The UNHRC has officially adopted the Goldstone report criticizing Israel and Hamas for their conduct during the Gaza war. Well, sort of — though Goldstone’s report contained criticisms of both Israel and Hamas, the UNHRC’s resolution, “inexplicably”, says nary a word about Hamas. Stunning, I know. Judge Goldstone apparently is displeased with this, but you can’t tell me he’s actually surprised, as the only principle the UNHRC holds deeper than “screw Israel” is “insulate Palestine”. His at least partial effort at demanding that Hamas be held accountable for war crimes as well was noted and admirable, but it was also completely unsupported by the commission’s original mandate and no credible observer expected it to go anywhere. I’m not exactly shocked to find out that the UNHRC felt absolutely zero compunction in ignoring it. I sort of feel bad for Judge Goldstone, whom I suspect had convinced himself that he had made a difference in countering the absurd one-sidedness of the UNHRC’s treatment of Israel, but at the same time, he’s a big boy, and he was not so naive as to not know what he was getting into.
That gets, somewhat obliquely, to Jeffrey Goldberg’s warning to the West that the precedent set by this commission will come back to bite it once American or British or NATO commanders are arraigned on war crime charges. Insofar as the commission’s standards have made terrorist tactics nearly immune from retaliation (essentially, if you’re willing to kill off the civilians you’re supposedly “defending”, you’re in the clear), that’s going to hurt America in Iraq or NATO in Afghanistan as much as it hurts Israel in Gaza.