...The Goldstone report is an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices. The difference in tone and attitude in the report when discussing Israeli and Hamas actions is surprising.

I probably do not need to state for most readers that as a soldier who has run a war against an opponent not dissimilar to Hamas, facing problems perhaps similar to those faced by Israeli commanders, my sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis. I can hold and openly declare those prejudices even while I acknowledge that within institutions that may be overall just and moral, there can be individuals or small groups who act outside the law. They must be dealt with, and in my war, they were.

But having stated my prejudice, I think I may be more honest than Goldstone, who seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so. It comes down to equality of scepticism: if you refuse to believe anything the Israelis say, then you have no right to unquestioningly accept what Hamas says.

Goldstone is a former chief prosecutor for war-crime tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps it is easier to come to a judicial decision with some integrity in such circumstances, than it is to examine the Israeli and Hamas roles in the last Gaza war. This kind of report, with all its biases, is one of the reasons why the US did not subject its military to the International Criminal Court. But Australia did.

As George Walden recently wrote in Britain's The Times, "Morality minus practicality is pious grandstanding, something best left to pop stars and theatre folk." And perhaps to the UN.