The nucleus of truth

Israeli bitterness over the Goldstone report has a great deal of justification. Immeasurably greater crimes than those the report claims to have discovered during Operation Cast Lead have been, and are still being, committed by other states and other groups worldwide, yet they attract scarcely any international condemnation. There may also be some truth to the Israeli claim that the measures the Israel Defense Forces took to minimize harm to civilians were unprecedented in the world's military annals.

Moreover, there seems to be truth to the contention that the Palestinians deliberately used elderly people, women and children as human shields to carry out murderous acts on the other side's elderly, women and children. One example is the launching of rockets at concentrations of Israeli civilians from within, or near, concentrations of Palestinian civilians.

Indeed, the existence of institutionalized Palestinian cruelty toward their own women and children was proven in the second intifada. It was documented in the blood of Jewish children that was spilled and mixed with the blood of Palestinian "martyrs" who blew themselves up in coffee shops, markets and many other places in various parts of Israel.

But even a document born in sin and created in hypocrisy, and whose publication indeed encourages global terror, can include words of truth among its pages. Take, for example, page 521 of the Goldstone report, where paragraph 1674 states: "The Mission is of the view that Israel's military operation in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 and its impact cannot be understood and assessed in isolation from developments prior and subsequent to it. The operation fits into a continuum of policies aimed at pursuing Israel's political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole. Many such policies are based on or result in violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."

Even IDF spokesmen and Israeli cabinet ministers do not deny that during the military operation in the Gaza Strip, many human rights were violated, included the right to life, as were basic humanitarian laws. Granted, Israel contends that these violations were either unavoidable or committed by mistake, and that responsibility for most of them rests with the Palestinians themselves. Yet no one denies - and in view of the television coverage, no one can deny - that basic humanitarian laws were indeed violated by Israel during those rash, bitter weeks.

The saying "We shall never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their sons" is often attributed to the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. I have not found reliable documentation to support the theory that Golda in fact ever made such a statement, either orally or in writing. But whether or not it was actually said, this sentence expresses the beliefs and sentiments of many Israelis very well. It is certainly a central motif in the anti-Goldstone campaign that Israel's government is currently waging.

But for all the hypocrisy in the report, Richard Goldstone took the bull by the horns: The 42-year-old occupation of land inhabited by millions of civilians who refuse to accept the yoke of the occupier makes it a necessity, almost a law of nature, for the occupying army to violate humanitarian laws.

The Gemara, in Tractate Kiddushin, asks whether the thief is the mouse that stole the cheese or the hole in which he hides it. That, in miniature, is the social and legal question of where responsibility lies for a criminal act. Does it fall on the one who commits the crime, or does the guilt perhaps rest with the conditions and circumstances that make it possible and worthwhile to commit the crime, in which case the main culprit is the person responsible for the existence of these conditions?

The Goldstone report hits on the truth about the source and reasons for the violations of humanitarian law that took place during Operation Cast Lead. It was not the mouse - in other words, the army - that was the chief sinner. The violation of human rights stems from the black hole known as "the occupation," which makes these violations unavoidable. Responsibility thus lies with the successive Israeli governments that, as the report correctly stated, adopted policies "aimed at pursuing Israel's political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole." And "many such policies are based on or result in violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."

Israel's government continues to feed this black hole instead of moving away from it and getting its citizens away. And it is thereby failing to save Israel - not only from the ongoing and unforgivable harm it is doing to human rights, but also from a huge threat to its very existence as a Jewish, democratic state.