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Mon. 26 Oct. 2010
COUNTER PUNCH
➢ Tissue, Skin, Bone and Organ Harvesting at Israel's National Forensic Institute………………………...…………………..1
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Tissue, Skin, Bone and Organ Harvesting at Israel's National Forensic Institute
Body Parts and Bio-Piracy
By NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES
Counter Punch Exclussive Report,
25 Oct. 2010,
Editorial Note: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the doctoral program in medicine and society. Since 1996, she has been involved in active field research on the global traffic in human organs, following the movement of bodies, body parts, transplant doctors, their patients, brokers, and kidney sellers, and the practices of organ and tissue harvesting in several countries – from Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba, to Moldova, Israel and Turkey, to India, South Africa, and the United States. She is a co-founder of Organs Watch, an independent, medical human rights, research and documentation center at UC Berkeley.
What follows is her detailed report on the tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting conducted for many years at Israel’s L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine, a.k.a. The Abu Kabir Institute, under the aegis of its former director and current chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss. Long before Donald Boström leveled allegations of organ-harvesting from Palestinians in the Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, in August 2009, causing furious accusations of “blood libel,” Dr. Scheper-Hughes had already interviewed Dr. Hiss and had on tape the interview that forms part of her report here.
Dr. Scheper-Hughes says her purpose here is to refute the controversial official statements of the Ministry of Health and the IDF that while there may have been irregularities at the National Forensic Institute, they have long since ended. To this day, she says, they have failed to acknowledge, punish, or rectify various medical human rights abuses, past and present at the National Forensic Institute. While many of the allegations are widely known, the testimony by Israeli state pathologist and IDF (reserve) Lt. Col. Chen Kugel has never been published in English and his allegations are known only within Israel. Dr. Scheper-Hughes invited Dr. Kugel to speak publicly on this topic in the U.S. on May 6, 2010.
There are three lawsuits ongoing in Israel at the present moment concerning the Forensic Institute and Dr. Hiss. Two concerns alleged abuses against the dead bodies of Israeli citizens. The third concerns Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen who was killed in Gaza in 2003 while protesting the demolition of houses. Transcripts of court proceedings show that Corrie’s autopsy was conducted in contravention of an Israeli court order that an official from the U.S. Embassy be present. These transcripts also show Dr. Hiss conceding that he had kept samples from Corrie’s body without her family’s knowledge. Dr. Hiss also testified that he was uncertain where these samples now are. For his part, Dr. Kugel asserts that abuses at the Institute continue to this day.
The Scheper-Hughes article takes care to note Dr. Kugel’s description of his former mentor, Dr. Hiss, as a man who saw himself as willing to take great personal and professional risks “to serve a noble end… to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks,” with his actions “as something sublime, or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood.” AC/JSC
In July 2009, I was identified as the “whistle-blower” in the arrest by New Jersey FBI agents of a Brooklyn organs trafficker, an orthodox rabbi, Isaac Rosenbaum,1,2 whose unorthodox business activities I had uncovered several years earlier while investigating an international network of outlaw transplant surgeons, their brokers, lawyers, kidney hunters, insurance and travel agents, safe house operators, and “baby sitters” to mind sick and anxious international “transplant tourists.” The particular criminal network, in which Rosenbaum played a bit part, originated in Israel through a “company” run by a well-known crime boss Ilan Peri, who had over the years established shady transplant deals and kidney transplant outlets and connections in Turkey, Moldova, the Ukraine, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, the Philippines, China, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Columbia, and the United States.3
The arrests, amidst gunfire in the operating rooms, of two of Ilan Peri’s transplant associates – Dr. Zaki Shapira, formerly of Rabin Medical Center, Petach Tikva, Israel, and his Turkish associate Dr. Yusuf Sonmez – in a private hospital in Istanbul in 20074 gave pause to the Israeli Ministry of Health which, until then, had permitted Israeli sick funds (medical insurance) to reimburse living donors overseas with transplants, many of them trafficked from the former Soviet Union countries. The kidney sellers captured in the Turkish shootout, however, were two Palestinians, Omar Abu Gaber, age 42, and Zaheda Mahammid, age 26. The organ recipients were an Israeli man of 68, Zeev Vigdor, and a younger South African man, John Richard Halford, who were filmed on Turkish TV being carried out of the operating room on stretchers and taken to another hospital before being returned home, without the transplants they had so desired.
After his release from a German prison in 2007, Peri returned to Israel, where he was investigated for tax fraud,5 detained, but released because Israel’s organ-transplant laws were murky with respect to the legality of “brokering” overseas transplants using paid donors. In 2008, two new laws were passed by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset): one that paved the way for applying brain death criteria that would satisfy the ultraorthodox, and the other that outlaws buying, selling and brokering organs for transplant.6 The Ministry of Health no longer reimburses overseas transplants unless they are legal. Peri continues to organize transplant tours, but today, he claims, using only deceased donor organs and legal pathways.
In its heyday (1997-2007), the Israeli transplant tourism/organ-trafficking network was an ingenious and extremely lucrative multimillion-dollar program that supplied a few thousand Israeli patients and diasporic Jews worldwide with the “fresh” organs and transplants they needed. With Rosenbaum’s arrest, the U.S. media were suddenly interested in the Israeli-based transplant-trafficking scheme, now that there was a proven link to hospitals in New York City.
The NYC Commissioner of Health and the FBI, whom I alerted years earlier about the Rosenbaum transplant gang, had dismissed the information as lacking credibility. How could patients and kidney sellers from two different countries be smuggled into hospitals for illegal transplants? How would they get through the red tape required for any transplant operation? It sounded like an old wives’ tale, an urban legend, or a blood libel against Jewish surgeons and their patients. And that was the worst suspicion of all.
Although the criminal justice system refused to believe the story I gave them, transplant surgeons working in hospitals in the U.S. who had been approached by Ilan Peri and his associates, including Isaac Rosenbaum, knew it to be true and knew that some of their colleagues were complicit in transplant crimes that ranged from violating the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) in the buying and selling organs, to fraud, deception, money laundering, taking bribes, participating in organized crime and human trafficking. The Rosenbaum case, still in preparation, will be the first U.S. federal prosecution of crimes related to organs trafficking.7
The Aftonbladet Story Breaks
Then, in August 2009, another organ-trafficking story broke, one that linked Rosenbaum’s U.S.-Israel organ-brokering and money-laundering schemes with much older allegations of organ-and-tissue stealing from the bodies of Palestinian “terrorists” and stone throwers’ following autopsy at Israel’s National Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. These allegations, dating back to the early 1990s, were recycled by a Swedish journalist Donald Boström in a left-leaning Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet, on August 17, 2009.8
Headlined “Our Sons Plundered for Their Organs,” Boström’s feature story was a mix of organ-theft accusations, seemingly coincidental connections, and political rhetoric. The information was based on Boström’s research in Israel and the Occupied Territories during the first Intifada, and his award-winning book, Inshallah,9 published in 2001, where Bostrom first introduced the allegations of body tampering and organ-and-tissue theft from Palestinian dead brought for autopsy to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. Boström’s article suggested that Palestinian bodies were being harvested as the “spoils of war.”
The Aftonbladet story, instantly translated into Hebrew and English, created a firestorm of protest that included a libel lawsuit by anti-defamation lawyers in New York City and a boycott of Swedish industries. Boström was labeled an anti-Semite, and the story he “dredged up from the sewer” was labeled a despicable “blood libel” against Israel and the world’s Jews.
