The latest favorite means that Israel partisans use to try to attack me is by making false claims about my two articles on Israeli organ trafficking. (These articles represent perhaps about 1 or 2 percent of my writings on the topic of Israel-Palestine).

The best way to refute their claims I feel is to suggest that people read for themselves what I have written on this topic, including the numerous footnotes, so I’ll post these articles below. As people will see, the information is largely from mainstream sources, including the Israeli media. I’ve also written a few follow-up commentaries on this topic, which I’ll also post.

In addition, I discuss this at length in the below extended video interview by the managing editor of the South Dakota newspaper, the Argus Leader.

I hope that anyone who sees these claims about me will now post this url for people to see.

Click on the image below to go to the video:

Below are my articles:

Israeli Organ Trafficking and Theft: From Moldova to Palestine

Alison Weir
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
November 2009, Pages 15-17

In August Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing grisly evidence suggesting that Israel had been taking Palestinian internal organs. The article, by veteran photojournalist Donald Bostrom, called for an international investigation to discover the facts.¹

In this photograph taken March 22, 2007, Vasile Dimineti holds a picture of his 24-year-old son, who died a year after selling his kidney. The family lives in the impoverished Moldovan village of Mingir, where about 40 of its 7,000 residents are thought to have sold a kidney. AFP photo/Daniel Mihailescu/Files

Israel immediately accused Bostrom and the newspaper of “anti-Semitism,” and charged that suggesting Israelis could be involved in the illicit removal of body parts constituted a modern “blood libel” (medieval stories of Jews killing people for their blood).²

Numerous Israeli partisans repeated these accusations, including Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin, who asserted that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.”³ Others suggested that the newspaper was “irresponsible” for running such an article.⁴

The fact is, however, that Israeli organ harvesting – sometimes with Israeli governmental funding and the participation of high Israeli officials, prominent Israeli physicians, and Israeli ministries – has been documented for many years. Among the victims have been Palestinians.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, the founder of Organ Watch, and the author of scholarly books and articles on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream media call upon when they need expert commentary on the topic.⁵

While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers and procurers come from numerous nations and ethnicities, including Americans and Arabs, she is unflinchingly honest in speaking about the Israeli connection:

“Israel is at the top,” she states. “It has tentacles reaching out worldwide.”⁶

In a lecture last year sponsored by New York’s PBS 13 Forum, Scheper-Hughes explained that Israeli organ traffickers, “had and still have a pyramid system at work that’s awesome…they have brokers everywhere, bank accounts everywhere; they’ve got recruiters, they’ve got translators, they’ve got travel agents who set up the visas.”⁷

Lest this sound simply like a successful international concern, it’s important to understand the nature of such a business.

As Scheper-Hughes describes it, organ trafficking consists of “paying the poor and the hungry to slowly dismantle their bodies.”

Organ traffickers prey on the world’s poorest, most desperate citizens – slum dwellers, inhabitants of dying villages, people without means or hope. Traffickers promise them what seem like astronomical sums of money (from $1,000 to $10,000) – which they frequently don’t even deliver – in return for vital internal organs.

For traffickers, human body parts are commodities, to be cut out of the bodies of the poor and sold to the rich. The organ “donors” receive no follow-up care and end up worse off on many levels – physically, financially, psychologically, socially – than even their original tragic situation. Sometimes they are coerced into such “donations.”

Organ sales have been illegal in most countries for years. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which covers prevention, enforcement and sanctions in trafficking of humans, includes in its definition of human exploitation the extraction of organs for profit.⁸ Israel finally passed legislation against organ trafficking in 2008.^{9, 10}

In her Forum 13 lecture Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust.”

She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her “it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

Scheper-Hughes says that she “even heard doctors saying that.”

For many years Israelis in need of an internal organ have gone on what experts call “transplant tourism” – traveling to other nations to obtain internal organs. Sometimes body parts are obtained from those freshly dead; more often from the desperately needy. While affluent people from numerous countries and ethnicities engage in this practice, Israel is unique in several significant ways.

First, Israelis engage in this at an extraordinarily high rate. According to a 2001 BBC report, Israelis buy more kidneys per capita than any other population.

Second, Israelis have the lowest donor rate in the world – one-fifth that of Europe, according to BBC. This is in part because there has been a widespread impression that Jewish religious law prohibits transplants as a “desecration of the body.”¹¹ The Israeli news service Ynet reports, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups.”¹²

Third, the Israeli government has enabled the practice. For many years the Israeli health system subsidized its citizens’ “transplant holidays,” reimbursing Israelis $80,000 for medical operations abroad. Much of the remaining costs could often be obtained from government-subsidized¹³ Israeli insurance plans.¹⁴ In addition, Israel’s Ministry of Defense was directly involved.

Scheper-Hughes discussed Israeli organ trafficking in detail in 2001 in published testimony to the Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.¹⁵ In her extensive testimony, Scheper-Hughes stated that although Israel had become a pariah for its organ policies, Israeli officials exhibited “amazing tolerance…toward outlawed ‘transplant tourism.’”

She described an international syndicate which was “organized through a local business corporation in conjunction with a leading transplant surgeon, operating out of a major medical center not far from Tel Aviv,” and which had forged links with transplant surgeons in Turkey, Russia, Moldavia, Estonia, Georgia, Romania, and New York City.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense was directly involved in what Scheper-Hughes called Israel’s “‘illicit [in other nations] national ‘program’ of transplant tourism…Members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them” accompanied transplant junkets.

In her Forum 13 lecture, Scheper-Hughes said that investigating Israeli organ trafficking over the past decade had taken her “from country to country to country to country.”

One of these is Moldova, the poorest country in Europe – and homeland of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman – where 90 percent of the people earn less than $2 a day. A 2001 BBC report on organ trafficking described the situation: “Hundreds of Israelis have created a production line that starts in the villages of Moldova, where men today are walking around with one kidney.¹⁶

Another is Brazil, where a legislative commission found that 30 [it may actually have been as high as 60] Brazilians from impoverished neighborhoods had sold their kidneys to a trafficking ring headed by Israelis, with Israeli citizens receiving almost all of the organs, and the Israeli government providing most of the funding.¹⁷

The ring had also begun inquiring about buying other vital organs from poor residents, including lungs, livers and corneas.¹⁸

An Inter Press Service (IPS) news story from the time reported that Scheper-Hughes testified to the commission that international trafficking of human organs had begun some 12 years earlier, promoted by Zaki Shapira, head of kidney transplant services at Bellinson Medical Center, near Tel Aviv.

Scheper-Hughes reported that Shapira had performed more than 300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries such as Turkey. The recipients were very wealthy or had very good health insurance, and the “donors” very poor people from Eastern Europe, the Philippines and other developing countries.

The chairman of the Brazilian commission, physician Raimundo Pimentel, was outraged at Israeli policies, pointing out that trafficking can only take place on a large scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system. Pimentel charged that the resources provided by the Israeli health system “were a determining factor” in enabling a network that preyed on society’s poorest populations.

In 2004 there were reports that Israeli traffickers had added China to their target donor populations.¹⁹ In one recent case an Israeli paid an organ broker $100,000 for a kidney transplant in China from an 18-year-old Chinese girl. She received $5,000 and died following surgery.²⁰

New York Times reporter Larry Rohter pointed out that allowing brokers to operate with few restrictions benefited Israel “by exporting Israel’s organ shortage overseas.” Rohter cites a kidney specialist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem who explained that patients who go abroad “‘save the country a lot of money; not only in terms of what doesn’t have to be spent on dialysis, but also by opening places for other people who are on the list.’”²¹

Many people find governmental complicity in organ trafficking deeply troubling on moral and philosophical grounds.

As Scheper-Hughes testified: “The sale of human organs and tissues requires that certain disadvantaged individuals, populations, and even nations have been reduced to the role of ‘suppliers.’

“It is a scenario in which only certain bodies are broken, dismembered, fragmented, transported, processed, and sold in the interests of a more socially advantaged population…of receivers.” She believes that the risks and benefits of organ transplant surgery should be more equally distributed among nations, ethnic groups, and social classes.

Organ theft

It is difficult to know how often Israeli trafficking involves outright theft of vital organs from living human beings.

It is not rare for the “donor” to receive little or none of the compensation promised. For example, in 2007 Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that two Israelis had confessed to persuading Palestinians “from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” According to the Haaretz report, after the organ had been taken the traffickers refused to pay for them.

On occasion, people are coerced into giving up their organs. For example, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, the alleged Brooklyn trafficker recently arrested in an FBI sweep in New Jersey, reportedly carried a gun. When a potential organ seller would try to back out, Rosenbaum would use his finger to simulate firing a gun at the person’s head.

The Rosenbaum case, reportedly part of a ring centered in Israel, is the first case of trafficking to be prosecuted in the US. His arrest and the substantial evidence against him may have surprised State Department Countermisinformation Director Todd Leventhal, who had characterized organ trafficking as an “urban legend,” stating, “It would be impossible to successfully conceal a clandestine organ-trafficking ring.” Leventhal called such reports “irresponsible and totally unsubstantiated.”

More often organ theft involves dead bodies – or those alleged to be dead.

Israel’s very first successful heart transplant, in fact, used a stolen heart.

