Category: Israel-2009

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.

The compendiously smart and well-informed blogger Profco has a lot of great background about Israeli-Norwegian relations over at TPM Cafe today.
S/he wrote it, of course, in light of Norway’s recent decision to divest itself of previous investments in the company Elbit, which produces electronics for Israel’s illegal Wall.
Profco notes that Haaretz has put a new lead onto its story about this, noting the following:

The director general of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi Gal, on Thursday summoned the Norwegian ambassador to Israel, Jakken Bjørn Lian, to protest Norway’s decision to pull all of its investments from the Israeli arms firm Elbit.
Following the meeting, the Foreign Ministry relayed that, “Israel will consider further steps of protest in the future.”

“Further steps of protest”! Like what? Does Israel, too, have a $400 billion sovereign wealth fund that it can deploy in defense of its national values around the world?
Maybe the Israelis will unleash dirty tricks, or an invasion and occupation, or a suffocatingly tight siege against Norway?
Um, maybe better not, since Norway is not only a pretty darned exemplary western democracy but also a member of NATO.
Gal’s spluttering threat looks really childish, all in all…
So now, when will other western investment institutions start following Norway’s excellent lead?

Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen today announced that the country’s $400 billion-strong sovereign wealth fund, the Oil Fund, has divested itself of all investments in the large Elbit company, based on Elbit’s involvement in the building and maintenance of the illegal Wall built by Israel deep inside the occupied West Bank.
Elbit, based in Haifa, makes surveillance systems used by Israel on the wall.
Bloomberg reports that Halvorsen told a press conference in Oslo today that,

“[I]nvestment in Elbit constitutes an unacceptable risk of contribution to serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”
… “The International Court of Justice has ruled that the building of this barrier violates international law and the Norwegian authorities have expressed the same opinion… The decision to exclude this company is not on the background of its nationality. The surveillance system Elbit delivers to the Israeli authorities is a central component of this separation barrier, or wall.”

Amira Hass, reporting this development for Haaretz, notes that Halvorsen’s decision comes in response to vigorous protests that have been mounted in Norway against Norwegian involvement in settlement-related and Wall-related companies.
She adds,

Norway’s pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies.
A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called “Who profits from the occupation” found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.

You can find the Coalition’s information on this here.
Norway’s decision on Elbit is a breakthrough. The Bloomberg piece gives more details about the operations, thinking, and other recent ethics-related decisions taken by the country’s Finance Ministry regarding the investment portfolio of the Norwegian Oil Fund.
It tells us that before today, the ministry, based on the advice of the ethics council that the Oil Fund established in 2004, had previously divested itself from 30 other companies, though some of these bans were later rescinded. For example, a ban was earlier imposed on Thales, Europe’s biggest maker of military electronics, because it was making cluster munitions; when that production stopped, the ban was rescinded.
I hope that portfolio managers in other institutions with large investment portfolios– including of course, pension funds and universities in the US– are looking closely at Norway’s latest decision and, crucially, the reasoning behind it.
Divesting from direct financial entanglement with Israel’s large-scale and continuing construction and control projects in the occupied territories strikes me as unquestionably the right thing to do, regardless what one thinks about the issue of a broader divestment from Israel as a whole so long as its government continues with these illegal policies.

… in this excellent interview, from Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voices for Peace.
The words of Klein’s publisher, Yael Lerer– a Jewish Israeli– are particularly hard-hitting. She says,

As an Israeli citizen, I need boycotts for two reasons. First, I want Israelis to feel more strongly that everything is not normal. It means nothing for many self-identified left-wing Israelis to say, “It’s awful, what’s going on in Gaza and in Hebron,” while continuing their daily lives like everything is fine. They go to the shows and they go to the concerts. These people are the elites in this country. These are the journalists that work at the newspapers. I want to move them. I want to shake these people up and make them understand they cannot continue their normal life when Palestinians in Qalqiliya [a West Bank city completely surrounded by the Separation Barrier] — only fifteen minutes away from Tel Aviv — are in prison.
The second reason I need the boycott is because I lost the hope of creating change from within, which was what I tried to do as an activist for many years. Twenty years ago I could never have imagined this semi-apartheid situation. I care about the future in this place. I care about my fellow Israelis. I have a huge family here and many, many friends. I know many people who don’t have any other passports, and who don’t have any other options. I think that the solution for this place, the only possible future, is living together. Unfortunately, at this stage, I don’t see how this future can be achieved without international pressure. And I think that boycott is a nonviolent tool that has already shown us that it can work. So I’m asking: please boycott me.

