The debate that changed Goldstone’s mind?

Just four days before Justice Richard Goldstone’s shocking admission that his controversial report on Israeli war crimes committed during the 2008-2009 Gaza war was flawed, I participated in a panel debate with him at Stanford Law School. During the debate, Goldstone repeated one of his standard talking points — that none of the factual accounts in his report had been challenged. But then, under pressure from a line of argument, he backed off and acknowleged, perhaps for the first time, that some of the facts in the Goldstone Report were in dispute. And he suggested that his report might have been different had his fact-finding mission had access to Israeli evidence.

Four days later, Goldstone published his mea culpa op-ed in the Washington Post — an admission of fault he had reportedly been unwilling to make in a draft op-ed submitted to the New York Times less than a week before the debate. In the Post article, Goldstone wrote, "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document." But he went further still, acknowledging that his report was wrong to allege that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians.

Read more.