In 1968 Avraham Sadegat unexpectedly died two days after being hospitalized in Beilinson Hospital in Israel’s Petah Tikva for a stroke. When his family finally was able to retrieve his body (the hospital initially refused to release it) they found his chest covered with bandages; odd, they thought, for a stroke victim. Upon removing these they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages and the heart was missing.²²

During this time, the Israeli press was heralding the historic heart transplant, performed by a team of surgeons who were to become some of Israel’s most celebrated physicians, among them Dr. Morris Levy, Dr. Bernardo Vidne, and Dr Jack Solomon, who harvested the heart.²³

When the family began to ask questions, the hospital denied any connection. After the man’s wife and brother had raised a media furor, petitioned three cabinet ministers – and agreed to sign a document that they would not sue – the hospital finally admitted it was Sadegat’s heart that had been used.

Haaretz quoted Sadegat’s tearful wife: “They treated him like an alley cat. From the moment he entered the hospital, they apparently saw him only as a potential source of organs and not as a man in need of treatment. They only thought about how to do the deed without us knowing.”

Sadegat’s medical condition before his heart was removed has not been made public. It is possible – perhaps probable – that up until his heart was removed it was still beating; according to an Israeli media report, “once a heart stops beating, it is no longer fit for transplantation.”²⁴

Even if he was what is now termed “brain dead,” the general view is that family members should at least be a party to decisions regarding the patient: first, whether to “pull the plug,” and, second, whether to donate an organ. At the time, however, Israeli law allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent.

Forty years later the hospital held an anniversary celebration of the transplant, despite the fact that, according to Haaretz, the heart had been obtained “through deceit and trickery.” The festivities, which honored surviving members of the transplant team, featured balloons and a red, heart-shaped cake.

In this incident of organ theft (and from a possibly living body), the family was Israeli. Had the wife and brother been Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, they would not have possessed the power to force a confession from the hospital, and it is likely that those individuals today calling the Swedish article a “blood libel” or “irresponsible journalism” would have applied the same epithets to journalists reporting questions concerning the historic Israeli heart transplant – if any reporters even bothered or dared to do so.

Yehuda Hiss, keeper of the morgue

Perhaps one of the most long-term and high-level cases of organ theft – and one that involves Palestinian as well as Israeli organs – concerns an extraordinarily high official: Dr. Yehuda Hiss, Israel’s chief pathologist and, from 1988 through 2004, director of Israel’s state morgue, the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir.

An early indication of malfeasance came to light in 1998 and concerned a Scottish man named Alisdair Sinclair, who had died under questionable circumstances after being taken into custody at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport.

The Israeli story, as reported by the Israeli news magazine Jerusalem Report, is that Sinclair had confessed to transporting drugs, even though none were found, although he was in possession of 9,000 German marks ($5,000). He then, the police claim, hanged himself by looping his shoelaces and T-shirt around a towel bar about a meter off the ground and slipped the improvised noose around his neck. From a squatting position, the police story goes, he repeatedly threw his bodyweight downward, choking himself.

Sinclair did not die, however, and medics were able to restore a heartbeat. He was transferred to a hospital where, according to the magazine report, the hospital’s associate director, Dr. Yigal Halperin, said that Sinclair “had suffered irreversible brain damage, and there was little doctors could do for him. Left in a corner of the emergency room, he died at 7 p.m. [It’s unknown whether he had been put on life support.] His corpse was transferred to the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir for an autopsy.”

Afterwards, Israeli authorities located Sinclair’s family and gave them three weeks to dispose of the body. They suggested that he be buried in a Christian cemetery in Israel, pointing out that this would be one-third the cost of shipping the body back to Scotland. However, the grieving family scraped up the money to bring him home.

They had a second autopsy performed by Glasgow University, only to discover that Sinclair’s heart and a small bone in his throat called the hyoid were missing. The British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel, and a heart was sent to Scotland. According to the Jerusalem Report, the family “wanted the Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother’s, but the Institute’s director, Prof. Jehuda Hiss, refused, citing the prohibitive cost.”

Despite a protest from the British government, Israel refused to supply Hiss’s pathology findings or the police report. According to the British government and a report in the Israeli media, around the time of Sinclair’s death a doctor at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital put in a request for a hyoid bone for research purposes – and eventually received a bill for shipping costs.²⁵ Israel retained Sinclair’s $5,000.

Through the years Hiss and the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic medicine continued to be accused of organ theft. In 2000 the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published an investigative report alleging that Hiss had been extracting organs without permission and then packing the bodies with broomsticks and cotton wool to fill in cavities before burial. The report charged that under Hiss the institute had been involved in organ sales of body parts – “legs, thighs, ovaries, breasts and testicles,” allegedly to medical institutions.

In 2001 a district judge found the Institute had performed hundreds of autopsies and had removed body parts without the families’ permission – and sometimes in direct opposition to their expressed wishes.²⁶ One report described a “museum of skulls” at the institute.

Little was done, however, and complaints continued – often by the parents of dead Israeli soldiers horrified to discover that body parts had been taken from their sons. Finally, in 2004 Israel’s health minister transferred directorship of the morgue itself away from Hiss. Hiss, however, retained his position as Israel’s chief pathologist, a post it appears he holds to this day.^{27, 28}

Hiss had also been connected with two previous national scandals, both of which may have involved powerful people in Israel, which may account for his longevity in Israel’s medical establishment despite years of proven wrongdoing.

The first controversy concerned the “Yemenite Children’s Affair” – a situation, largely from the early 1950s, in which a thousand babies and small children of recent immigrants to Israel had “disappeared.”

When the immigrants had arrived as part of Israel’s “ingathering of the exiles,” babies were immediately taken from their mothers and placed in children’s houses. Many were hospitalized for a variety of ills, and hundreds died, their deaths coming in such large numbers that they were announced over loudspeakers.

The distraught parents often never saw the body or received a death certificate, and there were growing suspicions that not all had died – some, it was believed, had been “given” to Ashkenazi parents. One author writes: “It was a well-known fact within the Jewish community in the United States that if a family wanted a child they could go to [baby brokers, both rabbis] and simply pay the necessary fee.”²⁹

Some Israeli investigators have found considerable evidence for these charges, and indications of complicity at multiple levels of the power structure. In fact, one researcher charges: “People in positions of power at the time that the State of Israel was established profited from the abduction and sale of children from poor immigrant families.^”30

Hiss’ connection comes in 1997, when Israel finally had formed a committee to investigate the disappearance of Yemenite and other Jewish children in the years 1948-1954. Among those testifying before this committee was a California woman who had come to Israel searching for her biological mother – and, according to DNA testing by a geneticist at Hebrew University, had found her.

The committee demanded that another DNA test be conducted at the Abu Kabir forensic institute. As at least one observer predicted ahead of time, Hiss’s test came up negative, and the government was allegedly exonerated, despite the fact that the geneticist who had conducted the first tests stood by his results.³¹

Hiss also plays a role in some conspiracy theories regarding the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who had begun a peace process with Palestinians. In March 1999 a group of academics presented findings alleging that Hiss had submitted false evidence to the commission that investigated the killing.³²

Palestinian Victims

Israelis have also targeted Palestinians, a particularly vulnerable population on numerous levels.

In her congressional subcommittee testimony, Scheper-Hughes reported that before he moved overseas, Israeli hospital transplant head Zaki Shapira had located kidney sellers “amongst strapped Palestinian workers in Gaza and the West Bank.” She said that his “hand was slapped by an ethics board,” and he moved his practice overseas.

For decades numerous Palestinians and others have charged Israel with taking body parts from Palestinians they had wounded or killed.

In her subcommittee testimony, Scheper-Hughes testified that toward the end of the apartheid period in South Africa, “human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinians by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv.”

A Washington Report for Middle East Affairs article by Mary Barrett (see “Autopsies and Executions,” April 1990 Washington Report, p. 21) reported “widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.”

Barrett quotes a forensic physician: “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume?”

A 2002 news story from IRNA reported that three Palestinian boys aged 14-15 had been killed by Israeli forces on Dec. 30, their bodies finally being returned for burial on Jan. 6. According to the report: “shortly before burial, Palestinian medical authorities examined the bodies and found out that the main vital organs were missing from the bodies.” In an interview on Al Jazeera, President Yasser Arafat held up photos of the boys, saying, “They murder our kids and use their organs as spare parts.”

Journalist Khalid Amayreh, recently investigating this topic further, found that “several other Palestinians gave a similar narrative, recounting how they received the bodies of their murdered relatives, mostly men in their early twenties, with vital organs taken away by the Israeli authorities.”

Israel has consistently characterized such accusations as “anti-Semitic,” and numerous other journalists have discounted them as exaggerations.

However, according to the pro-Israel Forward magazine, the truth of these charges was, in fact, confirmed by an Israeli governmental investigation a number of years ago.

In a recent story critical of the Swedish article, the Forward actually confirmed its main point, that Israel had been taking the body parts of slain Palestinians. The Forward article reported that one of the governmental investigations into Hiss had revealed that “he seemed to view every body that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game for organ harvesting.”³³

Over the years, a great many Palestinian bodies have “ended up” in the Israeli morgue. In numerous cases Israeli occupation forces have taken custody of wounded or dead Palestinians. Sometimes their bodies are never returned to their grieving families – Palestinian NGOs say there are at least 250 such cases.

In other cases the bodies have been returned to the families days later, with crudely stitched naval-to-chin incisions. On many occasions Israeli soldiers have delivered the bodies late at night and required the bereaved families to bury their children, husbands, and brothers immediately, under Israeli military guard, sometimes with the electricity shut off.

