Israel’s Politics of Deflection: Theory and Practice

by Richard Falk

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He writes that he initiated his blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.

General Observations

During my period as the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Palestine on behalf of the Human Rights Council I have been struck by the persistent efforts of Israel and its strong civil society adjuncts to divert attention from the substance of Palestinian grievances or the consideration of the respective rights of Israel and Palestine under international law. I have also observed that many, but by not means all of those who represent the Palestinians seem strangely reluctant to focus on substance or to take full advantage of opportunities to use UN mechanisms to challenge Israel on the terrain of international law and morality.

This Palestinian reluctance is more baffling than are the Israeli diversionary tactics. It seems clear that international law supports Palestinian claims on the major issues in contention: borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, resources (water, land), statehood, and human rights. Then why not insist on resolving the conflict by reference to international law with such modifications as seem mutually beneficial? Of course, those representing the Palestinians in international venues are aware of these opportunities, and are acting on the basis of considerations that in their view deserve priority.  It is disturbing that this passivity on the Palestinian side persists year after year, decade after decade. There are partial exceptions: support for recourse to the International Court of Justice to contest the construction of the separation wall, encouragement of the establishment of the Goldstone Fact-finding Inquiry investigating Israeli crimes after the 2008-09 attacks on Gaza, and the Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Israeli settlement expansion (report 22 March 2012). But even here, Palestinian officialdom will not push hard to have these symbolic victories implemented in ways that alter the behavioral realities on the ground, and maybe even if they did do their best, nothing would change.

On the Israeli side, diversion and the muting of legal and legitimacy claims, is fully understandable as a way to blunt challenges from adversary sources: seeking to have the normative weakness of the Israeli side offset by an insistence that if there is to be a solution it must be based on the facts on the ground, whether these are lawful or not, and upon comparative diplomatic leverage and negotiating skill in a framework that is structurally biased in favor of Israel. The recently exhumed direct negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Government of Israel exemplify this approach: proceeding despite the absence of preconditions as to compliance with international law even during the negotiations, reliance on the United States as the convening intermediary, and the appointment by President Obama of an AIPAC anointed Special Envoy (Martin Indyk), the latter underscoring the absurd one-sidedness of the diplomatic framework. It would seem that the Palestinians are too weak and infirm to cry ‘foul,’ but merely play along as if good natured, obedient, and frightened schoolchildren while the bullies rule the schoolyard.

Such a pattern is discouraging for many reasons: it weights the diplomatic process hopelessly in favor of the materially stronger side that has taken full advantage of the failure to resolve the conflict by grabbing more and more land and resources; it makes it virtually impossible to imagine a just and sustainable peace emerging out of such a process at this stage; it plays a cruel game in which the weaker side is almost certain to be made to seem unreasonable because it will not accept what the stronger side is prepared to offer, which is insultingly little; and it allows the stronger side to use the process and time interval of the negotiations as an opportunity to consolidate its unlawful claims,  benefitting from the diversion of attention.

There are two interwoven concerns present: the pernicious impacts of the politics of deflection as an aspect of conflictual behavior in many settings, especially where there are gross disparities in hard power and material position; the specific politics of deflection as a set of strategies devised and deployed with great effectiveness by Israel in its effort to attain goals with respect to historic Palestine that far exceed what the UN and the international community had conferred. The section that follows deals with the politics of deflection only in the Israel/Palestine context

The Specific Dynamics of the Politics of Deflection

–anti-Semitism: undoubtedly the most disturbing behavior by Israel and its supporters is to deflect attention from substance in the conflict and the abuses of the occupation is to dismiss criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism or to defame the critic as an anti-Semite. This is pernicious for two reasons: first, because it exerts a huge influence because anti-Semitism has been so totally discredited, even criminalized, in the aftermath of World War II that featured the exposure and repudiation of the Holocaust; secondly, because by extending the reach of anti-Semitism to address hostile commentary on Israel a shift of attention occurs—away from the core evil of ethnic and racial hatred to encompass the quite reasonable highly critical appraisal of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinian people by reference to overarching norms of law and morality.

