The Return of the Body
Snatchers
By Israel Shamir
In the Turkish blockbuster action movie
Valley of the Wolves, an
American Jewish doctor in Abu Ghraib prison gently removes a
kidney out of a live and suffering Arab prisoner and places
it into a special vessel with the label “To Tel Aviv”, thus
reinforcing the Israeli-American bond of eternal friendship.
Real life imitates cinema, as we learn from the dreadful
story of Palestinian youths being hunted for their inner
organs by that
most moral army in the world,
Israel's, as published by a leading
Swedish newspaper [read its
English translation below]
Donald Boström, a Swedish photographer
who worked in the West Bank in 1992, was tipped off by UN
officials to follow the bloody trail of Israeli soldiers who
had kidnapped young Palestinians and returned their dead
bodies five days later “with a slit from the abdomen up to
the chin.” The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt
that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons were
used as involuntary organ donors; they disappeared for a
number of days only to be returned in the dark of night,
dead and autopsied. Why did they keep their bodies for five
days before letting us bury them? What happened to their
bodies in the meantime? Why are they performing autopsies,
against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why
were their bodies returned at night time? Why was this done
with a military escort? Why was the area closed off during
the funeral? Why was the power supply interrupted?”
These questions continued to haunt
Boström. He took gruesome pictures of the returned bodies.
Like Vanunu, he smuggled his films abroad. When back in
Sweden, he offered the story to Dagens Nyheter, a
liberal newspaper which, incidentally, is owned by the
Jewish Bonnier family. DN refused to publish it. The
story was laid to rest until now, when the Social Democrat
newspaper Aftonbladet decided to let it run.
In Israel, the reaction was hysterical.
The country is in danger of busting its guts in rage. Huge
pressure has been exerted upon Swedish authorities to
condemn the newspaper, to punish the offending author and to
beg forgiveness. The Swedish Ambassador in Tel Aviv, a
member of the rich and influential Jewish family Bonnier who
incidentally own the majority of Swedish newspapers, TV
networks and cinemas, expressed her ‘shock and disapproval’
on a website. Her speedy acceptance of the Tel Aviv diktat
misfired. The Swedish government disavowed her interference
with the freedom of Swedish press; the editors of
Aftonbladet insisted on their right to say what they
find fit and called for an international inquiry.
Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister,
was discomfited by Israel's intention to cancel his
scheduled visit and had already written in a blog that “such
articles can cause anti-Semitism, and instigation is against
the Swedish law”. However, he did not cry uncle in the way
Netanyahu and Lieberman had demanded, while indomitable
Aftonbladet Culture Editor Åsa Linderborg, the true hero of
the drama, had sent two of her correspondents to the area of
crime. They confirmed Boströms findings. Unprepared for such
steadfastness, the rage and hysterics in Tel Aviv rather
subsided, facing united front of Swedish public opinion.
It is easier to express ‘outrage about
the old canard’ than to answer the questions posed by
Bostrom. The facts are disturbing, and the accusations are
not new. There were too many reports of such goings on,
beside the cases mentioned by the Aftonbladet.
Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and
Hashem Mahmid
accused the Abu Kabir
institute of forensic medicine of expropriating the inner
parts of Palestinian corpses. They said that Palestinian
doctors have complained about receiving the bodies of their
dead emptied of their innards. Israeli newspapers reported
that in 2007 three Palestinian teenagers were killed near
Khan Younes in Gaza Strip and their bodies were returned to
their parents all cut and brutalised six days later. Israel
often does not even return the dead bodies of Palestinians
to their families but has them buried in a secret cemetery.
This causes even more suspicions.
Worse, it fits into a larger pattern.
All over the world, Israel and Israelis
are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern form of
cannibalism. Beside the case of the
New Jersey ring mentioned in
the Boström’s
article, there are plenty others.
-
Turkey: An Israeli professor Zaki
Shapira was arrested in Turkey for allegedly cutting
into live Turks for spare parts, reported the
notoriously anti-Semitic paper
Jerusalem Post.
-
South Africa: Another anti-Semitic
paper, the
New York Times,
reported on an Israeli trafficking ring active from
South Africa to Brazil.
-
Brazil: An Israeli officer,
Gedalya Tauber, was arrested in Brazil for inducing
the poor to part with their body parts. He spilled the
beans about activity of his fellow countrymen.
