This article was originally published by The San Francisco Chronicle and is republished with permission.

A Palestinian boy walks past the rubble of homes destroyed by Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. (Maan Images)

President Obama has placed restoration of the stature of the United States among his primary foreign policy goals. He has already achieved substantial progress in Europe, where polls indicate that he is widely admired. The president's June Cairo University speech also won praise in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Yet there are still no substantive policy changes implied by his inspiring words.

Obama can solidify broader global respect by supporting the recommendations of the just-released Goldstone report in the U.N. Human Rights Council. Richard Goldstone, a former South African supreme court justice and chief prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, led a mission to investigate allegations of war crimes in Gaza last winter (Dec. 27, 2008, through Jan. 19). The Goldstone mission concluded that, indeed, Israel and Hamas committed war crimes, and recommended that both parties be given six months to mount independent internal investigations. If they fail, the mission calls on the U.N. Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court.

Much of the 575-page report documents Israeli violations of the laws of war surrounding the intense fighting of last winter. That is fair - the harm Israel caused to lives and property in Gaza vastly exceeded that inflicted by Hamas. Israel killed approximately 100 Palestinians for every Israeli who died, and destroyed vast swaths of private housing, industrial and agricultural facilities, and public infrastructure.

The Israeli government boycotted the Goldstone mission; Palestinian authorities, in contrast, cooperated with it. Doubtless, the group's conclusions would have been more definitive had Israel shared information with its authors. Israel now seeks to discredit the report, attacking everything from Goldstone himself to the U.N. Human Rights Council, and claiming that the report's findings would hamstring other nations - including ours - facing "asymmetric warfare." This is nonsense.

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There is nothing novel about "asymmetric warfare," at least not of the kind waged by Israel, requiring departures from standard international law. Colonial powers that displace indigenous peoples, as Israel does regularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, always have faced armed, and sometimes crude, popular resistance. Israel might prefer that international law revert to the sparser protections prevailing before World War II, but that would harm us all.

The Obama administration should echo the Goldstone report and urge Israel to mount serious investigations of its military's documented misdeeds.

We should also not quail at the Goldstone mission's recommendation that the Security Council refer the matter to the International Criminal Court, if Israel fails to comply. Enforcement of international law cannot only be for the losers of international conflicts; indeed, the legitimacy of international law depends on its universal application.

The world will take notice when President Obama's warming rhetoric is matched by equally principled deeds - and likewise will take notice when it is not.

George Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.