Israel’s human rights violations

HASSAN TAHSIN

When famous scholar and philosopher Ragaa Garaudy published his most controversial book “The Founding Myths of Modern Israel” in 1998, a French court  sentenced him to a suspended jail term and fine. The main charge against him was his denial of the Holocaust. He said the Holocaust was a myth, stating that the large numbers of European Jews claimed to have been killed in gas chambers by the Nazis was invented as a myth and that it had not taken place.
  
Until this book was published, few realized that it was the Jewish terrorist and Israel’s first head of state Ben Gurion, who himself came forward to reveal the names of the sick and elderly among the Jews to the Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany. This was done with the aim of cooperating with the Nazis during that critical period as well as to facilitate the creation of a state for Jewish people without the sick and the elderly. The German Zionist group, though it was a small minority at the time, followed a policy of compromise and even of collaboration with the Nazis.

The killing of some people at the hands of others is not alien to the Jewish people. After the creation of the Hebrew state, the Israeli secret agents of Mossad killed a number of Jewish families in the Egyptian cities of Suez and Ismailia. They then accused Egyptians of killing these families with the ulterior motive of forcing the migration of Egyptian Jews to Israel. This took place when a large number of Jews refused to leave Egypt for the Hebrew state.

The leading Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz carried a report about the gross human rights violations of the Israeli government, and here the victims are Jews themselves. The newspaper reported details of the legal battle waged by Julius Malick, an ex-staffer at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. In a lawsuit filed in the Be’er Sheva Labor Tribunal, Malick alleged that he and four colleagues were forced to “volunteer” to drink uranium in 1998 as part of an experiment. The workers were then asked for a urine sample, which was then analyzed to determine how uranium is excreted from the body through urine.

Malick, who worked at the Dimona reactor for 15 years before retiring in 2008, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at Bar-Ilan University. He has another degree, in industrial engineering and management, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva. In the lawsuit, Malick alleged that the experiment was carried out without obtaining written consent from them or warning them of risks or side effects as required by the Declaration of Helsinki on human experimentation.

These are indisputable historical facts, which I mention to show how Israel victimizes its own people. Israeli scientists committed a crime against humanity when they conducted this experiment with the tacit approval of the political leadership. This scandal was made known by the Jews themselves, and it was not an invention of the Arabs as the Jewish leadership always tells the world.

Malick stated that he was forced to undergo the experiment, out of fear for his livelihood and future in the department. He also disclosed that the experiment was conducted without the supervision of a medical team.
Despite all this, Malick noted that he was asked to tender his resignation. The worker was even told by the former director of the facility and the director of human resources that if he did not retire he would be fired. Malick is now suing the Dimona facility for a total of 1.8 million shekels in compensation.

When the newspaper published this investigative report, scientists who conducted the controversial experiment on workers at the Dimona reactor facility were forced to fabricate a new version of the story by claiming that there was no hazard involved in the experiment. Even if we ignore details of the lawsuit, we cannot disregard the fact that this experiment was inhumane and totally in contravention of the ethics of honest scientific research and the safety of human beings.

This forces us to ask several questions: What are the human rights of Jews? Where are their civil rights organizations? Who is fulfilling their international agreements and treaties?  Why does the whole world seemed to be barred from criticizing Israel when it commits such crimes?
I think that the protection of Israel does not simply involve protecting Jews but also subjugating Arabs and doing harm to Islam.

Not long ago, the Gallup World Poll carried out an opinion survey asking participants a question: Which is the country that poses a real threat to the world as well as to world peace and security? The answer was that Israel was the most dangerous state and the United States the second most dangerous. Taking this into account, how can we trust Israel when it clamors for peace? How can the world trust Israeli positions?

Since its creation, Israel has not respected any bilateral or international agreement or treaty. It has not taken any positive position from which we can assume that it is standing for the sake of real peace.

— Hassan Tahsin is an Egyptian writer and political analyst.
He can be reached at
htahsin-8@hotmail.com