This misuse of language to attack Jewish critics of Israel by  irresponsible characterizations of critics as  ‘self-hating Jews.’ Such persons might exist, but to infer their existence because of their criticisms of Israel or opposition to the Zionist Project functions as a means to move inhibit open discussion and debate, and to avoid substantive issues. It tends to be effective as a tactic as few people are prepared to take the time and trouble to investigate the fairness and accuracy of such allegations, and so once the shadow is cast, many stay clear of the conflict or come to believe that  criticism of Israel is of less interest than are the pros and cons of the personal accusations.  Strong Zionist credentials will not insulate a Jew from such allegations as Richard Goldstone discovered when he was vilified by the top  tier of Israeli leadership after chairing a fact-finding inquiry that confirmed allegations of Israeli war crimes in the course of Operation Cast Lead. Even the much publicized subsequent Goldstone ‘retraction’ did little to rehabilitate the reputation of the man in Israeli eyes, although his change of heart as to the main allegation of his own report (a change rejected by the other three members of the inquiry group), was successfully used by Israeli apologists to discredit and bury the report, again illustrating a preference for deflection as opposed to substance.

Even such global moral authority figures as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter have been called anti-Semites because they dared to raise their voices about the wrongs that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people, specifically identifying the discriminatory legal structures of the occupation as an incipient form of apartheid.

In the unpleasant course of being myself a frequent target of such vilifying techniques, I have discovered that it is difficult to make reasoned responses that do not have the effect of accentuating my plight. To fail to respond leaves an impression among some bystanders that there must be something to the accusations or else there would be forthcoming a reasoned and well-evidenced response. To answer such charges is to encourage continuing attention to the allegations, provides the accusing side with another occasion to repeat the charges by again cherry picking the evidence. NGOs such as UN Watch and UN Monitor specialize in managing such hatchet jobs.

What is more disturbing than the attacks themselves than their resonance among those holding responsible positions in government and international institutions, as well as widely respected liberal organizations. In my case, the UN Secretary General, the U.S. ambassadors at the UN in New York and Geneva, the British Prime Minister, and the Canadian Foreign Minister. Not one of these individuals bothered to check with me as to my response to the defamatory allegations or apparently took the trouble to check on whether there was a credible basis for such damaging personal attacks. Even the liberal mainstream human rights powerhouse, Human Rights Watch, buckled under when pressured by UN Watch, invoking a long neglected technical rule to obtain my immediate removal from a committee, and then lacked the decency to explain that my removal was not ‘a dismissal’ when

UN Watch claimed ‘victory,’ and proceeded to tell the UN and other bodies that if Human Rights Watch had expelled me, surely I should be expelled elsewhere. I learned, somewhat bitterly, that HRW has feet of clay when it came to standing on principle in relation to someone like myself who has

been the victim of repeated calumnies because of an effort to report honestly and accurately on Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.

–Auspices/Messenger: A favorite tactic of those practicing the politics of deflection is to contend that the auspices are biased, and thus whatever substantive criticisms might issue from such an organization should be disregarded. Israel and the United States frequently use this tactic to deflect criticism of Israel that is made in the UN System, especially if it emanates from the Human Rights Council in Geneva or the General Assembly. The argument is reinforced by the similarly diversionary claim that Israeli violations are given a disproportionately large share of attention compared to worse abuses in other countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa. Also, there is the complementary complaint that some of the members of the Human Rights Council themselves have appalling human rights records that disqualify them from passing judgment, thereby exhibiting the hypocrisy of criticisms directed at Israel.

It is tiresome to respond to such lines of attack, but important to do so.

First of all, in my experience, the UN has always made fact-based criticisms of Israeli policies and practices, appointed individuals with strong professional credentials and personal integrity, and painstakingly reviewed written material prior to publication to avoid inflammatory or inaccurate criticisms. Beyond this, Israel is almost always given an opportunity to review material critical of its behavior before it is released, and almost never avails itself of this chance to object substantively. In my experience, the UN, including the Human Rights Council, leans over backwards to be fair to Israel, and to take account of Israeli arguments even when Israel declines to make a case on its own behalf.

