Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, ''We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.''

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. ''This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,'' the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. ''We'd glue the eyelid shut,'' he said. ''We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.''

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

[. . .]

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report ''anti-Semitic.''

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were ''by a long shot'' not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because ''the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.''

the Harper government has moved to align Canada with Israel and its staunchest supporters. Canada is now the most "Israel, right or wrong" government in the world, except for the Israeli government itself.

Even Barack Obama's new administration, itself obviously pro-Israel, has uttered a few mild criticisms about settlements in East Jerusalem and the banning of certain trade with Gaza. But not the Harper government. Mum's been the word.

The big pro-Israel organizations in Canada hailed the decision to ban Mr. Galloway. But do Canadians, while of course being supportive of Israel's existence and security, really want their country to be the most completely aligned with Israel, especially now that it is to be led by a very right-wing coalition that doesn't believe in a two-state "solution" to the Palestinian problem?

Benjamin Netanyahu, the incoming prime minister, is a hardliner. While not exactly ruling out the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, he doesn't fundamentally believe in one, preferring little enclaves of self-rule, a kind of Palestinian Bantustan. Worse, it would appear his foreign minister will be Avigdor Lieberman, leader of a far-right party who wants loyalty oaths from Arab citizens of Israel and is uninterested in the usual concept of a Palestinian state.

Canada has very little influence in the Middle East, truth be told, but for years, under both previous Conservative and Liberal governments, it did support a two-state "solution" to the problem of the co-existence of Israelis and Palestinians.

Presumably, the Harper government does, too, but it takes almost all of its cues from Israel's latest positions. This positioning might have been at least defensible under previous Israeli governments, but it's hard to imagine the same being said for the forthcoming one.

</li>Acts of Minor Treason speculates on the constellations people might see in the sky from the star HD 98618, a very Sun-like star a hundred light-years away</li>

• James Bow is decidedly unimpressed by the decision of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Recife to publicly excommunicate the mother of a nine-year old who became pregnant with twins after she was raped by her stepfather and had to have an abortion to save her life, and the doctors who performed the abortion.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster refers to interesting computer simulations suggesting that Earth-sized--perhaps even Earth-like--planets can form in close orbits around dim red dwarf stars. Since most stars are red dwarfs, this has obvious implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.


• Edward Lucas reviews an interesting book on Jewish historians in interwar and Second World War Poland who tried to preserve their history in the face of oppression and eventually genocide.


• Marginal Revolution cites the fact that a black man in Washington D.C. is more likely to be HIV-positive than his Rwandan counterpart.


• Normblog's Norman Geras considers the ways in which liberalism and socialism are intimately and necessarily intertwined.


• Slap Upside the Head reports that the Anglican Church of Nigeria wants to punish participants in gay marriages with long jail sentences.


• At Space and Culture, Anne blogs about Mumbaikers' tolerance for random street encounters and how this makes their city livable. (Thoughts?)


• Strange Maps features a map showing how Israeli travel restrictions have helped make Palestinian communities in the West Bank into a disconnected archipelago.


• Over at Noel Maurer's blog, Jussi Jalonen makes a guest post explaining why, after 1815, the autonomous Russian-affiliated states of Finland and Poland experienced such divergent political fates.


• Torontoist reports on someone who's spreading false rumours that the food at Laila, a Middle Eastern take-out restaurant in the Annex, is killing people.


• The Volokh Conspiracy links to Toto's music video for Africa, shot in a law library, and addresses the question of whether or not the Vatican is required by international law to keep its various artistic treasures.


• Windows on Eurasia quotes a Russian scientist who suggests that Russia's population decline might prompt ethnic minorities, like Tatars and Udmurts, to seek independence lest they disappear, and blogs about how Russia's Komi Permyak are very unhappy with the results of the amalgamation of their ethnoterritorial unit with Perm oblast.

The Armenian pottery nameplate beside the door is common, even among Jews, but the painting over the door is a dead giveaway. Only a Christian would display outside his home a picture of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with its black-domed roof and cross on top. And only an unusual Christian would display it here, in the middle of Israel's biggest Jewish settlement.

Yousef Majlaton is an unusual Christian. An Arab born in the Old City of Jerusalem 49 years ago, when it was under Jordanian control, he decided in 2000 that he, his wife and three sons deserved better housing than what they had in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem. So the engineer and building contractor set out to buy an apartment in Pisgat Ze'ev, just north of Jerusalem.

In doing so, Mr. Majlaton started a trend that is raising the ire of a comfortable Jewish settlement, and pitting Israel's democratic values against its Jewish identity.

