30 August 2009
Background: In late July, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Cooke filed a criminal complaint in US District Court (District of New Jersey) against Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. The complaint alleges that Rosenbaum unlawfully conspired “to acquire, receive, and otherwise transfer human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation … and did an act to effect the object of the conspiracy.” Rosenbaum is quoted as indicating that he had been procuring human organs for “[t]en years” and that there are “people over there [in Israel] hunting” for organs. The Rosenbaum case was part of broader corruption and money-laundering case that garnered international media attention.
On August 17, 2009, a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, published “Our sons plundered for their organs,” an article by veteran Middle East photojournalist Donald Boström. Boström indicates that the organ trafficking charges against Rosenbaum inspired him to bring to light his experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1990s. He writes: “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. … The families … 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.” Although Boström does not assert the factuality of the Palestinian accusations he does note that the charge that Palestinians are being used as Israel’s “organ reserve” is “a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”
Boström’s article echoes a report by Mary Barrett, “Autopsies and Executions” was published in April 1990 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. In it, Barrett concludes, “The question of organ theft is of compelling concern to Palestinians.” On June 27, 2001, medical anthropologist Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley and Organs Watch gave testimony to the U.S. House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. She told subcommittee members:
… hundreds of kidney patients from Israel … travel in privately brokered ‘transplant tourist’ junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania where desperate kidney sellers can be found, to Russia where an excess of lucrative cadaveric organs result from lax standards for designating brain death, and to South Africa where the amenities in transplantation clinics in private hospitals can resemble four star hotels. …
While in Israel for Organs Watch in the summer of [2000] and, again in March 2001, … I interviewed more than 50 transplants professionals, transplant patients, and organs buyers and sellers involved in commercialized transplants. Most surgeons, while worried about the risk to their patients and the potential for exploitation of both organs sellers and buyers on the part of unscrupulous doctors and their commercial brokers and intermediaries, none were willing to condemn a practice which they saw as ‘saving lives’. …
Meanwhile, human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinains [sic] by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv. …
The passivity of the Ministry of Health in refusing to intervene and crack down on this multi-million dollar business, which is making Israel something of a pariah in the international transplant world, requires some explanation. First, in the absence of a strong culture of organ donation and under the pressure of angry transplant candidates, each person transplanted abroad is one less client with which to contend. A more troubling phenomenon is the support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the illicit national ‘program’ of transplant tourism. Some patients who traveled with the outlaw Israeli transplant surgeon to other countries noted that in each of the organized transplant groups were members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them.
It requires no great leap of logic or imagination to go from “support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense” in illegal Israeli organ transplantations abroad to Israeli military involvement in the harvesting of organs from Palestinians in territories under Israeli military occupation. And as it turns out, just a little more than a year after Scheper-Hughes gave her testimony, Israel’s Chief Pathologist and Director of the national Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, was investigated for “for suspicions including the removal of organs from 81 deceased persons without familial consent.” The Israeli news network, Arutz Sheva, reports in 2005, Hiss agreed to a plea bargain with Israel prosecutors. It say: “In all of the 125 cases, Dr. Hiss and his subordinates removed organs, bones and tissue without the permission of, and in many cases, against the expressed wishes of the families of the deceased.”
Veteran, award-winning Palestinian journalist Kawther Salam wrote recently: “The issue of stealing the Palestinian organs is known to everybody in Palestine. I reported several times about this crime.” She concluded: “If the Israelis go forward and cause troubles for Donald Boström in court, I will volunteer to testify in his favor about these disgusting crimes of the Israelis …”
Israelis have indeed gone forward to cause trouble for Boström, Aftonbladet, and Sweden, in general. The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth’s English-language web site reported on August 24, 2009, that “Thousands of Israelis on Sunday signed an internet petition calling for a consumers’ boycott on Swedish home products retailer IKEA, as well as other companies from the Scandinavian country, including vehicle maker Volvo, Absolut Vodka, and fashion chain H&M.” Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pressuring Sweden’s government to “condemn the ‘anti-Semitic’ article” and “Swedish Chancellor of Justice Goeran Lambertz received two written requests on Tuesday asking to investigate whether the report amounted to racial agitation …” Ha’aretz reports the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) is delaying the issuance of press credentials to Swedish journalists trying to get into Gaza. Ominously, GPO head Danny Seaman said, in connection with the request of the Swedish journalists, “the GPO ‘has dealt with people impersonating as reporters in order to get into Gaza in the past, so we have passed their information to the IDF so that forces on the ground can be aware of their presence.’ ” The Jerusalem Post reports Israeli lawyer Guy Ophir filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against the Aftonbladet and Boström in a New York court on August 25, 2009.
Despite the vociferous Israeli response, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has called for “an immediate, serious investigation into reports alleging that Zionist occupation forces stole organs from young Palestinians they killed in the West Bank and Gaza.” Family members of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, whose mutilated body was pictured in Boström’s article, are also calling for an investigation. The Jerusalem Post reports: “Jalal [Bilal Ghanem’s younger brother] and other members of the family said that ‘rumors’ about Israel killing Palestinians to steal their organs have been circulating for a long time. ‘I can’t tell you if these rumors are true or not,’ the brother said. ‘But in light of the investigative report in the Swedish newspaper, we are demanding an international commission of inquiry into the case.’ ” In the US, American Muslims for Palestine has also stated it “believes the questions the article raises must be investigated.”
Petition text: As people deeply concerned with human rights, we believe it is essential to listen respectfully when many members of a population speak about war crimes committed against them. Therefore, we support Donald Boström and the editor and publisher of Aftonbladet in their decision to publish “Our sons plundered for their organs.” We salute the Swedish government in refusing to submit to Israeli pressure and undermine the fundamental rights of freedom of the press and freedom of expression. We support calls for a thorough investigation into allegations that Israelis have removed organs from Palestinians in violation of international humanitarian law. We urge the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, and other competent tribunals to undertake a thorough, impartial investigation of these charges.
Organizational endorsers: Deir Yassin Remembered, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, If Americans Knew, Voices of Palestine, and We Hold These Truths
