The world has looked on aghast as the Israelis have sowed a deadly harvest of cluster bombs in south Lebanon and bombarded the helpless penned-in citizens of the Gaza ghetto with rockets and heavy ordnance including deadly white phosphorus shells. Had the Serbs or the Iranians launched such attacks, Washington would have howled with rage. But for too long successive American administrations have stayed hypocritically silent while their Israeli ally has flouted the rules of war and common humanity and behaved like a terror state.

Will the UN’s report this week into the attacks on its own premises in Gaza during the Israeli assault last December and January convince the Obama White House that a change of tack is long overdue? The hard-hitting UN inquiry has concluded that on six out of the nine occasions when UN property was hit with loss of life, the Israelis were clearly responsible. On a seventh occasion, a deadly attack on a UN warehouse, the investigators blame Hamas fighters.

The report concludes that the formal inquiry headed by South African Judge Richard Goldstone should proceed with an eye on possible war crimes prosecutions. Goldstone and his team are meeting this week in Geneva before seeking to travel to Israel and Gaza. Last night, however, it was still unclear whether the Israelis will grant them entry visas.

It would not be surprising if they refused. They have maintained all along that troops only fired at Hamas fighters and that some of these had holed up in UN premises. The implication is that local UN officials either through fear or negligence permitted Hamas gunmen onto their property. Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak protested Tuesday that his country had “the most moral army in the world”. The Netanyahu government may calculate that if the Goldstone investigation is unable to mount proper on-site inquiries, it will be unable to gather enough evidence to bring any war crimes charges, whether against Israeli forces or the Hamas fighters the preliminary enquiry has concluded mounted at least one attack.

Nevertheless, one way or other there must be an investigation. As a result of the enormity of the Gaza bombardment, world opinion has swung away sharply from Israel and the Obama administration must recognize this. People want to know what really happened. If crimes have been committed, they want to see the guilty brought to book. The pity is, however, that partiality for Israel has for too long played a distorting role in the way events in conflict have been judged. This explains the condoning by some in the West of the Israeli shelling, day after day of crowded civilian areas or the use of loathsome cluster bombs in Lebanon.

What happened in Gaza must be determined by the facts, not any sympathy for one side or the other. Obama should see it is time some truth was injected into this conflict. With truth can come trust and with even a little trust, the peace process might just start to inch forward again.

A resignation and judicial review

President Obama would be right to appoint a bench in line with his own wishes for American society, said The Times of London in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:

We are about to find out the type of president whom Americans have elected. The American system of government comprises, in the phrase of the historian Richard Neustadt, separated institutions sharing powers. Barack Obama has an early opportunity to shape one of those institutions, the Supreme Court. David Souter, one of its nine justices, has announced his resignation. Obama has the opportunity to make the court more like America.

Obama’s choice may affect the balance of opinion on divisive constitutional issues about which the court exercises judgment. And it will be an indication of the type of presidency that he will pursue. On many votes under the current make-up of the bench, opinion has been split 4-4 between liberal and conservative interpretations, with a decisive vote sometimes exercised by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Souter was appointed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. He was expected to vote along positions favored by congressional Republicans. In reality, Souter has been an independently minded judge who has often sided with his liberal colleagues. Obama thus has little scope at the moment for altering the political complexion of the bench along more liberal lines. He has previously expressed a wish, in making judicial appointments, for “somebody who’s got ... the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled or old”. But during the presidential campaign, he also expressed caution about judicial activism. Obama’s instinct will probably be to appoint a minority or female judge, but not one who can readily be depicted by Republicans as doctrinaire. One possible appointee would be Diane Wood, a legal academic at the University of Chicago who has both the judicial experience and scholarly weight to be an effective justice.