On Sunday, Richard Goldstone publicly acquitted Israel of war crimes. This man spearheaded a 2009 United Nations report that slandered Israel for its actions in Operation Cast Lead, an offensive against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip that began Dec. 27, 2008. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

Let’s look at the facts here. They are enormously telling—not only about Israel, but also about the Palestinians and the UN itself.

First, remember what led up to the 2008 Gaza War. In 2005, Israel completely, and very painfully, evacuated Gaza. The Palestinians, at their first opportunity, awarded the terrorist group Hamas with a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas quickly got busy, raiding an Israeli army post and killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers. It began a campaign of launching rockets by the thousands on Israel. Then it assaulted its rivals in the Palestinian leadership, the Fatah party, in 2007 and split the government in two, taking complete control of Gaza.

In the face of Hamas’s continued mortar attacks, Israel finally retaliated in December 2008. Its effort to eliminate Hamas’s offensive capabilities was drastically complicated by Hamas deliberately using civilian shields and stockpiling weapons in residential areas. Even the Associated Press reported on Israel’s extreme efforts to avoid killing non-combatants. Israeli forces went so far as to send Arabic-language cell-phone messages to locals urging them to evacuate buildings that held Hamas stashes, so they could flee before the bombs dropped. How did Hamas respond? Try to wrap your mind around it: It put civilians on the rooftops of those very buildings. When Israel realized this, it mercifully refrained from bombing them.

The facts of Operation Cast Lead spotlighted two diametrically opposite mindsets between Israel and Hamas. The difference was eloquently expressed by Fathi Hammad, a Hamas politician, in February 2008 on Gaza’s Al-Aqsa tv, when he boasted, “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel …. The elderly excel … and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life’” (translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute; emphasis mine throughout).

A handful of Arab leaders—fearful of how a Hamas victory would strengthen the hand of its sponsor, Iran—openly rooted for Israel to rout Hamas. It quickly became clear, though, that this wouldn’t happen. Israel said its intent was merely to stop Hamas’s rocket attacks and prevent its smuggling illegal weapons from Egypt.

Nevertheless, the international community rained a storm of criticism against Israel for its use of “disproportionate and excessive” force. The dominant media narrative became one of a “Goliath” Israel battering brave, beleaguered Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert caved to the intense pressure and ended the operation on January 17—after three weeks of fighting that not only left Hamas intact, but never even succeeded in stopping the terrorists’ rockets. Israel vacated Gaza within three days. Hamas supporters, which had actually swelled because of the war, held victory rallies.

The UN Human Rights Council (unhrc) took it upon itself to investigate the war. This distinguished body nurtures a special loathing for Israel. One of its 10 permanent agenda items, for every council session, is a review of Israel’s alleged human rights abuses. As of last year, over 47 percent of all the resolutions and decisions it has ever passed specifically condemn the Jewish state—outweighing its criticism of all other 191 UN member states combined. (The unhrc’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted,” Goldstone acknowledged in his recent article.)

If there weren’t enough clues as to the unhrc’s intent in examining Cast Lead, here is the wording of its proposal to Richard Goldstone: It asked that he oversee the inquiry into “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression.” Its bias is obvious, but how it could consider Gaza “occupied,” given Israel’s complete withdrawal, is especially remarkable. Even so, Goldstone agreed to the job, as long as he could additionally investigate human rights violations by Hamas.

Israel, deeply aware of the unhrc’s antipathy, refused to cooperate formally. Goldstone now claims this deprived him of the information he needed to render an accurate verdict—even though there was plenty of open-source evidence available. In the end, the UN’s report criminalized Israel’s antiterrorism campaign, lambasting Israeli forces for “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.” It called the war an illegitimate exercise of “collective punishment” and made the outrageous charge that Israel purposefully targeted innocent civilians. Goldstone concluded the report by recommending that Israel and the Palestinians each conduct their own investigations; if they didn’t, he said, the matter should head to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution.

Ever since, the libelous Goldstone Report has been widely used as a potent weapon against Israel. As Michael Weiss wrote in the Telegraph, “[T]his document has served as a byword for rogue statehood, a cudgel taken up not only by rabid anti-Zionists but by seemingly dispassionate observers of human rights and international law to further Israel’s de-legitimization. The country’s elected officials have not been able to travel freely to the UK for fear of being arrested under universal jurisdiction. And Israel’s reasonable acts of self-defense have been categorically dismissed as government ‘spin’ because of the taint that Goldstone lent to its military motives.”

Nevertheless, Israel has aggressively investigated every one of more than 400 allegations of military misconduct raised by the report. The resulting evidence has convinced Goldstone, he now says, that in fact, “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of [Israeli] policy.” He even accepts as accurate the numbers of Palestinian casualties the Israelis provided all along, rather than the grossly inflated numbers circulated in Hamas propaganda.

In the meantime, Hamas has conducted no investigations of its own. Goldstone admits this probably shouldn’t surprise anyone: “It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations,” he wrote. “At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality.”

In fact, he says, the contrast between Israel’s conduct and Hamas’s is stark: “That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying—its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.”

It’s quite a reversal for Mr. Goldstone. And after all the publicity his report received when it first came out, how much attention do you suppose the mainstream press is devoting to his revelation of its falsity? Precious little. The Guardian and the Independent have yet to report on it. The bbc, in its article on the subject, wrote a cutline under the accompanying picture that still used Hamas’s erroneous casualty figures.

For its part, the unhrc says that Goldstone’s retraction was merely his personal opinion, not that of the committee. It still stubbornly considers the Goldstone Report valid. Why should mere facts stand in the way of its agenda?

Meanwhile, Hamas is back to launching rockets at Israel from Gaza and diligently promoting its “death industry.” And it receives no condemnation for doing so.