Two points stand out to me. The first is the integrity of Goldstone. His report stuck to what it could find but was stymied by the Israeli government's refusal to cooperate:
Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants). As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel.
The op-ed, I think, makes his defense of his report's original attempt to get at the truth within the evidence available more plausible. A man with an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic agenda would never go public with this partial retraction in the face of new evidence, would he? He would dig in, as the necons always do. And the fundamental reason he reached his inference of war crimes from such appalling casualties in the first place was because the Israelis refused to provide him with their full side of the story. In some cases, those details, withheld from Goldstone by the Jewish state, make all the difference:
The most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.
I don't know how Goldstone could have known these exculpatory details without Israeli cooperation. Telepathy? And he must know that both his report and his acknowledgment of new evidence will not defuse the vile rhetoric levied against him by the neocon media machine. Here's JPod, once again pouring oil on troubled waters:
He is a dupe, a fool, a clown, and a worldwide embarrassment. Not to mention a special kind of reprehensible and appalling figure of inglorious, hideous shame to his own people through the delivery and promulgation of a false document that helped anti-Semites everywhere feel themselves justified.
Beneath the extreme rhetoric, the implication is that Goldstone should have presumed that the awful human toll of the Gaza war - almost entirely on one side - was not a deliberate targeting of civilians to put pressure on Hamas. But his job was to find facts and precisely not to presume anything. And it remains a fact that he also insisted on calling Hamas' clear war crimes what they were - and are.