Apologies for the long delay in blogging here, caused by ill health , which is now under control!
BDS and the Cultural Boycott are hotting up! Over the last week, two film events have come to the fore as locations of the debate over BDS, with the director of the Melbourne Film Festival, Mr. Ricahrd Moore, blogging in the Guardian Comment is Free, in a bizarre attack on Ken Loach, who has not agreed for his film to be shown at the festival, unless the festival agreed to NOT accept funding from the Israeli government. Mr. Moore called this an act of ‘censorship’ and refused to relent, in the name of artistic freedom… see the entries related below:
Censorship has no place in film: CommentisFree, The Guardian
Chinese efforts to censor our festival overshadowed Ken Loach’s equally insidious attempt to prevent sponsorship from Israel
This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival was beset by attempts to censor our programme. The most celebrated effort came from the local Chinese consulate – demanding the withdrawal of the documentary 10 Conditions of Love about Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled voice of the Uighur minority. The festival’s refusal to comply with this diktat produced an extraordinary response: the withdrawal of several Chinese films, hackers assaulting our website and ticketing system and waves of abusive emails, faxes and phonecalls. The Kadeer controversy overshadowed an equally insidious attempt to censor our programme by the English filmmaker Ken Loach. While the Chinese wanted to silence Kadeer, Ken Loach demanded that we refuse any cultural sponsorship from Israel.
The Israeli state has been a sponsor of the film festival for several years and is one of many cultural bodies who support our independent organisation. The list varies depending on the composition of our programme, this year our cultural partners included the British Council, the Japan Foundation, the Taipei Trade and Economic Office and the Danish Film Institute. Sponsors generally proffer financial support for their respective national cinema, and they are never granted any programming rights or any right of veto over the festival programme.
In this case the Israeli embassy in Australia offered to fund an airfare for Tatia Rosenthal, the director of the first Israeli/Australian co-production, $9.99. The funding allowed New York-based Rosenthal to introduce the Melbourne premiere along with two of its stars, Geoffrey Rush and Anthony La Paglia.
But for Loach the only question was the origin of that money. We were told that unless we rejected Israeli funding Loach would withdraw his latest film, Looking For Eric, already confirmed and printed in the official guide. This isn’t the first time that Loach has pulled this stunt. Earlier this year the Edinburgh Film Festival buckled after complaints from Loach that Israel had provided £300 to fly director Tali Shalom-Ezer to the screening of her film Surrogate. The funding was withdrawn. This was a repeat of a shameful 2006 episode when Edinburgh returned a travel bursary funding flights for another Israeli director, Yoav Shamir.
This curse must not be allowed to spread to other film festivals. Politics will always walk hand in hand with film, and with film festivals, but at the core of every festival, from Melbourne to Montreal, is the independence and integrity of the programme: it is a festival’s primary asset and part of an inviolate bond of trust between a festival and its audience. To allow the personal politics of one filmmaker to proscribe a festival position would not only open a veritable floodgate, but also goes against the grain of what festivals stand for. Not that I felt the need to justify ourselves but in my response to Loach, explaining why Melbourne’s film festival would not comply with his demands, I reminded him that it had had a long interest in the Middle East and has programmed many films about the Israel-Palestinian question – most, if not all, sympathetic to the Palestinians.
Loach’s reply was:
Film festivals will reflect many points of view, which are often radical and progressive. It is also true that there are many brutal regimes and many governments, including our own, which have committed war crimes. But the cultural boycott called for by the Palestinians means that remaining sympathetic but detached observers is no longer an option.
In other words, everyone has been given a royal dispensation from Loach to commit war crimes bar the Israelis. Far be it for me to act as an apologist for Israel but the logical extension of Loach’s position is absurd. Aside from ignoring the fact that film festivals fulfil an important role in allowing filmmakers to circumvent national censors, is he saying we can continue to programme films from North Korea, from Iran, from China – but we must boycott Israel? On a moral relativity scale does that mean that Iran’s treatment of women is acceptable? Should we keep quiet about how North Korea treats its citizens? Loach disagreed with George Bush’s approach to foreign policy; so was it OK to programme American films during the Bush era?
Loach’s demands were beyond the pale. As a supporter of independent film and filmmaking he should be ashamed of himself.
