The Goldstone Question

Over the past decades, our public discourse has provided a catalog of pithy rhetoric, phrases that in a few words capture much broader cultural conversations. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” said George Bush the father in 1988. “Can we all get along?” asked Rodney King in the LA race riots of 1992. President Clinton provided more than his fair share. “I didn’t inhale.” And my personal favorite: “It all depends on what your definition of is…is.” These “teachable moments,” (compliments of President Obama) range from the sublime heroism of “let’s roll,” to the ridiculous “If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.” We know where we were when we heard them. Years later, they can be referenced again and again as key guideposts, inflection points, of who we are, who we seek to be, and in many cases, our deepest anxieties expressed in a tight rhetorical package.

Last month, the Jewish community was bequeathed a new one, compliments of Richard Goldstone in his op-ed in the Washington Post. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” As news of the piece spread, I rushed to read it with my own eyes. Richard Goldstone, the retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, former Chief Prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the chair of the UN fact-finding mission for the Gaza conflict, in the report bearing his name, concluded that Israel had, among other misdeeds, intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy. The report, endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in the fall of 2009, sparked outrage for its hostile suggestion of Israeli war crimes, and Goldstone himself came under sustained personal attack, most famously the controversy as to whether he would be barred from attending his own grandson’s Bar Mitzvah last April. This month’s stunning retraction, clumsy as it was, seemed to vindicate the claims of the pro-Israel community. We were right, he was wrong…wrong all along, his accusations baseless. Israel’s detractors on the other hand, have stood by Goldstone’s findings, suggesting his change of mind came as a result of duress. Goldstone’s recent recantation, according to this thinking, bears no weight on the initial report’s validity and its recommendations for the future. As for the Jewish community, we have been squirming on the needle point of Goldstone’s “If I had known then what I know now.” Do we take him back? Does he stay out in the cold? What does news of this recent turnaround mean for the pro-Israel community?

I am not a psychologist and can not read Goldstone’s heart to judge what internal or external pressures motivated him to issue the report the first time around, or to write the recent retraction. I am not a political scientist or military expert; I have no special aptitude in determining what did or didn’t happen in the war in Gaza, the merits of the first report and its deficiencies that prompted Goldstone to rethink his conclusions. And yet even so, I continue to wonder, what, if anything, this entire incident says about what it means to be a Zionist today. After all, this is neither the first nor the last so-called UN fact finding mission to level accusations at Israel. In this world of boycotts, divestments and sanctions, we certainly don’t need the Goldstone Report to find evidence of those seeking to delegitimize Israel. So what is it exactly about the Goldstone Report that caught our cultural attention? What is (to repackage the title of Howard Jacobson’s novel) at the foundation of the “Goldstone Question?”

I believe that the Goldstone question may be summed up in one word – and that word is not surprisingly – “Goldstone.” If the report bore the name of Jinkin, Chilawi, Travers or any of the other commission members; if it did not bear the name of its most Jewishly identified juror, then I believe the report, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, would be considered – both by those endorsing and by those rejecting it – of an entirely different and lesser magnitude of concern. In other words, I think the enduring drama of the Goldstone Report is not so much its particular merit, but about a more fundamental dilemma facing a Jew involved in public policy relating to the state of Israel. The Goldstone Question is, to some degree, the same as the Dennis Ross Question, the Dan Kurtzer Question, the Martin Indyk Question, or the Rahm Emmanuel Question, the same question posed to any Jewish public figure dating back to Kissinger or perhaps as far back as Brandeis. When it comes to Israel, how does a Jewish public figure negotiate devotional loyalty to the Jewish state and the claim to intellectual honesty?

In my mind there three possible outcomes when Goldstone agreed to lead the UN Commission.

First, there was what actually happened – a report that reflected poorly on Israel. In the eyes of Israel’s detractors this was a double victory as it came from a “Goldstone,” a Jew with expressed loyalty to the Zionist State. His Jewishness served as cover for charges of anti-semitism. For Israel’s supporters, such an outcome resulted in cries of intellectual dishonesty, self-hatred or claims that Goldstone allowed himself to be naively used as a pawn in the lethal act of Israel’s deligitimization. A contemporary embodiment of Isaiah’s verse m’harsayikh u-maharivayikh mimekh yetze'u, “Your destroyers and devastators will emerge from you.” (Isaiah 49:17)

The second option – entirely theoretical because it didn’t happen – would have been a report from Goldstone that reflected well on Israel. Had such a report been issued, I suspect it would have been easily and immediately dismissed by Israel’s detractors; after all, what would one expect from a “Goldstone”? So, too, in the eyes of the Jewish world, does a report by a “Goldstone” really matter in buttressing Israel’s legitimacy in the court of world opinion? Option two, a positive report, would have come and gone without a blip.

