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Israeli doctors colluding in torture of Palestinian detainees
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 30 June 2009
Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.
The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).
More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr. Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.
The campaign against Dr. Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities can be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.
Until 1999, when Israel’s high court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.
During that period Dr. Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.
Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.
Last week, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.
The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.
According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.
Ishai Menuchin, the head of PCATI, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, “Ticking Bombs,” in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.
PCATI highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent.”
In June last year, PHR-I drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.
Anat Litvin of PHR-I told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net — take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”
The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.
In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.
Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.
“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr. Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.
“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”
This month, Defence for Children International-Palestine Section issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”
The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated.”
Campaigners against Dr. Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.
Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr. Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”
Dr. Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous,” saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.
The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during the Second World War.
In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
A version of this article originally appeared in
Israeli right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that Israel did not “go far enough” in its 22-day invasion and massacre of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza earlier this year and who has never accepted even the possibility of an independent state for the Palestinians, is now the new prime minister. He was sworn in on April 1, after being asked in February by President Shimon Peres to form a coalition government.
Netanyahu’s government includes Ehud Barak, who as Defense Minister in the previous Labor Party government masterminded the war on Gaza. The Israeli Labor Party, which is supposedly a left-leaning party, is about as leftist as George Bush. To make matters worse, the new foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman of the racist, anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu Party and one of Time magazine’s 100 “Most influential people in the world.” He is also a former member of the outlawed Kach Party, whose founder, Meir Kahane, advocated the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historical Palestine. Time failed to mention this aspect of his history.
This triumvirate represents what will be undoubtedly be a continuation of previous policies of ‘population transfer’ and forced exile, a government determined policy to push more and more Palestinians off their land in the 1948 territories as well as the West Bank and Gaza. There are also dozens of laws in the 1948 territories that explicitly and clearly discriminate against the Palestinians who live there, especially in the criminal justice system, but also in regards to civil restrictions on buying land, building on already owned property, and even marriage.
In his first crack at prime minister a few years back, Netanyahu expanded illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has promised to continue to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem through continued land expropriation and settlement-building in the present and future as well. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu has also agreed to initiate legislation to deprive Palestinians of their citizenship and other rights in the 1948 territories, in support of Lieberman’s stance that all Palestinians who live there must sign a ‘loyalty oath’ to Israel.
Although this new government has leaders who are terrorists, war criminals and ultra-right wing racists, it is Zionism and the entire conceptualization of the state of Israel that should be indicted and condemned. A state for Jews only, a state that was formed by expelling hundreds of thousands of people, a state that makes laws to uphold the supremacy of Jews over other religious groups, a state that violates international humanitarian law every minute of every day, is a manufactured state, is a state that has no right to exist.
With the economic, military and political backing of imperial Great Britain, and against the popular sentiments of tens of millions of Arabs, Israel became a Jewish state in 1948, established on 78% of historic Palestine (even though Jews owned only 6% of the land), and forced into exile over 750,000 Palestinians. These Palestinians and their descendants make up the largest refugee population in the world, with estimates varying from 4.7 to 6.2 million people.
At the time of the founding of Israel, the most famous slogan of the Zionists was that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” as if the Palestinians had never existed. Zionist militias, armed and protected by the British, terrorized Palestinian cities and villages and forced the mass exile of 1947-48 that the Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe.
This political movement, Zionism, sought to bring Jews from all over the world to settle in and colonize Palestine as a state exclusively for Jews. Britain, and later the U.S., have unequivocally supported Israel, considering it their settler-colonial outpost in the Arab world and Middle East. And leaders of these Zionist terrorist groups became future Israeli government officials, like former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir, who believed in the concept of Greater Israel – that all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territories occupied in 1967, belonged to the Jews as well.
For 61 years, the state of Israel and the Zionism it represents have repudiated the national rights of Palestinians to self determination, return and independence. The Palestinians constitute a nation, one that has been oppressed for decades and one that continues to resist Israeli Zionist racism.
Resistance to South Africa’s apartheid system was the most correct and righteous struggle of its day. At that time, you would have been on the wrong side of morality, justice and history if you challenged the South African liberation movement’s demand to absolutely destroy and shatter apartheid. Why is Zionist Israel any different? Especially this new government? It is correct to boycott Israel, to divest from it and to push for sanctions against it. And you will find yourself on the wrong side of history again if you challenge the Palestinian liberation movement’s demand to dismantle Zionism, racism and the state of Israel. This is the real road to peace and justice for all people who live in historic Palestine and the entire region.
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THE GUN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH: THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
by David Hirst, Middle Eastern correspondent for the Guardian.
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PALESTINIANS: FROM PEASANTS TO REVOLUTIONARIES
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