Salon – by JARED FLANERY AND BEN NORTON
The State Department devoted itself to, in its own words, “deferring” U.N. action on Israeli war crimes, “reframing the debate” about the atrocities, and “moving away from the U.N.”, according to numerous emails from former Secretary of State HillaryClinton. The messages, some of which are written by high-level State Department officials, expose the role of the U.S. government in undermining the international response to the 2009 United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, also known as the Goldstone Report — which the U.S. admitted was only “moderate,” but still opposed.
The Goldstone Report — named after South African veteran jurist and genocide expert Richard Goldstone, who oversaw the study — was commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in order 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.”
In this 2008-2009 campaign, dubbed Operation Cast Lead by the Israeli military, 1,391 Palestinians were killed, over half of whom were civilians, including 454 women and children, according to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (also known as B’Tselem). Hundreds of Palestinian homes, hospitals, schools, businesses, and more were also destroyed in the attack.
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers were killed—four of whom died from friendly fire—along with three civilians. The disproportionate casualties led Palestinians to dub the conflict “the Gaza Massacre.”
The Goldstone Report accused Israel of numerous war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law. Israel committed “a grave breach” of the Fourth Geneva Convention in its intentional targeting of civilians, the U.N. report found. It also documented the Israeli military’s use of chemical weapons like white phosphorus on civilian areas, including hospitals. Palestinian militant groups were guilty of violating international law in their use of rockets, the report additionally noted.
Throughout the long and delayed process in compiling the report, the U.S. and Israeli governments tried to stymie the investigation into atrocities committed by the IsraelDefense Forces (IDF). The final report was released on September 15, 2009 at a massive 452 pages, yet even then was criticized by human rights activists for not being thorough enough in its documentation of what the U.N. characterized as Israeliwar crimes.
Publicly released Clinton emails reveal that the UNHRC, under heavy U.S. pressure, postponed consideration of the Goldstone Report from October 2 until March 2010. While the UNHRC ultimately endorsed the report’s findings on October 16, it took nearly six months for the body to urge the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council to refer the Gaza massacre to the ICC pursuant to 13(b) of the Rome Statute, which the U.S. then blocked.
An email from Harold Koh — then Legal Adviser to the Department of State and leading defender of the Obama administration’s predator drone program, now a professor of international law at Yale University, where he previously served as dean of the law school, who also previously taught international law at New York University — demonstrates that the U.S. State Department self-consciously and successfully obstructed endorsement of the Goldstone Report by the UNHRC.
In an October 2, 2009 message to Clinton advisers Jacob Sullivan and Cheryl Mills entitled “HRC Scorecard,” Koh enthusiastically declared that the “Goldstone-report [was] deferred through extraordinary political work by all of you.”
Koh boasted that the Clinton camp “ran the table” in the UNHRC, with a “stunning performance” from various governmental organizations. Undermining the release of the U.N. fact-finding mission shows the “State Department at its finest,” he exulted.
The State Department’s attempts to “defer” U.N. action on Israeli war crimes in Gaza are further evinced in a message from Michael Posner — a former assistant secretary of state who served as founding Executive Director of Human Rights First and is now a business professor at NYU. In a November 10, 2010 note, Posner discussed multiple trips he and U.S. government officials took to Israel in order to discuss the Goldstone Report with the Israeli government. Posner reveled the U.S. and Israeli governments worked together in order to “reframe the public debate” around Israel’s attack. He wrote:
“Our approach has been to offer our support and willingness to work with the Government of Israel to reframe the public debate from defensive (responding to Goldstone or Flotilla reports and resolutions at the UN, etc.) to a more pro-active narrative focused on the challenges of fighting an urban or asymmetrical war. We are having productive, and generally positive preliminary conversations about a possible GOI white paper that would: 1) set the context, outlining the challenges in fighting an asymmetrical conflict; 2) spell out the steps the IDF and other agencies have taken to address these challenges; and 3) identify ongoing challenges that Israel and other professional armies will need to address in the future.”
Another message shows the State Department admitting that U.N. action around the Goldstone Report was “moderate,” but still opposing its policy recommendations. In an email marked “sensitive but unclassified,” Executive Secretary of the StateDepartment Daniel Smith stated that a U.N. General Assembly resolution on the Goldstone Report to be voted on the next day, February 26, 2010, “is relatively moderate, but U.S. and Israel will likely be alone in opposing it.”
“Our friends in the Pacific have lost their votes for the time being because of non-payment of dues,” Smith adds in a parenthetical, referring to the Pacific island nations that are often the only other countries in the world aside from the U.S. to vote against U.N. measures calling for action on Israeli war crimes.
Internal communication like this demonstrates that what U.S. government officials admit among themselves differs greatly from what they say publicly.