Richard Goldstone defended himself against charges that his judicial rulings during apartheid “mercilessly” sentenced dozens of blacks to death, and he said a front-page story in Israel’s largest daily newspaper “reveals nothing that has not been a matter of public record for the last three decades.”
The newspaper Yediot Achronot aired the charges May 7, two weeks after pro-Israel groups in South Africa withdrew threats to picket Goldstone at his grandson’s bar mitzvah.
His defenders argue that while Goldstone was obliged as a jurist to enforce the apartheid regime’s racist laws, he also issued rulings and pursued investigations that did much to dismantle the system.
Senior Israeli officials and some prominent American Jews seized upon the charges in their campaign against Goldstone, head of the U.N. commission that published a report last September alleging Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during their 2008-09 conflict in Gaza. They view the report’s findings as threatening Israel’s legitimacy and adamantly deny the report allegations.
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, was one of several high-profile figures who compared Goldstone to the Nazis.
“I don’t want to exaggerate,” he told Israel Radio, commenting on Goldstone’s position that at the time he was bound as a judge to enforce South African law, “but these are the same explanations we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II.”
Harvard law professor and pro-Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz compared Goldstone to Nazi SS officer and torturer Dr. Josef Mengele. “That’s what Mengele said, too — ‘We just followed the law,’ ” Dershowitz told Israel’s Channel 2.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly ordered distribution of the Yediot article to Israeli diplomatic missions abroad to be used by official representatives arguing against Goldstone’s Gaza findings.
In an e-mail exchange with the Forward, Goldstone said the article was based on old information shorn of key context.
He pointed to the fact that Mandela appointed him to serve on South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional court as evidence that his rulings under apartheid were not out of line.
“South Africans, who are of course familiar with my record and with apartheid, have not made the sort of allegations that certain members of the Israeli press and government are currently making,” Goldstone wrote.
“I have been judged by my fellow South Africans and by President Mandela for my role both during and after apartheid, and I find it curious that no one in Israel ever raised the issue except to laud me, prior to my Gaza report.”
The investigative report, by Yediot staff writer Tehiya Barak, said that Goldstone “sentenced dozens of blacks mercilessly to death” during his tenure as a trial judge and then on an appellate court in the 1980s and 1990s. The article specified later that he “sentenced at least 28 black defendants to death,” appearing to conflate those he sentenced as a trial judge and others whose cases he reviewed as an appellate judge. Most were found guilty of murder. The contexts were not political.
Goldstone acknowledged that as a trial judge he sentenced two convicted murderers to death, but he maintained that some of the cases cited by Yediot “are taken out of context and misrepresented.”
He said many of his judiicial decisions were “extremely difficult ones” and he had always admitted “the difficult moral issues that had to be faced in taking an appointment on the apartheid bench.”
Goldstone was one of several liberal South Africans who accepted appointments during the apartheid era. Goldstone has explained his decision to accept the appointment by citing the belief that he could reform the system from within. He has described the decision as “the most difficult of my career” because of the risk that he would grant legitimacy to the regime.
While Goldstone, as reported by Yediot, adhered to apartheid laws, he also is credited with having used his judicial power to undermine some racial restrictions. In 1986 he handed down a decision limiting the government’s ability to evict black people living in neighborhoods designated for whites. The decision paved the way for abolishing racially based residency restrictions.
Goldstone is credited as well with having helped bring down the curtain on apartheid through a government-commissioned investigation he led that exposed the existence of covert state-sponsored terror units deployed by South Africa against its own black citizenry.