Israel reaps the whirlwind around organ harvesting rumours
There are some persistent rumours around the Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners that simply refuse to go away. As soon as speculation arises about rape and organ harvesting the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) flexes its muscles and swats away such horrific stories accusing the accusers of anti-Semitism and bigotry.
The mud usually sticks and silences the accuser but, if it persists, what usually follows is a massive unrelenting pile on from the ADL and its supporters who wheel out the old blood libel trope, which is extremely difficult to rebut unless you have an advanced historical knowledge of the Middle Ages when Jews were routinely accused of using the blood of Christian children to bake their Passover bread.
It’s a bit of a leap but, in the current Israeli-Palestinian context, organs are substituted for blood, and in some cases, activists are alleging that Israel purposefully kills Palestinians to harvest their organs. I myself have been caught on the axis of this dilemma because of my lack of knowledge of 12th century Jewish history – my bad, I suppose.
However, celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach launched a vicious attack on Palestinian supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid for invoking “blood libels against the Jewish people”. He launched his attack by saying: “Gigi and Bella Hadid are two of the great antisemitic hypocrites of our time. For years they have leveraged their massive Instagram followings to foment hatred of Israel and falsely accuse Israel of war crimes.”
He wrote the article in April 2022. Admittedly, it hasn’t aged well since we know that Israel actually is guilty of war crimes and the Zionist state’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has an arrest warrant pending for himself and his former defence minister issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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The Hadid sisters have a combined 125 million Instagram followers so you can imagine any criticism they direct at the Zionist State is taken seriously. To Rabbi Boteach’s outrage, the fashion magazine Vogue shared “Gigi Hadid’s blood libel on its Instagram page to its 37.9 million followers.” Naturally he was delighted when Vogue removed one of Gigi’s posts comparing Ukraine to Palestine but to his horror “less than a day later, under pressure from antisemitic bullies, Vogue restored the reference to Palestine in the caption.”
I have to agree with him … how on earth could she compare the suffering of the Ukrainian people to that of the Palestinians living in Gaza. The number of dead is far greater in the tiny Gaza Strip than in Ukraine and, while I’m sure the people there are still suffering, food has not been used as a weapon to starve an entire nation as it has by Israel in Gaza.
In terms of weapons deployed and bombs dropped, the tonnage used to flatten Gaza is far, far worse than anything dropped on Ukraine (and WWII, come to that). Simple drone photographs can bear testament. By November 2023, Gigi ramped up her criticism of Tel Aviv saying Israel was the only country that kept children as prisoners of war. Her words caused outrage.
The supermodel’s tweet referenced Palestinian Ahmed Manasra, who Israeli police arrested at the age of 13 after his cousin stabbed a 20-year-old security guard and 13-year-old boy. Manasra received a sentence of 12 years in prison before it was reduced to 9.5 years. Here’s the thing that Israel wants you to forget: it actually does hold children in “administrative detention” without charge, trial and indefinitely. It is a savage and brutal prison regime, as we saw when the 90 Palestinian hostages were released on Sunday, Hadid’s criticism of the Zionist State was proven true – children did emerge from the shadows with terrified expressions on their gaunt, pale little faces.
The supermodel has often said “hundreds of Palestinian children remain detained, suffering in Israeli jails.” But this is true, it is an undeniable truth that Israel’s apartheid laws mean one thing for Palestinian children and another for Israeli children.
Undaunted, by the end of that month in November 2023, Gigi was accusing Israel of organ harvesting. It is a claim I’ve heard several times before and anyone repeating it suffers severe repercussions like Baroness Jenny Tonge who was sacked from her front bench position as the Liberal Democrats health spokeswoman in the House of Lords. It was the second time Tonge had been fired as a Liberal Democrat frontbencher for making controversial comments about Israel.
Before anyone stopped to think why such a highly respected, much loved, retired doctor would make such a comment she was dragged through the Kangaroo Court of public opinion with the British tabloids and right-wing media sitting as judge and jury.
What Tonge was calling for was an inquiry. We have all heard the rumours and they are persisting. She told the Jewish Chronicle newspaper at the time: “To prevent allegations such as these – which have already been posted on YouTube – going any further, the IDF and the Israeli Medical Association should establish an independent inquiry immediately to clear the names of the team in Haiti.” Personally speaking, I cannot for the life of me see anything wrong in that. A public inquiry is needed to clear up the speculation.
I hate the saying there’s no smoke without fire, but as I watched Palestinian prisoners being returned to their loved ones, my eyes fell on the image of a young man being wheeled away on some sort of hospital trolley. His frail physical condition left me gasping and a man by his side said the ex-prisoner was seriously ill and was missing his sight, spleen and colon.
I’ve since found out the man’s identity and more harrowing detail has followed. His name is Rami Abu Mustafa, an individual with mental disabilities, who was arrested several months ago from the city of Khan Yunis in Gaza. Unable to walk, he was released by the Israeli military in June 2024 having lost his eyesight, experienced brain hemorrhages, as well as having his spleen and colon removed against his will.
I am certainly not going to speculate about what has happened in an Israeli prison, but we do know they are rife for torture, rape and abuse. We know this because of the number of Palestinians who have died under torture in Israeli detention since 7 October, which is the highest since 1967, as per a report by the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS).
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I, for one, would support Baroness Tonge’s call for a full public inquiry. If Israelis are harvesting organs from Palestinian prisoners we have a right to know and I couldn’t give a flying fig if that upsets the likes of the ADL and its concern about blood libel. The savagery we have seen with our own eyes on the Facebook, TikTok videos and other social media posted by the shameless IDF soldiers is shocking and much of it will be used in forthcoming war crime trials by the ICC and its lawyers.
Since October 2023, more than 9,400 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and thousands from Gaza and hundreds from the 1948-occupied territories have been abducted and suffered at the hands of their captors, according to the Commission and the PPS.
“Detainees are subjected to torture and various forms of abuse, including sexual assault and rape,” details a UN report. The sad thing is, having investigated and written up this report, I know I will once again be accused of anti-Semitism and invoking the centuries old blood libel.
The ADL once served the Jewish community very well, opposing the McCarthyism era in America and combating the seriously anti-Semitic propaganda by the car maker Henry Ford. However it has gone off the rails in my view by tackling what it calls the concept of new anti-Semitism which claims anti-Zionism and criticisms of Israel are also anti-Semitic.
If that’s the case, call me an anti-Semite and be done with it! I really do not care, but I do value human rights and believe in upholding international law and humanity. Israel is heading for the abyss and is already on a downward spiral of insanity, cruelty and lawlessness.
I don’t know what happened to Rami Abu Mustafa’s left eye or his spleen or colon but some medical practitioner surgically removed the latter two and possibly operated on his eye causing blindness. When rumours persist of organ harvesting (based by the way on a true story published more than 15 years ago) Israel must own responsibility and, instead of grabbing the cloak of victimhood, should open a frank and thorough inquiry.
The blood libel is a big lie that has persisted down at least eight centuries because no one tried to expose it for what it was at the time. And, after the atrocities Israel has carried out on the Palestinians in Gaza, the Zionist State and the ADL have nothing to lose by opting for transparency. Tel Aviv’s international reputation is already in shreds … ripped up by its own bloody hands.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.