I read these news reports with mounting dread. Like Boström, I was once greeted during a research visit to Israel in 2003 with an ugly headline and centerfold ( “New Blood Libel on French TV – Israel Steals Kidneys of Orphan Children in Moldova”) in Makor Rishon, a right-wing tabloid.10 The feature story reviewed an hour-long TV documentary by French filmmaker Catherine Bentellier, Kidneys Worth their Weight in Gold. I had traveled with the filmmaker to Moldova in 2001, where we interviewed people in villages that had been ravaged by organs traffickers targeting young men and trafficking them to Turkey, the Ukraine and Georgia as paid, sometimes coerced, kidney providers to Israeli transplant patients. The “blood libel” accusation featured medieval woodcuts and a blurry photo of me patting the hand of a Moldovan orphan in his crib.
With respect to the Swedish “blood libel” against the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir, the main issue that wasn’t raised in the avalanche of articles, editorials, and news columns published in Israel, Europe and the United States was one simple question, “Was the organ theft story true?” And were there any grounds for linking the tissue theft from the dead to the organization of illicit transplant tours for Israeli patients? Were there any grounds for linking the one story with another?
Introducing Dr Yehuda Hiss
I knew the answer. In July 2000, while studying the growth of organized transplant tours run by underworld brokers in Israel, I conducted a formal, audiotaped interview with the director of Israel’s National Forensic Institute, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, at Abu Kabir, in which he openly and freely discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from the bodies of the dead brought to the Institute for examination and autopsy. Hiss described a kind of “presumed” consent, one invented by him and shared with no one except, by example, with his medical students and residents and interns. He pursued a quiet policy of aggressive tissue, bone, skin, and organ harvesting, purportedly for the greater good of his country, a country at war, and for the good of his countryman. Professor Hiss, viewed by many Israelis and by the New York Times as a hero because of his service to the nation in handling bodies killed by terrorists and suicide bombers, deemed his behavior as patriotic. He was, in his own mind, not so much “above the law,” as representing the law, a much higher law, his law, supremely cool, rational, and scientifically and technically correct. The country was at war, blood was being spilled everyday, soldiers were being burned, and yet Israelis refused to provide tissues and organs needed. So, he would take matters into his own hands.
The taped interview was a smoking gun, but I feared the unintended consequences of making it public. The tape sat, more or less untouched, in my archives for ten years. But now it was necessary to set the record straight. But before I did so, I wanted to give professor Hiss a chance to explain, or even to correct, the things he had admitted to in the 2000 interview. Prior to leaving for a research trip in September-October 2009, accompanied by Dan Rather and his team for a news report on the criminal networks built around organ trafficking in Turkey, Moldova, and Israel, I contacted Yehuda Hiss in Israel (through one of my several Israeli research assistants) requesting a follow-up interview.
The Ministry of Health thwarted his initial acceptance. A private interview in his home was proposed, but Hiss (and his lawyers) wanted to review beforehand any questions I wished to raise. Then the Ministry of Health denied Hiss permission to speak with me at all, under any circumstances. While being interviewed about the effects of the changes in transplant laws and practices, several medical and transplant colleagues in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem often interjected disparaging references to the “despicable blood libel by the Swedish media,” even though they knew full well – and knew that I knew – that tucked inside Boström’s tabloid story was a real medical and political scandal of international proportions. I understood their nervousness about the topic, but not their denial of a known fact that was being manipulated into a global political tool of the Israeli government.
Just before returning to the United States, I met with Meira Weiss, a distinguished anthropologist and former professor at Hebrew University, and Chen Kugel, M.D., a forensic pathologist who had worked side by side with his mentor, Yehuda Hiss, at the Institute. Both Weiss and Dr. Kugel urged me to write a rebuttal to those in Israel who were “crying wolf” and using blood libel accusations to bludgeon their critics into submission. Weiss reminded me of the taped interview, done in 2000, with Dr. Hiss, as she herself had arranged the interview and was present during it, and she was as stunned as I was at the boldness and arrogance of Hiss’ revelations. Chen Kugel, a military officer (reserve) and former forensic pathologist at the Institute, agreed that the truth should be told to the global community, though perhaps not by them. Both had suffered enough. Both had been forced out of their jobs.
My interview with Yehuda Hiss at the Institute had come about in the following circumstances. In July 2000, three years into the Organs Watch project, I was given a file and a photo by an Israeli human rights lawyer, Lynda Brayer, at her organization’s headquarters in Bethlehem. The Society of St. Yves was created to provide legal assistance to Palestinian families, whose relatives had suffered the demolition of their homes, forced removals, and other abuses. The organization was then representing the family of Abdel Karim Abdel Musalmeh, who was shot in the head on November 8, 1995, by IDF snipers. The single bullet that killed Abdel is clearly indicated in the photo, which was part of the autopsy record. A military order for the demolition of Musalmeh’s home in Beit Awa, a village outside of Hebron, preceded his murder by the IDF as a “wanted person on the run.” The lawyers were arguing a case to allow the home to stand, so that Abdel’s widow and their six children would not be homeless. If murder and dispossession were not enough, Musalmeh’s body was returned to his wife in tatters. The autopsy report attributed death by rifle shot to brain. Why, then, was the body subjected to a total dissection and the removal of cornea and skin? I agreed to look into it.
When I first shared this information and the graphic photo with Meira Weiss, she reassured me at that time that there was no organ or tissue harvesting at the Institute. She had witnessed hundreds of autopsies – of Israelis, Arabs, Arab-Israelis, Russian immigrants, foreigners, and Palestinians. While bodies were opened and organs examined, they were returned to the body, except for small tissue samples as needed for forensic examination in the laboratories above the morgue. There were practices Weiss had observed that were not in compliance with international codes of ethics and internal law, the 1975 Helsinki Accords on the use of human subjects.11 There were acts of deviance by certain staff members. Tattoos, for example, were sometimes removed with a knife from the bodies of new immigrants to Israel, mostly Russian and Ukrainian, always suspect of nor being Jewish enough. Tattoos gave them away, and so they were treated with hostility. Penises might be circumcised, postmortem, without the knowledge or consent of relatives. The bodies of Jews and Muslims were treated differently. When Palestinians were brought in, following conflict, they were subjected to a complete autopsy, as required to produce information for the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, the bodies of Israeli soldiers were respected, and autopsies were often discreet and partial.
Allegations About the Forensic Institute
The National Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, a Tel Aviv suburb, is Israel’s national depository of dead bodies requiring identification, examination, and autopsy. It serves two purposes, on the one hand, as a scientific institute affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine (Tel Aviv University), through which it operates a state-of-the-art genetics laboratory. On the other hand, the Institute is controlled and closely supervised by the chevra kadisha – the orthodox religious organization has a virtual monopoly on all burials in Israel, except for the military. The Institute is a civil organization working under the Ministry of Health. On the other hand, it is an arm of the security police and the military.
The Institute is then both a traditional medical-legal mortuary and, off the record, Israel’s primary source of tissues, bone, and skin needed for transplantation, plastic surgery, research and medical teaching. The illicit traffic in organs, tissues, bone and the stockpiling of assorted body parts at the Institute is what anthropologists call a public secret, something that every one inside the society knows about but which is never discussed, and certainly never admitted to those outside the society. But, in fact, allegations and official investigations of organ-and-tissue trafficking at the Forensic Institute have been ongoing in Israel since 1999 up to the present day. Yehuda Hiss has been, off and on, the focus of public scrutiny. He has been sued, and he has been decorated. He has been both upbraided and rewarded, fired from his position as director of the Institute, and given a new title, senior pathologist, with a higher salary.
Allegations of Hiss’ confiscation of organs, tissues and other body parts date back to November 1999, with an investigative report in the local Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir, which stated that medical students under Hiss’ direction were allowed to practice on bodies sent to the Institute at Abu Kabir for autopsy, and that body parts were transferred for transplant and other medical uses without permission from the families concerned. In 2000, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot published a price list for body parts that Hiss had sold to university researchers and to medical schools. A committee of international forensic experts was appointed by the Minister of Health to investigate practices at the Institute. It took two years for the investigation to be completed, during which time, according to Hiss’ former assistant and protégé, Chen Kugel, much of the evidence was destroyed. Nonetheless, according to Kugel, Hiss still had a huge collection of body parts in his possession at Abu Kabir, when the Israeli courts ordered a search in 2002. Israel National News reported at the time, “Over the past years, heads of the Institute appear to have given thousands of organs for research without permission, while maintaining a ‘storehouse’ of organs at Abu Kabir.” Hiss was reprimanded but allowed to continue his activities, which he defended as necessary for medicine, for the defense of the Israeli state, and for the advancement of science.