Further, the heightened attention given to Palestinian grievances is a justified result of the background of the conflict. It needs to be remembered that it was the UN that took over historic Palestine from the United Kingdom after World War II, decreeing a partition solution in GA Resolution 181 without ever consulting the indigenous population, much less obtaining their consent. The UN approach in 1947 failed to solve the problem, consigning Palestinians to decades of misery due to the deprivation of their fundamental rights as of 1948, the year of the nakba, a national experience of catastrophic dispossession. Through the years the UN has provided guidelines for behavior and a peaceful solution of the conflict, most notably Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which have not been implemented. The UN has for more than a decade participated in The Quartet tasked with implementing ‘the roadmap’ designed to achieve peace, but not followed, allowing Israel to encroach more and more on the remnant of Palestinian rights via settlement expansions, wall construction, residence manipulations, apartheid administrative structures, land confiscations, house demolitions. The UN has been consistently frustrated in relation to Palestine in a manner that is unique in UN experience, making the issue a litmus test of UN credibility to promote global justice and overcome the suffering of a dispossessed and occupied people.

Usually, the attack on the sponsorship of a critical initiative is reinforced by scathing screed directed at anyone prominently associated with the undertaking. The attacks on the legendary Edward Said, the one Palestinian voice in America that could not be ignored, were rather vicious, often characterizing this most humanist among public intellectuals, as the ‘Professor of Terror.’ The most dogmatic defenders of Israel never tired of trying to make this label stick by showing a misleadingly presented picture of Said harmlessly throwing a stone at an abandoned guard house during a visit to southern Lebanon not long before his death as if a heinous act of violence against a vulnerable Israeli soldier. This effort to find something, however dubious, that could be used to discredit an influential critic disregard the ethics of fairness and decency. In my case, an accidentally posted cartoon, with an anti-Semitic angle has been endlessly relied upon by my most mean-spirited detractors, although any fair reading of my past and present scholarship, together with the blog psot in which it appeared in which Israel is not even mentioned, would conclude that its sole purpose of highlighting the cartoon was to defame, and by so doing, deflect.

In like manner, the use of the label ‘terrorist’ has been successfully manipulated by Israel in relation to Hamas to avoid dealing with its presence as the elected governing authority in Gaza or in responding to its offers of long-term coexistence provided the blockade of Gaza is ended and Israeli forces withdraw to 1967 borders. The Hamas demands are really nothing more than a call for the implementation of international law and UNSC resolutions, and thus highly reasonable from the perspective of fairness to both sides, but Israel is not interested in such fairness, and hence avoids responding to the substance of the Hamas proposals by insisting that it is unwilling to respond to a terrorist organization. Such a stubborn position is maintained, and supported by the United States and EU, despite Hamas’ successful participation in an electoral process, its virtual abandonment of violent resistance, and its declared readiness for diplomatic accommodations with Israel and the United States.

If the messenger delivering the unwelcome message lacks prominence or the campaign of vilification does not altogether succeed, then at governmental levels, Israel, and the United States as well, will do its best to show contempt for criticism for the whole process by boycotting proceedings at which the material  is presented. This has been my experience at recent meetings of the Human Rights Council and the Third Committee of the General Assembly where my reports are presented on a semi-annual basis and Israel and the United States make it a point to be absent. There is an allocation of the work of deflection: at the governmental end substance is often evaded by pretending not to notice, while pro-Israeli NGOs pound away, shamelessly repeating over and over the same quarter truths, which often are not even related to their main contention of biased reporting. In my case, UN Watch harps on my supposed membership in the ranks of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, an allegation that I have constantly explained to be contrary to my frequently articulated views on the 9/11 attacks. It makes no difference what I say or what are the facts of my position once the defamatory attack has been launched.

Diplomatic Deflection: The entire Oslo peace process, with its periodically revived negotiations, has served as an essential instrument of deflection for the past twenty years. It diverts the media from any consideration of Israel’s expansionist practices during the period that the parties are futilely negotiating, and succeeds in making critics and criticism of Israel’s occupation policies seem obstructive of the overarching goal of ending the conflict and bringing peace to the two peoples.