My own comment on the site is below:
It is befitting the director of an Australian film festival, one suspects, to show gross insensitivity to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the brutal occupation which lasted over four decades, not to mention the severe war crimes by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. After all, what does Israel do which Australia has not done so many centuries before? As one of the few countries which was cleansed of its indigenous population by European settlers of a somewhat questionable character, and has almost managed to eradicate them altogether, like the mighty USA, one expects nothing less, of course, from such intellectuals of Mr. Moore’s calibre.
One can sense from his reaction that the question of not only past iniquities, but of the current injustice continuing, has never occurred to Mr. Moore as a problem. As a cultural event, then, his film festival shines as an example of those who will overlook murder and pillage in support of ‘artistic freedom’. Hurrah, the colonialists of mighty Australia!
Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Filmmaker and film studies scholar
The site has recorded many excellent reactions to this attack on Ken Loach, one of the best known and respected filmmakers, by an Apparatchik of a minor film festival, showing total disregard to the plight of Palestinians, as well as to the call of Palestinian artists, filmmakers and intellectuals for a cultural boycott of the Israeli apartheid state. In his text above, he even calls the Israeli state “one of many cultural bodies who support our independent organisation“! Now is that not a nice touch? It is certainly the first time the Israeli regime, responsible for mass killing and ethnic cleansing forr over six decades, was called a ‘cultural body’… To see some of the reactions. , use the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/aug/27/ken-loach-film-festival
The other controversy is the special programme of Israeli films about Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF. A number of filmmakers have withdrawn their films from the festival as a form of protest, led by John Greyson:
Filmmakers protest uncritical view of Tel Aviv at Toronto film festival: Ha’aretz
Several Canadian filmmakers plan to withdraw their movies from next month’s Toronto International Film Festival to protest a weeklong cinematic homage to Tel Aviv. They claim that the screenings will show Israel in a positive light instead of creating a critical forum in which to discuss the occupation. The Tel Aviv-centric week launches the Toronto Festival’s new City to City event and is intended to celebrate Tel Aviv’s centennial.
According to the protesting artists, including culture critic Naomi Klein and director John Greyson, the problem is not the official participation of Israeli films at the festival but the character of the forum in which they will be screened. They refer to an interview given last year by the Israeli consul in Toronto, Amir Gissin, to the Canadian Jewish News, in which he said that Israel’s image would be improved by participating in the festival.
Among the films to be shown are “Kirot” (“Walls”) by Danny Lerner, “Phobidilia” by Yoav and Doron Paz, “Bena” by Niv Klainer, “Jaffa” by Keren Yedaya, “The Bubble” by Eytan Fox, “A History of Israeli Cinema, Part I and II,” by Raphael Nadjari, “Life According to Agfa” by Assi Dayan, “Big Eyes” by Uri Zohar, and “Big Dig,” a 40-year-old film by Ephraim Kishon.
In a letter sent to the Toronto festival administration, Greyson wrote that the protest was not against Israeli films or filmmakers chosen for the festival.
He expressed admiration for film work by Israelis shown at previous festivals and said that he would attend Israeli films in the future.
Rather, he wrote, his protest was about the “spotlight” itself, the business-as-usual atmosphere advanced by the choice of Tel Aviv as a young, dynamic metropolis, in a celebration free of confrontation with less pleasant parts of Israel, such as what he termed the “brutal occupation.”
Greyson questioned whether an uncritical celebration at this time might be compared to having held such affairs in 1991 in South Africa, or in 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama.
Israeli director Udi Aloni is supporting the Canadian protest and is calling on Israeli artists to take the same steps.
In a telephone interview from New York, Aloni told Haaretz that he had talked to the festival curator to try to convince him not to hold an event in a format so uncritical of Israel.
Not Foreign Ministry cadets
According to Aloni, Israeli artists need to rethink their participation in the festival. “Wherever they appear they must decide if they are representatives of the Foreign Ministry or of an uncompromising opposition to occupation and racism in Israel,” he said. “Israeli directors don’t have to be defensive and ask ‘Why are they attacking us?’ but say to the Canadian directors: ‘We’re with you on this. We don’t represent [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman; we represent the opposition.’ There are only two options. It’s no longer possible to shoot and cry.” In a letter addressed to Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky, makers of “The Bubble,” Aloni asked them: “Are Israeli artists Lieberman’s new foreign service cadets?”
Gal Uchovsky said he preferred not to respond until he sees the letter in its entirety.