In 2005, new allegations of organs trafficking at Abu Kabir surfaced, and Hiss admitted to having removed parts from 125 bodies without authorization. Following a plea bargain with the state, the attorney general decided not to press criminal charges, and Hiss was given only a reprimand, and he continues on as chief pathologist at Abu Kabir, that is, the state of Israel’s official head pathologist. Illegal harvesting of bodies was simultaneously prohibited and tolerated. Hiss was, in fact, the state’s answer to the chronic scarcity of tissues and organs. He recognized the need produced by the deep cultural reluctance of families to tamper with the bodies of the dead, which allowed him to cross a line and to do as he pleased with the bodies entrusted to him.
Interviewing Dr Hiss
When I met professor Yehuda Hiss for the first and, as it turned out, the only time, the pathologist struck me as a formidable, frightening, and brilliant man. A Polish immigrant to Israel, with striking blue eyes, short beard, wiry body, and a tense, hypervigilant and belligerent demeanor, he commands attention. The interview took place on July 21, 2000, in Hiss’ office at the Institute, in the presence of a staff member and Meira Weiss. We were all, I think, shocked by his revelations. Hiss allowed the interview to be audiotaped, but parts of our conversation were off the record, and the tape was turned off at those moments. What follows now is a transcription of the audiotape pared down, some asides deleted.
YH: My name is Yehuda Hiss. I am a forensic specialist. Here we do forensic medicine, as well as anatomical pathology. I do both. The main issue, here, as compared to other countries, is that [in Israel] we have only one [forensic] Institute for the entire country. And it is very conveniently located in the center of Israel, so that the bulk of the population is located very near to us….There are another twenty medical centers in various places, each with its own department of pathology. But very few complete autopsies are performed in Israel.
I began my training in anatomical pathology in 1974, in Sheba (Tel Hashomer). We had only three residents, and we would perform about 850 complete autopsies [each year]. Today, there are 6-8 residents, and the hospital that trains residents in anatomical pathology is three times as big, but residents today perform only 40-50 mostly incomplete autopsies [per year]. So, this is representative of what is going on in the state of Israel. We did 800 per year 25 years ago with fewer residents, and only 40-50 per year today with many more resources. The only place where complete autopsies are conducted in Israel happens to be here.
Now, about the question of harvesting organs – it’s strange. Not only here, in Israel, but elsewhere it all depends on the personal approach of those in charge of pathology or organs harvesting. In my case, when I was a resident in Tel Hashomer – a hospital linked to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) – we would collaborate with the army and we would provide the army with grafted (harvested) skin for burn victims, and, from time to time, they would ask us for cornea. So, I would be involved in it because I was in charge, with two others, and we would provide this.
NS-H: Why cornea to the military?
YH: For injuries perhaps. Maybe it was easier [for the military] to make this request of us, and, once we had gotten permissions to perform – and the family agreed – to the autopsy, we would take some skin and take the cornea. For autopsy, we always had to ask permission of the family, unless it was a court order [a criminal case].
NS-H: There is some resistance here, in Israel, to autopsy – both Jewish and Arab – right?
YH: Yes. We did everything off the record, highly informal. We never asked for the families’ permission.
Then we started harvesting cornea for several Israeli hospitals, initially for Tel Hashomer, because I had friends there who knew me well. I suggested this to them at various meetings. I was amazed because no one had ever come to us to ask. Why are you not coming over to us? I told them how it worked at Case Western Reserve Hospital [in Cleveland]. So, then they started to come from hospitals in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Everything was done on a friendly basis between us and our colleagues in various departments. I felt strongly that these corneas should go to public patients and not to private clinics. We were not paid for harvesting, but we weregiven some donations, equipment that we needed.
Whatever was done here was off the record, highly informal. We never asked permission of the family. But we would harvest only from bodies that the family agreed to allow an autopsy. So, we would never harvest where there were objections to the autopsy.
NS-H: The law allows this?
YH: The law demands permissions for autopsy, but not for harvesting. I read this in the law books….There was an addendum to the law in 1981, that you should ask the permission of the family – for autopsy…. We were free to take skin from the back of legs. We took cornea. We would not take cornea from those bodies where we suspected that the families might want to open the eyelids. There are some Orthodox and some Oriental [Arab] families who open the eyelids and throw sand on top of them. We knew whom to avoid. Also we only removed the cornea, not as we did in Teleshemer [hospital], the whole eyeball. And we would close and glue the eyelids, and we would cover any place where we had removed something. And, similarly, we would take [skin] only from the back of the legs. In the beginning of the 1990s, we began to take some long bones from the legs. Then we were asked for cardiac valves, and we did a few of them, because of the lack of collaboration between us and major thoracic departments. Then, beginning in 1995, we started to do it more formally. It was done according to a certain list of priorities, established by various medical centers and specific departments. It was done as a kind of semi-legal thing. At that point, we would inform the Ministry of Health. Before that time [1995], it was only between me/the Institute and the various departments and medical centers – informally. Later, we decided that it should be done through the Ministry of Health.
NS-H: Your chief is the Minister of Health, but you were free to do quite a lot without any interference from them?
YH: Yes, correct, but there are things that really should be done with some instruction and through the Ministry of Health. It was unclear for many years.
NS-H: In some countries of Latin America, the IMF [Forensic Institutes] is under the jurisdiction of the police, but in others, like Cuba, it is under the Ministry of Health. In the old South Africa, it was under the military police – and here?
YH: Independence is very important. This institution was established in 1954 under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Then, in the early 1970s, it came under the police department. Then, in 1975 or ’76, it came under the Ministry of Health. We are now part of the Ministry of Health, and the director-general of the ministry is our boss, but we are actually completely independent. Until a few years ago, all medical centers were under the Ministry of Health, but in the late 1990s they have become independent. There are only a few still directly under the Ministry of Health. Since then, they are more interested in what we are doing here and in our capacities [to harvest tissues], and so we now get more demands and we feel that it should be regulated. We want to be on record, too, for the various costs that are involved in the harvesting of skin and cornea, bones, pulmonary values and so forth… . But until then, this was just between us and the various hospitals that we serviced, but we wanted there to be some control over this.
NS-H: How were the prices set?
YH: In 1996, we made up a list of the various medical services that we provided, a list of hundreds or thousands of shekels – there were expenses that we wanted to recoup. We would collaborate only with public hospitals. On one occasion, about ten years ago, there was a case of a head of a department who used one or two corneas donated to the hospital from a pathology Institute – and he used them for his private patients. This is the only case known to me – where tissue donated for general use was used privately. Since 1998, because of popular pressure, there was a sharp decline in autopsies, and we were made to ask permission of all families for autopsy and for harvesting, or for dissection, or for training of military medical students. It was all because a man went to the newspapers just recently to scream that his son, who died in military service, was used for medical experimentation and medical training. And a furor resulted in the country and permissions for autopsies declined. Since then – about two years ago [1998] – we were told to ask permission for everything. [This is a reference to the late Sergeant Zeev Buzaglo of the Golani Brigade, who was killed in a training accident in April 1997. When his father, Dr. Haim Buzaglo, a pediatrician, came to see his son’s body, he saw that it had been harmed at the Institute – NS-H].
NS-H: Why [is] the military [involved in this]?
YH: There is a special relationship between the Institute and the army because of the current political situation in Israel. All Israelis feel that we all have an obligation to help out in some way, and because we all served in the army, we all have a personal stake in the army ever after. We are all linked to the army. And because of this, we took it for granted. We never asked. We thought it was part of the duty of all Israelis to cooperate.