Geopolitical Deflection: Although not solely motivated by the goals of deflection, the bellicose focus by Israel on Iran’s nuclear program, has seemed so dangerous for the region and the world that it has made Palestinian grievances appear trivial by comparison. It has also led outside political actors to believe that it would be provocative to antagonize Israeli leadership in relation to Palestine at a time when there were such strong worries that Israel might attack Iran or push the United States in such a direction. To a lesser extent the preoccupations with the effects of the Arab upheavals, especially in Syria and Egypt, have had the incidental benefit for Israel of diminishing still further regional and global pressures relating to Palestinian grievances and rights. This distraction, a kind of spontaneous deflection, has given Israel more time to consolidate their annexationist plans in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which makes the still lingering peace image of a two-state solution a convenient mirage, no more, no less.

A Concluding Comment: Overall, the politics of deflection is a repertoire of techniques used to shift the gaze away from the merits of a dispute. Israel has relied on these techniques with devastating effects for the Palestinians. The purpose of my analysis is to encourage Palestinians in all settings to do their best to keep the focus on substance and respective rights. Perhaps, it is time for all of us to learn from the brave Palestinian hunger strikers whose nonviolent defiance of Israeli detention abuse operated with laser like intensity to call attention to prison and administrative injustice. Unfortunately, the media of the world was silent, including those self-righteous liberal pundits who had for years urged the Palestinians to confront Israel nonviolently, and then sit back, and find satisfaction in the response from Tel Aviv. Waiting for Godot is not a matter of patience, but of ignorance!

I became curious about the organization “Aish” when I stumbled across it while researching my piece on the Weider History Group’s censorship, and awhile ago I subscribed to the Aish feed.

Today I was amazed to read an article that I found openly supremacist; yet, the author and his editors probably feel he is being wonderfully tolerant and sensitive. In many ways I find it a very sad piece.

Below is the article from the Aish website. This was proudly announced in its daily feed.

The Often Invisible Non-Jews

Acknowledging the gentiles who keep our synagogues running.

by Dr. Simon Yisrael Feuerman

A few weeks ago I went back to a shul I hadn’t visited since I was small. Who would still be there after 40 years, I wondered? Quite a few people, as it happened, but one man in particular stood out: someone who was a constant in the shul all those years before, someone I would see all the time as a boy, even though I didn’t really see him at all. At the time, I never even knew his name. He was the custodian, and he lived in the shul.

As a very short, quiet, unassuming Hispanic man, Mr. Roetta – that, I only now found out, is his name – might have gone entirely unnoticed except for his dog, a German shepherd he kept chained on the roof, where he barked furiously. I remember coming to the shul for the evening service and seeing the dog at the edge of the roof, howling at the sky.

It was odd to have a German shepherd at a shul where many of the members were survivors; the rabbi himself, a famous Polish refugee, came to London via Vienna on the eve of the war and survived the blitz before he came to this congregation in Queens. But no one in the shul ever said a thing about the dog – or about Mr. Roetta; it was as if they weren’t even there.

He’s 92. The dog is long gone, but he is still cleaning up around here.

But even after 40 years, I recognized him immediately. He strode upright across the room with a strength that bespoke a man much younger and began setting up the kiddush. “He’s 92,” someone in shul told me. “The dog is long gone, but he is still cleaning up around here, mopping the floors in the bathroom and in the halls. In winter he is in front at first light with the snow blower.” Concealed in his small frame was a certain will, even an enthusiasm for manual labor, somewhat foreign to my Polish-Jewish bones.

A memory came back to me when I saw Mr. Roetta: Yom Kippur 40 years ago, almost to the day – Oct. 6, 1973. It was 3:00 in the afternoon, the sun was past its height, and the rabbi, in his holy garments, abruptly stopped the services. He klopped on the prayer stand: “There are reports of heavy fighting in the Sinai and the Golan; there are serious casualties.” How had he known? No one could have been listening to the radio or television on the holiest day of the year. It was a large shul and there was a silence I will never forget for all my life. One had to presume Mr. Roetta had informed the rabbi – and indirectly, the whole congregation–that “we” had been attacked. He had always been devoted to the rabbi and the shul. He still is.