Finally, a third option – also a road not taken – is that when Goldstone got the call, he could have said “no.” “Thanks but no thanks – I’m otherwise engaged.” As Rabbi Israel Salanter remarked: “Not everything that is thought should be said, not everything that is said should be written, and not everything that is written should be published.” I am asked all the time for a usable quotation on some issue relating to Israel, Jews or the Conservative movement; I very rarely answer those calls. I know that that my words are not being judged solely on their merits but by who is saying them and in what context. Goldstone presumably is smart enough to have seen behind door number one and two. He could have – but didn’t – decide to go on holiday.

But this option is also deeply problematic, because taking it would amount to an admission to the charge of dual loyalty. To not take the call would be akin to saying that a Jew can not fulfill the mandate of this week’s Torah portion: to render a fair decision; to admonish a kinsman if called on to do so; and to see that choice as an expression of, not in opposition to, one’s Jewishness. The third option says that when it comes to Israel, a Goldstone can’t simply call balls and strikes with the hope that the Jewish and non-Jewish world will not call that “Goldstone” self-hating, intellectually dishonest or worse. I understand those who say that Goldstone should have just kept his mouth shut, that Israel has enough tsurus as it is – why get involved in the first place? I understand them, but I can’t agree with them. Because to agree with them, to recuse oneself from public policy discussions vis-à-vis Israel, is to make a tragic and woeful concession from which we can never recover. What was true in Isaiah’s day is doubly true for us who live in the face of the modern state of Israel. L’ma'an Tzion lo eheshe, u-l’ma'an Yerushalayim lo eshkot, “For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem's sake I will not remain quiet.” (Isaiah 62:1)

To be fair, there was the fourth option – the one that we are muddling through – to issue a negative report and then provide a clumsy retraction. As bizarre, perverse and objectionable as it is to all sides, it is an option that reflects the insoluble question that is “Goldstone.” Ultimately the only real winners in this game were the ones who asked Goldstone in the first place. It was a gambit that they could not lose and a proposition that Goldstone could not win.

I could go on in this vein, but here is the upshot. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the Goldstone question isn’t really about Richard Goldstone, and for that matter it isn’t just about Indyk, Emmanuel, Ross and Kurtzer. It is about you, it is about me, it is about every Jew who is, at one and the same time, insistent on fierce devotion to Israel and on abiding intellectual honesty. The events of the Middle East are unfolding, literally as we speak. Israel and her supporters are sitting uncomfortably as Arab governments are being reshaped, alliances realigned and the tick-tock of the clock until whatever is going to happen this fall in the UN grows only louder.

And in the face of all this, there is an abject lack of voices in the Jewish world who are capable of squarely confronting – never mind solving – the Goldstone question. There are those who keep pointing at Iran and her proxies as a continuing existential threat to Israel. All true, but cold comfort to the Palestinian living in Ramallah. And then there are those who decry Israel for its settlements, for its blockades and for its security fence, but to the best of my knowledge have yet to answer the simple question of with whom exactly is Israel making peace? Hezbollah? Hamas? I love all lovers of Israel, but there is no subtlety or complexity to the AIPACS and J‑Streets of the world. There is, to the best of my knowledge nowhere that a Jew can stand proudly as a Zionist, honest, open and critical in discourse, and not risk being labeled self – hating. Dissent may or may not be the highest form of patriotism but it is certainly no crime. And, in the same breath, if one makes the claim to be pro-Israel, then when you do take issue with Israel, you must do so ever aware that you are, in the eyes of the Jewish and world community, a Goldstone. And yes, that means you have an added obligation to zealously couch your language in love, and to be savvy enough to know the difference between public and private rebuke. If that is the extra step we must take for living as proud Jews in the time of the modern miracle that is Israel, then that is an extra step well worth taking. I may be naïve, but I do think it is possible to create space where this debate can be had respectfully and more importantly, in a way that it can be won. That space sadly does not yet exist. But if we, the “Goldstones” of this community, will it, if we model a community that allows for the left and the right to be heard in the fullness of honest and respectful debate, then not only is it no dream, it is a reality by which we, the lovers of Israel will bring forth in strength for the rest of the Jewish world to follow.