In 2005 an Israeli soldier³⁴ described a military doctor who gave “medics lessons in anatomy” using the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Haaretz reports: “The soldier said that the Palestinian’s body had been riddled with bullets and that some of his internal organs had spilled out. The doctor pronounced the man dead and then ‘took out a knife and began to cut off parts of the body,’ the soldier said.

“‘He explained the various parts to us – the membrane that covers the lungs, the layers of the skin, the liver, stuff like that,’ the soldier continued. ‘I didn’t say anything because I was still new in the army. Two of the medics moved away, and one of them threw up. It was all done very brutally. It was simply contempt for the body.’”³⁵

While most Israeli investigations into organ theft have largely ignored the Palestinian component, a number of significant facts are known:

• Palestinian organs were harvested during years of an astonishingly lax system in which the body parts even of Jewish Israelis were extracted illicitly at the national morgue by the chief pathologist and exchanged for money.
• Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are largely a captive population. Numerous reports by highly reputable Israeli and international organizations have documented a situation in which Palestinians have few if any real rights; Israeli forces have killed civilians with impunity, imprisoned massive numbers of people without benefit of trials, and routinely abused prisoners.
• Israeli authorities have conducted numerous autopsies of Palestinians without permission of their families, without even a semblance of public transparency, and without, it appears, accompanying reports. For example, the families of those who were taken while still alive are not provided with a medical report stating time and cause of death.
• A very small but significant minority of Israelis, including military officers and governmental ministers, hold extremist supremacist views relevant to organ extraction. In 1996, Jewish Week reported that Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the Lubavitch sect of Judaism and the dean of a religious Jewish school in a West Bank settlement, stated: “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that.” Ginzburgh elaborated: “Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.” [The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12, 31]

While most Israelis strenuously repudiate such beliefs, Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, an Israeli scholar on Jewish scriptural views on racism and ethnic chauvinism, has said, “The sad thing is, these statements are in our books.” Greenberg, who was a professor at Hebrew University, pointed out that such Talmudic texts were “purely theoretical” at the time of their writing, because Jews did not have the power to carry them out. Now, he pointed out, “they’re carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.”

While it is impossible to know whether any Israelis have ever acted on such religious permission to kill a non-Jew in order to provide body parts to Jews, some observers have considered this a possibility.

Dr. A. Clare Brandabur, a distinguished American scholar who has lived and traveled extensively in Palestine, writes that the information published in the Swedish article “resonates with reports from Palestinians in Gaza which I heard during the first intifada.”

She comments, “When I interviewed Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, head of the Red Crescent in Gaza, I mentioned to him reports of shootings of Palestinian children at times when there were no ‘clashes’ going on – a solitary 6-year-old entering his schoolyard in the morning with his bookbag on his back. The soldiers abducted the wounded child at gunpoint, then his body would be returned a few days later having undergone an ‘autopsy at Abu Kabir Hospital.’”

She says: “I asked Dr. Shafi if he had considered the possibility that these killings were being done for organ transplant, since (as Israel Shahak notes in Jewish History, Jewish Religion), it is not allowed to take Jewish organs to save a Jewish life, but it is allowed to take the organs of non-Jews to save Jewish lives. Dr. Shafi said he had suspected such things but since they had no access to the records of Abu Kabir Hospital, there was no way to verify these suspicions.”

Scheper-Hughes, in her congressional testimony, describes the danger of “organs got by any means possible including (I was told by one guilt-ridden practitioner) chemically inducing the signs of brain death in dying patients of no means and with access to minimal social support or family surveillance.”

Whether or not there have ever been organ-inspired murders in Israel as it appears there have elsewhere, numerous groups around the world are urging an international investigation into Israel’s handling of Palestinian bodies in its custody.

However, the Israeli government and its powerful advocates abroad, who regularly block investigations into Israeli actions, are doing their utmost to prevent this one.^{36, 37} Several lawsuits have been filed against the Swedish newspaper, the largest by Israeli lawyer and IDF officer Guy Ophir, who filed a $7.5 million lawsuit in New York against the newspaper and Bostrom. Ophir declared that Israel must “silence the reporter and the newspaper.”³⁸

International investigations, of course, have two results: the innocent are absolved, the guilty discovered.

It is clear which category Israel believes it falls into.

An Internet petition calling for an investigation can be viewed at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/

Footnotes:

1. Bostrom, Donald, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” Aftonbladet, Aug. 17, 2009 , translated by Tlaxcala. http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en. (Original Swedish version at http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab)
2. Israel Insider, “Netanyahu to press Sweden to condemn blood libel,” Aug. 23, 2009 http://israelinsider.ning.com/profiles/blogs/netanyahu-to-press-sweden-to
3. Tobin, Jonathan, “Swedish Anti-Semites Dig Up a Blood Libel,” CommentaryMagazine.com, Aug. 20, 2009 http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/76522
4. Cassel, Matthew, “Baseless organ theft accusations will not bring Israel to justice,” The Electronic Intifada, Aug. 24, 2009 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10730.shtml
5. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, “The Organ of Last Resort,” UNESCO, www.unesco.org, July, 2001http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_07/uk/doss34.htm. University of California Berkeley Anthropology Faculty CV: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chancellor’s Professor in Medical Anthropology, Head, Doctoral Program in Medical Anthropology, Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body, Director, Organs Watch http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nsh.html
6. Griffin, Drew and David Fitzpatrick, “Donor says he got thousands for his kidney,” CNN Special Investigations Unit, CNN, Sept. 2, 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/09/01/blackmarket.organs/
7. Scheper-Hughes Lecture, New York PBS 13 Forum
8. Osava, Mario, “BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring,” Inter Press Service (IPS), Feb. 23, 2004 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
9. Yeshiva World News, “CNN: Israel a Leader in Organ Trafficking,” Sept. 3, 2009 http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/38973/CNN:+Israel+a+Leader+in+Organ+Trafficking.html
10. Chabin, Michele, “Organ Donation: Legal, But Still Controversial,” Jewish Week, April 9, 2008 http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c40_a7588/News/Israel.html
11. Rohter, Larry, “Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope,” The New York Times, May 23, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
12. Shapira-Rosenberg, Efrat, “A mitzvah called organ donation,” Ynet News, June 10, 2007 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3388529,00.html
13. Rohter, Larry, op. cit.
14. Ibid.
15. “Organs for Sale: China’s Growing Trade and Ultimate Violation of Prisoners’ Rights,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 107^th Congress, First Session, June 27, 2001, Serial No. 107–29 http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa73452.000/hfa73452_0f.htm
16. Lloyd-Roberts, Sue, “Europe’s poorest country supplying organs to its neighbours,” BBC Newsnight, 9/7/01 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1437345.stm
17. “BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring,” Mario Osava, IPS, Feb. 23, 2004 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
18. New York Times
19. “Israeli organ traffickers shift operations to China,” BioEdge, June 4, 2004 http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/7726/ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
20. “CNN: Israel a Leader in Organ Trafficking,” Yeshiva World News, Sept. 3, 2009 http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/38973/CNN:+Israel+a+Leader+in+Organ+Trafficking.html
21. “Tracking the Sale of a Kidney on a Path of Poverty and Hope,” New York Times, Larry Rohter, May 23, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/americas/23BRAZ.html?th
22. “40 years after Israel’s first transplant, donor’s family says his heart was stolen,” Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz, Dec., 14, 2008 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046041.html
23. “40 years on, medical staffers from Israel’s first human heart transplant reminisce about the feat,” Judy Siegel, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 7, 2008 http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-159077338.html
24. “Shas swing vote pushes through organ donor law,” Shahar Ilan, Haaretz, March 25, 2008 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/968084.html
    “With top rabbis’ blessing, Knesset approves organ donation law,” Shahar Ilan, Haaretz, Aug. 7, 2008 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/967871.html
25. “Scottish Tourist’s Family Rejects Out-of-Court Settlement,” Netty C. Gross, The Jerusalem Report, Jan. 29, 2001
26. “Attorney-General lodges complaint against Abu Kabir coroner,” Dan Izenbert, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2003
27. “Hiss fired for repeated body-part scandals,” Judy Siegel, Jerusalem Post, May 11, 2004
28. “Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,” Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
29. “Were the Children Sold?” Yechiel A. Mann, Stop-Abuse.nethttp://stop-abuse.net/ym5.htm
30. “The Missing Children,” Yechiel A. Mann, Stop-Abuse.net http://stop-abuse.net/ym1.htm
31. “Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,” Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
32. “Infamous Chief Pathologist to Once Again Evade Punishment,” Ezra HaLevi, Arutz Sheva Israel National News, Sept. 26, 2005 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518
33. “Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem,” By Rebecca Dube, Forward, Published Aug. 26, 2009, issue of Sept. 4, 2009 http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
34. “Palestinian corpse used for IDF anatomy lesson,” Amos Harel, Haaretz, Jan. 28, 2005 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=533018
35. “The Swedish canard – not only smoke, but also fire,” Shraga Elam, Aug. 25, 2009 (posted Sept. 4, 2009) (Hebrew: http://cafe.themarker.com/view.php?t=1192567 ) http://shraga-elam.blogspot.com/2009/09/swedish-canard-not-only-smoke-but-also.html
36. “Israeli lawyer sues Swedish paper,” JTA, Aug. 27, 2009 http://jta.org/news/article/2009/08/27/1007480/israeli-lawyer-sues-swedish-paper
37. “Israeli lawyer sues ‘Aftonbladet’ in NY Court,” E.B. Solomont, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 26, 2009 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145124980&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
38. “Israeli Reservists To Sue Swedish Newspaper,” David Bedein, The Bulletin, August 30, 2009 http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/09/04/news/world/doc4a9aa59f46ce3700709743.prt

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Israeli Organ Harvesting

The New “Blood Libel”?

