Of the many stories the Times ran on Judge Goldstone and his report, two merited front page placement: an initial article, titled “U.N. Inquiry Sees Gaza War Crimes; Israel Chastised,” that focused primarily on the report’s condemnation of Israel, and “A Gaza War Study, an Outcry, A Bar Mitzvah’s Missing Guest,” which sarcastically criticized the South African Jewish community for branding Goldstone a traitor and trying to prevent him from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah.
Both represent recurring themes in the New York Times’ coverage of the Goldstone Report – presenting the mission as a credible and respectable investigation that found Israel guilty of war crimes, and casting its denunciation as pro-Israel advocacy that demonizes anyone who criticizes Israel.
But the recanting of what essentially amounted to a blood libel, a landmark development on a major story, is apparently not quite as compelling to Times editors. An article covering Goldstone’s repudiation of the report’s central finding, “Head of U.N. Panel Regrets Saying Israel Intentionally Killed Gazans” was relegated to page 10 of the newspaper.
Even in this buried article, the newspaper seemed reluctant to abandon Goldstone’s original condemnation of Israel Although the report has been revealed as a sham, the paper clung to the desription of Goldstone as “an esteemed South African jurist” who “documented numerous examples of mistreatement of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers,” and emphasized that “he did not back away from those findings in his article.” The authors repeated Goldstone’s blame of Israel for refusing “to cooperate” with him and thus “severely hamper[ing] his report. “By ending with an account of Goldstone’s “ostracization” by his South African Jewish community, the article seemed to imply that in retracting his original condemnation of Israel, Goldstone was caving into social pressure.