-
The Ukraine: The
Jerusalem Post reported
the arrest of “an Israeli illegal organ-smuggling ring”
that flew their donors and recipients to the Ukraine.
In many cases, Israelis were the doctors,
traffickers, smugglers and recipients of the body parts, as
the Jewish state is the only country in the world where the
state pays for, and best doctors are legally engaged in, the
transplanting of illegally obtained organs, reported
Ha'aretz. The next step was
the evolution of international networks for this sort of
traffic. Jews are well positioned to get involved in this
sordid business: there are many Jewish doctors, there are
many ties between Jewish communities in different countries,
and there are few moral inhibitions.
This lack of moral inhibitions allowed a
leading Chabad rabbi,
Yitzhak Ginzburgh, to give his
religious permission to a Jew to take a liver from a goy
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.”
Modern Israelis have forgotten their
faith, but have retained this lack of inhibition. An Israeli
business newspaper,
The Marker, has published an
opinion piece by an Israeli lawyer justifying the trade in
body organs, for “organs are just commodity, and so they can
be bought and sold like any commodity in an open market”.
The distance between kidneys bought and
snatched is not that big: if organs are “just a commodity”,
surely it is permissible to take them from Palestinians,
just as it is ‘permitted’ to take from Palestinians
centuries-old
olive trees while building the
Wall.
Indignation is easy, but it is not so
easy to prove that the Israelis, who do not hesitate to
break arms and legs and pour napalm on schoolchildren, do
draw a line about getting some profit from Palestinian
innards. Aftonbladet’s
demand for an international enquiry is reasonable: if the
Israelis have done nothing wrong (beyond murdering hundreds
of young men), they have nothing to fear from an
international investigation. Yet Israel refused UN enquiry
commissions permission to visit Jenin after the 2002
massacre and Gaza after the 2009 massacre.
For Israel, the most upsetting part of
this affair was the breach made in the wall. I do not mean
the monstrous Sharon’s Wall protecting the biggest Jewish
ghetto in the Middle East, but the wall of media control
which protects it overseas. Jews buy media all over the
world not for fun, and not for profit, but for the influence
it has over minds. This is the case in Sweden, where members
of its tiny Jewish community own newspapers, magazines,
publishing houses and even Swedish Hollywood -
Svensk Filmindustri AB.
This media actively promotes the neo-liberal policies of
privatisation, commodification, immigrant influx,
dismantling the welfare state – in short, policies that are
good for wealthy Jews.
Israeli representatives work hard to keep
reporting from the Middle East under their control. A few
years ago, the leading radical left magazine Ordfront
published a thoughtful piece
Israeli Regime Directs Swedish Media
by Johannes Wahlström, telling of Israeli meddling with the
Swedish press, of Israeli officials going to newspaper
editors and to correspondents. In that article Donald
Boström tells of the dreadful story he wanted to tell, but
he couldn’t get through the wall of pro-Israeli censorship
in the Swedish media.
Israel is not the only country suspected
of such nefarious activities. Carla del Ponte, chief
prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for Balkan crimes,
wrote in her 2008 book The
Hunt: Me and War Criminals that under the aegis of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, this ally of NATO and the US,
hundreds of young Serb prisoners were allegedly taken by
truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs
were removed. Some prisoners were sewn up after having
kidneys removed until the moment they were killed for other
vital organs. Carla del Ponte had seen the house where such
surgeries were done and had met with the people involved,
one of whom "personally made an organ delivery" to an
Albanian airport for transport abroad.
However, Carla del Ponte’s accusation
against Albanians did not cause such a stir, and nobody
condemned her as “anti-Albanian”, nor would she care if
somebody had, for it is perfectly all right to be
anti-anybody as long as not anti-Jewish. The Jews have a
potent weapon in their “anti-Semitism” label. Or do they?
Could it be that the useful-for-Israel
fear of anti-Semitism does not work like a charm anymore?
This is possible. The Cairo speech of Obama apparently has
had no direct consequences; Obama tried to apply pressure to
Israel in order to freeze the settlements, but in vain. Did
he fail? It is too early to judge, as
Zhou Enlai was
wont to say. Such changes rarely occur by the wave of a
magic wand … they take time. Recent publications on the
Jewish criminal gang in New Jersey, attacks on Goldman
Sachs, medals for Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, an award
to
Felicia Langer, the collapse
of the pro-Jewish socialist party and the appearance of an
anti-zionist party in France, the Boström article in
Aftonbladet – all are small and separate incidents, but
together they imply that the change is coming. Swedes,
French, Germans and even New Jerseyans are no longer afraid
of Washington coming at them like sixteen tons in defence of
Zionists, as would have been the case in the days of George
W. Bush. Obama even refused to appoint a new
anti-anti-semitic
commissar.