Alison Weir
CounterPunch
August 28-30, 2009

Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing shocking material: testimony and circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years.

Worse yet, some of the information reported in the article suggests that in some instances Palestinians may have been captured with this macabre purpose in mind.

In the article, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Bostrom writes that Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”¹

An army of Israeli officials and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Bostrom and the newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An Israeli official called it “hate porn.”

Commentary magazine wrote that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.” Numerous people likened the article to the medieval “blood libel,” (widely refuted stories that Jews killed people to use their blood in religious rituals). Even some pro-Palestinian writers joined in the criticism, expressing skepticism.

The fact is, however, that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.

Below are a few examples of previous reports on this topic.

Israel’s first heart transplant

Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family.

In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat)² died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.”

After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke.

When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing.

During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers.

The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used.

The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent.³ (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.)

Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed.

Director of forensic medicine on missing organs

A 1990 article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled “Autopsies and Executions” by Mary Barrett reports on the grotesque killings of young Palestinians. It includes an interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, the former chief health official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of forensic medicine and autopsies.

Barrett asks him about “the widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.”

He responded:

“There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume?”⁴

Mysterious Scottish death

In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at Ben Gurion airport.

His family was informed of the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair’s corpse home. [Alisdair’s brother] says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different option: burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of about $1,300.”

The family scraped up the money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University of Glasgow. It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were missing. At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel.

The J report states:

“A heart said to be Sinclair’s was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James wanted the [Israeli] Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother’s, but the Institute’s director, Professor Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by some sources at $1,500.”

Despite repeated requests from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist’s and police reports, Israeli officials refused to release either.^{5 6 7}

Israeli government officials raise questions

Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh reports in an article in CCUN:

“In January, 2002, an Israeli cabinet minister tacitly admitted that organs taken from the bodies of Palestinian victims might have been used for transplants in Jewish patients without the knowledge of the Palestinian victims’ families.

“The minister, Nessim Dahan, said in response to a question by an Arab Knesset member that he couldn’t deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.

“‘I couldn’t say for sure that something like that didn’t happen.’”

Amayreh writes that the Knesset member who posed the question said that he “had received ‘credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Kabir extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank.”⁸

Israel’s chief pathologist removed from post for stealing body parts

For a number of years there were allegations that Israel’s leading pathologist was stealing body parts. In 2001 the Israeli national news service reported:

“… the parents of soldier Ze’ev Buzgallo who was killed in a Golan Heights military training accident, are filing a petition with the High Court of Justice calling for the immediate suspension of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and that criminal charges be filed against him. Hiss serves as the director of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute….According to the parents, the body of their son was used for medical experimentation without their consent, experiments authorized by Hiss.⁹

In 2002 the service reported:

“The revelation of illegally stored body parts in the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute has prompted MK Anat Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, to demand the immediate suspension of the director, Prof. Yehuda Hiss.”

Alisdair Sinclair’s death had first alerted authorities to Hiss’s malfeasance in 1998, though nothing was done for years. The Forward reported:

“In 2001, an Israeli Health Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running the state morgue, following years of complaints.”¹⁰

Harvesting kidneys from impoverished communities

According to the Economist, a kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. “Donors were recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday”; they pretended they were relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.”¹¹

In 2004 a legislative commission in Brazil reported, “At least 30 Brazilians have sold their kidneys to an international human organ trafficking ring for transplants performed in South Africa, with Israel providing most of the funding.”

According to an IPS report: “The recipients were mostly Israelis, who receive health insurance reimbursements of 70,000 to 80,000 dollars for life-saving medical procedures performed abroad.”

IPS reports:

The Brazilians were recruited in Brazil’s most impoverished neighbourhoods and were paid $10,000 per kidney, “but as ‘supply’ increased, the payments fell as low as 3,000 dollars.” The trafficking had been organized by a retired Israeli police officer, who said “he did not think he was committing a crime, given that the transaction is considered legal by his country’s government.”

The Israeli embassy issued a statement denying any participation by the Israeli government in the illegal trade of human organs but said it did recognize that its citizens, in emergency cases, could undergo organ transplants in other countries, “in a legal manner, complying with international norms,” and with the financial support of their medical insurance.

However, IPS reports that the commission chair termed the Israeli stance “at the very least ‘anti-ethical’, adding that trafficking can only take place on a major scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system.” He went on to state that the resources provided by the Israeli health system “were a determining factor” that allowed the network to function.¹²

Tel Aviv hospital head promotes organ trafficking

IPS goes on to report:

“Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who heads the Organs Watch project at the U.S. University of California, Berkeley, testified to the Pernambuco legislative commission that international trafficking of human organs began some 12 years ago, promoted by Zacki Shapira, former director of a hospital in Tel Aviv.

“Shapira performed more than 300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries, such as Turkey. The recipients are very wealthy or have very good health insurance, and the ‘donors’ are very poor people from Eastern Europe, Philippines and other developing countries, said Scheper-Hughes, who specialises in medical anthropology.”

Israel prosecutes organ traffickers

In 2007 Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported that two men confessed to persuading “Arabs from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” They then would refuse to pay them.

The paper reported that the two were part of a criminal ring that included an Israeli surgeon. According to the indictment, the surgeon sold the kidneys he harvested for between $125,000 and $135,000.¹³

Earlier that year another Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, reported that ten members of an Israeli organ smuggling ring targeting Ukrainians had been arrested.¹⁴

In still another 2007 story, the Jerusalem Post reported that “Professor Zaki Shapira, one of Israel’s leading transplant surgeons, was arrested in Turkey on Thursday on suspicion of involvement in an organ trafficking ring. According to the report, the transplants were arranged in Turkey and took place at private hospitals in Istanbul.”¹⁵

Israeli organ trafficking comes to the U.S.?

In July of this year even US media reported on the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, recently arrested by federal officials in a massive corruption sweep in New Jersey that netted mayors, government officials and a number of prominent rabbis. Bostrom opens his article with this incident.

According to the federal complaint, Rosenbaum, who has close ties to Israel, said that he had been involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years. A US Attorney explained: “His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.”¹⁶

This is reportedly the first case of international organ trafficking in the U.S.

University of California anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who informed the FBI about Rosenbaum seven years ago, says she heard reports that he had held donors at gunpoint to ensure they followed through on agreements to “donate” their organs.¹⁷

Israel’s organ donor problems

Israel has an extraordinarily small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population holds such cards.¹⁸

“According to statistics from the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”

According to Ynet, the low incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed silently.”^{19 20}

The Swedish article reports that ‘Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the 1990s. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

“Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).”

To fill this need former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then health minister of Israel, organized a big donor campaign in the summer of 1992, but while the number of donors skyrocketed, need still greatly surpassed supply.

Palestinian disappearances increase

Bostrom, who earlier wrote of all this in his 2001 book Inshallah,²¹ reports in his recent article:

“While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

“Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.”

“I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.”

He describes the case of 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his village.

“The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.”

Five days later he was returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Bostrom reports that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head. Bostrom writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a thing.

“The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.”

Why autopsies?

Bostrom describes the questions that families asked:

“Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?”

Israel’s answer was that all Palestinians who were killed were routinely autopsied. However, Bostrom points out that of the133 Palestinians who were killed that year, only 69 were autopsied.

He goes on to write:

“We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

“It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.”²²

The new “Blood Libel”?

In scanning through the reaction to Bostrom’s report, one is struck by the multitude of charges that his article is a new version of the old anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Given that fact, it is interesting to examine a 2007 book by Israel’s preeminent expert on medieval Jewish history, and what happened to him.

The author is Bar-Ilan professor (and rabbi) Ariel Toaff, son of the former chief rabbi of Rome, a religious leader so famous that an Israeli journalist writes that Toaff’s father “is to Italian Jewry as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” Ariel Toaff, himself, is considered “one of the greatest scholars in his field.”^{23 24}

In February 2007 the Israeli and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the U.S. media somehow missed it) with news that Professor Toaff had written a book entitled “Pasque di Sangue” (“Blood Passovers”)²⁵ containing evidence that there “was a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”

Based on 35 years of research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many, real incidents.

In an interview with an Italian newspaper (the book was published in Italy), Toaff says:

“My research shows that in the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.”^{26 27}

Professor Toaff was immediately attacked from all sides, including pressure orchestrated by Anti-Defamation League chairman Abe Foxman, but Toaff stood by his 35 years of research, announcing:

“I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me… One shouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth.”

Before long, however, under relentless public and private pressure, Toaff had recanted, withdrawn his book, and promised to give all profits that had already accrued (the book had been flying off Italian bookshelves) to Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League. A year later he published a “revised version.”²⁸

Donald Bostrom’s experience seems to be a repeat of what Professor Toaff endured: calumny, vituperation, and defamation. Bostrom has received death threats as well, perhaps an experience that Professor Toaff also shared.

If Israel is innocent of organ plundering accusations, or if its culpability is considerably less than Bostrom and others suggest, it should welcome honest investigations that would clear it of wrongdoing. Instead, the government and its advocates are working to suppress all debate and crush those whose questions and conclusions they find threatening.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than responding to calls for an investigation, is demanding that the Swedish government abandon its commitment to a free press and condemn the article. The Israeli press office, apparently in retaliation and to prevent additional investigation, is refusing to give press credentials to reporters from the offending newspaper.