It got me to thinking about the various people in the shuls that I have been, custodians and others, many of them not of the tribe, but somehow by virtue of their devotion to their jobs and to their synagogues, partially of the faith.

Popeye and the Bais Medrash

When I was a young man, I would spend summers at Camp Morris, the storied, summertime Catskills home of Yeshiva Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin. One year in late spring when I was in 10th grade, lightning struck the main building of the camp that housed the bais medrash and the dining room. The 100-year-old wooden structure burned to the ground in minutes.

A swift campaign was launched to rebuild in time for summer. Funds were raised, and miraculously, a new building was completed in less than two months. At the entrance to the new bais medrash was a plaque with the names of the major donors. Alongside the usual Jewish names you might expect was the name Patrick Henry. Campers stared in disbelief: Who was Patrick Henry?

We thought it must have been some kind of joke, but Patrick Henry was one of the janitors in the yeshiva. He was the closest living thing to the cartoon character of Popeye anyone will ever see in this lifetime. He smoked a corncob pipe, had maritime tattoos (anchors!) on his hand, and looked like he had been a deckhand on a whaling ship off Nantucket in the year 1840. He bumped his gums when he ate, because he’d lost most of his teeth. He must have been around 70 when he first came to the yeshiva. Yet there he was, bent but not weak, washing the bathroom floors and the hallways and ladling out the green peas and mashed potatoes on the chow line at lunchtime.

“Pat,” one of the rabbis told us (no one knew his last name), “emptied his life savings and gave it to us.”

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We were shocked. Here, a man who we thought of as nothing more than a drunken sailor, gave all his money to build a bais medrash.

We were shocked. Here, a man who we thought of as nothing more than a drunken sailor, gave all his money to build a bais medrash – a place to study Talmud day and night, a place we assumed he could not begin to identify with. One of my cynical friends quipped: “A goy – a shikker – what do you expect? What else he is going to do with his money?” My rebbe gave him a sharp, shaming look and scolded: “You think he had nothing better to do than to give it to us? It was an act of tzidkus – righteousness. Here, a man of 75 cleans up the kitchen and the hallways without a krechtz to anyone and on top of it all, he gives his money. Only a fool could make light of him.”

Every synagogue, yeshiva, and Jewish institution has people like Mr. Roetta and Pat the janitor: non-Jews who toil in the Jewish world without ever becoming fully part of it. They are often invisible – we see them, but we don’t see them, as though we can never imagine them beyond their silent supporting roles. The fact is that they have always been part of our culture, the hewers of wood and the carriers of water going back to the days of the Temple. Even if they are not fully part of the Jewish world, neither are they fully separate. As we start a New Year and begin the Torah anew, we might take a new look at those who help us and the debt we owe them, the non-Jews without whom the Jewish world could not function.

 

A version of this article originally appeared in Tablet magazine.

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

#

Below are my follow-up blog entries:

Another professor is also attempting to prevent students and others from learning facts he dislikes.

However, while Greenbaum (and perhaps others) have succeeded in pressuring the South Dakota World Affairs Council to drop its sponsorship of my presentation, and they all assumed that this would cancel the event, in reality it is going forward at the same time and location — but now under different sponsorship. Read more here (campaign unavailable anymore).

It is sad to see a former professor who demonstrates such disregard for free academic inquiry and who attempts to censor information. For too long the bullying of such people has prevented Americans from learning the facts on Israel-Palestine. Fortunately, their control is eroding.

Apparently, Dr. Murray Haar, chairperson of the Religion, Philosophy, and Classics Departments at Augustana College in South Dakota, is trying to pressure colleges to cancel my upcoming lectures on Israel, Palestine, and America.

He is also, it appears, trying to pressure the media not to cover them.

It’s so sad to see academics without academic principles.

Those who suffer most are the students who should be learning from scholars committed to learning, knowledge, and free academic inquiry.

It’s truly unfortunate when their professors are partisans who attempt to abuse their power, and whose actions demonstrate a profound lack of principle.