Pisgat Ze'ev, named for Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the right-wing leader of the Jewish Irgun underground, sits in Israeli-occupied territory. While Israel claims to have annexed it, calling it a neighbourhood and adding it to the municipality of Jerusalem, the international community considers it occupied land.

Not that that bothers Mr. Majlaton.

He wanted better public services, a larger home and a mortgage to help pay for the place, none of which he could get in Beit Hanina. And he soon found that there was nothing to stop him buying in Pisgat Ze'ev, even though it was an exclusively Jewish community. "The agent only asked for my Jerusalem ID," he explained.

[. . .]

This past spring, just after Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of about 20 Jewish youths attacked a number of Arab teenagers at the entrance to the mall. With sticks, clubs and knives, they beat them, some seriously. A few months ago, a 17-year-old boy from Pisgat Ze'ev was sentenced to a year in prison for what the judge called "regretful and shameless" acts of violence. The judge said she couldn't believe the accused had never understood the lesson of the Holocaust - "the horrors in the pursuit of people for belonging to a different race."

Ely Ben Hamu, head of the Pisgat Ze'ev council, says Palestinian families have only themselves to blame. "Jews should live with Jews and Arabs should live with Arabs," he said, "because problems could erupt, like what happened here."

"We don't want them to come to Pisgat Ze'ev," he said. "They have their own areas, such as Beit Hanina. Why should they come and live here?"

• Centauri Dreams examines the equations used to try to estimate the numbers of high-tech civilizations in our galaxy and comes up skeptical but hopeful. More data's needed, of course.


• Daniel Drezner worries that Dubai's government isn't being nearly as open about its finances and the emirate's economic plight as it should be.


• Far Outliers blogs about the women and children left behind by Japan after the Soviet conquest of Manchuria, and the surprising ways in which they were treated, as well as the ethnic politics of Uighur dance halls.


• Gideon Rachman blogs about his visit to Hebron and comes off depressed.


• Mark MacKinnon argues that, for the time being, it's probably best for Russia and the West to leave countries like Ukraine alone, and to let them evolve on their own terms rather than try to sponsor proxies.


• Noel Maurer is surprised by the speed at which China's exports are contracting. Also, that the drop in U.S. employment in this recession is no different from other recessions, and that a "double-dip" pattern has been characteristics so far.


• At Passing Strangeness, Paul Drye examines the mysterious Vela incident (asteroid impact or nuclear weapons test in the late 1970s Indian Ocean?), Ford Motors' Brazilian rubber plantation city and the ever-dangerous Reelfoot Rift of the central Mississippi river area, poised to go off in a tectonic catastrophe.


• Slap Upside the Head blogs about the tiresome tendency of some conservative groups to put quotation marks around "marriage" when it's used in reference to same-sex relationship.


• Spacing Toronto reports that Paris' bike-rental scheme is encountering major problems, thanks to the theft or vandalism of bikes.


• Strange Maps features maps showing how non-French Euro coins infiltrated across the French frontiers.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin speculates that the economic crisis will discredit the current Russian government, leading either to a more authoritarian model of government or a more liberal one.


• Windows on Eurasia suggests the Russian political system is set to transmute under the pressures of the economic crisis, that Russian ambassador in Kyiv Viktor Chernomyrdin's professions of skepticism about closer Russian-Ukrainian relations might be, suggests that Circassians and other Russia-based diasporas might receive "the right to return" under citizenship legislation though ethnopolitics is likely to be an issue slowing this down if not blocking it entirely.

Thirty-nine Canadians, still stranded in war-wracked Gaza yesterday, could have safely departed the territory last Friday – if only Canadian diplomats had known it.

Early last Friday, more than 30 hours before the launch of a deadly Israeli ground offensive, more than 200 foreign nationals fled Gaza via the Erez border crossing, which had been opened by Israeli authorities for just that day and for just that purpose.

Had the Canadians shown up at the border on Friday, they likely would have been permitted to cross, said Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesperson for the Israeli agency that handle's this country's activities in the territory.

"We don't like to be surprised," he told the Star last night, "but I'm pretty certain we would have facilitated that."

But it was only on Friday that Canadian diplomats first provided the Israelis with a list of names of Canadians who wanted to leave the territory, and no attempt was made to contact them that day, to tell them to get to the border right away, because it was open.

Meanwhile, beginning early Friday, 226 citizens of six other countries – Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States – began crossing into Israel, where they were put onto buses and driven to neighbouring Jordan.

The embassies in Israel of each of these countries had all contacted Israeli authorities days beforehand in order to arrange the departures, submitting lists of the names of their nationals wanting to leave.

"Those embassies spoke to us," said Lerner. "It's a ritual that repeats itself every time there is an increase in tension in Gaza."