Just as in the case of the rampage against Jenin, the attack on the USS liberty, the massacre of Gaza, the crushing of Rachel Corrie, the torture of American citizens, and a multitude of other examples, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide resources to interfere with the investigative process.

It is difficult to conclude that it has nothing to hide.

Notes

1. There are two English translations; this article uses the first:
   http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
   http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/SwedishTrans.htmlThe original Swedish article in Aftonbladet can be viewed at
   http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab
2. New York Times, Feb. 3, 1969, p. 8, Column 6 (53 words)
3. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046041.html
   40 years after Israel’s first transplant, donor’s family says his heart was stolen By Dana Weiler-Polak, Haaretz Correspondent, Dec. 14, 2008
4. http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0490/9004021.htm
   Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1990, Page 21, The Intifada: Autopsies and Executions
5. http://www.jweekly.com/
   October 30, 1998,Bizarre death of Scottish tourist involves suicide, missing heart by NETTY C. GROSS, Jerusalem Post Service
6. http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
   The Forward, Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem, By Rebecca Dube, Aug. 26, 2009
7. http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg114437.html
   Masons, Muslims, Templars, Jews, Henry and Dolly.
8. http://ccun.org/Opinion
   Al-Jazeerah: Cross-Cultural Understanding, Khalid Amayreh, August 20, 2009
9. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/12699
10. http://www.forward.com/articles/112915/
    Forward, Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem, By Rebecca Dube, August 26, 2009
11. http://www.economist.com/
    The Economist, Organ transplants: The gap between supply and demand, Oct. 9, 2008
12. 12/http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=22524
    BRAZIL: Poor Sell Organs to Trans-Atlantic Trafficking Ring
    By Mario Osava, IPS, Feb. 23, 2004
13. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/935092.html
    Haaretz, Two Haifa men sentenced to jail for organ trafficking, By Fadi Eyadat, Dec. 18, 2007
14. http://www.jpost.com/
    Police uncover illegal organ trade ring
    By REBECCA ANNA STOIL, July 23, 2007
15. http://www.jpost.com
    Israeli suspected of organ trafficking
    By Jpost.com Staff, May 1, 2007
16. http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/671687
    Sting rocks U.S. transplant industry, David Porter, Carla K. Johnson, ASSOCIATED PRESS, july 25, 2009
17. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102799.html
    U.S. Professor: I told FBI about kidney trafficking 7 years ago
    By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspondent, August, 3, 2009
18. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3388529,00.html
    A mitzvah called organ donation, Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg, 10.6.07
19. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3265889,00.html
    Orthodox in uproar over organ donation incident, Neta Sela, 06.22.06
20. http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Body_Snatchers.htm
    The Return of the Body Snatchers, By Israel ShamirIsraeli writer Israel Shamir reports that some years ago “…a leading Chabad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburgh, gave his religious permission for a Jew to take a liver from a non-Jew even without his consent. He said that ‘a Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of an animal.’
21. http://www.bokus.com/b/9789170370939.html
22. http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
23. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/829381.html
    Ha’aretz. The Wayward Son, by Adi Schwartz, March 1, 2007
24. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
    Ha’aaretz, Bar-Ilan to order professor to explain research behind blood libel book By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Service and The Associated Press, Feb 11, 2007
25. http://www.bloodpassover.com/toafftableofcontents.htm
26. http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824152.html
    Haaretz, Bar Ilan to order professor to explain research behind blood libel book, by Ofri Hani, Feb. 11, 2007.
27. Earlier books containing related information on medieval and modern Judaism, some of it particularly relevant to discussions of organ extraction, as well as on the widespread suppression of such information, were published some years ago, also by an Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, of whom Noam Chomsky once wrote, “Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.” We encourage people to read these books in full: “Jewish History, Jewish Religion, The Weight of Three Thousand Years” and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” coauthored by Professor Norton Mezvinsky.
28. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/957357.html
    Ha’aretz, ‘Historian recants theory that Jews killed Christian child in ritual murder,’ By Adi Schwartz, Feb 24, 2008
29. http://www.israelshamir.net/English/blood.htm

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Below are my follow-up blog entries:

Since I wrote my two articles on Israeli organ trafficking (here and here), the subject periodically pops up again in the news (though it’s minimally covered, if at all, by mainstream US news sources). Following are two of the most recent incidents of Israeli organ trafficking (for previous updates on this topic go here):

Israeli Organ Trafficking Ring Broken Up

Costa Rican police raid labs connected to illegal Israeli transplant network

* * *

Israeli arrested in Rome for organ trafficking

Man escaped from Brazil while on leave from prison in 2009, after being convicted of leading a kidney purchasing ring

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive of Haiti told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Jan. 27th that there had been reports of child trafficking and organ trafficking in Haiti…

CNN news report on this – “Traffickers targeting Haiti’s children, human organs, PM says”

(CNN) — Trafficking of children and human organs is occurring in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated parts of Haiti, killed more than 150,000 people, and left many children orphans, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said Wednesday.

“There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs,” Bellerive said in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour….

[petition calling for an investigation]

A few weeks ago, following my article in CounterPunch “Israeli Organ Harvesting: The New ‘Blood Libel’?”(now available in Spanish, French, and Italian), the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs asked me to write a piece on this topic for their publication.

In conducting research for this — largely from Israeli media, Congressional testimony, BBC reports, etc — I found considerably more information.

As a result, I have now produced two new footnoted articles — one that is in the print edition of the November Washington Report (I urge people to subscribe to the magazine in order to get this shorter, more concise article) and a longer one that is on their website:

Following are some excerpts from the website version: 

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, the founder of Organ Watch, and the author of scholarly books and articles on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream media call upon when they need expert commentary on the topic.⁵

While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers and procurers come from numerous nations and ethnicities, including Americans and Arabs, she is unflinchingly honest in speaking about the Israeli connection:

“Israel is at the top,” she states. “It has tentacles reaching out worldwide.”

*  *  * 

… In her Forum 13 lecture Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: “Revenge, restitution—reparation for the Holocaust.”

She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her “it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

*  *  * 

… For many years the Israeli health system subsidized its citizens’ “transplant holidays,” … In addition, Israel’s Ministry of Defense was directly involved.

*  *  * 

… Journalist Khalid Amayreh, recently investigating this topic further, found that “several other Palestinians gave a similar narrative, recounting how they received the bodies of their murdered relatives, mostly men in their early twenties, with vital organs taken away by the Israeli authorities.”

Israel has consistently characterized such accusations as “anti-Semitic,” and numerous other journalists have discounted them as exaggerations.

However, according to the pro-Israel Forward magazine, the truth of these charges was, in fact, confirmed by an Israeli governmental investigation a number of years ago.

*  *  * 

… In 1996, Jewish Week reported that Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a leader of the Lubavitch sect of Judaism and the dean of a religious Jewish school in a West Bank settlement, stated: “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that.” Ginzburgh elaborated: “Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.” [The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12, 31]

*  *  * 

Still in denial?

Finally, it is interesting that some writers with friendly and family ties to Israel, who are slowly overcoming their denial on Israeli war crimes, still quite often leap to Israel’s defense against evidence of Israeli wrongdoing.

Some of these bloggers attempt to cover up Israeli actions by alleging that facts in some of my articles are incorrect — for example, like other Israel partisans, some claim that Israeli Professor Ariel Toaff, a preeminent Israeli historian who wrote a book initially suggesting that there had apparently been cases of ritual killings of Christians during the Middle Ages (after massive pressure he later recanted) is actually — they allege — not an expert.

However, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and other Israeli sourcees refer to Dr. Toaff as “an international expert on Italian Jewry,” “an expert on the history of medieval Italian Jewry“, “who is considered an international expert on Italian Jewry“, “one of the greatest scholars in his field‘”, “the university also reiterated that Toaff was among the senior lecturers in his field in Israel and internationally“; reviews of earlier books noted his “scholarly rigour” and stated, “Toaff is the acknowledge master of the social history of Umbrian Jewry“

It is interesting to note that Professor Toaff, who is also a rabbi, initially said: “I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me.” Following multiple and diverse threats, he recanted.

Ha’aretz reports some of Toaff’s statements:

“I tried to show that the Jewish world at that time was also violent, among other things because it had been hurt by Christian violence,” the Bar-Ilan history professor said. Of course I do not claim that Judaism condones murder. But within Ashkenazi Judaism there were extremist groups that could have committed such an act and justified it,” he said…

“Over many dozens of pages I proved the centrality of blood on Passover,” Toaff said. “Based on many sermons, I concluded that blood was used, especially by Ashkenazi Jews, and that there was a belief in the special curative powers of children’s blood. It turns out that among the remedies of Ashkenazi Jews were powders made of blood.”

Although the use of blood is prohibited by Jewish law, Toaff says he found proof of rabbinic permission to use blood, even human blood. “The rabbis permitted it both because the blood was already dried,” and because in Ashkenazi communities it was an accepted custom that took on the force of law, Toaff said. There is no proof of acts of murder, Toaff said, but there were curses and hatred of Christians, and prayers inciting to cruel vengeance against Christians. “There was always the possibility that some crazy person would do something.”