Greyson’s letter to the TIFF is reproduced below:
GREYZONE
95 SHAW ST
TORONTO CANADA M6J 2W3
647-272-0386
johngreyzone@gmail.com
August 27, 2009
Piers Handling, Cameron Bailey, Noah Cowan
Toronto International Film Festival
2 Carlton St., 13th floor
Toronto Canada M5B 1J3
Dear Piers, Cameron, Noah:
I’ve come to a very difficult decision — I’m withdrawing my film Covered from TIFF, in protest against your inaugural City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv. In the Canadian Jewish News, Israeli Consul General Amir Gissin described how this Spotlight is the culmination of his year-long Brand Israel campaign, which includes bus/radio/TV ads, the ROM’s notorious Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, and “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissen said Toronto was chosen as a test-city for Brand Israel by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, and thanked Astral, MIJO and Canwest for donating the million-dollar budget. (Astral is of course a long-time TIFF sponsor, and Canwest owners’ Asper Foundation donated $500,000 to TIFF). “We’ve got a real product to sell to
Canadians… The lessons learned from Toronto will inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said.”This past year has also seen: the devastating Gaza massacre of eight months ago, resulting in over 1000 civilian deaths; the election of a Prime Minister accused of war crimes; the aggressive extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the accelerated destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; the viral growth of the totalitarian security wall, and the further enshrining of the check-point system. Such state policies have led diverse figures such as John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Bishop Desmond Tutu to characterize this ‘brand’ as apartheid.Your TIFF program book may describe Tel Aviv as a “vibrant young city… of beaches, cafes and cultural ferment… that celebrates its diversity,” but it’s also been called “a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” (Naomi Klein) and “the only city in the west without Arab residents” (Tel Aviv filmmaker Udi Aloni).To my mind, this isn’t the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international economic boycott campaign against Israel. Launched by Palestinian NGO’s in 2005, and since joined by thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides — and in the process, forced every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line. Let’s be clear: my protest isn’t against the films or filmmakers you’ve chosen. I’ve seen brilliant works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes of a “vibrant metropolis [and] dynamic young city… commemorating its centennial”, seemingly untroubled by other anniversaries, such as the 42nd anniversary of the occupation. Isn’t such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991?
You’re probably groaning right now — “inflammatory rhetoric!” — but I mention these boycott campaigns because they were specific and strategic to their historic moments, and certainly complex. Like these others, the
Israel boycott has been the subject of much debate, with many of us struggling with difficult questions of censorship, constructive engagement and free speech. In our meeting, for instance, you said you supported
economic boycotts like South Africa’s, but not cultural boycotts. Three points: South Africa was also a cultural boycott (asking singers not to play Sun City); culture is one of Canada’s (and Israel’s) largest economic
sectors (this spotlight is funded by a Canadian Ministry of Industry tourism grant, after all); and the Israel rebrand campaign explicitly targets culture as a priority sector.
Many will still say a boycott prevents much needed dialogue between possible allies. That’s why, like Chile, like Nestles, the strategic and specific nature of each case needs to be considered. For instance, I’m helping organize a screening in September for the Toronto Palestinian Film Festival, co-sponsored by Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and the Inside Out Festival. It’s a doc that profiles Ezra Nawi, the queer Israeli activist jailed for blocking army bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes. Technically, the film probably qualifies as meeting the technical criteria of boycott — not because it was directed by an Israeli filmmaker, but because it received Israeli state funding. Yet all concerned have decided that this film should be seen by Toronto audiences, especially Jews and Palestinians — a strategic, specific choice, and one that has triggered many productive discussions.
I’m sorry I can’t feel the same way about your Tel Aviv spotlight. Despite this past month of emails and meetings, many questions remain for me about its origins, its funding, its programming, its sponsors. You say it was
initiated in November 2008… but then why would Gissen seem to be claiming it as part of his campaign four months earlier? You’ve told me that TIFF isn’t officially a part of Brand Israel — okay — but why haven’t you
clarified this publicly? Why are only Jewish Israeli filmmakers included? Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live? Why only
big budget Israeli state-funded features — why not a program of shorts/docs/indie works by underground Israeli and Palestinian artists? Why is TIFF accepting and/or encouraging the support of the Israeli government
and consulate, a direct flaunting of the boycott, with filmmaker plane tickets, receptions, parties and evidently the Mayor of Tel Aviv opening the spotlight? Why does this feel like a propaganda campaign?
