WASHINGTON: The head of the UN commission which issued a stinging report Sept. 15 on the Israeli invasion on Gaza last December has rejected Jewish criticism that said the report was biased while efforts to quash the report appear to have succeeded.

“I deny that completely,” Judge Richard Goldstone told reporters. “I was completely independent; nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made,” he said.

The report, commissioned by the UN’s Human Rights Council, headed by Judge Goldstone, a widely respected South African jurist who served on his country’s highest court and went on to prosecute war crimes and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The Israelis launched an organized campaign “to counter the report moments after Goldstone’s presentation of it. Israeli leaders took to the air waves and blasted the report as biased,” wrote the US Jewish weekly, Forward.

Israel barred Goldstone from entering Israel to investigate charges, even though Goldstone planned to examine charges against both Israel and Hamas.

The report reveals that Israel specifically sought to punish Gaza’s civilians because many of them backed Hamas. The number of civilian deaths according to international sources is over 1,400.

Claiming that Israeli and American diplomats came to the United Nations last week “not to praise the Goldstone Report, but to bury it,” Forward added: “As a result of their efforts, it appears all but certain that the report accusing Israel and the Palestinian faction Hamas of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity will not reach any binding international forums.”

Following the release of the report, “It became clear that in the arm-wrestling contest between international rights organizations and the established Israeli-American diplomatic bond, the latter wins easily,” Forward said. Some of the media picked up on the battle of words: “...Even the most battle-hardened (Israeli) officials were shocked, then furious, at the litany of accusations in a 575-page report, ... that (said) Israel is guilty of one of the worst crimes: Deliberately and systematically attacking civilians and making them suffer as a war aim,” said The Economist.

Israel and its supporters condemned the report, “even though it also raised serious allegations against Hamas, slamming its accounts of alleged Israeli human rights violations and its use of the terms ‘war crimes’ and ‘possible crimes against humanity,’ to describe Israeli actions,” Nathan Guttman wrote in Forward.

Israeli officials were reportedly enraged that the commission said it found “little or no evidence that Hamas... deliberately fired rockets from civilian houses, stored weapons in mosques and used the basement of one of Gaza’s main hospitals as a military command center,” said Forward.

On the diplomatic stage, “Israeli officials in Washington, New York and Jerusalem pressed Israel’s ... American counterparts to quarantine the report within the confines of the council to ensure that it (would not) be picked up by other international forums.” Attacks on the report, meanwhile, were immediate: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, called the report “deeply flawed” and said Goldstone’s investigation was “rigged.”

In Congress, crucial supporters of Israel, such as Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, accused the report’s authors of living in “self-righteous fantasyland.”

Others focused their attacks on Goldstone, including Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, who denounced him as an “anti-Semite,” despite the fact that Goldstone has solidly supported Israel and currently serves on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Board of Governors.

Goldstone’s daughter, Nicole, who lived in Israel for many years but now lives in Canada, vigorously defended her father’s report in an interview on Israeli Army radio. “If it hadn’t been for him, the report would have been even harsher,’ she said, speaking in Hebrew.