This post is in response to a letter to the editor found in today’s Harvard Crimson.
In response to our recent Crimson editorial, “Reclaiming Goldstone’s Missed Opportunity,” Abdelnasser Rashid writes today that “[i]n fact, Goldstone did not retract the most damning accusations of the more than 500-page report.” He dubs our characterization of Goldstone’s op-ed in the Washington Post as a “retraction” a “dangerous misreading.” Mr. Rashid asks “where is the retraction” of any key charge? In fact, he asserts, there is only “one incident which Goldstone says should be corrected.”
Given that Mr. Rashid’s interpretation of Goldstone’s remarks differs from nearly every mainstream account, it’s hard to know where to begin.
Perhaps with Goldstone’s own retraction in the op-ed in question:
While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
We quoted this verbatim in our editorial. As we wrote there, Goldstone’s report claimed that “the Jewish state had intentionally and systematically targeted civilians for massacre.” He has now retracted this unprecedented and “most damning” accusation. It appears Mr. Rashid missed this fact in both Goldstone’s original piece and in our own.
But the New York Times didn’t. Here’s what they wrote in an article entitled “Israel Grapples With Retraction on U.N. Report”:
The disavowal, by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who led a panel of experts for the United Nations, appeared in an opinion article in The Washington Post. He said that he no longer believed that Israel had intentionally killed Palestinian civilians during its invasion of Gaza.
The Economist, too, seems to be in on our “dangerous misreading”:
… Richard Goldstone’s public recantation of the charge that Israel may have deliberately killed non-combatants in Gaza two years ago.
The charge was a key element of the Goldstone Report…
But wait, didn’t Goldstone merely take back (not “retract,” of course) “one incident,” as Mr. Rashid asserts? Yes, Goldstone does indeed offer only one specific instance in his op-ed where Israel was innocent of the charge of civilian targeting. But what The Times, Economist and major media noticed – and Mr. Rashid somehow did not – is that Goldstone prefaced that paragraph with two important words. Let us pick up from where the original retraction quote above left off:
… civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home…
After repudiating his earlier charge that Israel purposefully targeted civilians, Goldstone then takes up the “most serious [Israeli] attack” criticized in the Goldstone Report – and shows how it was not the result of intent. In other words, he takes the strongest alleged instance of Israeli misconduct in his report and defangs it. This is given as a powerful “example” of his broader contention that Israel did not target civilians as policy. We invite readers to review Goldstone’s original editorial in context and see who is misreading it – we, the NY Times and the Economist, or Mr. Rashid.
We wish to draw attention to one last pundit who seems to have understood Goldstone very differently than Mr. Rashid, one who is not generally known as a right-wing Israeli apologist:
Goldstone’s volte-face appears in the form of a Washington Post op-ed. It’s a bizarre effort. He says his report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now.” The core difference the judge identifies is that he’s now convinced Gaza “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
This pundit is Roger Cohen. We found his op-ed posted as a response to our editorial on the web site of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee. It seems the committee misread Goldstone’s op-ed as a “retraction” as well.
The purpose of our editorial was to avoid the partisan paradigms that too often characterize the Israel-Palestine discourse, and instead push the conversation forward into a constructive discussion regarding reducing civilian casualties during asymmetrical conflicts. Some, like Mr. Rashid, will attempt to force our editorial into a particular political box – one which bears little relation to the piece’s contents or the reality it addresses. We hope, however, that considerate readers will approach the article in the spirit in which it was written, and use it as a platform for thoughtful and productive debate over very important questions.
Avishai D. Don
Beth I. Drucker
Yair Rosenberg
Photo Credit: Flickr (BlatantNews.com)