A Palestinian schoolgirl walks near the ruins of a mosque in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah that was destroyed during Israel's 22-day offensive. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

Richard Goldstone has become a household name. Palestinians know him because he is the UN-commissioned judge who called Israel out on its grave war crimes and human rights violations in Gaza during Cast Lead. Israelis know him because Goldstone represents a "self-hating Jew", a man who says he is Zionist and loves Israel but who nevertheless exposed the Israeli army and the government that directs it for its brutal pummeling of a largely unarmed population, which caused unimaginable devastation in its wake.

The Americans know him because they understood that to keep Israel happy they would have to reject, delay and oppose the Goldstone Report in any forum possible. This is exactly what they did, last week in the UN Human Rights Council, when the US along with five other countries voted against endorsement of the report. The report still passed, thankfully, because 25 other countries knew it was time for Israel to be held accountable for the crimes it committed.

For Israel, the Goldstone Report has assumed a life of its own, one which they probably had not anticipated. When the South African judge first came to Gaza, he requested, very strongly, from Israel to cooperate. Israel would hear nothing of it and banned Goldstone and his team from even entering Gaza from an Israeli border, thus forcing them to travel to Egypt and enter though the Rafah Crossing. Perhaps naively enough, Israel thought if it turned Goldstone away and closed its own eyes to what it knew Goldstone would uncover, this whole nightmare would go away.

That did not happen, obviously. On the contrary, not only is Israel being criticized for not cooperating with the UN team, it is now under close scrutiny for the acts it committed against the people of Gaza in 22 days of bombardment, shelling and devastation. If nothing else, the Goldstone Report has put Israel on the defensive in an unprecedented manner, which is no doubt, an achievement of its own.

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Still, this is not enough. A report like Richard Goldstone's is one that the Palestinians have been long hoping for. We first looked for endorsement, now we want action. Unfortunately, given the history of the UN, the United States and most other western countries in dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the justice we seek is not the justice that will be served. One fundamental reason why resolutions on the Palestinians continue to fall through is because of an absurd premise that anything remotely pro-Palestinian is disregarded as "one-sided."

That is how the United States described the Goldstone Report simply because it put more emphasis on Israel's violations than Hamas'. Isn't that logical given the fact that one, Israel is the occupying power with one of the strongest armies in the world and thus has the upper hand, and two, during its invasion it killed a staggering 1,400-plus Palestinians - overwhelmingly civilian - against a handful of Israeli casualties?

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