Initial Reactions to the Goldstone Report and Reflections on Israeli Accountability

Abstract

The legitimacy of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” the 22-day military offensive in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, and of Israeli practices in its occupation of the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank was called into question by the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The report, more commonly referred to as the Goldstone Report after Justice Richard Goldstone who headed the investigation, sparked an international controversy, the effects of which are still being felt at time of writing. This report was commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council on April 3, 2009 with the mandate “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after”.

“The Mission concludes that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict [hereinafter Goldstone Report], September 15, 2009, Article 1690, p. 525.

J.D. Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor, Global Studies, California State University San Marcos. Substantial portions of this text first appeared in the article “The Goldstone Report: Challenging Israeli Impunity in the International Legal System?” published in Global Jurist. For a more detailed analysis of the Goldstone Report’s findings, you are encouraged to refer to this article: Barnette (2010).