The Goldstone report on Israel's 2008 incursion into Gaza is not what anyone expected – and it could threaten future attempts to re-ignite the peace process.

From the very start, which is to say, from the moment former South African Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to head up the United Nations official report on Operation Cast Lead – Israel’s December 2008 incursion into Gaza – nothing that could have been predicted came to pass. Goldstone is a Zionist, a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s board of trustees and a man with many family connections in Israel. He was therefore expected to shed favorable light upon the IDF whose activities in Gaza brought about the death of some 1,300 Gazans over the course of the campaign. Israel, for its part, lost 13 soldiers. And so, when the report was finally served to the UN Security Council it was wholly surprising to discover that Israel stood accused of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. To be sure, Goldstone’s report was not one-sided – Hamas, Gaza’s ruling party also stood accused; not only of crimes perpetrated during Cast Lead but for launching missiles that targeted Israeli non-combatants that triggered the Israeli assault in the first place.

When the report was finally made public, the entire Palestinian world including Palestinian members of the UN General Assembly and former member of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, Richard Falk, imagined that the Palestinian Authority would be thrilled; that it would advocate for an immediate discussion at the UN Security Council. From there, all senior analysts expected the Palestinians to push for debate in the General Assembly where the report’s findings could not be vetoed as they could be in Council. And yet nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary. Late last week, PLO President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to delay submission of the report for six months, until March 2010 at which point the world’s interest will most certainly have been seriously deflated. The West Bank erupted in protests and in a resounding demand for Abbas’s head.

Meanwhile, in Israel, another strange twist: instead of the all-hands-on-deck outrage – as we got from Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing government – many IDF officers became troubled and demanded that a new updated guideline on ethics be adopted. The IDF still operates on its old code of conduct called the Spirit of the IDF. But while this code constitutes the grounds for legal action and for military court marshals, it has been a long time since senior IDF officers felt any empathy with the host of moral imperatives it recommends. This is because the wars for which the guidelines were generated were symmetrical wars – battles between one professional army and another. The war against terror on the other hand is an asymmetrical war and therefore raises moral and ethical issues that are not covered by the extant code or by any theories of “just war” such as those about which Professor Michael Walzer and others have written so extensively. Military guidelines for asymmetrical war are, in Israel, and everywhere else for that matter, seriously deficient. According to hard line Major General Amos Yadlin, head of IDF’s Military Intelligence, a new Code of Ethics for the War on Terror needs to be adopted immediately. IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has not given the new code a green light.

Libya, which is the only Arab country on the Security Council, demanded a discussion of the Goldstone report yesterday. Libya has the right to bring the report for discussion at the General Assembly but will probably not exercise this right if only to avoid an embarrassing situation in which President Abbas refuses to partake in a discussion which is mostly undertaken for the benefit of his people. Abbas, it seems, has yielded to American lobbyists seeking to delay discussion of a report that could scuttle any further attempts to re-ignite the peace process.