Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: e bravo Jonathan Freedland

Non sono sempre d'accordo con lui, ma questo articolo e' magistrale.
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/06/goldstone-report-israel-palestine/print
Where's the Goldstone report into Sri Lanka, Congo, Darfur – or
Britain?
If you want a glimpse of the anger and heartache caused by the
Goldstone report into the Gaza conflict of 2008-9, you could do worse
than take a trip to the National Theatre. There a new and absorbing
play, The Holy Rosenbergs, imagines the rift in a British Jewish
family sparked by the daughter's work as a lawyer for a Goldstone-like
inquiry into Israeli conduct in Gaza. It is the eve of her brother's
funeral, and the local rabbi urges her to stay away: if she attends,
pro-Israel activists will demonstrate at the cemetery.
If that sounds a stretch, think again. A year ago, Richard Goldstone –
the eminent judge who had headed a UN fact-finding mission to Gaza –
was told by key players in the South African Jewish community that he
should not come to the synagogue where his grandson was due to have
his bar mitzvah: if Goldstone showed his face, the 13 year-old's big
day would be disrupted by protests.
In the end, the row was resolved, but that is about the only part of
the Goldstone saga that was: the rest remains fiercely contested, for
reasons which point to a much larger story than simply the tale of one
man and his report.
That particular battle has been reignited by the op-ed piece the judge
wrote last week in the Washington Post "reconsidering" his own report
and withdrawing what had been his most devastating finding. Goldstone
wrote that the latest evidence "indicate[s] that civilians were not
intentionally targeted as a matter of policy".
Peter Till Freedland 5/3/2011 Illustration by Peter Till
The import of that sentence can hardly be exaggerated. His original
suggestion that Israel had been guilty of "wilful killings" of
"protected persons" had been received as the most damning indictment
possible, an international mark of Cain on Israel's forehead. Anti-
Israel activists had seized on it; many Israel supporters branded
Goldstone a traitor, ignoring his own description of himself as a
proud Zionist.
Now the two camps are strapping on their rhetorical armour all over
again. Israel advocates are savouring the Goldstone semi-retraction as
sweet vindication, believing the entire report can now be trashed;
Israel's opponents are looking for those unwithdrawn charges that
still have to be answered. One side revels in Goldstone's bald
declaration that "Hamas has done nothing" to follow the report's key
recommendation – which was for both Israel and Hamas to investigate
the charges against them. The other notes the gravity of the
outstanding claims and the fact that Israel's own investigations,
while numbering 400, have led to all too few prosecutions.
None of this will bring back the more than 700 noncombatants, many of
them children, who were killed in Gaza during those appalling winter
weeks. Nor will it end the argument chiefly because, as many have
noted, Goldstone was never going to be a cool, legal process but a
burningly political one. That was baked in from the start, in a way
that points to that wider and deeper problem.
For who was it that commissioned Goldstone and his team to look into
Gaza? It was the UN Human Rights Council. That sounds like an
eminently respectable body – until you look at its record. A 2010
analysis showed that very nearly half of all the resolutions it had
passed related to Israel: 32 out of 67. And guess which country is the
only one to be under permanent review, on the agenda for every single
meeting? Israel. There is only one rapporteur whose mandate never
expires. No, it's not the person charged with probing Belarus, North
Korea or Saudi Arabia, despite the hideous human rights records of
those nations. It is Israel. The UNHRC, whose predecessor body was
once, laughably, chaired by Libya, had originally asked Goldstone to
probe just one side of the Gaza war: it was only the judge's own
insistence that he investigate Hamas too that widened his remit. No
wonder Goldstone says now of the body he served that its "history of
bias against Israel cannot be doubted".
We can laugh at an organisation so potty it would put a murderous
tyrant like Muammar Gaddafi in charge of monitoring human rights
around the globe. But in its belief that no country in the world
behaves worse or matters more, a belief expressed by the sheer volume
of attention it pays to Israel, it reflects a view that is alarmingly
widespread.
Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the "core
issue" in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine
conflict – that it is the "running sore" whose eventual healing will
heal the wider region and beyond.
That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come
along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt,
Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that
have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis
and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn't relieve those in Damascus
or Manama or Sana'a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not
"the heart of the matter", as the cliche always insisted it was. The
heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in,
day out, for 40 years or more.
Yet it is not the suffering of these hundreds of millions of Arabs
which has attracted the sympathy of the UN Human Rights Council. Nor
has it stirred the compassion of left-leaning liberal types who pride
themselves on thei r care for the oppressed. Few places get them
excited the way Israel does.
So in 2009 Sri Lanka could kill between 7,000 and 20,000 civilians,
displacing 300,000 more in its bombardment of the Tamils at about the
same time as the Gaza conflict – but you will search in vain for the
Goldstone report into Sri Lankan war crimes. Nor will you find Caryl
Churchill writing a play called Seven Sri Lankan Children – asking
what exactly is it in the Sri Lankan mentality that allows them to be
so brutal.
There is no Goldstone or Churchill to probe the 4 million deaths in
the Congo, the slaughtered in Darfur or the murdered in the Ivory
Coast, let alone the civilian deaths inflicted by the US and Britain
in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one is proposing an academic boycott of
those nations or any of the other serial violators of human rights.
Tellingly, two members of the four-person board of the LSE's Middle
East Centre are firm advocates of cutting all scholarly ties to Israel
– but were only too happy for the college to receive £1.5m from the
Gaddafi family.
Many will say that there is indeed a double standard – but it benefits
Israel, routinely protected by a US veto at the UN unavailable to
those weaker states deemed hostile. That may be true of the most
powerful western governments. But when it comes to the academic,
cultural and, yes, the media sphere, the bias often works the other
way around.
To be clear, this is not to deny that there is a desperately serious
problem in Israel-Palestine. There is, and Israelis and Palestinians
need it to be solved. I fully understand why Jews and Palestinians
regard their conflict as the central issue in the universe. But for
the rest of the world to see it that way – the way those who
despatched Judge Goldstone saw it – makes no sense at all.


Perfetto, quanto inutile.
-- 
Io non gufo l'Inter. Le spacco le corna.

 Perfetto, quanto inutile.
ad essere esageratamente ottimisti si potrebbe pensare che le indagini
sui finanziamenti delle universita' britanniche potrebbero modificare
i riflessi condizionati degli accademici che scrivono editoriali per
il Guardian. Per il momento mi accontento di trovarvi editoriali di
Jonathan Freedland un pelino piu' riflessivi del solito. Che, di
solito. e' a livelli di Lerner.

 Britain?
E dove sono i pacifisti? :)
-- 
Namib
"I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis"
(ultime parole di Humphrey Bogart)

 sui finanziamenti delle universita' britanniche
se non si denuncia l'original sin, che è permettere ai privati di
finanziare istituzioni che dovrebbero fare ricerca più imparziale
possibile (mentre i privati nell'università mettono soldi per
guadagnarci), certe indagini non portano da nessuna parte. Anche
perchè si possono fare indagini di segno opposto (sul lobbysmo dei
nemici di certi finanziatori) e si concluderebbe che ognuno usa i
soldi per tirare l'acqua al proprio mulino invece di fare ricerca
seria.