As I wrote earlier, people who wish to take the time to delve into this further and to determine whether or not Toaff’s evidence supported his initial conclusions can read an unauthorized translation of his book here. (This book, despite an enthusiastic review by Italian Jewish historian Sergio Luzzatto, was withdrawn by Toaff following pressure from the Israeli Knesset, the ADL, death threats, etc.)

Unfortuntely, his new, revised book has not yet been translated into English. In the meantime, parts of it are available. For example, Toaff’s detailed description of the attacks on him and his defense of his work is available here. It is well worth scanning.

Ha’aretz reported that, at least before his book came out, “Faculty members described Toaff as a unique lecturer who is well-liked by students.” 

(By the way, it’s probably worthwhile to point out that despite the immense focus from some quarters on Toaff, information on his book and the massive attacks on him were actually a minor part of my CounterPunch article; he is not even mentioned in my recent ones. People who wish to look into this further might wish to view this analysis of Toaff’s research.)

Quite a bit has happened since I wrote my articles.

It turns out that Israel’s chief pathologist and one of its highest paid public officials, at least, had admitted on tape in 2000 that he had taken numerous body parts from Palestinians (as well as from Israelis). I posted several stories about this on our news blog. I’ll write more about this later, especially since the Israeli propaganda apparatus in the U.S. and in Israel is attempting to bury this/spin it away.

Also, additional stories have been published on the issue. I’ll start posting some of them here:

New York police arrest Jewish gang trafficking organs of Algerian children

Watan, September, 2009

An Algerian official revealed Sunday the New York city police were able to catch a Jewish gang involved in the abduction of children from Algeria and trafficking of their organs headed by Levy Rosenbaum.

Dr. Mustafa Khayatti, the head of the Algerian national committee for the development of health and research, said that the arrest of the gang came after Interpol investigations showed that Algerian children were abducted from cities in western Algeria and taken to Morocco in order to harvest their kidneys and traffic them in Israel and the US for $20,000 and $100,000 dollars each.

“The arrest of Jewish organ trafficking gangs does not mean that the danger has gone, top officials and specialists in this issue assert that there are other Jewish gangs who remain active in several Arab countries,” Dr. Khayatti noted.

US authorities had arrested 44 people including Rabbis and mayors in New Jersey last July; they all were prosecuted for money laundering activities and sale of human organs.

Last month, a report issued by Aftonbladet, a newspaper Swedish, accused Israeli soldiers of kidnapping Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to kill them and steal their organs, indicating a possible link between these crimes and the mafia of human organs detected in the US.

In another related context, the humanitarian relief committee affiliated with the union of Egyptian doctors declared Monday its intention to organize an international and Arab media campaign to expose the Israeli crimes of stealing organs from Palestinians.

The committee called in a statement for opening an investigation into these crimes, stressing that a number of Israeli surgeons are involved in harvesting human organs of Palestinians.

Dr. Abdelkader Hegazy, the head of the committee, said that the union of Egyptian doctors received a letter from the Jordanian union about the ways of cooperation in prosecuting every Israeli involved in committing such crimes.

[A petition is here – useful synopsis of issues involved]

[Relevant videos are at the end of the entry]

With all the heat engendered by the recent Swedish article, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” I feel that there is a need for some clarification and logical discussion. 

First, I’d like to alert people to additional information that we’ve just discovered:

 In  June 2001 Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley and Organs Watch testified before the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. Scheper-Hughes testified that she had discovered a “multi-million dollar business” that the Israeli Ministry of Health refused “to intervene and crack down on.” She stated:

… hundreds of kidney patients from Israel … travel in privately brokered ‘transplant tourist’ junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania … to Russia … and to South Africa …

While in Israel for Organs Watch in the summer of [2000] and, again in March 2001, … I interviewed more than 50 transplants professionals, transplant patients, and organs buyers and sellers involved in commercialized transplants … none were willing to condemn a practice which they saw as ‘saving lives’…

Meanwhile, human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinains [sic] by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv. …

A more troubling phenomenon is the support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the illicit national ‘program’ of transplant tourism. Some patients who traveled with the outlaw Israeli transplant surgeon to other countries noted that in each of the organized transplant groups were members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them.

Second, I’d like to make two points about the Swedish article itself:

1. Everyone should read Bostrom’s article for him or herself – carefully — to see what it contains and what it does not. It is often being misrepresented and/or misunderstood. I worry that people are reading what people say it says instead of simply finding out for themselves.

2. When people read the article, they will see that it does not claim to prove anything. It provides facts, describes incidents, includes photos, and repeats questions that the reporter feels are significant enough to merit a thorough investigation.

Do I agree with the need for an investigation?

Absolutely. Below are some reasons:

When a multitude of people describe similar incidents, all pointing to the same serious human rights abuse, it is important to listen to them and investigate their concerns – particularly when there are additional, outside clues that seem to support their statements.

The world has a history of ignoring Palestinian (and others’) charges – only to find later that they were true.

• After Israel’s founding war Palestinian refugees said that they had not left voluntarily but had been violently expelled from their land. This was viewed as extremism and anti-Semitism. Again, it was true.

• Palestinians described horrific massacres during this war, relating grisly tales of brutality; again they were largely dismissed. Later, former Israeli soldiers corroborated their claims.

• For decades Palestinians have described grotesque abuses against them while in prison. Again, these were portrayed as lies and exaggerations, until finally they were documented by outsiders.

• For many years American veterans of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty claimed that this had been an intentional attack. They were called anti-Semitic and disdained. Thirty years later, the senior prosecuting attorney of the one official investigation into the attack stated in a legal document that he and others had been ordered by the White House to cover up the fact that all of the evidence indicated that it had been a deliberate attack.

It is time to listen – and investigate.

As we all know, accusations do not prove guilt, and not all Palestinians are making these particular ones. However, when there are a great many such charges, and when they are accompanied by circumstantial evidence, they should be explored.

The innocent can then be absolved; the guilty discovered. An investigation leads to both.

On a side note, there is no doubt that journalist Bostrom and his editors were aware that they would be viciously attacked and threatened if they published his information and gave voice to the questions it contains. I feel that they should be supported for fulfilling their journalistic responsibility to print the news. When numerous people are making serious charges, these are normally reported. It was appropriate to bring them to the public’s attention.

Incidentally, it appears that the Palestinian Association in Sweden, which represents more than 30,000 Swedish Palestinians, agrees. Reportedly the group has sent a letter to the Aftonbladet newspaper, expressing their appreciation.

People who agee with the need for an investigation may wish to sign this petition.

How likely is it that such an investigation will find wrongdoing?

Below are some thoughts….

1. Internal organs are extremely valuable commodities – a kidney goes for at least $160,000. I can only imagine what a heart gets.

2. Israel has been riddled with organ-trafficking scandals – some involving extremely high Israeli officials and israeli funding.

A. Israel’s very first heart transplant was taken without permission from a victim who had survived a stroke and whose family was told for days that he was ‘doing well.’ (See the Israeli report.) Only after the family brought media attention and sufficient pressure did the hospital finally admit that it had stolen the heart. 

If the man had been Palestinian, it is quite likely that the hospital admission would never have been forthcoming. In such a case those decrying the Swedish article would, in all probability, be suggesting that this man’s family members were simply overwrought, that their accusations were another unacceptable ‘blood libel.’ and that individuals listening to them and also calling for an investigation were gullible, irresponsible, and/or  anti-Semitic.

B. Israel’s chief pathologist was finally removed from his post – not fired – years after evidence had long been accruing that he was stealing ‘legs, ovaries, and testicles’ – and probably the heart of a Scottish man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He took body parts from Israelis.  Do we find it likely that he took no organs from the many Palestinian bodies to which he had extremely easy access?

C. Israelis have for many years been heavily involved in international organ trafficking.

An official investigation in Brazil found that Israel was providing most of the funding for an organ trafficking ring that targeted Brazil’s most impoverished citizens. The same type of trafficking was going on in numerous other places – Turkey, Romania, Moldova.

D. According to the above testimony by an organ trafficking expert before a Congressional subcommittee, the Israeli military was directly involved.

3. Palestinians are a largely captive population.

Numerous human rights groups have documented their situation in detail. There are a multitude of official studies that indicate Israel can kidnap, torture, and kill Palestinians with impunity. They can detain them without charge, hold them as long as they wish, abuse them while in custody, and turn over dead bodies that have been ripped open and ‘autopsied’ without explanation to or permission from the helpless, grieving family.

Given the above points, it begins to appear that the suggestion that no Israelis or Israeli governmental officials have ever stolen Palestinian body parts is the the more far-fetched hypothesis.

Finally, there is one additional aspect to include when pondering this topic. A very small but significant minority of Israelis hold disturbing religious views that are essential to understand in considering the situation for Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and that are directly related to the question of involuntary organ extraction.

This tiny but sometimes lethal group (a Jewish religious extremist assassinated an Israeli prime minister, another gunned down 29 people while they were praying, still another threw a grenade into the middle of an Israeli peace march) have a disproportionate effect on Israeli policies – much to the outrage of many Israelis. They also have considerable power over Palestinians.

Yesterday, I received an email from a person who said that he was from Sweden, had read my article, and had seen the footnote in which I cite a piece by Israeli author Israel Shamir about a rabbi who had given his permission for “a Jew to take a liver from a non-Jew even without his consent.”

This email correspondent sent the full transcript of a news article on this subject that he said he had originally received from Israeli author Israel Shahak.

I’ll post it below for anyone who’s interested in looking into this facet and so that it will be available on the public record.

