The Truth about Israeli Organ Harvesting

Back in August 2009 an article in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet by Donald Boström sparked a global furore about a 'new blood libel' that ended up causing a large-scale rift between the Swedish and Israeli governments. (1) The article concerned charged that the Israel Défense Force (IDF) had been collecting organs from Palestinians that they had killed, or who had died in Israeli custody, for transplant operations for Israeli citizens and/or scientific research. The article does not, as was mistakenly reported by some media outlets, assert that the IDF deliberately killed Palestinians for their organs, but rather took advantage of Palestinian deaths while in their custody to harvest organs from them.

Predictably enough the jews globally - with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the vanguard - began screaming that this was ipso facto anti-Semitic and was a 'variant' of the 'blood libel'. (2) This of course nonsense as it is not anti-Semitic to charge that the Israelis are engaging in highly illegal practices as it isn't accusing the jews writ large of anything, but is precisely accusing the IDF and possibly the Israeli Defence Establishment of such which does not equate ‘the jews’ in any way, shape or form.

Anti-Semitism is a very specific ideological charge not a catch-all term for criticism that jews do not know how to respond to so they just scream demented rhetoric at it. For similar reasons the editor of the Aftonbladet newspaper Jan Helin was routinely denounced by Israeli and jewish politicians and media sources as being a 'Nazi', (3) which is clearly absurd, and a rhetorical smear designed to suppress criticism by equating it with mass murder.

One enterprising jew, from New York City no less, even tried to sue the Aftonbladet in US Civil Court for 'libel' against the Israel and/or jewish people, which has unsurprisingly got no-where given that the evidence, as I will relate, has tended to vindicate Boström not the shot-from-the-hip Israeli denials.

Now it is not my purpose here to recount the Aftonbladet versus Israel affair as that is complicated and deserves a separate analysis. My purpose here is simply to look at the claim that the IDF harvested organs from Palestinians it had killed or those who had died in IDF custody (mainly, but not exclusively, during the 1980s and 1990s). Further adding to this are unsubstantiated claims that the Israelis have also been harvesting organs in a similar fashion in Haiti (4) when an Israeli medical team was sent there as part of the international humanitarian relief effort to assist the Haitians rebuild after a large earthquake had hit the country in 2010.

Now while I find the Haitian angle difficult of this story difficult to believe I do not find the central claim, in relation to the IDF harvesting organs from Palestinian who have died in their custody, to be unbelievable, but rather to have a substantial and plausible evidential base.

The difference between the two claims of Israeli Organ Harvesting is actually quite drastic, because in the Haitian case: the Israeli medical team are operating in non-Israeli controlled conditions, far from organ donation centres and not within easy distance to enable them to send the organs home easily (unless for dissection and tissue experiments). Indeed, even selling the organs on the black market would be difficult due to the destruction of Haiti's transport and healthcare infrastructure by the earthquake, which would have made quick market access (vital when dealing with organ transports) almost impossible.

Further the Haitian claim originates, as the Jerusalem Post article correctly relates, from a jewish anti-Zionist blogger in the United States: who made said claim on the basis of an unverifiable YouTube video posted by a group called 'AfriSynergy'. (5) Having looked at the group's other videos on YouTube they appear to be a black nationalist group that believes that anyone and everyone is involved in a conspiracy to exploit and oppress black people. Indeed, they allege that the Egyptians, (6) Ukrainians, (7) South Africans (8) and the American police (9) are all harvesting the organs of black people in an international conspiratorial cartel.

The fact that nobody else seems to know about this or have found any substantial evidence for it. Necessarily suggests that the claims about Haitian organ harvesting by the Israelis are probably groundless and based on nothing more than the almost random paranoia of a group of black nationalists.

In comparison the claims made about the IDF harvesting organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians are quite specific, because they allege that named victims were taken into the IDFs custody (and thus care) only to then have their bodies returned to their families without specific organs.

The main body of contention around this claim is related to the body of Bilal Ghanem (which is the central feature of Boström's Aftonbladet article); who was taken into Israeli custody after having been shot by the IDF just for being a Fatah member and activist. (10) After the body of Bilal was returned to them a week later; the Ghanem family noticed that Bilal had been 'opened up' (suggesting an autopsy rather than an operation) as he had stitch marks up his torso and also appeared to have no abdomen while Bilal's brother Jalal also noticed that Bilal now had no teeth in his mouth. (11)

Now I want to draw attention to two important observations made by Jalal here. In the first instance the fact that Bilal's body seemed to have no abdomen (i.e., no belly) is suggestive that organs had been removed precisely because normally when laying down the abdomen should be slightly pronounced (i.e., distended) due to the presence of the bulky organs beneath it (in addition to any body fat that is extant). However, the body appearing to have no abdomen suggests that it looked cadaverous or in other words like a skeleton because the organs had been removed and not replaced in the chest’s cavity inside a biodegradable bag.

