…before I bugger off on holiday:
(Yeah, I should be packing. But I think Mrs Goy has done it all for me. I hope Mrs Goy has done it all for me…)
To be quite honest, the return of the “Organ Harvesting” row doesn’t particularly interest me. It’s quite obvious that tampering with dead bodies, without the permission of their nearest and dearest, is pretty appalling. However, as the AFP report makes quite clear, this is something quite distinct from the big stink over the summer, following the story in Swedish newspaper Afton-Bladet: “The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, cornea, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.” Couldn’t be clearer: another case of medical arrogance, something not at all limited to this crazy little part of the world. As an illustration, this should be rather instructiveMind you – as a twit twitting on twitter pointed out last night: “If one’s people have a blood libel hanging over one’s head, one ought to think a little more carefully about what one does with the bodies of others…”This interests me far more: A story in the Yeshiva World News about a woman in Ashdod asking the authorities to prosecute the city’s chief Rabbi for contempt of court. The woman had applied for a Hechsher – Kosher certification – for her restaurant: The Rabbinate declined. The woman sued in the High Court: The court found in her favour. But the Rabbinate still resisted. The problem, it seems, is that she is a Messianic Jew – a Jew for Jesus. Them lot are not terribly popular in this part of the world, for some odd reason. The talk backs for the article are quite illuminating, as well as entertaining. And that’s something I rarely say, since I genuinely believe that the talkback facility is only good for keeping the clearly unwell off the streets. There is a bit more background to the story here: If this blows up – as I suspect it will, if the High Court sticks to its guns – it is going to provoke a very interesting debate about the muddled mix between synagogue and state in Israel.(For the record: I should say that I believe, firmly, in freedom of religion. I also believe in freedom from religion.)Didi Remez – whom, as far as I can tell, is the only person ever to work in PR with anything approximating a human conscience – runs an interesting blog called Coteret. His argument, essentially, is that the English speaking press in Israel – which many foreign journalists, as well as people living outside Israel and with an interest in Israel, rely upon – is scandalously limited. Ha’aretz’s English language edition and Yediot’s English language website only translate a small percentage of all their news stories; jpost has an editorial slant which means that a lot of juicy stories pass it by. (I should say that I have a soft spot for two of these three outlets, but I agree with this assessment). So, to redress the balance and educate the Hebrew-challenged public, he translates stories in the Hebrew Press – Ma’ariv, Yediot, Globes and more – that he thinks have a significant public interest quotient. At the moment, he is working on one man’s campaign to overturn the traditional obfuscation of the IDF’s spokesperson Unit. Matti Golan, a columnist with Globes, decided to take up the IDF on a classic example of saying very much without saying anything at all – the story of a politician clearing an enhanced Army pension, even though his actual service was seriously circumscribed – with surprising results. Remez, after his translation, makes an interesting editorial point: “For civilian deaths, even those of children, a common IDF reply is along the lines of ‘the (soldiers) felt threatened and fired at suspects’, and except for a few exceptions that prove the rule, that is the end of any investigative journalism. Imagine the change if every foreign bureau chief or Israeli defence correspondent, took the Golan approach and really looked into the death of even on of every fifty or a hundred dead children. That’s how oversight works – even the slight chance of exposure causes a tremendous change in behaviour.” And so it should be. An interesting story from the BBC, this time about organ donation. Apparently, a law has been passed (or is about to be: I should check, but I’m already de-mob happy and refuse to do anything else in the name of ‘research’) granting Israeli organ donor cards the right to priority medical treatment, should they require an organ transplant. Now, I’ve carried a Donor card all my adult life, and I always will: I accept that there is a very slim chance that any of my organs will be good for anything in the case of my untimely demise, but on the off chance…quite seriously though, whilst I think that organ donation is pretty important, I’m not sure that this is the way to coerce people into going about it. In England, I think they now have the ‘presumed consent’ approach, which is to assume that one is happy to donate one’s organs to science in the case of ones death unless explicit instructions to the contrary are made. Whilst I’m still not entirely comfortable with that either, it seems a better path to take. Prioritising health care on the basis of criteria such as this seems inequitable, at best.In any case, organ donor card or not, who knows whether the Israeli medical authorities will want my innards, anyway? I’m not allowed to donate blood in Israel, a consequence of the BSE/Mad Cow diseases outbreaks in the UK in the mid-90s; aside from that, there are documented cases of medical professionals discarding blood donated by Ethiopians, because they worried – without any evidence – that it might be tainted by all sorts of unpleasant things.I was about to look up a link for the latter point, but I’ve just realised that Mrs Goy didn’t pack for me. Her argument is that since she isn’t going on holiday with me, she sees no reason why she should sort out my luggage. So she only did the Small Noisy One’s suitcase, and now has swanned off to work. Wives! I tell you…As any Hebrew speaker would be able to tell you, the word for ‘owner’ and ‘husband’ are the same in the language. So, to say ‘my husband’ is the same as saying ‘my owner’. A civilised position that I fully agree with. However, Mrs Goy, feminist that she is, seems to have other ideas. Right. I am off. 
