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Sometimes, reading an article about war, I want to puke. Recovering from Max Blumenthal’s latest bombshell from Haifa, that was my first impulse. Eventually, though, I merely cried:
[Dr. Yehuda Hiss] also conceded to taking “samples” from Corrie’s body for “histological testing” without informing her family. Just which parts of Corrie’s body Hiss took remains unclear; despite Hiss’s claim that he “buried” the samples, her family has not confirmed the whereabouts of her missing body parts.
Dr.Hiss came to attention because of this:
The chief pathologist of Israel for a decade and a half, Hiss was implicated by a 2001 investigation by the Israeli Health Ministry of stealing body parts ranging from legs to testicles to ovaries from bodies without permission from family members then selling them to research institutes. Bodies plundered by Hiss included those of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. He was finally removed from his post in 2004 when the body of a teenage boy killed in a traffic accident was discovered to have been thoroughly gnawed on by a rat in Hiss’s laboratory. In an interview with researcher Nancy Schepper-Hughes, Hiss admitted that he harvested organs if he was confident relatives would not discover that they were missing. He added that he often used glue to close eyelids to hide missing corneas.
While Dr. Hiss’ testimony was part of the opening, back in March of the civil suit by the Corrie family against the Israeli Defense Forces and Defense Ministry, no writer wrote back then so compellingly as Blumenthal has now done, in his article posted today on the testimony and depositions given Sunday and Monday in the opening portion of the second half of the trail.
Also catching us up on details of this week’s proceedings is Nora Barrows-Friedman, writing for Al Jazeera. In her article, Barrows-Friedman writes about the statement of Col. "Yossi" from the IDF, about whom I wrote on Tuesday:
"During war there are no civilians," that’s what “Yossi,” an Israeli military (IDF) training unit leader simply stated during a round of questioning on day two of the Rachel Corrie trials, held in Haifa’s District Court earlier this week. “When you write a [protocol] manual, that manual is for war,” he added.
For the human rights activists and friends and family of Rachel Corrie sitting in the courtroom, this open admission of an Israeli policy of indiscrimination towards civilians — Palestinian or foreign — created an audible gasp.
Yet, put into context, this policy comes as no surprise. The Israeli military’s track record of insouciance towards the killings of Palestinians, from the 1948 massacre of Deir Yassin in Jerusalem to the 2008-2009 attacks on Gaza that killed upwards of 1400 men, women and children, has illustrated that not only is this an entrenched operational framework but rarely has it been challenged until recently.
The blog Mondoweiss has reprinted Max Blumenthal’s article in entirety. They often partner with Max. Earlier in the week, there were a few articles at that Israel/Palestine-centric blog about whether or not the four civilians recently gunned down near Hebron on illegally seized land on the West Bank, were legitimate targets. The consensus there was that the militant settlers were not "legitimate targets." Commenting there, I sided with that view, but observed that Col "Yossi’s" testimony at the Corrie suit hearing this week, weakens the argument of those who condemn the recent settler shootings unequivocally. If all of Gaza, or large parts of Gaza are war zones in which there are no civilians, how does that differ conceptually from lands on the West Bank, illegally wrested from the rightful Palestinian owners by armed Israeli thugs?
In the midst of these moral dilemmas, what does one do? Blumenthal relates, in today’s article, the common sense of Craig Corrie:
Among the most disturbing aspects of Corrie’s case is the abuse of her body by Israeli authorities after she was killed. Craig Corrie recalled to me a panicked phone conversation he had with Will Hewitt, a friend and former classmate of Rachel Corrie who had just witnessed her killing.
“It’s getting dark over here and there are no refrigeration units for her body in Gaza,” Hewitt told Craig Corrie.
“Just leave it until tomorrow,” Craig replied. “We don’t want you or anyone else to get killed.”
“But her body is starting to smell,” Hewitt pleaded.
Another family exhibiting common sense, even in the weird environment of what is done with these poor bodies of Israelis, Palestinians and Americans killed in such senseless violence, is the Salhout family in East Jerusalem, as told in this story:
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) – On 27 August, a Palestinian four-year-old, Abdul-Hayy Salhout, fell from a balcony at his family’s home in the Jabal Al-Mukabbir village in occupied East Jerusalem.
Doctors at the Hadassah Medical Center spent eight hours trying to revive the toddler in the intensive care unit, where he died six days later. Abdul-Hayy’s parents decided at the time to donate his organs.
According to the Israeli news site Ynet, the boy’s liver has since been successfully transplanted to a critically ill seven-year-old Israeli boy. A kidney was given to an eight-year-old girl, also Israeli, whose body has accepted it. The other kidney went to a 55-year-old Israeli man, and he is in good condition too despite concerns of rejection due to the age difference.
"My son arrived at the hospital in very serious condition, and it was impossible to save his life. But we’re so happy to see him alive inside other people," Abdul-Hayy’s father told Ynet. "It makes no difference to us whether the recipients speak Arabic or Hebrew, because saving a human life is the same."
