing, "No amount of vitriol will compel Israel onto a course of self-destruction." Well, according to the AP, PM Mahmoud Abbas has "never faced as much outrage as over his decision to suspend efforts to get Israeli officials put on trial for war crimes in Gaza." Simmering outrage like this diminishes the ability of Palestinians to deliver a peace deal, and without disengagement from the West Bank, Israel is indeed on a course of self-destruction.
Finally, via Matthew Yglesias, this charming argument in the Jerusalem Post probably made more sense in the original Serbian.
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Ackerman is a bit overwrought. Maybe Oren took some poetic license. The Goldstone Report is a blood libel that exasperates Israelis. Israel worked hard to minimize collateral death and gets slammed for it.
There is potential that the Report will harm Israel and the peace process. Cries of “War Crime” will trigger kangaroo courts, et cetera…
“Blood libel”? Really?
The Goldstone Report is a blood libel that exasperates Israelis.
Yeh, so-called friends of Israel have played the anti-Semitism card so often that it has worn through to blood libel. I wonder where they will go when they have worn out that slander. Seemingly, Israelis are not exasperated by politicians who start wars, that kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians, as an election gimmick.
Israel worked hard to minimize collateral death and gets slammed for it.
The didn’t get slammed for working hard “to minimize collateral death” – they get slammed because they didn’t work hard just as they have never worked hard. Every Israeli killing of a Palestinian is an accident. Countries working hard to “to minimize collateral death” don’t fire chemical weapons in built-up areas just as they don’t drop thousand of cluster bombs in withdrawing as Israel did in Lebanon.
There is potential that the Report will harm Israel and the peace process.
The reality is precisely the opposite. The peace process has been badly damaged by decades of appeasement of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. What has most damaged the peace process in this case is the US acquiescence to the Israeli desire to bury the report. This has demonstrated once again the US is not an honest broker in this conflict and that there is unlikely to be a solution as long as the US holds a leadership role. I believe the most likely tipping point towards a solution will be the arrest in Europe on war crime charges of a senior Israeli offical. Such an arrest would force the US to make moral choices it has so far shown itself unwilling to make.
Cries of “War Crime” will trigger kangaroo courts, et cetera …
Israel has settled 400,000 citizens in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in an action that is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. What turns international tribunals into a kangaroo court is our refusal to prosecute the very serious violations of international humanitarian laws by the State of Israel. If the citizens of israel seek to avoid accusations of war crimes then they should stop committing them.
So, did Oren called Goldstone a self-hating Jew?
Damn…I support Israel, but I do question whether any state built upon a single religion can treat everyone fairly & equally.
Hamas is a monster. Maybe the original incarnation that was a charity wasn’t, but the current one is. That being said, some Israel soldiers went out of their way to knowingly kill civilians (ie – old people, women & children) during the Gaza invasion (Operation Cast Lead or whatever). Some far right Israeli groups openly pushed for the Israeli Defense forces to indescrimiately(?) kill the Palesinians in Gaza. Why do I say this? I read it in the Jerusalem Post.
At this point in time, I think the only way out is an inclusive one state solution. Have Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza and make everyone there Israeli citizens. That’ll never happen, I know that. But that doesn’t stop me from believing it’s the only way out.
Stuff like Oren’s post shows how easy it is for me to support Israel without giving all it’s factions similar credence. Sadly, it’s all too apparent that there are some in this world, including here in the US and in Israel that learned the wrong lessons from the Nazi’s.
Maybe you are a bit overwrought when you start responding to FredJ’s attempt at humor as if he was being serious.
No one is really that stupid or blind. (Commentary magazine,it’s editors and contributing writers being excluded.)
Yo, FredJ, did I miss your joke? Sorry if I did.
No one is really that stupid or blind.
The problem is that there are way too many people on the internet who are. It is hard enough to signify jokes on the internet without trying to do so on such a contentious topic.
I presumed that Ambassador Oren was responding to the oft-quoted lined from the Commission report: “While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.” No?
I don’t think, incidentally, that the line by Judge Goldstone necessarily requires the meaning Ambassador Oren imputes to it (although certainly many anti-Israel critics are happily making the ascription). But nor is it a wholly unreasonable interpretation of what it means to say Israel targeted “the people of Gaza as a whole” in distinction to engaging in valid self-defense.