This thought frightens the Tel Aviv
government more than anything. If today they let the Swedes
get away with it, tomorrow there will be somebody else, and
then the fear of the Jews will be assigned to the category
of unmanly unrealistic fears, like fear of mice.
Second Ending
More importantly, Israeli outrage is a
proof that -
despite approval for it by radical Cabbalists and
neoliberals - transplantation of human organs is an immoral
dreadful thing, too close to cannibalism, and we all know
that. Yes, it is awful if Israeli soldiers tear kidneys out
of Palestinians and kill them afterwards. But it is equally
awful, if a kind doctor removes a kidney out of a Detroit
mechanic whose house was repossessed by a gentle banker, or
out of a Ukrainian worker who was sacked by a polite
oligarch, or out of an Indian farmer who has to pay his debt
to Monsanto. Every poor man on the planet is a Palestinian –
though the means of his dispossession may vary. This kind of
thing should be stopped. The human body is sacred. These
operations are too expensive and can’t be justified. Mankind
should overcome its fear of death. We live and we die. There
is no reason to waste thousands of dollars prolonging a life
by expensive operations if this money can be used for
feeding the starving. More about this later...
___________________________________________________________________
An English translation of the famous
article in a leading
Swedish paper.
Our sons plundered for their organs
By Donald Boström
You could call me a “matchmaker,” said
Levy Yitzhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret
recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client.
Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was
arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of
money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed.
Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It
was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the
black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for
10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell
the organs to desperate patients in the States for 160,000
dollars. The accusations have shaken the American
transplantation business. If they are true it means that
organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the
US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.
On the question of how many organs he has
sold Rosenbaum replies: “Quite a lot. And I have never
failed,” he boasts. The business has been running for quite
some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant
surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney
Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper
that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from
Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well.
5-6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent of the world’s
kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to
Delmonici.
Countries suspected of these activities
are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the organs
are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But
Palestinians also 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.
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 nineties. 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).
In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then
minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ
shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the
Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation. Half
a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud
Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of
weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign
was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had signed up.
Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal
month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the
reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was
still large. 500 people were in line for a kidney
transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of
45 people in need of a new liver, only three could be
operated on in Israel.
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. One
example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young
stone-thrower Bilal Ahmed Ghanan.
It was close to midnight when the motor
roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the
outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts
of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake.
They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark,
some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls,
or trees that provided protection during the curfew but
still offered a full view toward what would become the grave
for the first martyr of the village. The military had
interrupted the electricity and the area was now a
closed-off military zone - not even a cat could move
outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence
of the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I
don’t remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to
the tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli
special force had used the village’s carpentry workshop for
an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of
action was Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing
Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the
Israeli soldiers.
As one of the leading stone-throwers
Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple of
years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the
Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught
meant torture and death for these boys - they had to stay in
the mountains at all costs.
On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when
for some reason, he walked unprotected by the carpentry
workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he
took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed
to restock.
Everything went according to plan for the
Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their
cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly
aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough
they needed only to pull the triggers. 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. Villagers say that people from both the
UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge
and came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some
arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim.
Discussions ended with 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 came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital
fabric.
A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the
leader of the military column who had transported Bilal from
the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the
place for his final rest. “Captain Yahya is the worst of
them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had
unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light
cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by
the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.
Together with the sharp noises from the
shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as
they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was
put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became
clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the
boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first
young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen
up to his chin.
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 Mahmud and Nafes from Gaza, who had all
disappeared for a number of days only to return at night,
dead and autopsied.
- 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?
Nafes’s uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.
The relatives of the dead Palestinians no
longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the
killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed
that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the
Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis,
he said. Bilal Ahmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians
killed in various ways that year. According to the
Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the
street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged
in prison, shot in school, killed at home et cetera. The 133
people killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only
half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem
examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians - of
which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on
the reality in the occupied territories. The questions
remain.
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.
Donald Boström
THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab