Livni: Cast Lead was justified with or without Goldstone

Eli Yishai, who served as deputy PM during Gaza op, calls on South African jurist to "write the report that he should have."

By REBECCA ANNA STOIL
Tzipi Livni speaking (R) 311 (photo credit: REUTERS/Baz Ratner)
Tzipi Livni speaking (R) 311
(photo credit: REUTERS/Baz Ratner)
Political leaders who held top positions in the Olmert administration united over the weekend in their calls for South African Judge Richard Goldstone to take steps to correct harm done to Israel by the report published under his name.
Former ministers, whether currently in the coalition or opposition, agreed that the article Goldstone published in Friday’s Washington Post needed to be followed by further acts on the international stage.
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“Operation Cast Lead was an important and justified operation with or without Goldstone. It is better now than later, but the correction must be more significant than a newspaper article. The Goldstone Report was not factual, and built on a significant failure,” complained opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni, who served as foreign minister in the Olmert administration.
“I cannot accept all the comparisons between terrorists, who seek to kill civilians and children, and IDF soldiers, who act against terror targeting civilians. All of the comparisons are fundamentally, morally and legally unfounded. If Goldstone wants to correct it, an article is insufficient. He should correct it in the same forums that condemned Israel in the spirit of his report.”
Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas), who served as both deputy prime minister and as industry, trade and labor minister in the Olmert administration, called on Goldstone to write “the real report that he should have, focusing on how Palestinian terror paralyzed the life of the children of the south.”
Yishai said he expressed that same sentiment in a letter he recently sent to the judge.
“Goldstone should have the same [amount of] courage to publish a personal apology to all residents of Israel, as he had to publish an untruthful report,” Yishai said in a statement Saturday night.
Following the Friday publication of Goldstone’s opinion piece, in which he said that he would have written the report differently in retrospect, MK Miri Regev (Likud), chairwoman of the Knesset’s Forum Against the Delegitimization of Israel, said she planned to send a letter to UN representatives in Israel demanding that they immediately shelve the report “in order to erase it from the pages of history.”
“The Goldstone Report is similar in its credibility to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the European blood libels,” continued Regev.
“There should be an urgent hearing on the negligence of the report’s author, as well as regarding all of the organizations that flocked to him.”
Jonah Mandel contributed to this report.