I would also draw attention at this juncture that the fact that Bilal's body had been sewn up down the front suggests that an autopsy had been performed by the IDF or by Israeli doctors following Bilal's death. This in itself isn't too surprising, but what is interesting is the apparently cadaverous appearance of the body suggesting that the organs are missing.

This directly suggests that Bilal was autopsied and as part of that autopsy his organs were removed, but not replaced again as is required by Israeli law and nor standard international practice in autopsy. It is usually the case that when autopsies are undertaken then the next of kin, if any can be located, have to make a decision as to whether they want the organs to be returned to the deceased individual's corpse or donated.

However, in this case the organs had apparently been removed without consent and the key issue is what they have been used for as the organs of someone who is dead can, it is true, be used for scientific research, but if a man is clinically dead then it is possible for a short time afterwards to use his organs as transplants. Additionally, tissues such as skin, heart valves, corneas and veins, are transplantable up to 24 hours after death.

This means in effect that because all (or most) of Bilal's abdominal organs had apparently been removed (we do not know about the others) en bloc. Then it suggests to us that either he was subject to an autopsy immediately after death (or died while being operated on allowing the surgeons to immediately remove all his abdominal organs) for the purposes of organ transplants or his organs had been removed at a slightly later date in the official autopsy for the probable purpose of scientific experimentation.

The other fact that is suggestive is the second issue with the body: the complete removal of Bilal's teeth. I can't think or find any reason why these would have all been removed in the course of an autopsy or even an operation after he had been shot as even if he had been shot in the mouth this would have not really have been necessary. It is however quite possible for teeth to be transplanted (although not necessary today) and the use of teeth for scientific experimentation/practice or as a source of genetic material is fairly common.

I would be less inclined to believe in the literacy of Jalal's claim about the fact that Bilal's body seemed to have no abdomen if that was all there was to it. The removal of all of Bilal's teeth however - because it is such an unusual thing to do - suggests foul play, because it is the sort of thing that one may notice and not attach importance to but isn't exactly the sort of thing that a grieving relative would make-up precisely because it wouldn't be the first allegation to make against someone accused of stealing the organs of your relative.

It also adds to the overall impression given by Jalal's testimony that the IDF or the Israeli medical establishment had more or less gutted Bilal's body before returning it to the family for burial.

This, as far as evidence goes, is suggestive as it is clear that the body was likely substantially tampered while it was in Israeli custody and that nobody else is likely to have performed the tampering other than the IDF and/or the Israeli medical establishment.

However, the other evidence that surfaced in the wake of the high-level of politicization of the claim by the Israeli government and the jews themselves caused the screeching about 'anti-Semitism' and 'Nazis' to significantly backfire on them. This was in large part due to the fact that an American anthropologist - who is also an investigator into organ harvesting and donation on the black/grey market - had taped an interview in the year 2000 with the director of Israel's 'L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine' (aka the 'Abu Kabir Forensic Institute'): Yehuda Hiss.

Hiss admitted on that tape that during the 1980s and 1990s he had undertaken to harvest organs, and more specifically tissues such as those taken from Bilal Ghanem, without the knowledge or permission of the relatives of the deceased in his institute (which as director he could have had others doing as well) from the dead who brought there: (12) most of these were Palestinians, but included IDF soldiers and foreign workers as well. (13)

This served as more or less the nail in the coffin of the fact that organ harvesting had been happening on a regular basis in Israel. With the typical screech of gears, we suddenly saw Israeli propagandists and jews suddenly start back-pedalling quicker than a swimmer who has just seen a shark's dorsal fin a few metres away.

All of a sudden that which had been a new 'blood libel' and 'hideous anti-Semitism' before had become a quite plausible argument. The Israeli Ministry of Health then jumped into the fray and made the following statement to Russia Today:

'The subject of your enquiry is a matter that passed into history years ago. The Institute performed an organ-harvesting procedure for the purpose of medical treatment that took no note of the provenance of the cadavers.' (14)

Now this is typical public relations newsbyte speak that we need but a few moments to unpick.

What the Israeli Ministry of Health is actually saying here is that:

A) Bad things done in the past (by Israel) don't matter.

B) The 'L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine', under the directorship of Yehuda Hiss, used the organs of cadavers for transplant operations.

C) The majority of cadavers subject to the program were those who had no known relatives or where the Israeli authorities didn't know where the body had come from.

Now obviously A is an attempt to claim a special exemption for the jews from the court of history, which is especially in the fact that the Israelis insist that everyone on the planet should receive a large amount of 'Holocaust' education and, if possible, a visit to Auschwitz for some ritualized weeping.

