This kind of selectivity is a gift to defiantly lawless governments like Israel's, since it allows states to hide behind their critics' hypocrisy. ("They should call us the day the Human Rights Council decides on a human rights inquiry on some other place around the globe," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, explaining away his government's refusal to cooperate with Goldstone.) But a new standard has been set. The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law -- enshrined in a system that, flawed as it is, remains our best protection against barbarism. When we rally around Goldstone, insisting that this report be read and acted upon, it is this system that we are defending. When Israel and its supporters respond to Goldstone by waging war on international law, characterizing any possible legal challenge to Israeli politicians and military officials as "lawfare," they are doing nothing less than recklessly endangering the human rights architecture that was forged in the fires of the Holocaust.
One of the people I met in Gaza was Ibrahim Moammar, chair of the National Society for Democracy and Law. He could barely contain his disbelief that the crimes he had witnessed had not sparked an international legal response. "Israel needs to face war crimes trials," he said. He is right, of course. In a just world, the testimonies collected by Richard Goldstone and now published in book form would not merely raise our consciousness; they would be submitted as evidence. But for now, in the absence of official justice, we will have to settle for what the survivors of Argentina's most recent dictatorship have called "popular justice" -- the kind of justice that rises up from the streets, educating friends, neighbors and family, until the momentum of its truth-telling eventually forces the courts to open their doors.
It starts with reading the report.
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