This decision was very tough. For thirty years, TIFF has been my film school and my community, an annual immersion in the best of world cinema. You’ve helped rewrite the canon through your pioneering support of new
voices and difficult ideas, of avant-garde visions and global stories. You’ve opened many doors and many minds, and made me think critically and politically about cinema, about how film can speak out and make a
difference. In particular, you’ve been extraordinarily supportive of my own work, often presenting the hometown premieres of my films to your legendary audiences. You are three of the smartest, sharpest, skillful and most
thoughtful festival heads anywhere — this isn’t hyperbole, with all of you I speak from two decades worth of friendship and deep respect — which makes this all the more inexplicable and troubling.
What eventually determined my decision to pull out was the subject of Covered itself. It’s a doc about the 2008 Sarajevo Queer Festival, which was cancelled due to brutal anti-gay violence. The film focuses on the bravery of the organizers and their supporters, and equally, on the ostriches, on those who remained silent, who refused to speak out: most notoriously, the Sarajevo International Film Festival and the Canadian Ambassador in Sarajevo. To stand in judgment of these ostriches before a TIFF audience, but then say nothing about this Tel Aviv spotlight — finally, I realized that that was a brand I couldn’t stomach.
Peace,
John Greyson
TIFF Celebrating Israeli colonialism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid! City-to-City Spotlight on Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival: PACBI
Occupied Ramallah, 27 August 2009
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is gravely concerned that the Toronto International Film Festival 2009 (TIFF) has decided to spotlight Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City program. We encourage filmmakers and audiences to boycott the Spotlight as it extends a gesture of “goodwill” to a colonial and apartheid regime which is violating Palestinian human rights with utter impunity.
According to program notes by Festival co-director and City-to-City programmer Cameron Bailey, the City-to-City programme “will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
The ‘diversity’ celebrated by the Spotlight is in fact based on the erasure of the physical presence of the Palestinians, their culture, heritage and memory. The adjacent Palestinian city of Jaffa and numerous villages were emptied of their indigenous inhabitants to make way for Tel Aviv. Many refugees from Jaffa and other destroyed villages that Tel Aviv replaced reside in Toronto today, denied the right to return to their homes.
To celebrate Tel Aviv or any Israeli city for that matter is indefensible, particularly after this year’s lethal assault on Gaza, while Israel continues building its illegal Apartheid wall and settlements and extends its network of checkpoints that suffocate the Palestinian population. Most recently, in the Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children, and injured another 5380 [1]. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighbourhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as “a prelude to genocide.”
Such a celebration at this time, therefore, can only be seen by Palestinians and supporters of a just peace around the world as an act of complicity in whitewashing Israel’s war crimes and other grave violations of international law. It is a cynical and immoral politicization of the TIFF.
TIFF has argued that the Festival’s focus is on cities and not nation-states. Tel Aviv is the seat of Israeli political and economic power. It houses the masterminds of Israel’s longstanding policies of ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination and military subjugation. It is more emblematic of apartheid and colonial rule than any other Israeli city. The Spotlight on Tel Aviv is akin to celebrating Sun City during apartheid-era South Africa.
This inaugural City-to-City program is receiving funding for filmmaker participation through the Israel Film Fund, an Israeli public body that receives state funding and support, and which is part and parcel of the Israeli effort to normalize Israel’s presence in the global cultural arena.
In 2008, Toronto was selected as a ‘test market’ for a year-long public relations campaign launched by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to improve Israel’s image. Israel’s consul general, Amir Gissin, announced then that the culmination of this ‘Brand Israel’ campaign would be at the TIFF [2]
TIFF has claimed that the Spotlight on Tel Aviv has no relationship to the rebranding campaign but have not issued a public statement to that effect. Whether the City-to-City program is officially connected to the ‘Brand Israel’ campaign or not, it is rebranding to the core: it serves to normalize Israel’s international image, an image tarnished by decades of military brutality and violations of international law.
TIFF has a proud history of supporting independent and progressive filmmakers. It must not become yet another tool for Israel’s apartheid public relations machine.
PACBI@PACBI.org
www.PACBI.org
US Army Chief: We’ll Always Stand by Israel’s Side: YNews
By Yitzhak Benhorin
The US will always stand by Israel’s side, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said overnight Thursday during a farewell party for Israel’s military attaché in Washington Major-General Benny
Gantz, who will be retuning to Israel following his appointment as IDF deputy chief of staff.