In the case of B and C: they are actually direct confirmation of what I have argued in relation to the case of Bilal Ghanem, which after all is the case that set all off the storm of irrational outrage from the jews and Israeli government. In so far as it directly tells us that - at the very least - the Israelis have engaged in organ harvesting without familial consent in the past.

Further in the case of C the Israeli Ministry of Health made a contradictory claim asserting that the cadavers with 'no providence' (i.e., they don't know who the body is and where it is from) were in nearly all cases those of Israeli citizens or fallen IDF soldiers. (15) This is a rather foolish claim to make precisely because how - if you have no idea of who a cadaver was or where that cadaver came from - then can you claim that you suddenly know that the majority/nearly all the cadavers concerned were Israeli citizens let alone IDF soldiers.

Clearly the defensive claims of the Israeli Ministry of Health are fallacious precisely because they are outright contradictory. The Israeli officials here are simply trying to put out the fire by randomly asserted that they 'know' who the dead were, but then get themselves in a twist by asserting to Russia Today that they didn't know who the dead were, so they harvested their organs as there was no family to contact.

Interestingly the Israelis also inadvertently widened the scope of the organ harvesting scandal precisely because their spokeswoman Einav Shimron-Grinboim declared that organ harvesting of this kind had gone on in multiple Israeli hospitals in the past (presumably the 1980s and 1990s). However, she - as in the statement to Russia Today - promptly suggested that Israel shouldn't be judged on what it had done in the past and denied it had occurred recently.

This is clearly not the case as in 2000 Hiss had stated on tape that he was doing just this, and Hiss was not fired - for 'body-parts scandals' - until 2004. Although he has remained the chief pathologist since that time (thus is reasonable to conclude that the organ harvesting under Hiss took place till at least 2004) and was only ‘fired’ in 2012. (16) What is noteworthy here is that here we have Hiss being fired for the same thing that he admitted on tape in 2000, but yet in spite of this blatant medical misconduct being allowed to stay on in a senior position.

Indeed – according to Judy Siegel-Itzkovich in the British Medical Journal - in 2001 the Israeli government moved in to review allegations of illegal organ harvesting at the 'L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine' lead by Hiss following an expose in a Hebrew language newspaper Yediot Aharonot Daily had been illegally harvesting organs from corpses. (17)

What this means is simply that Hiss admitted doing precisely what Boström and Jalal Ghanem accused the Israelis of doing with Bilal Ghanem's body while it was in their custody. That Hiss wasn't immediately fired for such major medical misconduct and that it took eleven years to do so is also highly suggestive of a fundamental lack of care at an ideological level among the Israeli medical profession for Palestinians. (18)

The incontrovertible revelations about Hiss's organ harvesting, and the implicit confession of the Israeli Ministry of Health, make the case of Bilal Ghanem difficult to dismiss and provide good supporting evidence that Bilal Ghanem was subject organ harvesting by doctors associated with the IDF.

This suggests to us that the claims made by Boström are - on the basis of the currently available evidence - true not an 'anti-Semitic fantasy' as the Israeli government and the jews were so quick to brand them. As well as that it vindicates the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat when he alleged in 2002 that the Israelis were harvesting organs from Palestinian cadavers without the permission of the next of kin.

What is not true – or rather likely to be true – is the claims by Palestinians that 25,000 Ukrainians children had been brought to Israel to have their organs harvested. (19) Instead it is far more likely to be a smaller scale operation with hundreds not thousands of (largely non-jewish) victims and the organs being sold as for profit enterprise on the black market by Israeli medical personnel.

References

(1)    http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/21/israel.sweden.organ.harvesting/index.html

(2) Raphael Israeli, 2012, ‘Blood Libel and Its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism’, 1^st Edition, Transaction: New Brunswick, pp. 56-57

(3) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3766093,00.html

(4) http://www.jpost.com/International/Haiti-organ-harvesting-claims-false

(5) Ibid.

(6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-_8HIvTNU

(7) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9IrD_uSrc8

(8) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0vaVcJ7p7o

(9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIIYMhp_Gjg

(10) http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2009/08/200982510415994815.html

(11) Ibid.

(12) http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009122161551898444.html

(13) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzQp6tCuFw&list=PLE00DBAB2CB687C15

(14) Ibid. (1:01 minutes)

(15) http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/21/israel.organs/

(16) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Kabir_Forensic_Institute

(17) http://www.bmj.com/content/322/7279/128.5

(18) Implied in relation to the medical profession by Ilan Pappe, 2011, 'The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel', 1st Edition, Yale University Press : New Haven, pp. 136; 165-166

(19) Israeli, Op. Cit., p. 19