In August Sweden\u2019s largest daily newspaper published an article containing grisly evidence suggesting that Israel had been taking Palestinian internal organs. The article, by veteran photojournalist Donald Bostrom, called for an international investigation to discover the facts.1<\/p>\n
Israel immediately accused Bostrom and the newspaper of \u201canti-Semitism,\u201d and charged that suggesting Israelis could be involved in the illicit removal of body parts constituted a modern \u201cblood libel\u201d (medieval stories of Jews killing people for their blood).2<\/p>\n
Numerous Israeli partisans repeated these accusations, including Commentary\u2019s<\/i> Jonathan Tobin, who asserted that the story was \u201cmerely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.\u201d3 Others suggested that the newspaper was \u201cirresponsible\u201d for running such an article.4<\/p>\n
The fact is, however, that Israeli organ harvesting\u2014sometimes with Israeli governmental funding and the participation of high Israeli officials, prominent Israeli physicians, and Israeli ministries\u2014has been documented for many years. Among the victims have been Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor\u2019s Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, the founder of Organ Watch, and the author of scholarly books and articles on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream media call upon when they need expert commentary on the topic.5<\/p>\n
While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers and procurers come from numerous nations and ethnicities, including Americans and Arabs, she is unflinchingly honest in speaking about the Israeli connection:<\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael is at the top,\u201d she states. \u201cIt has tentacles reaching out worldwide.\u201d6<\/p>\n
In a lecture last year sponsored by New York\u2019s PBS 13 Forum, Scheper-Hughes explained that Israeli organ traffickers, \u201chad and still have a pyramid system at work that\u2019s awesome\u2026they have brokers everywhere, bank accounts everywhere; they\u2019ve got recruiters, they\u2019ve got translators, they\u2019ve got travel agents who set up the visas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lest this sound simply like a successful international concern, it\u2019s important to understand the nature of such a business.<\/p>\n
As Scheper-Hughes describes it, organ trafficking consists of \u201cpaying the poor and the hungry to slowly dismantle their bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organ traffickers prey on the world\u2019s poorest, most desperate citizens\u2014slum dwellers, inhabitants of dying villages, people without means or hope. Traffickers promise them what seem like astronomical sums of money (from $1,000 to $10,000)\u2014which they frequently don\u2019t even deliver\u2014in return for vital internal organs.
\nFor traffickers, human body parts are commodities, to be cut out of the bodies of the poor and sold to the rich. The organ \u201cdonors\u201d receive no follow-up care and end up worse off on many levels\u2014physically, financially, psychologically, socially\u2014than even their original tragic situation. Sometimes they are coerced into such \u201cdonations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organ sales have been illegal in most countries for years. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which covers prevention, enforcement and sanctions in trafficking of humans, includes in its definition of human exploitation the extraction of organs for profit.7 Israel finally passed legislation against organ trafficking in 2008.8, 9<\/p>\n
In her Forum 13 lecture Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: \u201cRevenge, restitution\u2014reparation for the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n
She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her \u201cit\u2019s kind of \u2018an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We\u2019re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Scheper-Hughes says that she \u201ceven heard doctors saying that.\u201d<\/p>\n
For many years Israelis in need of an internal organ have gone on what experts call \u201ctransplant tourism\u201d\u2014traveling to other nations to obtain internal organs. Sometimes body parts are obtained from those freshly dead; more often from the desperately needy. While affluent people from numerous countries and ethnicities engage in this practice, Israel is unique in several significant ways.<\/p>\n
First, Israelis engage in this at an extraordinarily high rate. According to a 2001 BBC report, Israelis buy more kidneys per capita than any other population.<\/p>\n
Second, Israelis have the lowest donor rate in the world\u2014one-fifth that of Europe, according to BBC. This is in part because there has been a widespread impression that Jewish religious law prohibits transplants as a \u201cdesecration of the body.\u201d10 The Israeli news service Ynet reports, \u201cthe percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups.\u201d11<\/p>\n
Third, the Israeli government has enabled the practice. For many years the Israeli health system subsidized its citizens\u2019 \u201ctransplant holidays,\u201d reimbursing Israelis $80,000 for medical operations abroad. Much of the remaining costs could often be obtained from government-subsidized12 Israeli insurance plans.13 In addition, Israel\u2019s Ministry of Defense was directly involved.<\/p>\n