Arabs Paying The Price Of The Holocaust: Tutu: Ha’aretz
By Akiva Eldar
He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.” “But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians…
Another great success of the IOF:
Israel kills Palestinian fisherman: medics: Yahoo.com
Mohammed Attar, 25, was hit by shrapnel, according to Muawiha Hassanein, who heads the territory’s emergency medical services. He had apparently been in his boat just off northern Gaza’s shore when he was hit.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090827/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictgazatoll
U.S. drops demand for Israel building freeze in East Jerusalem: ha’aretz
The Obama administration has agreed to Israel’s request to remove East Jerusalem from negotiations on the impending settlement freeze.
Egypt: Israel must halt building in East Jerusalem before talks: Ha’aretz
Egypt’s foreign minister says East Jerusalem must be included in a freeze of Israeli settlement activity before Middle East peace talks can restart.
Merkel pushes Israel on settlements: Al Jazeera
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has urged Israel to stop settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and resume the Middle East peace process…
Israel admitted at least one case of Organ harvesting.:
I did notice missing from the discussion the fact that Israeli authorities themselves have acknowledged at least one pathologist harvesting organs but that story from 2002…
Afghanistan, Israel do defence deal: Pakistan Observer
Akhtar Jamal
Islamabad—Afghanistan and Israel have reached an unprecedented defence deal worth tens of million of dollars under which the Jewish state would supply “SUFA” armoured cars and other defence-related equipment to Kabul.
Reliable sources told this correspondent that an order has been place by Afghanistan for the purchase of “Sufa” (Storm) jeeps from Israeli based Automotive Industries. The Israeli armoured vehicle is used to counter guerilla fighters, whose modern portable weapons often make massive tanks ineffective. Sources say that an Israeli defence official had recently visited Kabul and held talks with Afghan Defence Ministry officials. A three-man Afghan military delegation paid a visit to Israel to settle the terms and conditions. Israel’s automotive Industries were until recently running into deficit but after fresh order Galilee armoured vehicle factory was in full production capacity now. It was not clear if Afghanistan would make the payment to Israelis directly or through U.S. military aid it received. Afghan watchers believe that several dozen Israelis were posted in Afghanistan including several in southwestern provinces bordering Pakistan.
Illicit Body-Part Sales Present Widespread Problem: The Jewish Daily Forward
By Rebecca Dube
When an article in a Swedish newspaper asserted that Israeli soldiers were snatching and killing Palestinian men to harvest their organs for transplant, Israelis reacted with outrage.
to be certain, the most incendiary claims in the story, which was published August 17 in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, the left-leaning Aftonbladet, are clearly false. There is no evidence that Israeli soldiers are killing Palestinians for their organs, and there is no evidence linking those organ-stealing allegations, as the article’s author did, to the July arrest of a suspected black-market kidney broker in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum.
Israeli leaders and citizens alike have denounced the article, as well as the refusal of Swedish government leaders to condemn it. An online petition calling for a boycott of such Swedish retailers as IKEA, Volvo, H&M and BabyBjörn has garnered more than 12,000 signatures.
But one part of the discredited Swedish story — the question of what happens to bodies after they arrive at morgues, whether dead from violence or from natural causes — may be worth closer examination. Black-market sales of organs taken from bodies without family consent is an international problem, one that has sparked scandals in both the United States and Israel, said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who is a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in global organ trafficking. In 2004, Israel’s chief state pathologist was removed from his post due, in part, to ethical violations surrounding organ “harvesting” from dead bodies.
“Around the world, poor people are terrified of their bodies ending up in a morgue, and really they should be,” Scheper-Hughes told the Forward.
Ghastly stories of illicit organ sales abound. At the University of California, Irvine, the director of the medical school’s willed-body program was fired in 1999 after the university said he sold spines from donated bodies to a private research firm. A morgue employee at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston was fired in 2002 after a university audit found evidence that he’d been selling body parts for illegal profit, including more than 200 fingernails to a pharmaceutical company. And just last year, a New Jersey dentist pleaded guilty to plundering bodies from funeral homes for parts, selling hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of bone fragments and bits of flesh to tissue processors around the country.
Israel had its own body-parts scandal in 2004, when pathologist Yehuda Hiss was removed from his post as head of the state-run L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine. There was a long history of allegations, substantiated by the Israeli government, of Hiss and his lab taking organs from dead bodies without permission and using them for research or selling them to medical schools
The allegations against Hiss first came to light in 1998, after a Scottish tourist suspected of drug dealing died in a holding cell at Ben Gurion International Airport. After an autopsy in Israel that was overseen by Hiss, the Scotsman’s body was returned to his family, who had a second autopsy performed — which discovered that the dead man was missing his heart and a small bone at the base of his tongue. The family sued, and the scandal was well publicized in Israel and Scotland.