According to his departmental profile, Dr. Haar “teaches courses dealing with the holocaust, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, religion, violence, courage, and evil. He also teaches Hebrew and Jewish philosophy. Haar has taken students to Israel and India. He has published a number of articles and given a variety of papers dealing with Israel and the holocaust.”

It appears that Prof. Haar has succeeded in preventing a lecture by me at Augustana College. I suspect he worries that in a “free marketplace of ideas,” the facts I present would trump the fallacies he prefers.

I hope Augustana students will learn of my other presentations in South Dakota and attend one. I will welcome their presence, their courage in listening to a presentation on a topic of great importance, their challenging questions, and their own independent research into the subject.

Perhaps they will be able to teach Dr. Haar that’s what college is supposed to be about.

#

My schedule will be posted on the If Americans Knew calendar.

At my recent presentation in Colorado Springs, an Israel partisan distributed a flyer entitled “A Critique of Alison Weir’s Book, Against Our Better Judgment (16 September, 2013).”

When I had a chance to look at this flyer, I discovered that its claims had little relation to my book/booklet. In fact, it seems fairly obvious that whoever wrote the flyer had not even read my book.

When I spoke to the man who was distributing it, he said that most of the flyer came “from the Internet.” He said that he himself had written the paragraphs at the end.

When I questioned him further, he admitted that he, also, had not read my book. He said he had “read parts of it.” I suspect that this misinformation is being sent out to pro-Israel lists and perhaps being posted on their sites.

I suggest that people read what I have written for themselves, including the voluminous footnotes at the end, before distributing foolish flyers from anonymous sources.

The article is available in hard copy and also online: Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel.

I thought I would clarify the question of whether the UN “created Israel,” since most people – even many of those who are otherwise well-versed on Palestine – are misinformed on this important matter.

The fact is that UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the Partition Plan (read below), was a recommendation that was to go to the Security Council. In the resolution the General Assembly requested that the Security Council take it up. This never happened, and the partition plan has no force of law.

Israeli propagandists, however, perpetrated the myth that the UN created Israel, and this interpretation was then been repeated by numerous others. Please see an article on this, “New States Are Not Created in the UN“. Below is an excerpt:

“…was it true that Israel owed its very existence to the U.N., as it became popularly perceived years later? …This same line of argument was repeated… by an Israeli analyst in the opinion section of the New York Times, who wrote that the vote on Nov. 29 was the “legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel.”

Leading international legal scholars have vociferously rejected this claim. The noted Australian legal scholar Professor Julius Stone wrote in 1980 that Israel “does not derive its legal existence from the Partition Plan.”

Even Cambridge University’s Professor James Crawford… concluded in his monumental book on the creation of states in international law that Israel was not created on the basis of Resolution 181…”

International jurist Henry Cattan, in his 1988 book The Palestine Question, explained the various reasons that the partition resolution was invalid, writing that the resolution was “vitiated by several gross irregularities.”

(1) First, he points out that the UN General Assembly did not have the authority to partition Palestine.

He writes: “The UN possessed no sovreignty over Palestine, nor the power to deprive the people of Palestie of their right of independence. Hence, the UN resolution for the partition of Palestine possesses no value, in law or in fact, as acknowledged by a number of leading jurists.”

Cattan quotes Pitman B. Potter‘s article in the American Journal of International Law (vol. 42, 1948 p. 860): “The United Nations has no right to dictate a solution in Palestine unless a basis for such authority can be worked out such has not been done this far.” Potter goes on to point out that Arabs denied the binding force of the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, and says “they are probably quite correct juridically.”

Cattan also quotes Professor Quincy Wright‘s 1968 address to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York: “The legality of the General Assembly’s recommendation for partition of Palestine was doubtful.”

He also cites the statement by Professor I. Brownie in his 1966 book Principles of International Law: “It is doubtful if the United Nations ‘has a capacity to convey title’, inter alia because the Organization cannot assume the role of territorial sovereign… Thus the resolution of 1947 cotaining a Partition plan for Palestine was probably ultra vires [outside the competence of the United Nations], and, if it was not, was no binding on member states in any case.”

Cattan concludes: “It follows, therefore, that the partition resolution was not legally effective or binding on the Palestinian people.”