YH [pointing out data from his files]: Look, here is the data. Since January–April we received here 705 bodies. Of these, 500 were not suitable for harvesting. Either the bodies were too decomposed, or because of infections. Only 175 were adequate for harvesting. We called all of them, and 98 refused. Twelve we could not locate the next of kin. Only 65 out of them agreed. So, I would say we have an acceptance rate of less than one-third.
When we cannot find the next of kin, we do not harvest by law. Originally, the law required only that we inform the family that harvesting is going to take place. Now, we not only inform, we have to ask them for permission. So, because of this one bad incident, the backlash is overriding the Parliament and the law of the land.
[Here NS-H explains how in some states in the U.S. there is “presumed” consent for cornea harvesting, as in California, but most people were totally unaware that it was going on. The law was more or less kept a secret.]
YH: Yes, this was our policy for many years, and then one case, one bad scandal, and it is all over for us. Now, young military medical personnel no longer can get the training they need and, when they are sent to Lebanon or to the Palestinian territories – and there are injuries, they have to intervene without proper training, so that they are actually experimenting on living soldiers. That is what all this has brought us. No previous experience, no training whatsoever with the human body. They have to practice [surgery] on dogs – but never on humans! This is an absurdity! I would not want anyone to perform a tracheotomy or colostomy on me without any previous experience or training. Would you? Today, they do virtual training on computerized bodies and so on, but it’s not the same thing.
NS-H: So, no biotech firms that want your material?
YH: In Israel, 100 per cent of the skin harvested goes to Hadassah Hospital’s skin bank – it is for military purposes only – no biotech firms have access. There is another skin bank in the south of the country, to which the Institute is not linked – but I know that if something happens – if one of the burn centers need skin for a private patient, say, they can take skin from the Hadassah skin bank, but they have to repay it. Logistically, we are only linked to Hadassah.
Since six months ago, we have a new man working with us downstairs, who is a kind of mortuary assistant, and he is harvesting skin, bones, cornea, and bones. Before him, there was only an arrangement with the army – they used to send us here every week a plastic surgeon, who would come here to harvest skin for the skin bank in Hadassah. This lasted for many years. More than 12 or 13 years he did this. Since 1987-1988, every other week, a plastic surgeon would come here to harvest skin. But now we no longer have this direct relationship with the army since this latest scandal. Now, we have our own mortuary assistant, who is paid to harvest for us all the skin, bone, cornea, etc., that is needed. He helps out in other activities as well.
NS-H: When you ask permission, do some say you can take this and not that organ?
YH: Some say do not touch the heart or the brain – some are afraid you might want to take the skin. But it is not like you are skinning a rabbit or something, and we say, no, it is not like that – it is gentle, there is no blood – we are not peeling the skin off. It is not like scalping a person. We take only a superficial layer off – from the back and the legs. And we tell them, too, that we are only taking the thin tissue [from the eye] and not the globe.
In order to fulfill both Jewish and Muslim laws about the disposal of the dead, everything is done immediately. We start working here at about 6 in the morning. By 7 a.m., we have the whole list of all the bodies that are going to be coming in that day. Only some of these are going to be autopsied. And then this person here draws up a list about what will be done to whom. And then we are on the phone.
NS-H: Are there special techniques for how to present this request to people?
Staff member: We have to know how to read people.
YH: – Yes, but this is not for me. From the very beginning, I said, “Please free me from this! I cannot possibly talk to people about these things.” I am not patient like this.
Staff member: He loves the dead. But not the living! [Laughter]
YH: Yes, I switched to forensics from clinical medicine because I wanted the patients to shut up already! So, we say that X will do it – but she is too busy – and, really, we need a social worker to do this …
NS-H: Any other body parts taken – like pituitary glands?
YH: When I was a medical resident, we would take pituitary glands. Today, we have chemical substitutes, but when I was a resident, I used to rush to the refrigerator to deposit pituitary glands in a bottle with water. I would collect them – sure, of course! Also, tiny bones from inside the ear – these are very good for some surgical procedures. We would do this about twice a year.
NS-H: Some of these small bones were used for training NASA astronauts for space travel, and its effects on balance? And what about transnational sales?
YH: You can buy cornea from Russia for $300 each, I think…. In Moscow, you can get a kidney for $20,000 and cornea for a few dollars, because they really don’t care… At every autopsy, they take what they want, and they have a tremendous stockpile of organs that they can draw on. They have skin and cornea. In some large medical centers in Russia, you can get fresh kidney that they get from auto accidents – and in Turkey as well. So, in both places you can get transplanted organs for just $20,000 – including the kidney – because they have a stockpile of them. I know because I was part of a transplant procurement organization, and we studied this. It is very cheap. It is well done by very good surgeons there. In fact, there is a surplus of kidneys in Russia. They have surplus because fewer people there can afford transplants.
NS-H: There is some doubt about whether Russia was using the international standards for determining brain death.
YH: Yes, sometimes our surgeons would accompany our Israeli patients to Russia, and they would perform the surgery there and the kidney was from a Russian. The surgery would be performed by Israeli doctors in Russia, with Russian kidneys. Some are leading transplant surgeons from Israel...
NS-H: Yes, transplant tourism, some of this has been reported in the newspapers.
YH: Right. They would go once a month for a few days and would perform five or six surgeries there, and the patient would come back here to recuperate.
NS-H: The UCSF medical ethics board decided that if people who want to break the law and travel to China or the Philippines to be transplanted, then we will not provide you with follow-up care – you can go to a private institution.
YH: Many things in Israel are done on a personal basis and through connections… I think that in Israel everything should be as equitable as possible. One should not have to depend on connections or money. If advertising and the media would only persuade the Israeli population to donate organs from deceased victims from trauma… [ and even though there is nothing in Talmudic law against organ harvesting from the dead], a religious family will find a rabbi who will agree with them. I try to tell them how important it is to donate, and they will say, “I need to discuss this with my rabbi” – and nine times out of ten they come back with a negative answer. That is, the answer that they want….
Dr Chen Kugel, Whistleblower
As can be seen from the transcript, Hiss readily admitted to the non-consensual, informal tissue, skin, bone and organ harvesting to serve the needs of the country. Until he arrived in 1987 as chief pathologist at the Forensic Institute, there was no organ or tissue harvesting. He explained to his staff that this practice was common elsewhere in the world, in the U.S., at Case Western Reserve, where he had studied, and in other forensic Institutes he had visited. It was a “presumed consent” without the backing of the population, or the law. Although it was in violation of tissue and organs laws, Hiss thought it could be justified for a war-torn and traumatized country like Israel. Hiss admitted that the organs-and-tissue harvesting was “informal” and its legality unclear. From his perspective as a state pathologist, little harm was done by the careful removal of some organs that would never be missed by the deceased and about which the family would never have to know. Medical students in military training were brought into the morgue after Hiss and his team completed their legally mandated autopsies, to be trained in the removal of organs.
After my tape was released in Israel, on December 19, 2009, to Israeli TV’s Channel 2, government officials for the army and the Ministry of Health admitted that organs and tissues were harvested from the dead bodies of both Palestinians and Israelis throughout the 1990s, but that the practice ended in 2000. Dr. Hiss, however, publicly denied everything on tape – including his words to me. Today, he says that he denies it all – the stockpiling of body parts, the perjury, and the organ harvesting. He denies everything. He says that everything was all done in agreement with and by law, and that families consented to harvest for transplantation. No organs were taken for studies, he said, none at all.
In May 2010, Dr. Chen Kugel and Meira Weiss spoke at a special conference I organized at the University of California, before a working group of experts, including anthropologists, transplant surgeons, pathologists, detectives, prosecutors, and human rights activists.
