“We Told You So!”

David Shulman sifts through the wreckage after Goldstone’s partial retraction:

The government spokesmen clearly, perhaps deliberately, miss the point.

Goldstone’s statement in The Washington Post by no means exonerates Israel’s conduct in Operation Cast Lead. Rather, Goldstone’s statement rectifies the egregious failure of the Goldstone report to clearly condemn Hamas for its crimes leading up to and during the conflict, and expresses some satisfaction with the Israeli army’s own investigations into at least some of the alleged cases of war crimes. Perhaps most important, Goldstone unequivocally states that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” I am sure that this last statement is correct; anyone who knows the Israeli army knows that, for all its faults and failings, it does not have a policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians. Suggestions to the contrary are simply wrong.

But serious questions remain about Israel’s Gaza war; Goldstone’s recent statement does nothing to dispel them, nor, I would guess, did he intend to do so. (The other three members of the original Goldstone committee have meanwhile reaffirmed its original findings.) I want to touch on three such issues: the intensity of fire and the official and unofficial “rules of engagement”; the overall planning and strategy of Operation Cast Lead; and the wider context within which the operation took place. Sober consideration of these themes reveals, in my view, systemic moral failure on several interlocking levels.