By Dan Williams
Reuters
Sunday, January 24, 2010; 9:07 AM
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has prepared a rebuttal to a U.N. report censuring its conduct in the Gaza war, Israeli officials said on Sunday, arguing the United Nations' findings were so unfair as to have fueled a global wave of anti-Semitism.
Issued in September by a panel under South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the non-binding report cited evidence Israel had unlawfully targeted Palestinian civilians and gave it six months to investigate -- or risk prosecution in foreign courts.
Israel had boycotted the panel and brushed off its findings, calling them biased in favor of Gaza's Hamas rulers.
But Israeli officials have voiced worry that the suspicions raised, if unaddressed, could hobble future military operations. Cabinet minister Yuli Edelstein said Israel would make do with internal army probes of last year's war that resulted in a handful of courts-martial over minor offences, but would deliver a "formal response" to the Goldstone report on Thursday.
"It is certainly already clear that, for many of the 'incidents' and 'crimes' described in the report, no proof was found," Edelstein told Israel Radio.
Noting that Wednesday is U.N.-designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Edelstein said he would meet U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon in New York and suggest that the report had triggered recent attacks on Jews worldwide.
"When you light a match in the name of freedom of expression and human rights and even the fight against war crimes, when the double-standard is so salient ... sometimes it is translated in a manner far more extreme than the U.N. may have intended," Edelstein said.
FROM HOLOCAUST TO HAMAS
Israel said it attacked Gaza to stem years of Palestinian rocket salvoes and in the absence of peace prospects with Hamas, an Islamist group that refuses to recognize the Jewish state and spurns Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his diplomacy.
Israeli shelling in Gaza's cramped precincts killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians. They were the focus of the Goldstone report, though it also rebuked Hamas for its rockets -- which killed 10 Israeli civilians in the war. Three troops also died.
An Israeli diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the response to the Goldstone report aimed to disprove allegations that Israel wreaked deliberate damage on Gaza's impoverished and aid-dependant civilian infrastructure.
"Israel will pass this document on to the relevant U.N. officials, but still insists that it remains outside of the Goldstone process," the diplomat said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland, site of Nazi death camps. He similarly linked the Gaza war's fallout to anti-Semitism.
"The fight against anti-Semitism is more crucial than ever, as there is a significant increase in the manifestations of anti-Semitism since Operation Cast Lead," he told his cabinet, using Israel's codename for the Gaza offensive.
"This anti-Semitism comes with a new tack, which is the bid to deprive the Jewish state of the right to self-defense."
Goldstone is himself Jewish and has publicly identified as a Zionist. Israeli officials say they regard his ethnicity as irrelevant to the substance of the report.