Scheper-Hughes discussed Israeli organ trafficking in detail in 2001 in published testimony to the Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.14 In her extensive testimony, Scheper-Hughes stated that although Israel had become a pariah for its organ policies, Israeli officials exhibited \u201camazing tolerance\u2026toward outlawed \u2018transplant tourism.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She described an international syndicate which was \u201corganized through a local business corporation in conjunction with a leading transplant surgeon, operating out of a major medical center not far from Tel Aviv,\u201d and which had forged links with transplant surgeons in Turkey, Russia, Moldavia, Estonia, Georgia, Romania, and New York City.<\/p>\n
The Israeli Ministry of Defense was directly involved in what Scheper-Hughes called Israel\u2019s \u201c\u2018illicit [in other nations] national \u2018program\u2019 of transplant tourism\u2026Members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them\u201d accompanied transplant junkets.<\/p>\n
In her Forum 13 lecture, Scheper-Hughes said that investigating Israeli organ trafficking over the past decade had taken her \u201cfrom country to country to country to country.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of these is Moldova, the poorest country in Europe\u2014and homeland of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman\u2014where 90 percent of the people earn less than $2 a day. A 2001 BBC report on organ trafficking described the situation: \u201cHundreds of Israelis have created a production line that starts in the villages of Moldova, where men today are walking around with one kidney.15<\/p>\n
Another is Brazil, where a legislative commission found that 30 [it may actually have been as high as 60] Brazilians from impoverished neighborhoods had sold their kidneys to a trafficking ring headed by Israelis, with Israeli citizens receiving almost all of the organs, and the Israeli government providing most of the funding.16<\/p>\n
The ring had also begun inquiring about buying other vital organs from poor residents, including lungs, livers and corneas.17<\/p>\n
An Inter Press Service (IPS) news story from the time reported that Scheper-Hughes testified to the commission that international trafficking of human organs had begun some 12 years earlier, promoted by Zaki Shapira, head of kidney transplant services at Bellinson Medical Center, near Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n
Scheper-Hughes reported that Shapira had performed more than 300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries such as Turkey. The recipients were very wealthy or had very good health insurance, and the \u201cdonors\u201d very poor people from Eastern Europe, the Philippines and other developing countries.<\/p>\n
The chairman of the Brazilian commission, physician Raimundo Pimentel, was outraged at Israeli policies, pointing out that trafficking can only take place on a large scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system. Pimentel charged that the resources provided by the Israeli health system \u201cwere a determining factor\u201d in enabling a network that preyed on society\u2019s poorest populations.<\/p>\n
In 2004 there were reports that Israeli traffickers had added China to their target donor populations.18 In one recent case an Israeli paid an organ broker $100,000 for a kidney transplant in China from an 18-year-old Chinese girl. She received $5,000 and died following surgery.19<\/p>\n
New York Times<\/i> reporter Larry Rohter pointed out that allowing brokers to operate with few restrictions benefited Israel \u201cby exporting Israel\u2019s organ shortage overseas.\u201d Rohter cites a kidney specialist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem who explained that patients who go abroad \u201c\u2018save the country a lot of money; not only in terms of what doesn\u2019t have to be spent on dialysis, but also by opening places for other people who are on the list.\u2019\u201d20<\/p>\n
Many people find governmental complicity in organ trafficking deeply troubling on moral and philosophical grounds.<\/p>\n
As Scheper-Hughes testified: \u201cThe sale of human organs and tissues requires that certain disadvantaged individuals, populations, and even nations have been reduced to the role of \u2018suppliers.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a scenario in which only certain bodies are broken, dismembered, fragmented, transported, processed, and sold in the interests of a more socially advantaged population…of receivers.\u201d She believes that the risks and benefits of organ transplant surgery should be more equally distributed among nations, ethnic groups, and social classes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/span> It is not rare for the \u201cdonor\u201d to receive little or none of the compensation promised. For example, in 2007 Israel\u2019s Haaretz<\/i> newspaper reported that two Israelis had confessed to persuading Palestinians \u201cfrom the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.\u201d According to the Haaretz report, after the organ had been taken the traffickers refused to pay for them.<\/p>\n On occasion, people are coerced into giving up their organs. For example, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, the alleged Brooklyn trafficker recently arrested in an FBI sweep in New Jersey, reportedly carried a gun. When a potential organ seller would try to back out, Rosenbaum would use his finger to simulate firing a gun at the person\u2019s head.