Chen Kugel, the unheralded and original (unnamed outside of Israel) whistle-blower on the Forensic Institute, said that the situation was much worse than what Yehuda Hiss admitted in his interview with me in 2000. Kugel’s comments stand as a first-person account from a military officer and a forensic pathologist. When he returned to Israel to work at the Forensic Institute in 2000, after several years in the United States, where he was working in various hospitals and forensic programs, he says he immediately realized that something was terribly wrong. He tried to address the problems with three medical residents, and with them together to have a meeting with the director. Kugel was the spokesperson, and he told Hiss that it was wrong to harvest organs and tissues without permission, and that “giving false evidence in court is also not okay.” This went nowhere, and so the group wrote a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Health, outlining the illegalities. The Ministry of Health reacted with alacrity: they fired the three residents and punished Kugel, who, as a military officer working for the IDF, could not be fired. Then they went to the media and spilled the entire story about what exactly was going on.
Kugel: “Organs were sold to anyone”
In fact, according to Kugel, “Organs were sold to anyone; anyone that wanted organs just had to pay for them.” While skin, heart valves, bones, and corneas were removed and used for transplants, solid organs – hearts, brains, livers – “were sold for research, for presentations, for drills for medical students and surgeons.”
There was a price for these organs, low – $ 300 for a femur, for example – and should a client want all the organs from a body, that could be arranged, not the body itself, but all the organs removed and sold, Kugel said, for about $2,500.
Amid the uproar prompted by the whistle-blowers, Hiss waged his own media campaign and tried to convince the public that everything that was done was to serve a noble end, to help the war-wounded victims of terrorist attacks, and the sick. He presented his conduct, in Dr. Kugel’s descripton, “as something sublime or even heroic, as a modern-day Robin Hood. Taking from the dead and giving to the innocent victims.”
So, whom were the organs taken from? Kugel asked rhetorically. The answer was they were taken from everyone, from Jews and Muslims, from soldiers and from stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from immigrants. There were only two considerations – the physical condition of the body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.
Most of the victims of illegal organ harvesting, according to Kugel, were not even subject to autopsy, they were simply harvested. They hid the damage by putting pipes and glass eyes, and broom sticks, and toilet paper and plastic skull caps to cover the place where the brain was removed, and so on. The Institute, Kugel said, was counting on one thing: that most Israelis do not view the body after death except once, to verify that the body is the right one. The body is wrapped in a winding sheet, or might be wrapped in plastic sheets for the burial company to come for it. In that case, the staff would warn the burial employees, who were not well educated, not to open the sheet because the body was contaminated with an infectious disease. It was more difficult to take organs from soldiers because their bodies were supervised by the military, which was more difficult to fool. “But organs were taken from soldiers,” Kugel said. It was easier to take tissues and organs from the new immigrants, and, needless to say, easiest of all to take from the Palestinians. They would be going back across the border, and, “if there were any complaints coming from their families, they were the enemy and so, of course, they were lying and no one would believe them”.
What Kugel found most amazing was the uproar around the Boström article, when there was abundant detail in the Israeli press about the Institute whose affairs were discussed heatedly by commissions, finding blatant evidence of illegalities despite the attempts to destroy all the evidence. After these things were exposed, it took two years for the judge, or the head of the special inquest, to decide whether or not Hiss should be sued. Then, it took the police two years to begin a serious investigation. The end result was that Hiss was removed as director of the Institute but, as previously noted, retained as senior pathologist and given a salary increase. Kugel was dismissed from his post because, during the investigation, he spoke with one of the witnesses who had buried evidence – human body parts – and thus was seen as interfering with the trial. He was censored and blacklisted from teaching at all but one of Israel’s universities. To Dr. Kugel the prime issue had nothing at all to do with science: it was about disrespect, about hoarding body specimens, about turning the Institute into a factory of bodies. The Institute’s conduct was motivated by money, by power, and by authoritarian paternalism of the sort that says, “We know what’s good for you, we’ll decide what happens to you, the person who doesn’t know anything. We’ll decide.” And that’s the reason why that happened, and Dr. Kugel asserts it is happening to this day.
Questions About Rachel Corrie’s Autopsy
On March 14, 2010, the Haifa District Court heard testimony in the civil law suit filed by the family of the slain U.S. citizen and Gaza peace activist, Rachel Corrie, against the State of Israel for her unlawful killing in Rafah, Gaza. Corrie, an American college student and human rights activist, was crushed to death on March 16, 2003, by a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer. During the hearing, Dr. Hiss, who conducted the autopsy of Rachel Corrie at the request of the Israeli military, admitted that he had violated an Israeli court order that required an official from the U.S. Embassy to be present as a witness. Hiss stated that it was his policy not to allow anyone who is not a physician or a biologist to observe autopsy. Hiss admitted that he had retained samples of tissues and organs from Corrie’s body for examination and testing without informing the Corrie family. Hiss was uncertain about whether the samples had been buried with other body samples from the Institute. Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, were shocked by these chilling admissions and really do not know quite what to make of them or what, if anything, they should do about it. They are seeking, they told me, only the truth and symbolic damages of $1.00. The prevention of harm to others is, they say, far more important than money.
Finally, what links the story of Yehuda Hiss at the National Forensic Institute and Isaac Rosenbaum and the international network of organs traffickers in Israel? Perhaps only the same sad fact that hysteria about organs scarcities – whatever that chilling phrase evokes – have driven both the medical abuses of the dead and the medical abuses of those who were trafficked to service transplant tourists from Israel to New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, among other sites. When Dr. Zaki Shapira began putting out feelers for kidney sellers in the early 1990s to serve the needs of his transplant patients at Bellinson Hospital in Tel Aviv, he found them close at hand, Palestinian guest workers. Palestinians were, he told me in Bellagio in 1996 at a conference on organ trafficking, “pre-disposed” to sacrifice their organs. Or, perhaps, to be sacrificed. It works both ways. CP
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the author of several books on poverty and health, including Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil – listed by CounterPunch in its top 100 non-fiction books published in English in the 20th Century. She can be reached at: nsh@berkeley.edu
Footnotes
[1]. N. Mozgovaya, US Professor is whistle blower in Rosenbaum arrest. Haaretz 26 July, 2009. .
[2]. M. Daly Anthropologist's ‘Dick Tracy moment’ plays role in arrest of suspected kidney trafficker. New York Daily News 24 July 2009.
[3] Nancy Scheper-Hughes,2008,“Illegal Organ Trade: Global Justice and the Traffic in Human Organs” in Living Donor Organ Transplants, edited by Rainer Grussner,M.D. and Enrico Bendetti, MD. New York: McGraw-Hill; N. Scheper-Hughes,2006,“Kidney bKin: Inside the Transatlantic Kidney Trade”, Harvard International Review (winter) 62-65; “N. Scheper-Hughes, (2004) “Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography in the Organ Trafficking Underworld”, Ethnography 5(1): 29-73; N. Scheper-Hughes,2000, The Global Traffic in Organs, Current Anthropology 4192): 191-224
[4] “Israeli doctor said detained in Turkey for illegal organ transplants. Three other Israelis said detained, including 2 alleged kidney donors and a recipient;15 people held.” Haaretz News Service, January 1, 2007.
[5] In several detailed email exchanges (2006-2008) from a criminal lawyer (name withheld on request) I learned that the government of Israel decided to pursue the international crimes of transplant surgeons and brokers operating out of Israel by means tax fraud investigations.
[6] ” plant/about_adi.html “Knesset approves new organ donation law”, http//articles/0,7340,L-3523461,00.html
[7] United States District Court of New Jersey: criminal complaint: United States of America v. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, : Mag. No. 09-3620 a/k/a “Issac Rosenbaum”, July 2009
[8] English translation of Donald Bostrom’s article can be found at:
[9] Donald Boström, 2001. Inshallah : konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina. Stockholm: Ordfront.