(2) Denial of justice. A second irregularity was that the General Assembly refused to refer questions of its competence on this matter to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion.

Cattan writes: “P.B. Potter has observed that the rejection of the Arab requests to refer the question of UN jurisdiction over the Palestine sistuation to the International Court of Justice ‘tends to confirm the avoidance of international law’ ni this regard.”

Cattan concludes: “Such avoidance of international law constituted a denial of justice which deprived the partition resolution of any juridical value.”

(3) Cattan points out that the resolution violated Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, “which previously recognized the independence of the people of Palestine…”

(4) The resolution was also a “violation of the Charter of the UN and the principle of self-determination of the people of Palestine.”

(5) It violated “the most elementary democratic principles by the flagrant disregard of the will of the majority of the original inhabitants who opposed partition of their homeland.”

(6) He points out the “undue influence” of the US president (and others) in passing the resolution.

(7) He discusses the “iniquity of the plan of partition.” pointing out that “the partition plan attributed to the Jews – who constituted less than one-third of the population, who were largely foreigners and who owned less than 6 percent of the land – an area almost ten times greater than what they owned…”

Cattan concludes, “This was not partition, but a spoliation.”

In reality, Israel was created by a war of conquest and ethnic cleansing, which it calls its “War of Independence.”

I hope people will read my article on this subject: “ The Real Story of How Israel Was Created. Among other things, this piece describes how Zionists bribed and threatened varous UN member nations in order to procure sufficient votes to pass the resolution. (For citations on this see my article on how the US-Israel “special relationship” was created.)

Below is an excerpt from General Assembly Resolution 181, also called The Partition Plan [emphases added]. (Read the full resolution at the link below.)

Resolution 181 (II). Future government of Palestine

A

The General Assembly,

Having met in special session at the request of the mandatory Power to constitute and instruct a special committee to prepare for the consideration of the question of the future government of Palestine at the second regular session;

Having constituted a Special Committee and instructed it to investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem of Palestine, and to prepare proposals for the solution of the problem, and

Having received and examined the report of the Special Committee (document A/364) ^1/ including a number of unanimous recommendations and a plan of partition with economic union approved by the majority of the Special Committee,

Considers that the present situation in Palestine is one which is likely to impair the general welfare and friendly relations among nations;

Takes note of the declaration by the mandatory Power that it plans to complete its evacuation of Palestine by 1 August 1948;

Recommends to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union set out below;

Requests that

(a) The Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation…

http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/7F0AF2BD897689B785256C330061D253

With all the attention on Larry Summers’ possible appointment as the Fed Chief (he has now withdrawn his name) I thought I’d post a little info on him.

A while ago Ron Unz reported,

“[Summers] seems to have played a major role in transmuting Harvard from a renowned university to an aggressive hedge fund, policies that subsequently brought my beloved alma mater to the very brink of bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis.  Under his presidency, Harvard paid out $26 million dollars to help settle international insider-trading charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of his closest personal friends, who avoided prison as a consequence.  And after such stellar financial and ethical achievements, he was naturally appointed as one of President Obama’s top economic advisors, a position from which he strongly supported the massive bailout of Wall Street and the rest of our elite financial services sector, while ignoring Main Street suffering.  Perhaps coincidentally, wealthy hedge funds had paid him many millions of dollars for providing a few hours a week of part-time consulting advice during the twelve months prior to his appointment.”

In June, Summers rebuked Stephen Hawking for joining the international boycott against Israel. Israeli President Shimon Peres is Summers’ “a life-long friend” When he was president of Harvard, Summers told students and faculty that calls for the University to divest from Israel and a Harvard student group’s fundraising activities were “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”

I haven’t had time to read the following articles yet, but to see articles on a conservative website that mention Summers go here. To see the defense of Summers’ in the Boston Globe, see “Summers, Harvard, and Israel,” by Alex Beam. (article now deleted)

I just came across this in an old box of papers. I passed it out during a Fourth of July parade in Marin County, California over ten years ago – I believe it was in 2002. (Scroll down for a more readable image.)

and a more readable image:

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