Gilad Atzmon argues that recent reports of Israel killing Palestinian civilians in order to trade in their organs may be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” for the Western media, which is changing its mood and is beginning to confront Israeli crimes.
There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He tells him: “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money ... you can also do gold and diamonds.”
Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact: it is not just about money, it may also be about human organs. A few weeks ago we learned about a ring of American rabbis who had been arrested in New Jersey on suspicion of trafficking human organ trafficking. Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed “vulnerable people to give up a kidney for 10,000 US dollars which he would turn around and sell for 160,000 dollars." Not bad, I thought to myself then. We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating. Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.
In fact, the ring of rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking”. We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return with missing body parts".
In 2002 the Tehran Times reported:
The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli army nearly 10 days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist parliament, the “Knesset” Ahmed Teibi ... that he couldn't deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.
But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online newspaper, reported: “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF [Israel Defence Forces] soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.”
A few weeks ago we had a debate on Palestine Think Tank on whether or not Zionism is a colonial apparatus. One of the materialist arguments against the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine has never been too attractive economically – it lacks oil, gold and minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialize in organ theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the latest rapidly spreading news about the Israeli trade in stolen human organs, it would seem that the Jewish national project is colonial after all.
Although the Israeli government denies the accusation that it is trading in stolen human organs, and I myself am far from qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their military spreading death and physical suffering on the Palestinians, after reading that 94 per cent of Israelis supported the Israeli armed forces’ campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft seems to be a “light crime”.
Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are true is yet to be seen. However, one fact has already been established: after so many years of the West dancing to the relentless crying violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is now changing its mood and is willing to confront Jewish institutional crime.
Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we had better discuss the growth of Jewish institutional crime.
Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician, writer and anti-racism campaigner. His latest jazz album, "In loving memory of America", was released on 1 March 2009 and can be purchased here. A version of this article originally appeared in Palestine Think Tank. The version on this website is published by permission of Gilad Atzmon.
