The Israeli military goes on the attack to discredit the Goldstone report

Israel's defence force [IDF] has deliberately chosen 27 January 2010, to go on the attack of the UN Goldstone report on Israel's preemptive, collective punishment war against Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, which wrought ruin and havoc mainly on the civilian population of the Gaza strip, but hardly toppled Israel's nemesis Hamas.
27 January 2010 marks the 65 anniversary of the liberation of the dead camp at Auschwitz.
At first the right wing government of Benjamin Netenyahu dismissed the Goldstone report as not only one sided but biased. It refused to take part in the eminent South African jurist Richard Goldstone's UN mandate to investigate the war in Gaza. GuamDiary has already written about Jerusalem's intransigence, stressing that Judge Goldstone himself is Jewish, and a supporter of Israel. But to Israel, he is but yet another example of a 'self hating Jew'.
Israel's cold shouldering and at first dismissal of the report, did work wonders among the gaggle of geese which is the US government. The houses of Congress voted a resolution condemning the report, regardless of its findings, and US president Barack Obama [BHO] said words to that effect.
What did the report say, briefly. It condemned both Israel and Hamas, cataloging alledged war crimes for both; it called upon Israel and Hamas to conduct their own investigations to get to the bottom of responsibility for the war and the high number of Palestinian victims, and the utter destruction of infrastructure---hospitals, schools, homes, utilities, the only flour mill, so on and on. However the lion's share of blame fell on Israel's shoulders, which didn't go down well for Jerusalem at all at all. Fault in carrying out the investigations after a period of grace, the Goldstone report recommended bringing the matter to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. And that stuck in the Israeli caw!
Israel flatly refused to doing anything that the Goldstone report suggested. Arrogant and self assured, and buoyed by its own propaganda mill and political action committees abroad, and thinking that the weight of the US government's condemnation of the report, others wouldn't treat Judge Goldstone's conclusions, backed by the authority of the United Nations, with seriousness.
Well, Israel misjudged the matter, and how!The world did take the Goldstone report seriously, and especially in Europe which began criticising Israel, and questioning its positions on other issues.
In brief, Judge Goldstone's report had given Israel a black eye. And Israel's image as 'the eternal victim', a people that survived the demented extermination plans of the Nazis, a race long sanctifed by God, was above suspicion and reproof, was thought to be beyond the pale of blame. Wrong! And begrudgingly, Israel's defence establishment took to attacking the Goldstone report by parsing through its inconsistencies and its logic and its selectivity of the horror its own forces visited on the civilian victims of Operation Cast Lead.
We all know that the best defence is the offence. And the IDF has gone on it in a big way. Let's cut to the chase of what the IDF report will say. It is not too hard to fathom since it is made up of the stuff Israel comes up with when it is under the glaring light of scrutiny. One, it was the Palestinians in Gaza's own fault. They are to blame for the over the top punishment they sustained. Yes, blaming the victim is a facile instrument to bludgeon even more, a people left homeless and in mourning and what's more kept on the edge of starvation by a vindictive Israeli government which keeps enough food and building matters and medical supplies, etc. etc., and deliberatively!
But the big kahuna of the IDF's 'apologia pro sua vita' is the tar brush of anti Semitism. Yes, the Goldstone report is fundamentally anti Semitic. Which means in Israeli think, any rebuttal to the IDF's charge is not only indefensible but downright Hitlerian!
What Israel has not reckoned with, is the simple obvious truth that its war in Gaza, tore of the veil of its own temple to its inviolability and its own self centred sense of invincibility.
Israel is now reaping the whirlwind it so sowed. And there is no way of escaping that conclusion.