Here's an article in the Business Day last week that bewilders me beyond exasperation. It is authored by Nicole Fritz, Director of the South African Litigation Centre and former law clerk to Justice Richard Goldstone: SA must insist on justice without exception
The article draws equivalence between Israel and Sudan, claiming that both use the same banal excuses of selectivity in order to deflect attention away from their crimes. It behoves the director of the SA Litigation centre to do better than to put forward evidence suggesting that the application of a critique by one actor (Israel) is incorrect because it has been applied speciously by another actor (Sudan).
Fritz states that the report by Goldstone cannot be accused of being selective. Her evidence? “It subjects both Israel and Palestinian faction Hamas to scrutiny. It concludes that Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. If the report pays greater attention to allegations made against Israel, that was unavoidable. Despite numerous requests to co-operate in the investigation, Israel refused. It refused the mission permission to enter Israel or the West Bank.”
Fritz does nothing to counter one of the major critiques of the report – that of its origins. It originated from the UN Human Rights Counsel that was formed to rid the world’s primary Human Rights organisation of the tainted history of selectively censuring Israel. But the new counsel has fared no better than the old commission. The new UN Human Rights Counsel has spent as much, if not more, of a disproportionate focus on Israel as the previous disbanded UN Human Rights commission did. Over 80% of its country specific resolutions have targeted Israel. Its members who oppress their own people with impunity, free from fear of retribution, use it as a shield to protect their own records by focusing only on Israel. This is the same counsel that congratulated Sri Lanka after it brutally wielded its power to topple a Tamil Tiger uprising, allegedly killing more than 20 000 civilians. But listen to Nicole Fritz. Listen to Goldstone's previous law clerk. The Gaza report was not selective. Oh dear!
Digging deeper into its origins, the original mandate of the resolution called for an investigation into only the war crimes committed by Israel. Granted, Goldstone did widen its mandate to include investigations of Hamas but the original mandate was never actually altered. Perhaps for this reason, in the context of the findings against Israel, the criticism of Hamas is provided almost as an after-thought, almost as if it were there serving purely as the veneer of balance.
Thirdly, the make-up of the investigation team was highly questionable, in particular, Christine Chinkin signed a petition declaring that Israel had committed war crimes before the investigation began. Including her on the investigation was akin to including a Nationalist apartheid judge to rule over a dispute between a white and black person in the 1960s. The positions of the Nationalist judge are already known, so why even bother with the investigation?
Fritz also discounts the affront caused by the Report’s conclusions, pretending that it equally condemned Hamas and Israel. But the report’s over-arching conclusions are (1) that what happened in Gaza was nothing but a premeditated, deliberate and targeted attack in order to punish, humiliate and subjugate a civilian population, and (2) that Hamas fighters did not abuse civilian compounds such as mosques, schools and hospitals as bases for cover.
Without even looking at a critique of the facts that the report stands upon, it is patently clear that Israel launched the attack to stop incessant rocket fire from Gaza. Further, there is an abundance of evidence in the public domain supporting the Israeli claims that Hamas operated from civilian compounds. The report doesn’t find against Israel. It makes a mockery of justice! Whilst I can tolerate criticisms of methods used by Israel, a distortion of the entire objective renders it nothing but a vicious and personal attack on Israel and all her citizens and supporters.
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