The Goldstone Report: (2 Volume Set) : The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict

In the spring of 2009, South African judge Richard Goldstone set out on a mission to the Gaza Strip on assignment from the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate possible war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, Israel's invasion of Gaza a few months earlier. Many other reports on the Israel-Palestinian conflict had come and gone, but the account Goldstone's mission produced later that year was different - it became the report heard round the world. Formally known as The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, the report is one of the most controversial and historic documents published in the century-long conflict in Israel and Palestine. Alternating between clinical analysis and contained bursts of moral outrage, it offers a devastating catalogue of the events of Operation Cast Lead capped by a stark conclusion: that both Israeli and Hamas forces committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the twenty-two-day conflict. For the first time, a U.N. report accused the Palestinian side of grave breaches of international law, but it was the mission's emphasis on Israeli atrocities - in particular its conclusion that Israel had engaged in a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population - that made it a political bombshell. This new volume is an edited version of the original along with essays from a wide range of leading experts, activists, and journalists. They include Archbishop Desmond Tutu; human rights activist Raji Sourani; legal expert Jules Lobel; Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal; historians Rashid Khalidi and Jerome Slater; congressman Brian Baird; policy analyst Henry Siegman; authors Ali Abunimah, Naomi Klein, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin; and journalists Noam Sheizaf and Leila El-Haddad. The Goldstone Report is a corrective to the relentless attacks the original received and a strenuous and informed effort to put that report in its proper context.