Worth a Read: The Goldstone Edition

Judge Richard Goldstone has published a Washington Post article, where he seems to regret certain claims made in his infamous UN report. Most Notably:

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy. 

Melanie Philips in her charecteristic style is quick off the bat," By his own admission, the man stands revealed as at best an abject idiot and at worst a moral and judicial bankrupt." Ron Radosh follows a similar line, and doesn't believe that there is anything Goldstone didn't know when the original report came out,  Yaacov lozowick points out " Too late The damage has been done, and no retraction now will alleviate it, not unless, perhaps, the judge spends the rest of his days trudging from TV station to TV station, from newspaper to newspaper, from campus to campus, and insists that the original reports was an abomination."
Ha'aretz argues that Goldstone's recantation is a sign of a larger shift in Western opinion,  Ynet quotes an unidentified military source, that seems to think Goldstone's retraction will lessen judicial risk for IDF officers (It won't).


Ed Lasky makes the point that everyone will suspect that Goldstone's new view was made under duress. Memri brings a palestinian source already making that claim.