Goldstone Report: Interview with Israel Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren

PBS
September 15, 2009

http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/1439/goldstone-report-interview-with-israel-ambassador

GWEN IFILL: We get the Israeli response now from Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States. Welcome, Mr. Ambassador. Just heard Justice Goldstone say the ball is in your court. What about this report is right, and what about it is wrong?

MICHAEL OREN: Well, let's begin by first expressing Israel's regret for all civilian casualties, whether on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side. Israel does its utmost to avoid inflicting civilian casualties during military operations. This contrasts us very fundamentally, profoundly with Hamas and Gaza, which does its utmost to maximize civilian casualties on the Israeli side and exults in civilian casualties on its own side, declaring them as martyrs.

The operation in Gaza last winter followed years in which Israel was subjected to rocket fire, over 7,000 rockets fired into southern Israel. At one point, almost a million Israelis were under rocket fire, rockets that were deliberately targeted at our neighborhoods, at our nursery schools, at our hospitals.

And it followed the evacuation of Gaza, in which Israel evacuated 9,000 of its civilians, uprooted its settlements, pulled out its army bases in an attempt to create peaceful conditions along the Gaza border with Israel, and in return it just got this murderous rocket fire.

Ultimately, Israel had no choice but to summon its civilian army and to defend itself. We had appealed to the U.N. for relief. Israeli leaders begged Hamas to extend a cease-fire. All we got was aggression. We had no choice but to defend ourselves here, Gwen.

GWEN IFILL: Why didn't Israel participate, cooperate, tell its side of the story to this U.N. commission?

MICHAEL OREN: Well, first of all, the Human Rights Commission has condemned Israel more frequently than all other nations in the world combined, more than Libya, more than North Korea, more than Saudi Arabia. It's hardly an impartial body. This is the same Human Rights Commission that completely ignored Hamas rocket fire into Israel over the course of four years.

The mandate of the commission said that Israel was guilty of war crimes, said nothing about Hamas in the actual mandate. Even one of the judges involved in the commission had published a letter accusing Israel of unwarranted aggression.

And then, finally, the commission itself, the report, the investigation took place under the auspices of the Hamas-run government in Gaza. Hamas actually picked the witnesses for this commission. So Israel basically was the equivalent of being summoned to a court in which its guilt was already presumed, in which one of the jurors had already declared Israel guilty, and which the witnesses for the prosecution were, in fact, the murderers.

I can't think of any country in the world which would participate in such a farce of justice.

GWEN IFILL: There were also some Israelis, NGOs, nongovernmental organization representatives, the father of an Israeli soldier who's being held, who were flown to Geneva to testify before this committee. Do you not accept their testimony at all?

MICHAEL OREN: I don't know anything about their testimony. The report just came in this afternoon. It's 570 pages long. Israel is a democracy. Israelis have a right to speak out in any forums that they want to. This was an Israeli government decision not to participate, not to cooperate with an investigation which we thought was deeply, deeply biased against us from the very beginning.

GWEN IFILL: Even if you felt it was biased, now it's out there and it says things like you're guilty of war crimes, torture, a grave breach of the Geneva Convention, how do you wipe that slate clean?

MICHAEL OREN: I don't think we have to wipe the slate clean. I think you look at the mandate of this investigation. You saw the way it was conducted, under whose auspices it was conducted.

Israel has deeply investigated its conduct of this operation. We have an open judiciary, a free judiciary. We investigated numerable complaints of irregularities. The army was cleared of virtually all of them. In the few cases where it wasn't cleared, they're being thoroughly investigated and even prosecuted. There is a clear record established by Israel of the way the campaign was conducted and the immense efforts that were taken to avoid civilian casualties, including leaf-letting civilian areas, making hundreds of thousands of phone calls, sending SMS messages to areas that were about to be attacked to civilians, sort of sacrificing the element of surprise, risking our own soldiers' lives in order to minimize those civilian casualties. All that is a matter of record.

GWEN IFILL: Justice Goldstone said that those internal investigations were not independent and therefore not reliable.

MICHAEL OREN: This is an independent judiciary of a democratic country. I think that, once you start establishing the precedent that democratic countries can't investigate themselves, I think you've got a problem.

I think this report creates a problem not just for Israel, but for all free democracies in the world. It's a victory for terror. It is a major setback for any country, democratic country that is having to face war against an un-uniformed terrorist organization in a densely populated civilian area. I don't think the United States would like to see a similar report mounted against its conduct of its operations in Afghanistan.

GWEN IFILL: Now, Hamas wasn't particularly excited about the contents of this report, either. They felt that it equated the aggressor with the victim. Is there any way that you feel that the two of you might at least agree on this point, that maybe this report is not worth the paper it's printed on? Or do you believe that this is a starting point for a deeper conversation and investigation about the conflict?

MICHAEL OREN: I don't think so. I think that there are discussions going on in Jerusalem tonight between President Obama's special envoy, Senator Mitchell, representatives of the Israeli government, to get peace talks back on track between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the same Palestinian Authority who was overthrown violently by Hamas in Gaza. I think that is where the discussions should take place, not in a one-sided, biased report whose conclusions were foregone.

GWEN IFILL: Do you believe in any way this report could affect those talks?

MICHAEL OREN: I think it can only harm the ability of free democracies in the world to defend themselves.

GWEN IFILL: Ambassador Michael Oren from the State of Israel, thank you very much.

Related Topics:  Hamas, Palestinian Rockets receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free jewish policy center mailing list