Below that I will post a small discussion of my own article, and below that will be some relevant videos and links to other stories of interest.

The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12, 31

Hero Or Racist?

Are Jewish lives really more valuable than non-Jewish ones?

Radical rabbi just freed from an Israeli prison thinks so.

Lawrence Cohler, Staff Writer

The triumphal cheers of some 500 Lubavitch chasidim shook the hall on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights Sunday night as a tall, white-haired rabbi basked in their toasts to his recent victory over the government of Israel’s effort to silence him.

A sea of men in black hats and women in long dresses hailed Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh from separate sides of the ballroom of the Oholei Menachem Yeshiva. And amid round wood tables stacked high with challah, herring and rounds of vodka, Rabbi Ginsburgh joined them heartily as glasses rose to his long life.

But ask Lubavitch leader Rabbi Shmuel Butman about Rabbi Ginsburgh’s view that the Torah would “probably permit” seizing an innocent non-Jew for a liver transplant to save the life of a Jew, and Rabbi Butman, who helped organize the welcome, politely demurs.

“That is a purely halachic question,” he says, using the Hebrew adjective for matters pertaining to traditional Jewish law. We don’t get into that.”

“In general, he’s a very pious individual,” said Rabbi Butman, director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization. “And we’re sure he carries responsibility for what he says.”

Not everyone is so sanguine.

Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, a professor of philosophy at Yeshiva University and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the Orthodox Zionist rabbinic body, noted, “Even the devil can quote Scripture.”

The government of Israel’s attempt to stifle Rabbi Ginsburgh’s teaching and lecturing to his followers – including some in the West Bank, where he is dean of a yeshiva in the Palestinian town of Nablus – crashed in failure late last month. After he was jailed for three weeks without charge or trial, a member of Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government had insufficient evidence to justify holding Rabbi Ginsburgh under Israel’s administrative detention laws.

It marked the first time that administrative detention, which until recently has been applied overwhelmingly to Arabs, had ever been successfully challenged. And among many Lubavitchers, the government’s precedent-setting defeat was greeted as a miraculous, classically Judaic victory of the weak over the strong. It was this feeling, which makes daily news headlines a source of faith for so many of them, that permeated the hall Sunday night.

But Rabbi Ginsburgh, an intense but soft-spoken 52-year-old with a long white beard, looks far from the image of tousle-haired David facing the behemoth Goliath. At the same time, his quiet demeanor clashes sharply with the image of a dangerous, demagogic extremist of the sort that Israeli officials have invoked.

Still, no one doubts that his pronouncements and teachings have been controversial.

Regarded as one of the Lubavitch sect’s leading authorities on Jewish mysticism, the St. Louis-born rabbi, who also has a graduate degree in mathematics, speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of Torah.

“If you have two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh told The Jewish Week. ”If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.”

Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically, “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that.

“Jewish life has infinite value,” explained. “There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”

Notwithstanding this, Rabbi Ginsburgh hastened to add that nothing in this view undermines the holiness of non-Jewish lives.

“Just the opposite,” he insisted. ”…Ultimately the light they recognize from Jews will make their lives more valuable. Jews are essentially a giver nation. And non-Jews are receivers.”

Rabbi Ginsburgh is also an ardent sympathizer of Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born physician who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in a Hebron mosque in February 1994. While stopping short of endorsing Goldstein’s act outright, Rabbi Ginsburgh described him unambivalently as “a Jew who gave up his life for his people.” In a recent book devoted to Goldstein he called the massacre “an act of bravery whose source was divine grace.”

Citing explicit instructions he says he received from the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Ginsburgh has also strongly defended Jewish revenge attacks on Arabs, at least after-the-fact. Whether he would tell a Jew to engage in such a random attack beforehand “is a different story,” Rabbi Ginsburgh said. But after such an attack took place in response to an Arab provocation, “You can’t even hint it was a bad thing.”

Among other things, he explained, the jurisdiction of an Israeli court in such a case is illegitimate because “Legally, if a Jew does kill a non-Jew, he’s not called a murderer. He didn’t transgress the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not murder. This applies only to Jews killing Jews. Therefore [in a Jewish state], his punishment is given over to heaven” rather than to a secular court.

In 1989, Rabbi Ginsburgh was personally involved in the events that led to such a killing when he led a large group of his yeshiva students on an armed West Bank “walking tour” that slipped around Israeli Army restrictions and assertively through a Palestinian village. The tour ended in a melee that saw the rabbi stoned by angry villagers, the yeshiva boys rampaging through the village setting fires and vandalizing, and a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was sitting in her house shot by one of the yeshiva tourists.

At the trial of the yeshiva boy charged with the killing, Rabbi Ginsburgh said bluntly, “The people of Israel must rise and declare in public that a Jew and goy are not, God forbid, the same. Any trial that assumes that Jews and goyim are equal is a travesty of justice.”

In an interview at The Jewish Week, Rabbi Ginsburgh delivered his comments in a soft, unassuming voice with no sign of bitterness or hate.

In fact, he said, one reason the court ultimately felt compelled to free him was because his most controversial statements came not as personal opinions but always as citations from scripture, Kabbalah or recognized rabbinic authority.

Rabbi Ginsburgh also defended many of his statements as more musings and reflections in a struggle towards conclusions, rather than conclusions themselves.

“Torah is a complex matter,” he said he told the judge, “especially Kabbalah. You must consider many factors.” But in the course of working through this, he said, there is “a thinking-aloud process.”

“Even when you understand there is a justification for doing certain things,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh, ”studying Kabbalah sweetens the mentality.” The process usually calms, rather than inflames, his students, Rabbi Ginsburgh said.

“In class I’m teaching them not to act on these things, not because they are wrong, but because our way to influence the situation is completely different. If they think the thing to do is to get up and act violently, I teach them that that’s wrong.”

But to Israeli authorities, Rabbi Ginsburgh’s citations and outloud thinking were the stuff of incitement. They viewed many of his talks as incendiary and tried – unsuccessfully – to stifle his lectures to his students in the Nablus yeshiva in particular.

Finally, just hours after the devastating suicide bombing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Circle last March, amid a wrathful national mood, Rabbi Ginsburgh gave a Purim lecture on a long letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe about “the mitzvahs of war for the sake of revenge and war for the sake of conquering the Land of Israel,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh.

“The rebbe explained that war for the sake of revenge was a much higher mitzvah,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh, recalling his talk to the crowd.

It was soon after this that Prime Minister Shimon Peres signed a 60-day administrative detention order against him “to prevent Rabbi Ginsburgh from continuing his incendiary preaching of revenge.”

The public outcry that followed came mostly from the right. But some civil libertarians also protested his jailings as beyond the pale, even for Israel’s administrative detention law. That law empowers the authorities to jail without charge individuals who threaten public security. But unlike most other detainees, they noted, Rabbi Ginsburgh was jailed explicitly for his speech rather than his acts.

Still, when the court finally ordered him released, citing insufficient evidence that his statements had incited or would incite anyone, many Lubavitchers had no doubt it was their effort that turned the tide.

Rabbi Ginsburgh himself told the Crown Heights audience Sunday night, “The most important thing I want to convey is that the claim against me is a claim against the Torah, a claim against chassidus, a claim against the Lubavitcher rebbe.”

But not everyone agrees with how Rabbi Ginsburgh uses these sources, of course.

“It’s the greatest tragedy to take isolated texts and use them without tradition,” Rabbi Wurzburger said. ”[Rabbi Meir] Kahane did this, too. You can always take statements out of context.”

Even within Lubavitch, there are critics: Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the former administrator of the rebbe’s secretariat and current head of the sect’s international operations, termed Rabbi Ginsburgh’s views, as related to him in a phone interview, ”totally outrageous.”

But Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, called for radically revising Jewish thinking about some Jewish texts on the grounds that scholars such as Rabbi Ginsburgh are far from aberrant in their use of them.

Rabbi Greenberg, who has written extensively about Jewish scriptural views on racism and ethnic chauvinism, said, “The sad thing is, these statements are in our books.”

“There’ll be a statement in Talmud… made in circumstances where it’s purely theoretical, because Jews then never had the power to do it,” he explained. And now, he said, “It’s carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered. [These statements] are brought forward by people who themselves have no social responsibility and have not been elected to represent the Jewish people. But they’re called Torah scholars. And not having responsibility, they can say such things. Their self-confidence and self-righteousness is part of their total divorcement from consequences.”

But Rabbi Ginsburgh’s own thoughts were far from that this week. Preparing to go on to Los Angeles as part of the fund-raising tour his supporters had planned, he exulted that his bout with repression had gained him “thousands” of more listeners.

“Even my prosecutors got a lesson in chasidic thinking,” he said, smiling, ”because they had to study my thinking for their prosecution.”

 *

Contributing editor Jon Kalish contributed to this article.

Some comments on my own article…

My short section near the end of my article on Ariel Toaff’s suppressed book on blood libel was a very small part of the fairly long article, but, as expected, it has drawn considerable wrath from some quarters. Others have raised the question of whether it was relevant to include in the article, a reasonable question and one I pondered ahead of time, knowing the anger it would engender among those who wish such things to remain hidden. (Much more information on Toaff is here. A video of Toaff is below.)

Obviously, I decided in the affirmative. Given that virtually all Bostrom’s critics were using the epithet ‘blood libel’ in their attempts to block any real consideration of the article’s content, I felt that the successful silencing of an Israeli scholar who had raised significant questions about this very subject was quite relevant and useful for people to know about — especially since the Toaff controversy had been covered so extensively in the Israeli press at the time. I don’t like the idea that some people are permitted to know something, but that others are not supposed to learn about it.

