Saturday, April 9, 2011

Goldstone Recants (kinda)

Here's a criticism of the Goldstone report from a recent pro-Israeli article:
And we noted the disturbing tone of the report, which employed inflammatory language against Israel, while treating Hamas so tenderly that it never once, in the course of its 575 pages, acknowledged that Hamas is a terrorist organization under international law, that it had carried out suicide bombings, or that it explicitly seeks the destruction of the state of Israel.


The criticism is simply stupid. A legal report on whether a crime took place doesn't have to list every crime anyone involved has ever committed in the past. If it did it would also have to include Israeli crimes like the assassination of the first UN Envoy to the region, the Israeli President's subsequent decision to pardon the men who killed him, and that the current Israeli Prime Minister's idol gave the murderers a medal in the 80s. In other words a report that treated both sides fairly and included the crap they say they're fighting over would be thousands of pages long.

It's pretty clear what the authors are doing. They don't want to try to defend their countries actions, because a) they didn't read the Goldstone report (I haven't, but then I'm not writing about it in a prominent magazine of international affairs) or b) they can't. So they're shifting the debate to one they can win.

It goes on to sayy:
While Israelis are delighted by the measure of vindication, President Shimon Peres expressed the sentiments of many when he opined the weekend after Goldstone's op-ed appeared that Goldstone still owes the state of Israel an apology. In many respects, the report's damage to Israel's reputation and the attendant boost to Hamas's legitimacy are irreversible.


In many ways this section is microcosm of Israel's problem internationally:
They focus so much on the little stuff they forget there's a big picture. Nobody decided to turn on a country that's been righteous for 60 years out of it's 63-year existence because of one report. Nobody decided a terrorist organization that spent the 90s murdering innocent people were nice guys because one report said they'd been war-crimed for three weeks.

Here's the big picture:
In 1948 you guys murdered the UN envoy sent to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. You went on to spend the entire rest of your existence being very nice to the race you'd chosen to protect, the actual Chosen People, but not particularly caring what happened to anyone else. In the process you drove hundreds of thousands who were the wrong race from their homes, gave all their stuff to people who were of the right race, feigned shock when the race you'd driven out decided you'd started a race-war, and repeated the process on a smaller scale every day to construct settlements.

This whole time you're claiming to be as righteous as Sweden, which has refused to fight any war with anybody since Napoleon, has never demanded the Finns return the ethnic Swedish Aland islands, and is 1/7 foreign born largely because it lets refugees from anywhere in. You let refugees in, but only if they're the proper race.

Yes I freely admit that last paragraph leaves out a lot of context. That you were understandably fucked up due to the Holocaust, that thousands of people of the wrong race stayed in Israel and prospered, that the side with more reprehensible tactics in your race war is the Palestinians, etc. But I wasn't trying to prove that you guys are Hitler. I was trying to show you that this stupid little report is not the reason people like me are extremely skeptical of Israel. The reason is everything your country has done since it's founding.

You guys could solve some of those problems if you stopped playing the role of Universal Defender of all Jews, and started acting like Sweden does, but according to the authors that's unlikely:
What Goldstone's newfound forthrightness will not do, however, is bring about a rebirth of the peace process. The Middle East is in upheaval, the Palestinian Authority is currently boycotting talks, and, thanks in part to the Goldstone Report, Israeli doves are discredited. The Israeli left had justified Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza on the "pragmatic" grounds that greater Palestinian freedom would lead to better relations with Israel and that the international community would support Israel if it needed to defend itself in the case that things didn't go as planned. Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007 disproved the first argument. The Goldstone Report in 2009 helped bury the second. The Israeli electorate will not easily be convinced to withdraw from the West Bank on the basis of such arguments in the future.

I can't say I'm sympathetic.

As a first step it wasn't bad. But you didn't really give anything up. After all you kept the right to invade, and blockade.

This is actually one reason I find the South Africa comparison is apt. The Whites of SA would decide to make some concession to the international community, such as formally giving up sovereignty over the areas where most blacks lived, and then they'd destroy it by only giving the new countries land nobody wanted and making people who hadn't been home to the country for three generations citizens of the new Bantustan. They then claimed they were perfectly Democratic because only the whites were technically citizens of South Africa. Then when it didn't work they'd get defensive, vote conservative, and blame the anti-western enemy of the day: Communists.

In the same way you guys give up jack-squat in Gaza, claim your perfectly democratic and noble because you just gave up Gaza, elect Netanyahu, and then blame the west's current enemy (Islamic Terrorists) when it doesn't work.

You want a gesture that would convince me you're a democracy? You annexed East Jerusalem, and with it you obtained hundreds of thousands of Arabs. But they can't get citizenship because they don't want to pledge allegiance to the country that conquered them. They get residency instead. Just waive the Oath of Allegiance requirement in East Jerusalem. Heck just say residents are citizens. And remember, the whole point of a gesture like this is that it's something a normal country wouldn't do, and it's a big deal.

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