Feeling immense pressure from European Jewish lobbies, 736 members of the EP voted, with 335 MEPs saying “yes” and the other 287 saying “no.”With the endorsement of the Goldstone report, EP has been the first international institution to back the heavily discussed document. Forty-two European Jewish groups intensively lobbied against the Goldstone report and inundated MEPs with e-mails and frequent visits.
Although the European Jewish Congress thought it had gathered the necessary support to stop the bill from getting approved, the EP voted to approve it. Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, which represents 42 Jewish organizations on the continent, traveled to Israel last week to meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to decide on steps to prevent the document from being approved.
Facing a huge and very insistent lobby, the chair of the Palestinian delegation, Irish Socialists Proinsias De Rossa, sent an e-mail to his colleagues to ask them to stand firm against the pressure.
Though all parties in Parliament had negotiated over the wording of the resolution, the Christian Democrats, who have always been the most sympathetic to Israel, pulled out of the compromise unexpectedly on Monday and proposed a counter resolution. Despite EPP’s last-minute maneuver to block the resolution, a 335-to-287 vote split the house between left and right. MEPs from the center left, far left, the Greens and the Liberals backed a joint resolution, calling on the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and the bloc’s member states to “publicly demand the implementation of recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes.”
The Jewish lobby in the US was quite successful in convincing Congress last November to label the Goldstone report as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military killed almost 1,400 Palestinians, 300 of whom were children.
