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At Brandeis, Israel's Guilt and Innocence on Display
[Boston Globe] Jeff Jacoby - South African jurist Richard Goldstone and Dore Gold, Israel's former ambassador to the UN, were at Brandeis to discuss Goldstone's highly controversial UN report on Israel's Gaza operation last winter. Gold brought facts and figures, maps and photographs, and audio and video in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The encounter marked the first time that Goldstone publicly debated the report's merits with a leading Israeli figure. It would not surprise me to learn that he is in no hurry for a second. Gold played video of Israelis under Hamas rocket attack, and noted that such attacks had increased 500 percent after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. He displayed aerial photographs of Hamas military installations located amid schools and mosques. He described Israel's extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and showed Palestinian TV broadcasts confirming those efforts. He presented images of weapons caches inside Palestinian mosques and homes. It was a powerful presentation - so powerful, in fact, that Goldstone regretted not having seen it earlier. "The sort of information shown to us by Ambassador Gold," he said, "should have been shown to us during the [UN] investigation." What was most striking of all was Goldstone's inability to give a clear answer to an essential question: What should a law-abiding country do to defend itself against relentless terrorist attacks? "What would you do if your population was facing repeated attacks for eight years?" asked Gold, after describing the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas at Israeli communities. The judge, astonishingly, had no answer. He responded that that was a decision for the Israelis to make. Where the UN is involved, the guilt of the Jewish state is always taken for granted. The Goldstone Commission was a sham, and its bottom line was foreordained.