[10] Zeev Galilee, 2003. First Source (Makor Rishon) –“Pangs of Conscience” (Musar Klayot) New Blood Libel on French Television: Israel Steals Kidneys of Orphan Children in Moldavia, 24 October 2003.
[11] Meira Weiss, personal communication and paper read at Organs Watch conference combating traffic in organs and tissues, UCBerkeley, May 7, 2010.
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Like my Pentagon papers, these Iraq war logs can't be buried
There is no security risk in revealing the scale of torture and killing. Far more damage was done by trying to suppress it
Daniel Ellsberg,
Guardian,
25 Oct. 2010,
Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant.
As with Vietnam, we have again seen evidence of a massive cover-up over a number of years by the American authorities. The logs reveal the human consequences of the continuing Iraq war, which have been concealed from the western public for too long: the countless instances of torture; the killing of hundreds of civilians at roadside checkpoints.
Now we know that the Pentagon, which claimed in the early years of the Iraq invasion either that it didn't count casualties or that it had no evidence of them, was indeed keeping meticulous records all along. It has reports of 66,000 civilian casualties – 15,000 of which were completely unknown to Iraq Body Count, the only public attempt to log the war's victims. That means 15,000 deaths that never made any news report – five times the number murdered on 9/11. It certainly would be news if they were American or British deaths. That's 15,000 families who've suffered huge anguish and who may potentially have been motivated to seek revenge against American or allied troops. For the Pentagon to lie or try to hide this kind of carnage can only be self-defeating.
Perhaps that the victims are "only" Iraqis shows the kind of mindset among the occupying commanders that kept this bloody war going for so long. Perhaps they failed to realise that the coalition's deadly activities have been such a powerful recruitment weapon for the resistance, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When I released the Pentagon papers in 1971, the administration responded by trying to suppress publication. It took out an injunction against myself and the New York Times in order to stop publication – a clear violation of the US constitution's first amendment – claiming that every page and every day's revelations were gravely damaging national security. We were eventually vindicated by the fact that no such damage was shown to have taken place.
Indeed, what gained such great media attention then was not so much the substance of our revelations but the unprecedented efforts by the administration to suppress them. Other newspapers followed suit – in total 19 defied the department of justice. And this duel sparked a wave of civil disobedience that had never been seen before. After a two-week legal battle the supreme court eventually ruled in our favour.
The US administration has learned from that episode. It has repeated the line – as it did with the leaked Afghan war papers in July – that the leaks are a danger to national security and put US troops' lives at risk. (Though the Pentagon has now had to acknowledge that it doesn't have any evidence of a single life being harmed in Afghanistan since July, despite the fact they've been searching desperately for it.)
At the same time, however, the Pentagon has been trying to downplay the revelations in order to lessen the public reaction. It says these reports are nothing new, and that they've already been the subject of public discussion. Well, maybe they're nothing new to Iraqis, who have lived with the consequences of torture and checkpoint killings for seven years. And of course they're nothing new to the Pentagon – it has been reporting these cases internally for years. But over that period, each time the American media has reported claims of indiscriminate killings, it has always reported either that the US military deny the allegations or that they are "investigating". As former British ambassador Craig Murray once said, these revelations don't risk the lives of our soldiers, but risk merely the reputations of the politicians and bureaucrats who send them to their deaths.
The US is in the midst of a frenzied congressional election campaign, and because Republicans and Democrats are both incriminated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars have scarcely been mentioned. But now that we have strong evidence of a huge cover-up over a number of years – in the largest unauthorised disclosure in history – the mainstream media cannot ignore it. And I feel confident that meaningful action will result. Forty years ago, to make my revelations, I utilised the then leading technology, Xerox, to photocopy 7,000 pages of evidence. I can only envy the ability of a 21st century whistleblower to impart a vastly greater trove of material using digital technology. And now the information is on the web, millions have the ability to look into it further in the coming days. It will play out very differently.
In addition, I've been impressed by Britain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – who, rather than complaining about national secrets being compromised, has said the Iraq data need to be investigated. Any inquiry, even if only in the UK, will keep the issue high on the global agenda.
In the coming months I hope the courage and patriotism shown by the sources of these records – who risk long prison sentences – will be emulated by those with access to higher level documents. We need to see White House, Pentagon and CIA papers that reveal evidence of war crimes by top-level policy-makers – to bring the criminal activity that's happening right now into the conscience of the American people.
The possibility of uncovering this is worth the great personal risk by whoever the sources may be – just as I never doubted that it was worth risking my own freedom to reveal the Pentagon Papers four decades ago.
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Iraq war logs: These crimes were not secret, they were tolerated
Why did we not investigate allegations of murder and torture in Iraq at the time, when it was well known what was going on?
Peter Beaumont,
Guardian,
25 Oct. 2010,
The most shocking of the revelations in the current batch of leaked Iraq war logs is that most of the acts of torture and murder were committed in the open. They weren't secret. They were tolerated, sanitised – justified, even. Take the Wolf Brigade, the 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos. Everybody knew about them. You would see them in their pick-up trucks wearing balaclavas. When there was a sectarian murder people would talk about the wolves, until they became a shorthand to describe a certain kind of cruel violence. The wolf commandos became killers in the uniform of the Iraqi police.
I recall speaking to UN human rights investigators, western police advisers, diplomats and army officers about what was going on. In 2005 an Iraqi government official confirmed a list of places where she believed torture and murder were taking place. A British police mentor described entering the office of a notorious figure at the interior ministry and found a man with a bag over his head standing in the corner of the office.
Some of us who covered Iraq wrote about what we found. In summer 2005, I described the operation of the torture squads. Human rights organisations prepared their own reports. But nothing very much happened, except excuses.
When the bodies started turning up in western Baghdad in 2004, the official line was that it was former Ba'athists who were being killed. Like the looting that occurred in the aftermath of the fall of Iraq, it was "understood." The victims probably deserved it, was the unspoken intimation. Officials, British and American, were really not that bothered.
Later, when it was men in police uniforms who were doing the killing, reported in the Iraqi papers day after day, the official line was "anyone could buy a uniform" or that these were difficult times and there would be "bad apples".
But they weren't bad apples. I spoke to people who had been taken to the interior ministry and heard the screams. One day a DVD was brought to me of a former interview subject who had been tortured to death after being taken by men in uniform. Like others, I wrote up what I knew. But nothing much ever happened.
It's true that when things sometimes became too embarrassing – too obvious – a local police chief implicated in killings might be removed or officials at the ministry re-organised. But the murder continued. There was a new excuse: the police had been infiltrated by Shia extremists. Which was true, up to a point. Except it wasn't really infiltration, more of an alliance in many places: a coincidence of sectarian interest.
Sometimes I would come across soldiers who would intervene. One day, at the Ministry of the Interior, a group of American soldiers arrived to free some men who were being abused in a facility called the "guest house" which was being guarded by other American soldiers. An argument between two US officers ensued. The beaten Iraqis were released.
Sometimes it was an awful game. In 2007, I was embedded with a US unit in Baghdad, tasked to go after some Shia militiamen suspected of attacking Sunnis. The rules then required an Iraqi police escort. The chief of police found excuses for over an hour to prevent the raid commencing. Everybody knew that the targets were being warned off by the police – or suspected it at least. But nothing much happened except some grumbles at the wasted time. And it is this that makes me angry now when I hear UN officials and politicians, after the event, calling for inquiries. Yes, there we things we didn't know: about the US order not to investigate allegations of murder and torture; the evidence of collaboration. And yes, an inquiry is an absolute necessity. But why now, not then? For who in Iraq did not know about the killing and torture? About the police death squads? About nothing ever really happening to halt it when we had a chance? Investigate, by all means – but it is too late.
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Another summit failure exemplifies an Arab world in crisis
Regional states, which unite readily whenever Israel is the issue, can seldom do so regarding their own internal affairs.
