Gaza

Missing from this otherwise-very good Washington Post piece about the Obama administration’s early and serious missteps on restarting Israel/Palestine peace talks is, unfortunately, the Goldstone commission on Gaza, which is relegated to a single sentence. This is the capsule version: Obama feared that Israel would freak out and foreclose on any peace talks if U.N. [...]

As expected, the House approved Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s (R-Fla.) resolution condemning South African judge Richard Goldstone’s inquiry for the United Nations into war crimes committed last year in Gaza by Israel and Hamas. The lopsided final vote was 344 in favor to 36 opposed, with 22 “present” votes.

The House will shortly begin debating a resolution to denounce a U.N. report into Israeli and Hamas war crimes in last year’s Gaza war co-sponsored by Rep. Howard Berman’s (D-Calif), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The author of that report, South African Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote last week to Berman and his co-sponsors, [...]

Last week, Richard Goldstone, who investigated Israeli and Hamas war crimes in Gaza for the United Nations, wrote to Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) to say that a resolution co-sponsored by Berman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denouncing Goldstone’s report was significantly factually inaccurate. A spokeswoman for Berman, Lynne Weil, told me that [...]

Via Michael Goldfarb, the respected former South African judge who investigated war crimes in Gaza has sent a letter to Congress highlighting factual errors in its resolution condemning his investigation. For instance: the resolution condemns Goldstone’s team for
pre-judg[ing] the outcome of its investigation, by one-sidedly mandating the `fact-finding mission’ to `investigate all violations of international [...]

TWI has acquired the text of a congressional resolution that may be introduced in the next few days condemning the findings of U.N. investigator Richard Goldstone’s report into war crimes during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza this past winter.
The resolution — drafted by Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) and [...]

Benjamin Hartman of Ha’aretz conducted a strange, semi-credulous interview with birther/fraudster Orly Taitz, who’s in Israel for a month, and rather disappointed that the birther “phenomenon” has faded, “largely supplanted by the debate over health care.” Hartman buries the lede:
In a classic, Americana twist, the matriarch of the birthers has not ruled out her own [...]

There’s no question that international law is supposed to govern the Israel-Hamas conflict; but the persistent recriminations raise an important question: Does it matter?

Bill Kristol speaks to American Jewry:
As we recited this on Saturday, I couldn’t help but reflect that a distressingly small number of my fellow Jews seem to have given much thought at all to the fact that President Bush is one of the greatest friends the state of Israel — and, yes, the Jewish people [...]

CNN reports that Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape is about Gaza:
The message is “an invitation” from bin Laden to take part in “jihad to stop the aggression against Gaza.”
The terrorist leader has attempted to hijack the cause of the Palestinians before, so this was probably inevitable.