In 2001, an Israeli Health Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running the state morgue, following years of complaints. (The final straw, apparently, was when the body of a youth killed in a road accident was gnawed upon by a rat in Hiss’s lab.)
Scheper-Hughes said that when she interviewed Hiss in 2004, he admitted that he had done “selective harvesting” of organs from bodies that came to his lab.
The state inquiry found no evidence that Hiss targeted Palestinians; rather, he seemed to view every body that ended up in his morgue, whether Israeli or Palestinian, as fair game for organ harvesting. The families of dead Israeli soldiers were among those who complained about Hiss’s conduct.
The July arrest of an alleged black-market kidney broker in New Jersey may have given Swedish journalist Donald Boström a news peg for his most recent story, but the connection doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Boström claims to have learned of organ-harvesting in Israel in 1992, during the period in which Hiss served as chief pathologist. According to the criminal complaint against Rosenbaum, the accused organ broker told an undercover FBI agent that he’d been dealing in kidney transplants since about 1999.
But timeline aside, the alleged link doesn’t make practical sense. First of all, by the time dead bodies get to the morgue, it’s much too late to transplant their organs into other people. Second, Rosenbaum is alleged to have arranged, for a fee, kidney transplants from live “donors” who traveled to the United States from Israel for the operations; there’s no evidence that he ever dealt with postmortem organs.
The real problem of organ trafficking, Scheper-Hughes said, is more widespread, and it often goes unpunished because few people pay close attention to what happens to dead bodies.
“Because it is so secretive, because nobody likes death, nobody checks these places out and they make their own rules,” she said.
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com
ANALYSIS / Israeli academics must pay price to end occupation: Ha’aretz
By Anat Matar
Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel – including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott. He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it. Gordon looks at the Israeli society and sees an apartheid state. While the Palestinians’ living conditions deteriorate, many Israelis are benefiting from the occupation. In between the two sides, Israeli society is sinking into complete denial – drawn into extreme hatred and violence.
The academic community has an important role to play in this process. Yet, instead of sounding the alarm, it wakes up only when someone dares approach the international community and desperately call for help.
The worn-out slogan that everybody raises in this context is “academic freedom,” but it is time to somewhat crack this myth. The appeal to academic freedom was born during the Enlightenment, when ruling powers tried to suppress independent minded thinkers. Already then, more than 200 years ago, Imannuel Kant differentiated between academics whose expertise (law, theology, and medicine) served the establishment and those who had neither power nor proximity to power. As for the first, he said, there was no sense in talking about “freedom” or “independent thought” as any use of such terminology is cynical.
Since then, cynicism has spread to other faculties as well. At best academic freedom was perceived as the right to ask troubling questions. At worst was the right to harass whomever asked too much.
When the flag of academic freedom is raised, the oppressor and not the oppressed is usually the one who flies it. What is that academic freedom that so interests the academic community in Israel? When, for example, has it shown concern for the state of academic freedom in the occupied territories?
This school year in Gaza will open in shattered classrooms as there are no building materials there for rehabilitating the ruins; without notebooks, books and writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the goods embargo (yes, Israel may boycott schools there and no cry is heard).
Hundreds of students in West Bank universities are under arrest or detention in Israeli jails, usually because they belong to student organizations that the ruling power does not like. The separation fence and the barriers prevent students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and tests. Attending conferences abroad is almost unthinkable and the entry of experts who bear foreign passports is permitted only sparingly. On the other hand, members of the Israeli academia staunchly guard their right to research what the regime expects them to research and appoint former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University alone prides itself over the fact that the Defense Ministry is funding 55 of its research projects and that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department, is funding nine more. All the universities offer special study programs for the defense establishment.
Are those programs met with any protest? In contrast with the accepted impression, only few lecturers speak up decisively against the occupation, its effect and the increasingly bestial nature of the State of Israel.
The vast majority retains its freedom to be indifferent, up to the moment that someone begs the international community for rescue. Then the voices rise from right and left, the indifference disappears, and violence replaces it: Boycott Israeli universities? This strikes at the holy of holies, academic freedom!
The writer is a lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Philosophy