Play the game, not the man
EARLIER this month, Abraham H Foxman, of the US-based Anti-Defamation League, wrote to Justice Richard Goldstone urging him to repudiate the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) report “that has your name attached to it”.
The letter was striking not for its content —- which stressed the report’s damage to Israel’s reputation and its potential undermining of the peace process -— but for its generally courteous tone. “I know that you are moral and principled,” Foxman wrote. “I surely don’t agree with the attacks that label you a self-hating Jew.”
Those attacks are relentless: try googling “Richard Goldstone self-hating Jew” and it throws up more than a million hits.
The fact that Goldstone has been demonised in the toxic regions of the blogosphere isn’t, of course, surprising. What’s surprising is the extent to which mainstream figures have participated in the unedifying sport of playing the man. The ink had barely dried on the Goldstone report when Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz delivered the ultimate insult.
In arguing that Goldstone’s report used double standards in judging Israel’s actions in Gaza, Steinitz said: “Just as a non-Jew can be anti-Semitic, a Jew can also be anti-Semitic and discriminate against our people and despiseand hate our people.” And only last week, President Shimon Peres denounced Goldstone as “a small man”.
Here’s what I consider “givens” in this debate. Goldstone’s report was always going to be deeply flawed. The reasons have been well-canvassed and include: a) anything that initiates from the obsessively anti-Israel HRC is tainted from day one; b) Israel’s (justifiable) decision not to cooperate with Goldstone’s mission of inquiry ensured the final report was even more skewed against the state than was inevitable; and c) international law, which takes warfare between conventional armies of state actors as its frame of reference, is yet to engage with the moral dilemmas terror outfits such as Hamas provoke.
So the pertinent question is whether Goldstone was driven by anti-Zionist malice in accepting this job. The evidence suggests quite the opposite. Goldstone once described the State of Israel as the embodiment of the Jews’ struggle for human rights. He is a president emeritus of World ORT, a Jewish organisation that runs several vocational schools in Israel, and serves on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s board of governors. His daughter has lived in Israel.
A family friend of Goldstone’s told The Forward the judge was unsure about accepting the offer to head the probe, “but people encouraged him to accept, saying because he’s a Jew with a legal background, he’d give a fair assessment”.
Goldstone clearly believes he has done this. He explicitly rejected the HRC’s one-sided mandate, which called for an investigation into all violations of human rights and humanitarian law “by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people”. While the legal force of his more balanced mandate — obtained from the HRC’s president — remains in doubt, Goldstone clearly believes he has broken new ground in submitting a report to the HRC that also fingers Hamas for war crimes.
In an interview with The Forward, Goldstone likened his decision to head the probe to his accepting a judicial appointment in racist South Africa. He had agonised about accepting the post, knowing full well the regime occasionally appointed liberal judges for cynical PR reasons. And yet, his hopes for change-from-within were realised when one of his rulings helped end racially segregated neighbourhoods.
Goldstone appears to have genuinely believed he could change the UN human rights regime from within. He’s a legal purist with utter faith in the transformative power of justice. He struggles to accept that sometimes the framework of justice is so broken it can’t be fixed, or that justice sullied by politics is justice debased.
Even his reluctance to consider that his ethnicity might have been seen as a bonus in this mission suggests a man blinded by a Messiah complex.
And if indeed some anti-Israel agitators happily exploit Goldstone’s Jewishness, then the Goldstone-is-a-traitor lynch mob play right into their hands. Goldstone might be a silly Jew, a naive Jew, a gullible and self-absorbed Jew, but he’s not a self-hating Jew. In fact, it’s worth asking whether this pernicious focus on the man himself represents a kind of inverted anti-Semitism in the way it makes Goldstone’s Jewishness the story. His Jewishness has become the source of negative, dangerous qualities of moral distortion and worse besides. Either way, it’s ugly.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.