Introduction:

The UN Gaza Report is the most vicious indictment of the State of Israel bearing the seal of the United Nations since the UN General Assembly adopted its infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1975, which it subsequently repealed. A special session of the 47-member UN Human Rights Council called for establishing the Fact-Finding Mission that prepared the report through the adoption of Resolution S-9/1 on January 12, 2009. The special session was convened at the request of Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. Resolution S-9/1 was notably passed with the support of Russia, China, Arab/Islamic and third world countries, but not with that of a single Western democracy like Canada and the member states of the European Union.

The UN Human Rights Council has a history of clear anti-Israel bias. Indeed, of the eleven special sessions it has convened since being established in 2006, five have dealt with Israel. Back in November 2006, former UN Security-General Kofi Annan strongly criticized how the new UN Human Rights Council functioned right after its creation, noting its anti-Israel emphasis: "Since the beginning of their work, they have focused almost entirely on Israel, and there are other crisis situations, like Sudan, where they have not been able to say a word."

It was the president of the Human Rights Council who established the UN Fact-Finding Mission in April 2009 to investigate Israeli military operations in Gaza between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009. He subsequently appointed Justice Richard Goldstone to head the mission. Its report was published in September.

Maligning Israeli Society

The language used by the UN Gaza Report - and the gravity of its allegations about "deliberate" Israeli attacks on civilians - maligns Israeli society as a whole, for the Israel Defense Forces (the IDF) is a citizen's army, an army which is made up of the people of Israel. The IDF has been imbued for generations to avert civilian casualties at all costs. Israel's soldiers are taught the story of the Lamed Hey - the 35 college students who comprised a unit of soldiers during Israel's 1948 war of independence. Having captured an Arab shepherd, these young soldiers vigorously debated among themselves whether to let him go even though he might reveal their position. They decided to release him, and indeed he did report their movements to the enemy: all 35 soldiers were killed.

Israelis have repeated the story of the Lamed Hey and taught it to new soldiers for decades - not with regret at the tragic result, but with pride, as an inspiring example of the army's ethos and humanity. They retell the lessons of Kafar Kassam in 1953 where innocents who broke curfew were killed, and since then they have established the principle that when an order is given over which there waves a moral "black flag," that order must be disobeyed. What happened in Kafar Kassam is taught in officers' courses in the IDF right up the chain of command from company commanders to brigade commanders.

The ethos of Israel's citizen army

Unquestionably, the IDF has been imbued with a strong sensitivity to averting civilian casualties in war. In 2002, when the IDF carried out an operation in the Jenin refugee camp, which Hamas called "the capital of the suicide bombers," it chose to send infantry in house-to-house combat, to minimize collateral damage to the Palestinian side, even though in so doing it lost 23 Israeli soldiers. In 2003, when the entire leadership of the military wing of Hamas sat together in one room in the Gaza Strip, Israel called off an air strike using munitions that would
have destroyed them in one blow, because of the risk to civilian life. That same consideration guided Israel in 2009 when the Hamas command positioned itself in Gaza's Shifa hospital. That is the truth of who Israel is, and that is who Israel will always be, regardless of the accusations made against it in this report.

It is for that reason that the UN Gaza Report has been condemned by leading voices all across the Israeli political spectrum. That reaction comes from the mission's attempt to go beyond even its own evidence, and its own sources, to impugn the motives of an entire country, to invent a policy and a nefarious purpose where there was none, to impute the intentions of leaders miles, and months, away from its field of research, to infer ill-will where no such inference

was warranted, or even possible, on the evidence available - that is what drives our reaction. The allegations against Israel - misrepresenting its very purpose and strategic aim in this operation - obfuscate, first, the fundamental fact that Operation Cast Lead - also known as the Gaza War - was a war of self- defense.

Branded as the Aggressor from the Start

The UN Gaza Report, however, looks for other motives. It claims, for example, in paragraph 1883 in its "Conclusions and Recommendations," that: "While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defense, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole."

This language reflects what Professor Christine Chinkin, one of the members of this fact-finding mission, charged as a co-signer to a published letter in the London Times on January 11, 2009, even before she joined the mission, and only a week after the war began, when judgments would have been completely premature.  The letter stated nonetheless: "Israel's actions amounted to aggression and not  self-defense."

A day later on January 12, 2009, when the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted Resolution S-9/1 that established the international fact-finding mission that Justice Goldstone headed, it already called on the international community to end "the current military aggression in Gaza." Israel was thus branded an "aggressor" even before the Gaza mission got underway.

The UN Gaza Report itself does not differ significantly from these positions for it attempts to portray Israel as seeking to punish the Palestinians in Gaza for electing Hamas back in 2006. As it states in its concluding section in paragraph 1884: "In this respect, the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support."

CONTINUE TO PDF FULL REPORT on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website.

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