(emphases added)
12 Comments
Again I thank you for staying on top of this story. No one else seems to be covering it, not even DemocracyNow!, and I don’t understand that. It seems that the israeli attitude is that Rachel Corrie deserved what happened and it really is a waste of time to go into all of this. After all, the israeli government and its designees can do no wrong.
By the way, in the paragraph beginning “The blog Mondoweiss” you may want to correct the spelling of “Israel.”
[modnote: fixed, thank you.]
That was fast, mod. thanks.
As far as Israel was concerned, they were at war with the U.S. when they systematically destroyed the USS Liberty listening post in international waters. It was a shoot first and cover up afterward policy then and now.
Dr. Megele, I presume.
Why would ANY histological testing be needed when it is obvious death resulted from being crushed? Answer, it isn’t necessary.
TIME Magazine has picked up the trial today:
Contraditions Emerge
To those of us who have followed press coverage of the Rachel Corrie story from the beginning in the USA, this is quite startling, to say the least.
All of the coverage of Israel’s behavior (both Israel as a nation-state and the individuals who support it) makes the fundamental mistake of assuming the behaviors are those of a rational entity.
They are not.
And so all the subsequent attempts to understand, explain and predict those behaviors fail – because those attempts are based on the false premise of rationality.
When one accepts the underlying collective psychological state is one of a paranoid sociopath, then all the behaviors are simple to both understand and, more importantly, predict.
For example, from within this psychosis there is never any such thing as we out here know as an “investigation” (or its courtroom analog, a “trial”) – there is only ever a rationalization and explanation.
So that’s exactly what we see in the “trial” about Rachel Corrie’s murder (and the “investigation” of the murders of those aboard the Mavi Marmara).
Of course, when one realizes one’s friend or family member is ill, the humane and proper response is compassion and treatment.
Instead, what we have in the dysfunctional parent-child relationship between the United States and Israel (Nanny State 911, anyone?) is not solid boundaries and treatment but capitulation and indulgence.
Just like with a 2-year-old who’s testing their parent to see if they’re trustworthy, and finding them lacking acts out uncontrollably in a desperate plea for rules, boundaries, and structure, our Israel policy is one of out of control domestic dysfunction.
It is the parent’s responsibility, not the child’s, to create and enforce rules, to compassionately provide the structure and container the child needs for their development past this stage.
(That’s why the Old Testament “Ten Commandments” are the way they are – they’re the boundaries needed for a collective psyche at that stage, where the ego is just starting to stabilize. Like any parent of a 2-year-old knows, there’s a whole lot of “No!” necessary at that time, not only for a child to learn to socialize, but simply for a child to feel safe enough to learn any social or emotional skills at all.)
Abdicating one’s parental responsibility to the child, as the United States has done with Israel, can never work, because it’s precisely the ability to compassionately hold boundaries and structure that the child is trying to learn.
Once we recognize and accept all this, our responsibilities and necessary actions become simple and clear.
Israel will never behave any differently – until we do.
Our “leadership” is never going to act differently than they do now. When it comes to holding israel to account, there is too much money and support involved for the various office holders. So, we have a bunch of enablers that continue to support the out-of-control israeli govt.
My own personal opinion is that many American Jews have no intention of living in Israel, but they feel guilty about not facing any of the hardships from the past or current (which could probably have been avoided, and still could) so they support the hardliners in the govt to show how tough they would have been if they were there.
First off, thanks for reading what I wrote.
I very intentionally didn’t say our “leadership” (quotes quite appropriate) was ever going to act differently.
I said we need to.
That starts with changing our own failing of hoping that by simply “voting” for the right surrogate parent we can avoid having to be responsible for ourselves.
Essentially, we begin the larger process by being for ourselves what we’re later called to be for those depending on us. We first hold our own boundary, and stop allowing ourselves our own infantile indulgences (like expecting our political parents to change our social diapers for us).
That’s the real reason we haven’t yet held a boundary for Israel. Because in order to do that we’d also have to hold one for ourselves.
Again, it’s we – you and I – who need to behave differently. Because consciousness is self-similar, what we choose to do will simply be a representation at a smaller scale of what the larger system is doing. If we choose to explain why it’s not our fault and look for others to solve our problems, that’s exactly what the whole system will do.
And if we choose to accept responsibility for our condition and actually start to live, then that’s what everyone else will do too.
Which should be a pretty encouraging statement.
Instead of having to change the whole world, all we have to do is change ourselves.
And that we can do.
Happy Rosh Hashanah.
thank you ET
nothing but more tears for the Corrie’s today
Congrats, ET…! Uruknet picked up your diary…! ;-)
Eternal Vigilance, you’re dead on with the irrationality of the Israeli leadership, and sadly it’s being institutionalized into their national psyche…! Also, I agree that the US is culpable… One reason they’re so defensive of Israeli illegalities in the UN, is due to the potential blowback of UN actions/sanctions against the US for war crimes too…! A major reason why we refuse to recognize the ICC at the Hague…! *gah*
There are lessons the US could learn from Israel that would help us: gays in the military and socialized medicine being two of them. Unfortunately, we take home some of that country’s worst ideas.
Uruknet – I’ll be danged. Front-paged it, eh? I had hoped another blog might have front-paged it instead.
Thanks.