The Goldstone Report and the Gaza Truce

In a recent interview [PDF] with the Middle East Monitor, Colonel (ret.) Desmond Travers of the Irish Army — best known as one of the members of the U.N. commission that produced the Goldstone report — attracted attention for his statement that “the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding their operations was something like two.” Critics of the Goldstone report like Commentary‘s David Hazony and Evelyn Gordon have seized on the comment as proof that Travers and the rest of the Goldstone commission are irredeemably biased against Israel; Gordon cites figures [PDF] from the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center showing that over 300 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza during the month of December 2008. (Operation Cast Lead began on Dec. 27.)

As Jerry Haber notes, however, these criticisms are based on a simple misunderstanding. In fact, the “operations” that Travers refers do not commence with the start of Operation Cast Lead on Dec. 27, but rather with Operation Double Challenge on Nov. 4. Double Challenge was an IDF incursion into Gaza that left six Palestinians dead, ending months of calm; because the operation came the day of the U.S. presidential elections, it vanished without a trace in the U.S. media. Paul Woodward explains that the ceasefire was, in fact, functioning quite well until the Israelis broke it on Nov. 4; only after the IDF raid did the number of rocket attacks increase.

Therefore, when Travers speaks of “the month preceding their operations,” he is referring not to December but to October 2008. And how many rockets were fired into Israel in October? According to the very figures [PDF, p. 6] that Gordon cites against Travers, only one. (According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there were two rockets fired in October, and twelve in the four-month stretch from July through October.)

The fact that the ceasefire was actually working quite well in preventing rocket fire into southern Israel is one reason that we should be skeptical of the claim that Israel had no choice but to use military force to prevent the rocket attacks. (This is not, of course, to deny that the rocket attacks constituted war crimes in their own right.) If Israel’s primary goal were simply to end the rocket attacks, it could have worked to maintain the ceasefire (or better still, lifted the siege of Gaza). Why, then, did Israel choose to violate it instead? I suspect that the Israeli government, wary of the incoming Obama administration, believed that the blank check it enjoyed during the Bush years was coming to an end, and was determined to make one last sustained effort to root out the Hamas government before it did.

Daniel Luban

Daniel Luban is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. He holds a PhD in politics from the University of Chicago and was formerly a correspondent in the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service.

SHOW 15 COMMENTS

15 Comments

  1. I see the paid help is out in force. Against the “colonial entity” – but for the massacre of more than 600 women and children and 1000 civilians and mass destruction of civilian infrastructure. Not to mention that it was Israel’s obligation, according to the terms of the cease-fire, to lift the siege and allow food and water into Gaza. Didn’t happen. Or did you forget that part? I’m guessing you didn’t forget…

    Those were crimes against humanity, my friend. And international law allows for those under intense and brutal military occupation to resist such illegal actions. And those rockets are all the Palestinians had – and even they were the equivalent of crude moltav cocktails. Israel had no right to attack a defenseless civilian population when it didn’t fulfill it’s cease fire agreement.

    Or did you forget that about your ‘colonial entity’?

  2. And why post drivel from the Israeli government who have been shown, time and time again, to simply lie about it’s operations against the Palestinians?

    And then allow it’s million dollar, internet propaganda campaigners to infiltrate progressive websites and sow those seeds of doubt?

    If that’s not you – my apologies. And if not, why not?

    There’s money in your lies….

  3. Here is a fairly cogent analysis of what was fired into Israel in the months preceding Nov 4:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611.html

    It is pretty clear, tunnel and alleged kidnapping plan notwithstanding, that Hamas was maintaining the ceasefire to the best of its ability and Cast Lead should be viewed more as an aggressive move rather than defensive. The tunnel and alleged kidnapping plot bears all the hallmarks of a provocation.

  4. I don’t support a Jewish state in Palestine and I oppose ALL U.S. aid to Israel. I want no involvement with Israel because I believe it hurts American interests. I frankly don’t give a damn about anybody in the Middle East. It’s a region important only for its energy resources; culturally it’s been a backwater for centuries. I don’t wish the peoples of the region ill; I just want nothing to do with them beyond having trading relations with them.

    I can tell you that my views have caused me to be attacked in The Forward and called an anti-semite (which I’m not) in letters to the editor of a magazine I write for. I have no brief for the Israelis. But clearly, my friend, you’ve never been under fire, or experienced someone shooting at your children. If someone’s shooting at my children, I retaliate. I agree that the Israeli retaliation was disproportionate. But believe me, if someone starts shooting at my family, I will make every attempt to kill him.

    I condemn operation Cast Lead as overkill and in some respects illegal. But I don’t blame anyone for retaliating against someone who’s shooting at him. That’s a separate issue from the question of whether Israel should have been created to begin with.

  5. You are spot on.

    There was a chart of how rockets had originated from Gaza before the invasion on the Israeli defense website. After the chart made the rounds on the internet linking back to their website, one of two charts were deleted. The chart that was left was harder to read.

    And now the digging under the bridge to the Al-Aqsa mosque has been accelerated. The Palestinians suffer daily provocation.

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