THE GOLDSTONE Report was a blood libel.

Issued in September 2009 by a UN "fact-finding mission'' headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the 450-page document was an indictment of Israel's conduct during the brief war it launched in Gaza at the end of 2008 to end the intolerable rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas on Israel's southern towns. The Israeli campaign, the report charged, was nothing less than "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population.'' It repeatedly suggested that Israel was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.