Goldstone said no one had been able to show any error of substance in the report nor any of its findings
Former South African Constitutional Court justice, Richard Goldstone, rejects suggestions that he betrayed the Jewish people with his report on war crimes in Gaza.
"It would have been very difficult to live with myself if I had refused to get involved with the Middle East simply because I was Jewish.
"I certainly didn't think I was doing anything that any fair-minded member of the Jewish community would regard as anything but a service," he said in an interview with the Sunday Times this week.
"I did it because I believed, and still do, that a full inquiry into the allegations that have been made is in the interests of all parties in the Middle East - and perhaps particularly Israel."
Israel's vitriolic response to his report on war crimes in the Gaza war is obscuring the significance of its condemnation of atrocities by the Hamas administration in Palestine, says Justice Goldstone.
He has been battered by a storm of protest and personal criticism since he and three others published a report the size of a telephone book on atrocities by both sides in the conflict that raged in Gaza between December last year and January this year. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, died in the war.
Human rights groups estimate the Palestinian toll at about 1400.
The report was commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and has been adopted both by the HRC and the General Assembly.
But after refusing to co-operate with Justice Goldstone's commission in any way, Israel has launched an international campaign to discredit him and the report. Israeli President Shimon Peres told his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, this week: "Goldstone is a small man, devoid of any sense of justice - a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence."
Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, said the report was more damaging than attempts to deny the Holocaust.
In a telephone interview from Vienna, where he was attending a conference, Justice Goldstone said: "Nobody likes to be criticised ... it has been a very difficult couple of months as you can imagine." He called Peres' criticism "specious and ill-befitting the head of the Israeli state".
The report concludes both sides perpetrated war crimes and gross human rights abuses in the conflict and proposes that each should conduct a separate independent internal inquiry into the conduct of the war.
Justice Goldstone said no one had been able to show any error of substance in the report nor to repudiate any of its findings.
He said Israel had a legitimate complaint that previous investigations into the Middle East conflict had tended to single it out and not to criticise Hamas or the Palestinians. His report had set a new precedent.
"Israel has ignored the fact that the Human Rights Council and now the General Assembly have adopted a report in which Hamas and other militant groups have been found to have committed very serious war crimes."
Justice Goldstone says he probably would have refused the commission if he had known Israel would refuse to co-operate with the investigation.
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