The pot calling the kettle Gold

by Micah D. Halpern

When the UN Commission on Human Rights called for an investigation into Operation Cast Lead, the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the supposed purpose was to determine if there had been violations of human rights, violations of international law and/or the performance of illegal acts. In short, the investigation was created in order to find reason to blame Israel’s leadership and the Israeli military for defending Israel.

When Judge Richard Goldstone, a South African Jew, was appointed to head the investigation, the Commission got more than they could ever have hoped for. Goldstone authored a scathing moral and ethical critique of Israel; of how Israel defended herself during Operation Cast Lead and of how Israel defends herself on an on-going basis.

He blatantly condemned Israel for making moral mistakes, for violating basic norms of humanity and for making poor decisions that fecklessly endangered the lives of Palestinian civilians. The damage that the Goldstone Report did to Israel and to the supporters of Israel is too great to be quantifiable.

The damage that Goldstone did to himself is beginning to emerge. The first nail in Goldstone’s proverbial coffin came from his own South African Jewish, religious, leadership. The request was put to Richard Goldstone not to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah because they could not guarantee his safety. Imagine being told to keep away from your own family simcha. The next nail is being hammered in by Israel’s mass circulation daily Yedioth Achronoth and its website YNET which recently undertook its own investigation of Judge Goldstone.

The investigation uncovered that as a judge in South Africa during the Apartheid, Richard Goldstone sentenced at least twenty-eight black citizens to death. He also sentenced blacks to be flogged with lashes for the crime of listening to anti-Apartheid audiotapes. Asked to explain how he chose to mete out those punishments, Goldstone replied that he was a judge for the regime and had to rule on the existing laws.

We have heard that excuse before. We heard it from Adolf Eichmann. In her spectacular, groundbreaking, work called “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” Hannah Arendt recounts her impressions of the Eichmann trial which she covered for The New Yorker Magazine. As she listened to the proceedings Arendt developed a political concept still used today by political thinkers and moral philosophers ... the Banality of Evil. Eichmann’s defense was that he was simply following orders, a cog in the wheel of a large bureaucracy that impersonalized the killing of Jews. Arendt suggested that the method by which totalitarian regimes and tyrannies succeed is by creating bureaucracies. In that way it is easy to claim that there were very few murderers — only many efficient workers doing their jobs, like Eichmann, who was really only working out train routes and schedules, and transporting Jews — not murdering Jews.

That Goldstone should hide behind the law of Apartheid, an unjust system, is repugnant. Goldstone was neither forced to become a judge nor was he forced to execute criminals. Nothing forced him to accept a judgeship in such an unjust world. Or he could have accepted and then, after encountering this dilemma, he could have stepped down. That this man preached to Israel about the ethical way to conduct war against an enemy that was murdering Israeli citizens by firing rockets into their cities is unconscionable. That Goldstone should publicly humiliate Israel and supporters of Israel and preach morality when he sat on the bench for a racist oppressive regime is a travesty by any moral standard.

Shame, shame, shame.

Micah D. Halpern is a columnist and a social and political commentator. Read his latest book THUGS. He maintains The Micah Report at www.micahhalpern.com.