The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) concurs with the recent Government of Israel’s demand that the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) immediately rescind the Goldstone commission’s 2009 report on Israel’s defensive campaign in Gaza against Hamas aggression, and spurns Judge Richard Goldstone’s recent Washington Post corrective of his despicable anti-Israel UN report as too little, too late. ZOA notes that, at a minimum, Goldstone should publicly apologize for issuing this blood libel and retract his despicable Goldstone Report from the UNHCR podium at the UN headquarters in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in a public press conference.

ZOA further asks:

·         That the Obama Administration should publicly acknowledge Goldstone’s rescission and lead efforts in the UN to disavow the despicable Goldstone Report and withdraw support for any further consideration or action based on this report, and should highlight this intention by vowing to veto any UN security Council proposal based on the report, and to vote against any General Assembly proposals based on the report;

·         That all those groups, like JStreet, that actively supported and defended the despicable Goldstone Report should issue public apologies;

·         That all those groups around the globe that have launched lawsuits and have sought criminal indictments against Israel and Israelis based on the despicable Goldstone Report should drop their lawsuits and stop legal machinations;

·         That all those legal forums that have permitted such gross abuse of their authority based on the despicable Goldstone Report should halt their proceedings and desist from further actions;

·         That all those newspapers and media outlets that made front-page headlines and prime-time stories of the despicable Goldstone Report should now run stories on Goldstone’s mea culpa recanting of his Report;

The despicable Goldstone Report, which ZOA strongly condemned at the time of its publication, ignored all Hamas assaults upon Israel that led to Israel’s operations in Gaza and based its condemnations of Israel on unsubstantiated Palestinian testimony. The Report claimed to find no conclusive evidence that Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields in the fighting; copied major, politicized distortions of international legal norms habitually made by anti-Israel NGOs; falsely reclassified Hamas personnel as civilian police in order to indict Israel for legitimate assaults upon these forces; and invented non-existent legal obligations of which it then proceeded to find Israel in breach.

The Goldstone Commission was created by the UNHCR, which replaced the corrupt and ineffective Human Rights Commission in 2006 but remains just as biased. It has an in-built automatic majority of autocracies who determine its agenda and vote. In five years, the Council’s controlling membership eliminated probes into the most serious human-rights abuses in Belarus, Congo, Cuba, Liberia and Sudan. Asian and African dictatorships also acted in tandem to minimize scrutiny of nations like Zimbabwe. Israel, however, has been the subject of some 30 of the Council’s resolutions, approximately 80% of all critical Council resolutions.

ZOA concurs with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks that: “There are very few instances in which those who disseminate libels retract their libel. This happened in the case of the Despicable Goldstone Report…This leads us to call for the immediate cancellation of the Despicable Goldstone Report.”

Even The Atlantic’s leftwing Jeffrey Goldberg noted: “This is as shocking as it is unexpected: the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, who excoriated Israel for allegedly committing premeditated crimes against civilians in Gaza — contributing, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state —  now says, well, Israel didn’t actually set out to target Palestinian civilians, unlike Hamas, whose plainly-apparent goal was to murder Israeli civilians…. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.”

The Washington Post’s own November 15, 2009 editorial on the despicable Goldstone Report opined that “the Goldstone commission proceeded to make a mockery of impartiality with its judgment of facts.”

As Avi Bell astutely points out in the Jerusalem Post, that despite Goldstone’s appropriate retraction of the blood libel that Israel intentionally murdered civilians, “Goldstone has refused to disavow the report’s attempt to eliminate laws against terrorism from the international legal codex, and its refusal to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. He has not renounced the preposterous characterization of Gaza as territory under Israeli occupation, or the report’s shocking claim that Israel’s limited economic sanctions against the Hamas government are an unlawful form of collective punishment. He continues to remain silent on the report labeling all Israelis liars to stamp Hamas’s anti-Israel libels with the imprimatur of truth. He has not yet expressed remorse about the report’s gratuitous inclusion of anti- Jewish slurs, such as its endorsement of the bigoted claim that Israeli Jews are dehumanized and paranoid.

Joshua London and Daniel Pollak, Co-Directors of Government Relations for ZOA, commented:  “Richard Goldstone’s recent mea culpa in the Washington Post doesn’t even begin to undo the international harm he has perpetrated against the Jewish State of Israel by issuing and vigorously defending his horrific Despicable Goldstone Report. If he has any decency at all, he will now actively, vigorously and publicly work to attempt to undo the damage he has wrought. Goldstone should convene a press conference and publicly apologize before the international media, and then work to have his blood libel rescinded from the United Nations, and then publicly remonstrate with all those anti-Israel and so-called human rights groups whose support he enjoyed and urge them to recant and expunge all efforts and propaganda related to the false report he issued in 2009.”

ZOA National President Morton Klein said: “This report helped galvanize the ongoing campaign of delegitimization and demonization against Israel’s very existence.  The authors of that vicious anti-Semitic fraudulent tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would have been proud of the content and the impact of the despicable Goldstone Report.”

“It is outrageous that Goldstone’s sudden and surprising reversal has not even begun to garner the sort of press attention that greeted his initial report, and the vigorous personal efforts he took to promote and defend that report. Before he resigns from public life in total disgrace and opprobrium, he should apologize publicly, via a public press conference, for the great harm he has done to the State of Israel, the Jewish people, and the cause of Zionism. Besides this public apology, Goldstone should do the only other respectable thing left to him, by actively working to try and undo the delegitimization and demonization that he has caused by working to have the United Nations rescind his report and withdraw all support for its use in any UN forum.”

“It is equally outrageous that all those groups that actively promoted and defended the Despicable Goldstone Report have not come forward to, de minimus, acknowledge the falsity of that report and revise their statements and materials in accord with the corrected record. Those groups that claim to be pro-Israel, like JStreet, should be at the forefront now of distancing themselves from the Despicable Goldstone Report and apologizing for contributing to the Report’s acceptance and promotion.”