WILL THEY ACKNOWLEDGE THE ERROR OF THEIR WAYS?

Richard Goldstone’s UN report accusing the Israel Defense Force of deliberately targeting civilians during the Gaza war was gleefully accepted by those who constantly bash the Jewish state - the international community, human rights organizations, The New York Times and most other media outlets, luminaries like Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter, and even America’s left-wing Jews and the Israeli left.

Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic, doubts that any of those who were so eager to accept the false accusations against Israel will acknowledge the error of their ways now that Goldstone has admitted that the IDF did not deliberately target Gaza’s civilian population. Here are some excerpts from his column, ‘Richard Goldstone Recants a Blood Libel,’ in the April 6 issue of Jewish World Review:

Goldstone is crystal clear in his Washington Post disavowal of the report’s accusations of intentional killing by Israel of non-Hamas Palestinians: “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” On the other hand, Hamas’s rockets “were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.” Here is the judge’s pathetic confession: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Israel apparently will try to get the General Assembly to recant its endorsement of the Goldstone verdict on the Jewish crimes in Gaza. After all, the judge himself has recanted.

Maybe Washington, which voted against the report, will take the leadership role on this. The president, the secretary of state, and the American ambassador to the U.N. have, it bears remembering, argued that our presence at the Human Rights Council can make a difference. Will Obama even try? It would mean, of course, that another one of his exemplary lessons in creative engagement will collapse.

There should be many shamed faces in the crowd. The foreign high priest of the Palestinian cause is Desmond Tutu who, like his rival Jimmy Carter, finds no charge against Israel too preposterous to leave to, well, the gagasphere. But they have neither been heard from on Goldstone nor explained their silence. The Financial Times, which is the most consistent and hyperbolic critic of Israel in the United Kingdom, initially went bananas in praise of the Goldstone Report. It has not been heard from since the jurist’s own mea culpa. The human rights organizations? Ditto, Stephen Walt, Juan Cole, John Esposito, Naomi Klein, Michael Lerner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, J-Street, which peddled the report door-to-door on Capitol Hill. Here’s my projection: Not a one of them will come clean.

As is the case with the Israeli “peace left.” Not Peace Now, not the New Israel Fund, not B’tselem, not Agudah Lezchuyot Haezrch. And not Ha’aretz, either. They have made pacts with the devil.