If people read Toaff’s book for themselves, and I provided the link so that they could, they can see the content for themselves and determine whether they feel that his evidence supports the conclusions he had drawn or not. If they do feel that some small groups did do what he believes they did, this conclusion in many ways simply indicates that the Jewish population is basically similar to anyone else, since history  shows that there have been sects in numerous religious groups, that have committed “religious” violence.

The problem is that some people believe that the Jewish population is better than all the rest of humanity; others allege it’s worse. My view is that individuals within this population run the whole gamut, just as in other populations.

The continual portrayal of an entire population that has never done anything wrong (as Alfred Lilienthal once discussed), and that is eternally the victim of allegedly bigoted, always baseless accusations is part of what buttresses the Israeli myth, replete with its astonishing claim of ‘purity of arms.’  (The fact that so many people can believe that the soldiers of one army — unlike all others — have never committed a single abuse is an example of the pervasiveness of this myth of extreme exceptionalism.)

I feel that the continual attempt to censor all negative facts and allegations – to suppress books and block investigations — is a dangerous, two-edged sword. Many people believe the myth, at least for awhile, which enables continued and expanded misconduct. Others, however, do not, and they, recognizing the suppression, sometimes then imagine a reality that is considerably worse than the actual facts — and such suspicions smolder and grow.

I believe it’s always better for the truth to come out.

Clarification on Israel Shahak

Finally, the original version of my article contained a sentence in a parentheses near the end of the piece that may have seemed to say that Israeli professor and author Israel Shahak also believed there was a basis to the blood libel accusations. In reality, the findings that were similar to Toaff’s were Shahak’s information on Talmudic texts emphasizing vengeance, the profound anti-Christian statements to be found in numerous religious texts, and the extreme religious violence within some medieval Jewish communities, sometimes ordered by Rabbis, eg cutting out tongues, chopping off noses, etc – and not that there had been ritual killings of Christians.

I urge people to read his book along with Toaff’s to discover for themselves the similarities and differences. Shahak’s book is also posted here. An excellent analysis of Toaff is here.

It is a shame that Professor Shahak is no longer alive. It would have been valuable to learn his views on Toaff’s original book, and on Bostrom’s article.

#

Additional articles and postings

Yehuda Hiss

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/90518

Price tags on bones

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1173179

Organ warehouse

http://www.israelfaxx.com/webarchive/2002/01/2fax0104.html

Aftonbladet follow up

http://www.israelfaxx.com/webarchive/2002/01/2fax0104.html

Blog postings by kawther Salam

http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2009/08/23/the-body-snatchers-of-israel

http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2009/08/24/israel-stole-palestinian-bodies-from-their-graves

 Ynet article with kusam Aslam allegations

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3770443,00.html

 Gaudy Taubber portrait

http://clas.berkeley.edu/Publications/newsletters/Fall2006/CLASFall2006-ScheperHughes-small.pdf

Discussion of ethics, etc.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb137/is_4_27/ai_n29249860/

comment by Aftonbladet editor, etc

http://www.yobserver.com/reports/printer-10017180.html

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nsh.html

satires and discussion of the issue

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=46695

more blog postings on Toaff controversy

http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng16.htm

http://www.israelshamir.net/English/blood.htm

Video of Ariel Toaff discussing “Pasque di Sangue” (Part 1 of 6)

A number of people have been emailing me to ask my opinion about a youtube video and articles raising the question of Israeli organ harvesting in Haiti, given that I had researched Israeli organ trafficking and theft and had discovered how extremely significant it has been.

Regarding Haiti, however, at this point my feeling is that the Israeli team is most likely there largely for humanitarian reasons. At the same time, of course, I suspect that the IDF and Israeli government are fully aware of their use in pro-Israel publicity, as well. The latter is perhaps evidenced by the amount of U.S.media coverage they’ve received. Israel has been enormously concerned about its negative image around the world earned by its treatment of Palestinians, Lebanese, et al, and have been activity working at improving their hasbara efforts.

However, I think it’s good that T.West raised the issue of possible exploitation. Whenever there is chaos, desperation, and money to be made, it is not rare for nefarious activities to take place. It’s good for people in such conditions to be vigilant, and for the international community to be alert to the possibility of victims of a tragic natural disaster being victimized still further by human agency.

In addition, of course, it’s profoundly upsetting to see the media reporting on Israel bringing aid to Haiti without noting that Israel is preventing aid from getting to Gaza — an Israeli-made disaster. And while I’d like to think the best of the Israeli relief team in Haiti, I’d feel better about them if they’d use their media fame to speak out about Gaza, as some Israelis have done.

In terms of the question of organ trafficking and theft in Haiti… I would tend to worry about this more in the future – when media attention is averted, yet the desperately poor remain.

Update on Friday, June 3 2011 at 9:50PM

I’ve just discovered that a few weeks after I wrote this post, an Israeli doctor involved in this type of “humanitarian assistance” exposed its political agenda. It turns out I was even more correct, sadly, than I knew. The following was first published in Israel’s Yediot and then translated by Sol Salbe and posted with commentary on Tikkun Olam :

Public Relations instead of saving lives

Sending portable toilets to Haiti would have been a better option, but this does not provide good photo opportunities. Israeli missions to disaster areas in the past have shown that such activity was in vain.

Yoel Donchin

I received my final exemption from the army after I published an article which said that the State of Israel acts like the proverbial Boy Scout, who insists on doing a good deed daily and helping an old lady cross the road even against her will. How ungrateful of me to publish such a column when I had participated in almost all the rescue missions to overseas disaster areas! Suddenly I am no longer suitable to take part in such heroic endeavours. But in light of the experience I gained in such missions…we have wasted our effort.

Generally speaking, we start preparing for such a mission within hours of the announcement of a natural disaster. Most often the Israeli mission team is the first one to land in the area. Like those who climb Mount Everest, it plants its flag on the highest peak available, announcing  to all and sundry that the site has been conquered. And in order to ensure that the public is aware of this sporting achievement, the mission is accompanied by media representatives, photographers, an IDF spokesman’s office squad and others.

I understood the purpose perfectly when the head of one of the delegations to a disaster zone was asked whether oxygen tanks and a number of doctors could be removed to make room for another TV network’s representatives with their equipment. (With unusual courage, the delegation head refused!)

The lesson learnt from the activities of those missions is that when there is a natural disaster, or when thousands of people are expelled from their homes by force, as happened in Kosovo, survivors may benefit from international assistance only if it responds to the region’s specific needs. Also assistance must be coordinated among the various aid agencies.

The competitive race to a disaster zone imposes a huge strain on the local health and administration authorities. Airports are clogged by transport planes unloading a lot of unnecessary but bulky equipment. Doctors and rescue organisations seek ways to utilise single carriageway roads and in fact they are a burden.   The correct way to help is to send a small advance force to gauge the dimensions of the disaster…

Would they still call that child Israel?

Three components are crucial:  shelter, water and food — these things are crucial in order to save the largest number of people. Water purification equipment, tents, basic food rations are needed. But they do lack the desired dramatic effect. If we went down that track we would miss out on seeing that child who was born with the assistance of our physicians. Most certainly, the excited mother wouldn’t give her child (who knows if he will ever reach a ripe old age?) the name Israel or that of the obstetrician or nurse. (Would he get citizenship because he was born in Israeli territory? There would be many opposed to that.) The drama is indeed classy, but its necessity is doubtful.

It being Israel, our current force contains a Kashrut supervisor, security personnel and more.

In the present disaster, which is of a more massive scale than anything we have encountered to date, the need is not so much for a field hospital but field, ie portable, toilets. There is more of a need for digging equipment to dig graves and sewage pipes.

A country which wants to provide humanitarian aid without concern for its media image should send whatever is required by the victims, and not whatever it wants to deliver. But would the evening news show the commander of the Israeli mission at the compound with 500 chemical toilets? Unlikely. It is much more media savvy to show an Israeli hospital, replete with stars of David and of course the dedicated doctors and nurses, dressed in their snazzy uniforms with an Israeli flag on the lapel.

…It is quite likely that financial assistance commensurate with Israel’s resources would be preferable to the enormous expense and complicated logistics involved in the maintenance of a medical unit in the field…

But apparently a minute of TV coverage is much more important…and in fact Israel is using disasters as [military] field training in rescue and medical care. After a fortnight, the mission will reportedly return to Israel. To be truly effective a field hospital needs to remain for two or three months, but that’s a condition that Israel cannot meet.

…It is only in the Israeli aid compound in Haiti that large signs carrying the donor country’s name hang for all to see.

Prof. Yoel Donchin is the director of the Patient Safety Unit at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem.
Translated by Sol Salbe, who directs the Middle East News Service for the Australian Jewish Democratic Society.

Alexander Cockburn

June 06, 1941 – July 21, 2012

Master of Ceremonies – Jeffrey St. Clair

Speakers

Joseph Paff
Conn Hallinan
Alison Weir
Scott Handleman
David Yearsley
Fred Gardner, with guitar
Becky Grant
Jack Heyman
Justin Raimondo
Zach Blue
Sheryl Chard
Frank Bardacke
Bruce Anderson
Daisy Cockburn

*

Cockburn, the Israel Lobby and the Palestinians

Ripping Open the Curtain on the Forbidden