(JTA) — The head of a United Nations committee charged with implementing the Goldstone Report reportedly has resigned.
Christian Tomuschat, a judge in Germany, resigned unexpectedly, it was reported Thursday.
B’nai B’rith International welcomed the resignation in a statement issued Thursday, noting the report in the online edition of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot. The organization had called for Tomuschat to leave because he was not a neutral arbiter.
"Tomuschat’s resignation ought to further undermine the credibility of the report he submitted to the [U.N. Security] Council in September," the B’nai B’rith statement said. "In his report Tomuschat repeated the odious claim that Israel engaged in ‘violence against civilians as part of a deliberate policy.’ Tomuschat’s report went on to criticize Israel’s legal system for failing to mount a witch hunt for ‘officials at the highest levels.’ Referring to a Hamas internal ‘investigation,’ in which Hamas exonerated itself from all wrongdoing, Tomuschat’s team could only conclude that it ‘is not in a position to ascertain the veracity of any of these assertions.’ "
In July, human rights activist Anne Bayefsky pointed out on the Eye on the UN monitoring website that Tomuschat and the other two members of his committee were closely affiliated with a nongovernmental organization that works to vilify Israel.
Bayefsky, senior editor of Eye on the UN, as well as the director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, also wrote that a U.N. staffer appointed to work with Tomuschat was an anti-Israel blogger that during the Gaza war wrote that Israel targeted Palestinian civilians in order to impress voters.
The Tomuschat committee staffer wrote, “What better way to gain the support of the Israeli electorate than to … kill innocent civilians,” Eye on the UN reported.
