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Goldstone Recants

Two years ago, South African Jewish jurist Richard Goldstone authored an explosive report on behalf of the United Nations accusing Israel of committing war crimes in its counterattack against Hamas in the Gaza strip. Now Goldstone is renouncing his own report:

The leader of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of its report — that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians there. ...
“If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

The Goldstone report was not wrong about everything, but it was wrong about its most high-profile and influential claims. If you never read it, take a few minutes and read Moshe Habertal's careful and persuasive analysis of the Goldstone report from 2009. Habertal acknowledges that Israel used a number of troubling procedures in Gaza while dismantling vast swaths of Goldstone's accusation. I'd assume that Goldstone would now endorse most, and perhaps all, of Habertal's analysis.