Big appreciation to all three of these people. Who are all, as it happens, female.
By the way, they also deal really well with the principal anti-BDS arguments made by Uri Avnery– namely that people are not calling for a boycott of North Korea or Burma, so why Israel; and that that a boycott will only force Israelis into a defensive and even more intransigent crouch.

I have a lot of respect for the veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery. The first time I met him was in the PLO headquarters in Tunis in the late 1980s– a place that was anathema to both of our governments, but to his a lot more than to mine. (Indeed, for him as an Israeli it was actually illegal to meet with PLO people then.)
However, the argument he published yesterday that was against the burgeoning BDS movement was had some deeply flawed and dangerous arguments in it.
Over at Mondoweiss, Anees of Jerusalem has highlighted one serious (and apparently very racist) flaw in Avnery’s argument. His criticism was of these statements:

Blacks in South Africa are very different from the Israelis, and from the Palestinians, too. The collapse of the oppressive racist regime did not lead to a bloodbath, as could have been predicted, but on the contrary: to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

Actually, Avnery’s argument there is not only racist– with the clear implication that the Palestinians (“unlike the blacks of South Africa”) are indeed intent on a bloodbath; but also illogical.
Because yes, it is true that a “bloodbath” was what was widely predicted in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime– but western liberals went along with the sanctions campaign notwithstanding that.
… And then, it didn’t happen. So what good are the predictions of western liberals in regard to South Africa or Palestine, anyway??
Anyway, Anees was right to call Avnery on the racism of his argument there.
I want to call Avnery on a couple of other aspects of his argument.
First, he plays a deliberately deceptive numbers game.
He writes,

The South African struggle was between a large majority and a small minority. Among a general population of almost 50 million, the Whites amounted to less than 10%. That means that more than 90% of the country’s inhabitants supported the boycott, in spite of the argument that it hurt them, too.
In Israel, the situation is the very opposite. The Jews amount to more than 80% of Israel’s citizens, and constitute a majority of some 60% throughout the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. 99.9% of the Jews oppose a boycott on Israel.
They will not feel the “the whole world is with us”, but rather that “the whole world is against us”.

No, regarding Israel and Palestinians the situation is not “the very opposite” of what it was in South Africa. There are around six million Jews in Israel (and maybe 99.9% of them oppose the BDS campaign; or maybe fewer than that.) But there are some 5.5 million ethnic Palestinians in the area under Israeli control– and an additional five million or more Palestinians forced to live in exile from homeland.
Avnery just wipes the Palestinian exiles from his tally-board of political relevance as if they have no legitimate say in anything!
Well, that is one huge problem with his numbers game.
Don’t you think it would be important to Avnery as a peace activist that Palestinians moldering in refugee camps in Lebanon or elsewhere might finally be able to say, “the world is with us”?
But apparently, he doesn’t care.
Another problem with his argument comes where he tries to say that the Israelis have nothing in common with the Afrikaners– because only the Israelis suffered the Holocaust, and besides, many Afrikaners were pro-Hitler.
But guess what. The Afrikaners were also acting from a very deep sense of past community hurt and community vulnerability. They were the people for whom the whole concept of “concentration camps” had been invented in the first place, for goodness sake!
And they too, like many Jewish ethnonationalists in Israel, had a profound sense of having been “called” by their G-d to create their settler state in Africa.
So the two peoples have many similarities in their core culture. But one big difference is that the Israelis have not thrown up their “Frederik De Klerk” figure yet: a national leader who over time came to recognize the equal humanity and equal rights of the long-despised “other.”
What can all of us do to help persuade Jewish israeli society to generate its own De Klerk?
Wide-reaching BDS may indeed be one of the best ways.
But at a very minimum, in the first instance, all those governments in the west that espouse the cause of human equality and human freedoms should absolutely stop the generous and quite unconditional subsidies they continue to give to the Israeli state and business community.
See also the close critique of Avnery’s argument by the South African Ran Greenstein, that Avnery’s own organization was good enough to publish, here.
… Regarding Avnery, this is sadly not the first time I’ve had to remark on the limits of this veteran campaigner’s vision. Earlier this month, I wrote about the plea he had written to his fellow veteran in the peace movement Dov Yermiya, urging Yermiya not to go ahead with his planned renunciation of Zionism as a guiding philosophy.

