| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
By concluding that, in its assault on Gaza under the rubric of self-defense, Israel had targeted the civilian infrastructure and consciously "punished" the civilian population and demonstrated indifference to the suffering of noncombatants and engaged in other acts in violation of the laws of war, behaviors that possibly constituted in their totality crimes against humanity, the Goldstone Report became almost as controversial as the events precipitating it. In this agora, four eminent international lawyers, a mix of scholars and practitioners, assess from their distinctive perspectives the report's methodology, its compliance with fact-finding norms, and the overall quality of its effort to apply norms of international law to a bloody event in the ongoing multidecade conflict between Jews and Arabs over the governance and division of the former British-controlled Palestinian Mandate. Dialectically, they help to structure future debates over UN-sponsored fact-finding and also the normative parameters of the use of force by powerful states engaged in asymmetrical conflicts.
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