<\/p>\n The Rosenbaum case, reportedly part of a ring centered in Israel, is the first case of trafficking to be prosecuted in the US. His arrest and the substantial evidence against him may have surprised State Department Countermisinformation Director Todd Leventhal, who had characterized organ trafficking as an \u201curban legend,\u201d stating, \u201cIt would be impossible to successfully conceal a clandestine organ-trafficking ring.\u201d Leventhal called such reports \u201cirresponsible and totally unsubstantiated.\u201d<\/p>\n More often organ theft involves dead bodies\u2014or those alleged to be dead.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s very first successful heart transplant, in fact, used a stolen heart.<\/p>\n In 1968 Avraham Sadegat unexpectedly died two days after being hospitalized in Beilinson Hospital in Israel\u2019s Petah Tikva for a stroke. When his family finally was able to retrieve his body (the hospital initially refused to release it) they found his chest covered with bandages; odd, they thought, for a stroke victim. Upon removing these they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages and the heart was missing.21<\/p>\n During this time, the Israeli press was heralding the historic heart transplant, performed by a team of surgeons who were to become some of Israel\u2019s most celebrated physicians, among them Dr. Morris Levy, Dr. Bernardo Vidne, and Dr Jack Solomon, who harvested the heart.22<\/p>\n When the family began to ask questions, the hospital denied any connection. After the man\u2019s wife and brother had raised a media furor, petitioned three cabinet ministers\u2014and agreed to sign a document that they would not sue\u2014the hospital finally admitted it was Sadegat\u2019s heart that had been used.<\/p>\n Haaretz<\/i> quoted Sadegat\u2019s tearful wife: \u201cThey treated him like an alley cat. From the moment he entered the hospital, they apparently saw him only as a potential source of organs and not as a man in need of treatment. They only thought about how to do the deed without us knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n Sadegat\u2019s medical condition before his heart was removed has not been made public. It is possible\u2014perhaps probable\u2014that up until his heart was removed it was still beating; according to an Israeli media report, \u201conce a heart stops beating, it is no longer fit for transplantation.\u201d23<\/p>\n Even if he was what is now termed \u201cbrain dead,\u201d the general view is that family members should at least be a party to decisions regarding the patient: first, whether to \u201cpull the plug,\u201d and, second, whether to donate an organ. At the time, however, Israeli law allowed organs to be harvested without the family\u2019s consent.<\/p>\n Forty years later the hospital held an anniversary celebration of the transplant, despite the fact that, according to Haaretz<\/i>, the heart had been obtained \u201cthrough deceit and trickery.\u201d The festivities, which honored surviving members of the transplant team, featured balloons and a red, heart-shaped cake.<\/p>\n In this incident of organ theft (and from a possibly living body), the family was Israeli. Had the wife and brother been Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, they would not have possessed the power to force a confession from the hospital, and it is likely that those individuals today calling the Swedish article a \u201cblood libel\u201d or \u201cirresponsible journalism\u201d would have applied the same epithets to journalists reporting questions concerning the historic Israeli heart transplant\u2014if any reporters even bothered or dared to do so.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps one of the most long-term and high-level cases of organ theft\u2014and one that involves Palestinian as well as Israeli organs\u2014concerns an extraordinarily high official: Dr. Yehuda Hiss, Israel\u2019s chief pathologist and, from 1988 through 2004, director of Israel\u2019s state morgue, the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir.<\/p>\n An early indication of malfeasance came to light in 1998 and concerned a Scottish man named Alisdair Sinclair, who had died under questionable circumstances after being taken into custody at Israel\u2019s Ben-Gurion Airport.<\/p>\n The Israeli story, as reported by the Israeli news magazine Jerusalem Report<\/i>, is that Sinclair had confessed to transporting drugs, even though none were found, although he was in possession of 9,000 German marks ($5,000). He then, the police claim, hanged himself by looping his shoelaces and T-shirt around a towel bar about a meter off the ground and slipped the improvised noose around his neck. From a squatting position, the police story goes, he repeatedly threw his bodyweight downward, choking himself.<\/p>\n Sinclair did not die, however, and medics were able to restore a heartbeat. He was transferred to a hospital where, according to the magazine report, the hospital\u2019s associate director, Dr. Yigal Halperin, said that Sinclair \u201chad suffered irreversible brain damage, and there was little doctors could do for him. Left in a corner of the emergency room, he died at 7 p.m. [It\u2019s unknown whether he had been put on life support.] His corpse was transferred to the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir for an autopsy.