Richard Silverstein had a chillingly informative post on his blog this week that contained an English translation of a short piece Israeli journo Meron Rapoport wrote about a recent visit to the large Jewish settlement being established in the heart of the ancient Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, in East Jerusalem.
(Thanks for posting that, Richard.)
Rapoport wrote,

There were three of us – Ilan the director, Michael the cameraman, and me, the interviewee. We were making a film that explores the overt institutional discrimination against this East Jerusalem neighbourhood’s Palestinian residents…
Even before we manage to position our camera, a group of religious girls comes up the path (we could tell they were religious by their skirts). They were around eight to ten years old, smug and beautiful chatterboxes. One of them slowed down beside us. “Film me”, she said amiably. “What would you like to tell us”, we asked. “I want to say that Jerusalem is a city that belongs to us, the Jews”, she said while walking – “it’s just a shame there are Arabs here. The Messiah will only come when there’s not even a single Arab left here”. She walked on. The girls giggled and sauntered along with her.
…[T]wo young women came up the path. They are seventeen or eighteen years old. Secular, evidently not local residents. One of them stood in front of the camera. “Take my picture”, she fawned. “Do you want to be interviewed”, we asked her. “Yes”, she said. She’s from Gan Yavneh, came to visit Jerusalem, the City of David, she said. “Why the City of David in particular”, we asked. “Because this is where David was a king, this is a very important location for the Jewish people. It’s just a shame there are Arabs here. But soon all the Arabs will die, God willing, and Jerusalem will be ours alone”. She walked on.
Two minutes went by. An Orthodox family came up the path. The husband, dressed in black, asked Ilan the director: “say, do both Arabs and Jews live in this neighbourhood?” “Both Palestinians and Jews”, Ilan replied, “but the majority is Palestinian”. “That’s temporary”, the Orthodox man allayed his concerns; soon there will be no Arabs left here.
I look at Ilan and Michael. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed since we arrived; we had not interrogated anyone about their attitude to Arabs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or about the future of Jerusalem. We just stood in the middle of the street. Like pylons. The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean. Freely, naturally.

The piece was originally published in Hebrew, here. The translation was by Keren Rubinstein.
I think it was important that Rapoport noted that he and his colleagues hadn’t even started asking their questions before “The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean… ”
As Richard wrote in his blog post, Rapoport’s piece looks like a short prose equivalent of the two “Feel the Hate” videos that Max Blumenthal shot in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv earlier this summer.
This kind of blind inter-group hatred is tragic, wherever it occurs: a symptom of a very deep spiritual wounding.
But it is also particularly dangerous when it is promulgated amongst– and comes to be embraced by– a group of people who have guns and all the other appurtenances of state power to back them up and are capable of acting on their hate-fueled fantasies.
Much has been said about the role of “incitement” in stoking the antipathy that many Palestinians have for the Israelis. (The fact that Israel has been maintaining a belligerent, intrusive, and land-grabbing military occupation over East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Gaza for 42 years now is also, of course, relevant to Palestinians’ feelings.)
But how about the role of “incitement” in helping form the views of these Jewish Israelis? Where did they get them from?
In particular, where did the youngsters get their views from?
Definitely worth investigating.
I can believe that some of this hatred arose from the horror and tragedy of past Palestinian actions against Israeli civilians. (But we can only allow that to be a factor inasmuch as we allow the much greater horrors and tragedies that Israel has visited upon Palestinians also to be factor, for them.)
But is there no incitement by politicians, educators, and other community leaders involved in this generation of Israeli hatred? Of course there has been incitement.