ON APRIL 1 2011, in the pages of the Washington Post, the international jurist Richard Goldstone dropped a bombshell. He effectively disowned the massive evidence assembled in the United Nations report carrying his name that Israel had committed multiple war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during its 2008-9 invasion.Israel was jubilant. Everything that we said proved to be true, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crowed. We always said that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a moral army that acted according to international law, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared. We had no doubt that the truth would come out eventually, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed. The Obama administration used the occasion of Goldstones recantation to affirm that Israel had not engaged in any war crimes during the Gaza assault while the U.S. Senate unanimously called on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone Report.Some commentators have endeavored to prove by parsing his words that Goldstone did not actually recant. While there are grounds for making this argument on a technical basis, such a rhetorical strategy will not wash. Goldstone is a distinguished jurist. He knows how to use precise language. If he did not want to sever his connection with the Report he could simply have said I am not recanting my original report by which I still stand. He must have known exactly how his words would be spun and it is this falloutnot his parsed wordsthat we must now confront.Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters andmost unforgivablyincreased the risk of another merciless IDF assault. There has been much speculation on why Goldstone recanted. Was he blackmailed? Did he finally succumb to the relentless hate campaign directed against him? Did he decide to put his tribe ahead of truth? What can be said with certainty, and what Norman Finkelstein demonstrates in these pages, is that Goldstone did not change his mind because the facts compelled him to reconsider his original findings. Photograph of Norman Finkelstein Charles Eshelman Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005, expanded paperback edition, 2008); The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000, expanded paperback edition, 2003); Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995, expanded paperback edition, 2003); with Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (Henry Holt, 1998); and The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (University of Minnesota, 1996).