Yesterday the Obama administration held a conference call in which a “senior administration official” assured the participants that the Obama administration would not allow the Goldstone Report, a work product of the UN’s Human Rights Council that indicts Israel for war crimes in Operation Cast Lead, to reach the UN Security Council or the International Criminal Court. The Goldstone Report has been almost unanimously condemned as biased against Israel (the only group that didn’t condemn the report was, of course, J Street). And this rare moment of support for Israel from the Obama administration drew praise from unlikely quarters. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that “it has rightly made it clear that it will not allow the report to reach the level of the Security Council, much less the International Criminal Court.” But apparently this support for Israel was not intentional but a result of some…miscommunication. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, a true friend to the Jewish people (a righteous gentile, if you will), was asked to deliver the bad news:
Perhaps the administration views the prospect of international war crimes charges against Israeli troops and commanders as convenient leverage in negotiations with Netanyahu, or perhaps this administration simply wants to see Israelis charged with war crimes for exercising their inalienable right to self-defense.