By ZVI MAZEL
Jerusalem Post,
10/25/2010,
An extraordinary summit of the leaders of the Arab world was held on October 9 in the Libyan city of Syrte. It had been convened in accordance with the decision taken at the regular yearly summit in March. And the press – international and Israeli alike – did not have much to say about it.
Most press attention had been diverted to another meeting, that of the Arab League monitoring committee. Would it endorse the position of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who had stated that direct talks with Israel were contingent on the continuing building freeze in the settlements? It did and the council of Arab foreign ministers who met in Syrte to determine the upcoming summit’s program followed suit. However the council gave the US a month to find a solution enabling the pursuit of the talks.
Arab states that unite readily whenever Israel is the issue can seldom do so regarding their own internal affairs. The outcome of the Syrte summit is yet another powerful reminder of the continuing failure of these states to tackle their more pressing political and economic problems. Two vexing issues on which no consensus had been found at the regular summit were on the agenda.
PRIOR TO THE MARCH summit, which was also held in Syrte, the host country and chair, and Yemen, drafted a document calling on member states to upgrade the relevant institutions of the Arab League by amending its charter to ensure better coordination in dealing with common issues.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was in favor and even suggested changing the name of the League of Arab States (usually referred to as the Arab League) to the Union of Arab States.
Amr Mussa, whose term of office as head of the Arab League ends next year, gave his wholehearted approval to a move which would give him an opportunity to seek a new mandate in what would be a new organization. It was also Mussa who presented the second document, which deals with setting up a suitable framework for working with neighboring states such as Iran and Turkey. Here again was a bid to boost his standing and that of the Arab League, which had been badly eroded by their failure to contribute to the development of member states.
Despite intense media interest, Arab leaders demonstrated once again how reluctant they were to move forward. Internal strife and opposing views among summit members led to these issues being shelved until an extraordinary summit could discuss them in depth.
Observers had little expectations of seeing any significant progress on such important issues at the extraordinary summit. They had not counted on the combined efforts of Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi and of Mussa, who brought amended drafts of their proposals and tried to pressure participants into accepting them.
Following intense discussions in meetings which were closed to the public, the first proposal was endorsed and the secretariat of the Arab League was asked to prepare a definitive text which would be presented to the next regular yearly summit scheduled to be held next March in Iraq. (The venue is still in dispute, several states being reluctant to have the meeting there). Regarding the second proposal, it was decided to create a special committee headed by Gadaffi to further examine the issue.
In other words, the final decision was postponed again, till the next summit. Some progress had allegedly been made on the first proposal, which was accepted in principle, though some states, such as Saudi Arabia, were unhappy about it.
A few days after the Syrte summit ended, a number of sources leaked to the Egyptian daily Al-Masri al-Yom and to the Saudi daily published in London A-Sharq al-Awsat details from the closed meetings.
It turned out that seven countries led by Saudi Arabia were against changing the mandate of the Arab League; they argued that, in its present form, it provided the organization with all the tools it needed to promote and develop cooperation between member states.
The seven countries notified the secretariat of the Arab League that they did not agree to the minutes of the meeting communicated by Mussa to member states. Later, the official Saudi representation to the Arab League in Cairo published the memorandum it had sent on that subject; the Saudi information minister reiterated that there was no need to change the existing institutions, only to strengthen them through measures decided by consensus among Arab states.
This led to considerable agitation. In a interview with A-Sharq al-Awsat, Mussa tried to defuse the issue by saying that the recommendations in his proposal included “only” having two summit meetings a year instead of one and that in any case all member states would have their say at the next summit.
The Arab League was created in Cairo on March 22, 1945. The UK strongly supported the move and the league included the countries which were independent at the time – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan (the name was changed to Jordan in 1949), Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The Emirates and North African countries joined later when they became independent.
Changing the charter of the league is not an easy task, not to be achieved by a sneak attack such as was carried by Libya and by Mussa. It requires discussions in depth, and the consensus of all members, particularly founding members. Furthermore there is nothing in the proposed changes which can improve the disastrous political and economic situation of Arab states or bring about a rapprochement between feuding members.
WHAT ARAB countries need right now is determination and courage. Middle Eastern and North African Arab countries are today the least developed part of the world after African and Sahel countries. Yet their combined population is more than 350 million, they have immense natural resources including natural gas and oil, minerals and vast territories where they could develop advanced agriculture, alternative sources of energy and modern cities. However all – with the exception of Lebanon – have dictatorial regimes with varying degrees of corruption, and cannot therefore advance toward democracy and respect of human rights, let alone economic progress and education.
Tribal and ethnic conflicts combined with the rise of radical Islam have already brought the collapse of Somalia, while Sudan, Iraq and Yemen are perilously close to the same situation. Other states such as Saudi Arabia are threatened and must depend on their armies to survive. Iran’s ceaseless efforts to extend its influence and its steady progress toward the manufacturing of nuclear weapons are a direct threat to Persian Gulf countries. Through its proxies Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran is pushing its tentacles deep into the Middle East, as can be seen in Lebanon, Egypt and in the West Bank.
On the political front, pragmatic and extremist Arab nations are in a state of open confrontation. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco are facing Syria – which is assisting Iran and supports Hizbullah while meddling in Lebanese affairs. This has a destabilizing effect on the region. Qatar leans toward Iran; Algeria, where the civil war is yet to be subdued, is violently against Israel and against the West. One could go on to further expose the fallacy of the so called “union” on all issues – except, of course, Israel.
Regarding the second proposal, setting up a suitable framework for cooperation with neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey, it is quite obvious that most member states are against it. They are afraid of Iranian subversive activities and are only too well aware that there can be no dialogue with that country, only submission. Gadaffi will doubtless try to draft a seemingly acceptable document for the next summit, but the result is not in doubt.
Arab countries enjoy normal relations with Turkey, though they are uneasy with the deepening of the Islamic influence and the references to a renewal of the caliphate; they have not forgotten that Turkey is the heir of the Ottoman Empire which once ruled them.
Thus the concerted attempts by Gadaffi and Mussa to change the charter of the Arab League to bring about greater cooperation to tackle the difficult situation of the Arab states seem divorced from reality.
Much more is needed to see a change for the better in the Middle East. However it seems that no one wants to admit it. Arab states are still in denial and as long as they refuse to deal with the very real issues confronting them, things can only get worse. Summit meetings which won’t take the bull by his horns are doomed to fail and to plunge the Arab world deeper into the abyss.
The writer is a former ambassador to Egypt, Romania and Sweden and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Report: Caterpillar to delay supply of D9 bulldozers to IDF
Jerusalem Post,
10/25/2010,
Caterpillar, the company which supplies the IDF with bulldozers, has announced that it is delaying the supply of D9 bulldozers during the time that the trial of Rachel Corrie proceeds, Channel 2 reported on Monday.
The company does not usually manufacture a military version of the D9 but it has many features that make desirable for military applications and the IDF has used them extensively for operations.
Rachel Corrie was a US activist who was killed in Gaza seven years ago by a bulldozer driver who struck and killed her. Her family charged that the IDF and its officers had acted recklessly, using an armored Caterpillar D9R bulldozer without regard to the presence in the area of unarmed and nonviolent civilians.
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South Lebanon Army veteran Fuaz Najim: 'State of Israel turned its back on me'
South Lebanon Army veteran Fuaz Najim's money ran out after he and his wife fell ill, leaving him effectively homeless. 'I never asked for favors, only what I deserved,' he says
Hagai Einav
Yedioth Ahronoth,
25 Oct. 2010,
Last May Israel marked 10 years since its army's withdrawal from Lebanon and the arrival of thousands of South Lebanon Army (SLA) veterans to the country. Meanwhile, some have returned to Lebanon or moved to Europe while others settled in Israel, where there are those who are still struggling .
Fuaz Najim, 55, an SLA veteran was forced Monday to move out of his Kiryat Shmona apartment to a tent after his landlord issued an eviction order against him for a debt amounting to tens of thousands of shekels.
