Moshe Arens:
While the Goldstone report is being eagerly read in Israel and in capitals around the world, it is also being intensively studied by terrorists bent on destroying the State of Israel - and they must be breathing a sigh of relief.
This is not only because the Hamas terrorists in Gaza are in effect getting off scot-free in the report - they, in any case, did not have to be concerned about being brought before the International Court of Justice.
They can also interpret the report as international approbation for carrying out military operations from civilian population centers - schools, hospitals, refugee camps, etc. - as they did in the years when they were launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages in the south of Israel, and as they continued to do during the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.
The report is in effect a license to kill - for Hamas, for Hezbollah, and for terrorists all over the world. No less.
And Ami Isseroff:
Beyond all its irregularities, the Goldstone report made one claim that cannot be refuted: That Israeli policy and war tactics were deliberately designed to kill civilians. It can't be refuted because it is not logical or based on any facts. Like medieval accusations of well poisoning or the blood libel, it is obvious that the persons making the accusation already have all the information needed to refute it, and simply ignore it because of malevolent mendaciousness. The man claims your sister is a lady of easy virtue. But you have no sister, and he knows it!
Goldstone's report claimed:
1211. Statements by political and military leaders prior to and during the military operations in Gaza leave little doubt that disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy.593
In a real report, one might expect that reference 593 would include the statements by political and military leaders that left no doubt etc. Instead, the footnote (like much of the Goldstone report) simply references a report by an anti-Israel NGO:
Highlighting the pattern of military actions targeting civilian shelters and shelter seekers, the Habitat International Coalition concludes: “The official statements that accompany these actions […] seem to reflect a presumption that any source of brutality against the indigenous inhabitants would convert the victims into agents of the attackers’ preferred outcome: defeat of resistance” (submission, cited, p. 40).
One unsupported conclusion is used to support another and the Hamas terrorists, who seized power illegally, are elevated to the dignity of "resistance."
The Goldstone report further states:
The operations were carefully planned in all their phases. Legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign...[T]he 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.
Goldstone's "proof" is that the operation was planned. Planning and asking of legal opinions in any military operation are evidently valid evidence that civilian casualties resulting from that operation must have been planned. Goldstone evidently believes that nothing can even go wrong in any military operation and everything always occurs exactly according to plan. Presumably, legal advice was asked before soldiers left obnoxious graffiti and vandalized Palestinian property. Before each little girl was killed, the lawyers were called in to certify that killing the little girl was not against international law.
The death of Israeli soldiers by friendly fire was also presumably part of the plan according to Goldstone, , also approved by IDF legal counsel, as was the constant rain of rockets on Israeli towns and cities - civilian targets - by the Hamas "resistance." One wonders what book of military history Judge Goldstone and his fellow committee members read.
...The claim that the IDF or the Israeli government had a deliberate policy of harming civilians is therefore malicious nonsense. There are no additional facts that any Israeli investigation or any other investigation could unearth that would "disprove" it, because the claim doesn't depend on any facts. In the same way, those who made the blood libel accusation knew that Jews are forbidden to consume any sort of blood and especially human blood. They knew the accusation had to be false, and Goldstone knows this accusation is false. Those who believe this claim do so because they are evil and uninterested in truth. Proving that this or that incident described by the Goldstone mission did or did not occur, or that this or that officer was or was not guilty of war crimes, could never erase the terrible false accusation that Israel deliberately set out to kill civilians.