Israel Matzav

Peter Berkowitz pans the Goldstone apologists

Peter Berkowitz reviews a new collection of defenses of Richard Goldstone edited by three authors - two of whom also publish the virulently anti-Israel Mondoweiss blog. After dismissing the book, he rips the report apart, and then comes to this conclusion (Hat Tip: Shmuel Rosner).

The goldstone report is a deeply flawed document. If left uncontested and uncorrected, its errors will increase the dangers to which civilians and lawful fighters are exposed in an age of transnational terror.

Without so stating, the report sets aside, or seeks to rewrite, international humanitarian law. It effectively shifts responsibility for civilian losses away from terrorists who deliberately violate the law of armed conflict by operating in civilian areas and onto the states fighting them. The result is to reward those who, in gross violation of the laws of war, strive to obscure the distinction between civilian and military objects and, in the case of liberal democracies such as Israel and the United States, to punish those who seek to uphold it. And because rewarding behavior encourages more of it, the Goldstone Report — and the Horowitz, Ratner, and Weiss volume designed to honor it — will cause more terrorists to operate within densely populated urban areas.

liberal democracies will face a political and legal climate that all but criminalizes the exercise of their right to self-defense. In the short term, that may lead liberal democracies to increase the dangers to which they expose their own soldiers and civilians. In the long term, it risks impelling them to abandon international humanitarian law as hopelessly impractical, thereby undermining their own solidiers’ sense of justice and honor and increasing the peril to the other sides’ civilians.

In the Editor’s Note, Horowitz, Ratner, and Weiss state their “hope that this book will keep the report alive and its findings relevant.” Indeed, memory of the Goldstone Report should be preserved, but not for the reasons that the editors intend. The report should serve as a potent reminder that, like other actors, international human rights lawyers and international bodies have passions and interests, biases and blind spots; they are capable of manipulating the facts and distorting the law; they often lack the expertise in military affairs that is necessary to responsibly apply international humanitarian law to the complex circumstances of asymmetric warfare; and their judgment is unconstrained by the discipline of democratic accountability and national security responsibility.

The international law governing armed conflict — in Article 2 of the un Charter, Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 17 of the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court — assigns to states with functioning judicial systems, which in particular means liberal democracies, the right and primary responsibility to investigate allegations of war crimes. The many and varied failings of the Goldstone Report illuminate the wisdom of this critical feature of international law.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: distinction, Goldstone Report, international humanitarian law, prohportionality

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:21 PM