"I have nothing against the landlord," Najim told Ynet. "He waited for a long time to get me out. I feel ashamed of the situation I'm in and the fact that the State of Israel is ignoring me. For years I operated as part of a special ASL unit for the IDF, the Shin Bet and the Mossas until the IDF withdrew from Lebanon, and even afterwards when I was called to duty. People will never know about some of the things I did.
"Unfortunately, I don't get support from the Defense Ministry, and myself and my wife's poor health condition has led us to this state."
'Never asked for favors'
Najim arrived in Israel from the village of Kalia and like his friends tried to make a life for himself in the Jewish state. "Only when I got to Israel did I marry my wife because I was always afraid to die and leave a family behind.
"My wife fell ill and I'm waiting to undergo two urgent back surgeries. Whatever money we had run out and I'm ashamed to beg for help from leaders of a country whose soldiers I fought alongside. I never asked for favors, only what I deserved. The State of Israel had turned its back on me at the moment of truth."
Together with his SLA friends Najim approached the various governmental ministries. "Minister Yossi Peled's office promised to do something and I hope it happens as soon as possible. We're facing the winter and living in a tent with all your belongings scattered outside is painful and sad."
Peled's office, which is responsible of SLA veterans said, "We are familiar with Fuaz Najim's case and there is an attempt to find a solution for the matter in coordination with all relevant governmental elements."
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Robert Fisk: Exodus. The changing map of the Middle East
From Israel to Iraq, a Christian flight of Biblical proportions has begun
Independent,
26 Oct. 2010,
In the centre of the rebuilt Beirut, the massive old Maronite Cathedral of St George stands beside the even larger mass of the new Mohammad al-Amin mosque. The mosque's minarets tower over the cathedral, but the Maronites were built a spanking new archbishop's house between the two buildings as compensation. Yet every day, the two calls to prayer – the clanging of church bells and the wailing of the muezzin – beat an infernal percussion across the city. Both bells and wails are tape recordings, but they have been turned up to the highest decibel pitch to outdo each other, louder than an aircraft's roar, almost as crazed as the nightclub music from Gemmayzeh across the square. But the Christians are leaving.
Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq's Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of the population. More than half of Lebanon's Christians now live outside their country. Once a majority, the nation's one and a half million Christians, most of them Maronite Catholics, comprise perhaps 35 per cent of the Lebanese. Egypt's Coptic Christians – there are at most around eight million – now represent less than 10 per cent of the population.
This is, however, not so much a flight of fear, more a chronicle of a death foretold. Christians are being outbred by the majority Muslim populations in their countries and they are almost hopelessly divided. In Jerusalem, there are 13 different Christian churches and three patriarchs. A Muslim holds the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to prevent Armenian and Orthodox priests fighting each other at Easter.
When more than 200 members of 14 different churches – some of them divided – gathered in Rome last week for a papal synod on the loss of Christian populations in the lands where Christianity began, it was greeted with boredom or ignored altogether by most of the West's press.
Yet nowhere is the Christian fate sadder than in the territories around Jerusalem. As Monsignor Fouad Twal, the ninth Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and the second to be an Arab, put it bleakly, "the Israelis regard us as 100 per cent Palestinian Arabs and we are oppressed in the same way as the Muslims. But Muslim fundamentalists identify us with the Christian West – which is not always true – and want us to pay the price." With Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem cut off from Jerusalem by the same Israeli wall which imprisons their Muslim brothers, there is now, Twal says, "a young generation of Christians who do not know or visit the Holy Sepulchre".
The Jordanian royal family have always protected their Christian population – at 350,000, it is around 6 per cent of the population – but this is perhaps the only flame of hope in the region. The divisions within Christianity proved even more dangerous to their community than the great Sunni-Shia divide did to the Muslims of the Middle East. Even the Crusaders were divided in their 100-year occupation of Palestine, or "Outremer", as they called it. The Lebanese journalist Fady Noun, a Christian, wrote a profound article from Rome last week in which he spoke of the Christian loss as "a great wound haemorrhaging blood", and bemoaned both Christian division and "egoism" for what he saw as a spiritual as well as a physical emigration. "There are those Christians who reach a kind of indifference... in Western countries who, swayed by the culture of these countries and the media, persuade eastern Christians to forget their identity," he wrote.
Pope Benedict, whose mournful visit to the Holy Land last year prompted him to call the special synod which ended in the Vatican at the weekend, has adopted his usual perspective – that, despite their difficulties, Christians of the "Holy Land" must reinvigorate their feelings as "living stones" of the Middle Eastern Church. "To live in dignity in your own nation is before everything a fundamental human right," he said. "That is why you must support conditions of peace and justice, which are indispensable for the harmonious development of all the inhabitants of the region." But the Pope's words sometimes suggested that real peace and justice lay in salvation rather than historical renewal.
Patriarch Twal believes that the Pope understood during his trip to Israel and the West Bank last year "the disastrous consequences of the conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs" and has stated openly that one of the principal causes of Christian emigration is "the Israeli occupation, the Christians' lack of freedom of movement, and the economic circumstances in which they live". But he does not see the total disappearance of the Christian faith in the Middle East. "We must have the courage to accept that we are Arabs and Christians and be faithful to this identity. Our wonderful mission is to be a bridge between East and West."
One anonymous prelate at the Rome synod, quoted in one of the synod's working papers, took a more pragmatic view. "Let's stop saying there is no problem with Muslims; this isn't true," he said. "The problem doesn't only come from fundamentalists, but from constitutions. In all the countries of the region except Lebanon, Christians are second-class citizens." If religious freedom is guaranteed in these countries, "it is limited by specific laws and practices". In Egypt, this has certainly been the case since President Sadat referred to himself as "the Muslim president of a Muslim country".
The Lebanese Maronite Church – its priests, by the way, can marry – understands all too well how Christians can become aligned with political groups. The Lebanese writer Sami Khalife wrote last week in the French-language newspaper L'Orient-Le Jour – the francophone voice of Lebanon's Christians – that a loss of moral authority had turned churches in his country into "political actors" which were beginning to sound like political parties. An open letter to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, warning him to try to turn Lebanon into a "front line" against Israel, was signed by 250 Lebanese. Most of them were from the minority Christian community.
Nor can the church ignore Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is banned as a religion just as much as the building of churches. Christians cannot visit the Islamic holy cities of Mecca or Medina – the doors of the Vatican and Canterbury Cathedral are at least open to Muslims – and 12 Filipinos and a priest were arrested in Saudi Arabia only this month for "proselytism" for holding a secret mass. There is, perhaps, a certain irony in the fact that the only balance to Christian emigration has been the arrival in the Middle East of perhaps a quarter of a million Christian Filipino guest workers – especially in the Gulf region – while Patriarch Twal reckons that around 40,000 of them now work and live in Israel and "Palestine".
Needless to say, it is violence against Christians that occupies the West, a phenomenon nowhere better, or more bloodily, illustrated than by al-Qa'ida's kidnapping of Archbishop Faraj Rahho in Mosul – an incident recorded in the US military archives revealed on Saturday – and his subsequent murder. When the Iraqi authorities later passed death sentences on two men for the killing, the church asked for them to be reprieved. In Egypt, there has been a gloomy increase in Christian-Muslim violence, especially in ancient villages in the far south of the country; in Cairo, Christian churches are now cordoned off by day-and-night police checkpoints.
And while Western Christians routinely deplore the falling Christian populations of the Middle East, their visits to the region tend to concentrate on pilgrimages to Biblical sites rather than meetings with their Christian opposite numbers.
Americans, so obsessed by the myths of East-West "clashes of civilisation" since 11 September 2001, often seem to regard Christianity as a "Western" rather than an Eastern religion, neatly separating the Middle East roots of their own religion from the lands of Islam. That in itself is a loss of faith.
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