\u201d<\/p>\n Afterwards, Israeli authorities located Sinclair\u2019s family and gave them three weeks to dispose of the body. They suggested that he be buried in a Christian cemetery in Israel, pointing out that this would be one-third the cost of shipping the body back to Scotland. However, the grieving family scraped up the money to bring him home.<\/p>\n They had a second autopsy performed by Glasgow University, only to discover that Sinclair\u2019s heart and a small bone in his throat called the hyoid were missing. The British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel, and a heart was sent to Scotland. According to the Jerusalem Report<\/i>, the family \u201cwanted the Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother\u2019s, but the Institute\u2019s director, Prof. Jehuda Hiss, refused, citing the prohibitive cost.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite a protest from the British government, Israel refused to supply Hiss\u2019s pathology findings or the police report. According to the British government and a report in the Israeli media, around the time of Sinclair\u2019s death a doctor at Tel Aviv\u2019s Ichilov Hospital put in a request for a hyoid bone for research purposes\u2014and eventually received a bill for shipping costs.24 Israel retained Sinclair\u2019s $5,000.<\/p>\n Through the years Hiss and the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic medicine continued to be accused of organ theft. In 2000 the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot<\/i> published an investigative report alleging that Hiss had been extracting organs without permission and then packing the bodies with broomsticks and cotton wool to fill in cavities before burial. The report charged that under Hiss the institute had been involved in organ sales of body parts\u2014\u201clegs, thighs, ovaries, breasts and testicles,\u201d allegedly to medical institutions.<\/p>\n In 2001 a district judge found the Institute had performed hundreds of autopsies and had removed body parts without the families\u2019 permission\u2014and sometimes in direct opposition to their expressed wishes.25 One report described a \u201cmuseum of skulls\u201d at the institute.<\/p>\n Little was done, however, and complaints continued\u2014often by the parents of dead Israeli soldiers horrified to discover that body parts had been taken from their sons. Finally, in 2004 Israel\u2019s health minister transferred directorship of the morgue itself away from Hiss. Hiss, however, retained his position as Israel\u2019s chief pathologist, a post it appears he holds to this day.26, 27<\/p>\n Hiss had also been connected with two previous national scandals, both of which may have involved powerful people in Israel, which may account for his longevity in Israel\u2019s medical establishment despite years of proven wrongdoing.<\/p>\n The first controversy concerned the \u201cYemenite Children\u2019s Affair\u201d\u2014a situation, largely from the early 1950s, in which a thousand babies and small children of recent immigrants to Israel had \u201cdisappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n When the immigrants had arrived as part of Israel\u2019s \u201cingathering of the exiles,\u201d babies were immediately taken from their mothers and placed in children\u2019s houses. Many were hospitalized for a variety of ills, and hundreds died, their deaths coming in such large numbers that they were announced over loudspeakers.<\/p>\n The distraught parents often never saw the body or received a death certificate, and there were growing suspicions that not all had died\u2014some, it was believed, had been \u201cgiven\u201d to Ashkenazi parents. One author writes: \u201cIt was a well-known fact within the Jewish community in the United States that if a family wanted a child they could go to [baby brokers, both rabbis] and simply pay the necessary fee.\u201d28<\/p>\n Some Israeli investigators have found considerable evidence for these charges, and indications of complicity at multiple levels of the power structure. In fact, one researcher charges: \u201cPeople in positions of power at the time that the State of Israel was established profited from the abduction and sale of children from poor immigrant families.\u201d29<\/p>\n Hiss\u2019 connection comes in 1997, when Israel finally had formed a committee to investigate the disappearance of Yemenite and other Jewish children in the years 1948-1954. Among those testifying before this committee was a California woman who had come to Israel searching for her biological mother\u2014and, according to DNA testing by a geneticist at Hebrew University, had found her.<\/p>\n The committee demanded that another DNA test be conducted at the Abu Kabir forensic institute. As at least one observer predicted ahead of time, Hiss\u2019s test came up negative, and the government was allegedly exonerated, despite the fact that the geneticist who had conducted the first tests stood by his results.30<\/p>\n Hiss also plays a role in some conspiracy theories regarding the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who had begun a peace process with Palestinians. In March 1999 a group of academics presented findings alleging that Hiss had submitted false evidence to the commission that investigated the killing.31<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nIt is difficult to know how often Israeli trafficking involves outright theft of vital organs from living human beings.<\/p>\n