[Peace-discuss] Fwd: 'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors' by Israel

Wed Aug 26 10:38:05 CDT 2009

Not trying to equate horrific factual news w/ art, but "Central Station" is worth watching. CPL has the DVD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Station_(film)
 --Jenifer

--- On Wed, 8/26/09, John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: 'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors' by Israel
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 8:33 AM

Here's an interesting perspective.

THE WISDOM FUND
http://www.twf.org

August 23, 2009
palestinechronicle.com

'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors' by Israel

By Donald Boström

You could call me a 'matchmaker,' said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn,
USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a
client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested
and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal
organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum¹s matchmaking had nothing to do with
romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the
black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for $10,000, from poor
people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the
States for $160,000. The accusations have shaken the American
transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ trafficking
is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the New Jersey
Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: ³Quite a
lot. And I have never failed,² he boasts. The business has been running for
quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at
Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation¹s Board of Directors,
tells the same newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported
from Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well. 56,000
operations a year, about ten per cent of the world¹s kidney transplants are
carried out illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and
China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But
Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young
men and having them serve as the country¹s organ reserve  a very serious
accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court
of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with
organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ
collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that ³the
rest of the European countries are expected to follow France¹s example
shortly.²

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the
2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin
America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but
do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is
the only western country with a medical profession that doesn¹t condemn the
illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors
participating in the illegal business  on the contrary, chief medical
officers of Israel¹s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal
transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to
address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at
having the Israeli public register for post mortem organ donation. Half a
million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was
the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post
reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had
signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal month.
In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap
between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in line for a
kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45 people
in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear
from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers
would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories.
There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with
ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was
approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons
contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were
prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting
network 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. One example that I
encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed
Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column
sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts
of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still,
waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others
hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the
curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for
the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the
electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone  not even a cat
could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of
the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don¹t remember if
our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on
May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village¹s carpentry
workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action
was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters
who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the
military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he
hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught
meant torture and death for these boys  they had to stay in the mountains
at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked
unprotected past the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother,
knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to
restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The
soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and
calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they
needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest.
According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot
with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry
workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by
his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair.
Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close
by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care..
Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim.
Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a
jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military
helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family..
Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who
had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel
Aviv, to the place for his final rest. ³Captain Yahya is the worst of them
all,² the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body
and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of
the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing
cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from
the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal
was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to
the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to.
Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit
from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what
had happened: ³Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,² 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.

³Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury
them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing
autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the
bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the
area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?²
Nafe¹s uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to
the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army
claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian
victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem
was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to
the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street,
explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in
school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were between four
months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through
postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians   of
which the army spokesperson was talking  has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and
illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the
authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the
big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We
also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought
back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back
together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It¹s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what
is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel
since the Intifada began.

- Donald Boström is a Swedish photojournalist, graphic artist and writer. He
is a contributor to the Social-democratic evening paper Aftonbladet. He
contributed this article (originally published in Swedish, August 17th, in
Alfonbladet)

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15377

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