Author: Helena

I realize I’m coming into the Israel-linked organ-trafficking story late. But my old editors at the CSM always stressed the value of working assiduously at a story to get it done as well as possible rather than rushing in under the illusion you can write a satisfactory “first draft of history” within the confines of a 24-hour news cycle. And I’m still working at this one… Mostly, at this point, gathering and assessing sources.
One of the ongoing diplomatic dimensions to this story has been the tension that arose between the Israeli and Swedish governments after Swedish journo Donald Bostrom published his controversial article (English translation here) recounting the many allegations Palestinians and others made back in 1987-92 that the bodies of young Palestinians who were shot dead in those years were taken by the IDF forces back into Israel where they were stripped of many transplantable organs before being returned, hastily sewn back up along the mid-line, for speedy burial by their families.
The Israeli government screamed that the article was a “blood libel” and demanded that the Swedish government “condemn” it. The Swedish government replied, unsurprisingly, that it would not take an action that would violate the country’s free-speech traditions in such a way.
Sweden took over the presidency of the EU in July. Several observers noted that the Israeli government’s salvo of harsh accusations against Sweden over the Bostrom article may also have been a shot across the bow, in an attempt to “warn” the Swedish government off from undertaking any meaningful EU activism on the Palestine issue for the rest of its six-month presidency.
Yesterday, indeed, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, the internationally renowned diplomatic “rock star” Carl Bildt, announced he was canceling a planned visit to Israel.
Most Israeli sources and commentators speculated that this was because of Bildt’s embarrassment at the prospect of protests against him over the Bostrom article. The Swedish foreign ministry’s statement said “he’s waiting for the right opportunity to do it when the peace process is maybe in a more positive state.” Which seems at least as plausible, given the outrageously provocative steps the Netanyahu government has taken over the past few days.
Anyway, back on the Israel-and-organs story…
In addition to the two I referred to in this blog post Saturday (J. Cook and Shraga Elam), I’m now looking at two more:

* This lengthy August 25 piece in War in Context by Paul Woodward (HT: Steve C.), and
* This recent CounterPunch piece by Alison Weir.

Both of them use– and provide links for– a lot more very valuable material.
Woodward gives an excerpt from, and a link to, the very informative testimony on the worldwide market in often illegaly trafficked organs that UC Berkeley prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes gave to a congressional committee in June 2001.
Her prepared statement starts at p.62 there.
Scheper-Hughes is one of the founders of the Organs Watch project, which has been tracking the international traffic in human organs and tissues since the late 1990s. In the hearing, which was convened originally to examine China’s role in harvesting the organs of executed prisoners, she makes clear that Israeli doctors and medical institutions are significant actors in the global market in human organs.
I became intrigued by the role Scheper-Hughes played in the most recent (end-of-July) arrest in New Jersey of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum. In this July 24 article in the NY Daily News, Michael Daly wrote,

Rosenbaum’s name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent [in 2002] in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum’s role in the ring.
“He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.
Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.
“He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.
The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ ”
Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.
“I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment,” she said Thursday.
She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as “urban legend.”
“It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring,” a 2004 State Department report stated.
Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively…

Scheper-Hughes strikes me as an exemplary individual. She has been working hard to try to expand the role that anthropologists can play as socially activist public intellectuals.
Her work on the Israel case also, it strikes me, helps us to make sense of the many different episodes of human-body abuse that have been reported out of Israel.
She has also been one of the leaders of the international effort to ban “transplant tourism” and to draw up the 2008 Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, which stated the following:

The Istanbul Declaration proclaims that the poor who sell their organs are being exploited, whether by richer people within their own countries or by transplant tourists from abroad. Moreover, transplant tourists risk physical harm by unregulated and illegal transplantation. Participants in the Istanbul Summit concluded that transplant commercialism, which targets the vulnerable, transplant tourism, and organ trafficking should be prohibited. And they also urged their fellow transplant professionals, individually and through their organizations, to put an end to these unethical activities and foster safe, accountable practices that meet the needs of transplant recipients while protecting donors.
Countries from which transplant tourists originate, as well as those to which they travel to obtain transplants, are just beginning to address their respective responsibilities to protect their people from exploitation and to develop national self-sufficiency in organ donation. The Declaration should reinforce the resolve of governments and international organizations to develop laws and guidelines to bring an end to wrongful practices. “The legacy of transplantation is threatened by organ trafficking and transplant tourism. The Declaration of Istanbul aims to combat these activities and to preserve the nobility of organ donation. The success of transplantation as a life-saving treatment does not require—nor justify—victimizing the world’s poor as the source of organs for the rich” (Steering Committee of the Istanbul Summit).

Anyway, there are a lot more dimensions to this story that I want to look at. I see that Wikipedia already has a lengthy and very informative page on the Aftonbladet-Israel controversy, as they call it. I think I’ll spend a bit of time over there now.

Jonathan Cook had a great piece in The National yesterday, in which he pulled together from exemplary Israeli sources the history of serious problems at Israel’s government institute of forensics at Abu Kabir, near Jaffa.
He made the important point that the Swedish journo Donald Bostrom who wrote about the accusations and fears of illegal Israeli harvesting of Palestinian organs was making an unwarranted connection between the recent story of Jewish residents, including some apparent community leaders, in New Jersey, USA, being indicted on charges of organ trafficking and the much longer-running and very well established problems Palestinians and Israelis have experienced with organs being “harvested” (ugh!) without permission by officials at the Abu Kabir institute.
As far as I can tell, no connection between the two situations has yet been discovered. And the Palestinian claims about organ harvesting at Abu Kabir that Bostrom was writing about all related to the early 1990s; they were not current accusations.
Cook writes,

the doctor behind the plunder of body parts, Prof Yehuda Hiss, appointed director of the Abu Kabir institute in the late 1980s, has never been jailed despite admitting to the organ theft and he continues to be the state’s chief pathologist at the institute.
Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families’ claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.
Allegations of Hiss’ illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had “price listings” for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools. [6]

Cook used excellent sources, which are given at the foot of the article.
Despite that, and despite his history as a former reporter for the Guardian, the Guardian refused to publish this article in its “CommentisFree” section. Jonathan also gives us his record of his subsequent communications with CiF editor Georgina Henry.
Meanwhile, the Zurich-based Israeli investigative reporter Shraga Elam has also recently put a LOT of further information about Israel’s organ-removal problems into this post on his blog.
The post, which is now available in English, is tellingly titled The Swedish canard – not only smoke, but also fire.
It tells us that the government investigation committee that looked into allegations of wrongdoing at Abu Kabir in 2001 or 2002, made the following findings:

* The Institute harvests organs for the purposes of teaching and research, without the consent of the families, in contravention of the Law of Anatomy and Pathology, and on the basis of incorrect self-interpretation.
* The Institute transfers organs to research institutes and universities, in return for payments and reimbursement of expenses.
* The Institute does not have full documentation regarding the organs that were harvested from for the purposes of research and instruction.
* All the research done at the Institute were done with the full knowledge and agreement of Prof. Hiss.
* Prof. Hiss did not conform to the instructions of the Ministry of Health regarding research, instruction and the consent of the families. The management of the Institute attempted to cover up and to obscure the the seriousness of the acts that appear in the report.
* Irregularities were discovered in registration of the money that was given to the Institute in return to for the salvaging of the organs…

Elam also quotes a fairly lengthy article from Haaretz, published in 2005, that said this:

The Breaking the Silence organization has collected new testimony from Israel Defense Forces soldiers on harsh actions carried out during the course of the fighting in the territories.
Two of the testimonies pertain to a military doctor who gave medics lessons in anatomy using the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
IDf sources said on Thursday that the army was unaware of the incidents and that the reports would be investigated.
An IDF conscript who served as a medic in the Ramallah district some two years ago told Haaretz that the “lesson” had taken place following a clash between an armed Palestinian and an IDF force.
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. I saw other dead enemy bodies during my service. No other doctor did anything like that.”

It is clear that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.