As it happened, 20 Ukrainians not on their embassy's list also showed up at Erez on Friday and were nonetheless permitted to cross, the same treatment the 39 Canadians likely would have received, if only someone had told them to get to the border.

• Reuters reports on the latest round of Cypriot reunification talks. The decision of the leaders of both sides to initiate the talks is hoepful, but is this likely to end in something, I ask my readers with more knowledge in this drawn-out affair?


• Hugo Chavez and King Juan Carlos of Spain appear to have made up, some months after last November's spat when, Chavez, after Chavez accused former Spansih prime minister Aznar of being a fascist, the King told Chavez to shut up.


• The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon writes about the irony that the bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes and wreck their livelihoods are now being used against Israelis.


• More and more frequently of late news comes out of massive job cuts and layoffs in the Canadian (actually, Ontarian) auto industry. This will do wonders for the cities surrounding Toronto--Oshawa comes particularly to mind.


• Turkey's ruling and quite popular AKP party has been saved from being banned, which is quite good for Turkish democracy and still allows some faint hope of Turkey getting into the European Union along with Latveria. The Wall Street Journal has a quite interesting article on the ongoing political tensions in Turkey, making a convincing argument that Turkish secularists' devotion to Ataturk is almost as much of a religion as Islam.


• The blog IBEX Salad suggests that the economic health of a nation can be guaged by the cost of being smuggled into that coutnry. (The price of illegal migrants to Spain has dropped by half.)


• Finally, the extensive tract of forested land in British Columbia bought by German noble His Royal Highness Duke Carl Herzog von Wurttemberg after the Soviet invasino of Czechoslovakia, has been bought up by an environmental group that wants to operate it as a nature reserve.

• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen warns about how rising inflation and exchange rate worries and falling credit ratings in Ukraine, besides promising bad things for that country, not only reflects wider trends in post-Communist Europe (Hungary and Romania are mentioned) but reflects a global environment in which central banks are trying to control inflation at the expense of growth.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism favours the introduction of thoroughly critical and comparative religious study classes in school, if not for the same reasons that I would pick.


• 'Aqoul's Shaheen writes about Saudi Arabia's abandonment of its ludicrous decades-old program of subsidizing wheat growing and exporting with precious reserves of non-renewable fossil water. Government subsidies to major business groups and families seems to be at least partly responsible for this program's survival.


• blogTo is now releasing its paper maps of different Toronto neighbourhoods.


• Over at Centauri Dreams, Larry Klaes and blog owner Paul Gilster talk at length about the possibilities of generation starships, massive manned spacecraft that would take centuries if not millennia to reach other planetary systems.


• Daniel Drezner's blog examines the interesting topic of the growth of Chinese soft power. The comments area is quite active.


• The Dragon's Tales takes a look at the geographical distribution of the five hundred fastest supercomputers. Surprisingly, Canada only has two, versus Slovenia's one.


• Over at Hunting Monsters, Ian notes that the Israeli-Hamas truce doesn't seem like much of a truce and that the European Union is strengthening its Israeli ties regardless.


• Joe. My. God reports that the usual suspects are upset with Katy Perry's hit song "I Kissed a Girl." Surprised?


• According to Marginal Revolution, more sex is safe(r) sex.


• Otto Pohl writes about the complicated problems facing Central Asians as they relate to their historical memories of the Stalinist era.


• Pure Product of America celebrates gay marriage in California.


• Danish coins can be very confusing for Canadians.


• Spacing shows us the Royal Ontario Museum's new rooftop garden.

Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy.

Israel marks its 60th anniversary today and still feels isolated in the world. But it counts Canada as one of its few staunch allies on matters like UN votes, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit the country in June.

However, Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador in Ottawa, said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.

"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.

He cited intensifying demonstrations when he or other Israeli dignitaries speak on Canadian university campuses that have led to speeches being cancelled. He also mentioned reports that some delegates to the 2006 Liberal leadership convention sought to use the Jewish religion of Bob Rae's wife against him.

"First of all, there's a Muslim member of Parliament, who's elected to one of the Toronto ridings ..., [Omar] Alghabra, who has been outspoken in his hostility toward Israel," Mr. Baker said.

"I've got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we're seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system."

Mr. Alghabra, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erindale, said he is "at a loss" to understand why he would be called hostile to Israel, noting he supports a two-state solution for the Middle East.

"Also Bulgarian-Israeli ties are very friendly both at government and at 'street level.' One high-ranking official told me tongue-in-cheek that if you ask a thousand Bulgarians whether they support Israel or the Palestinians and one says that he favors the Palestinians, it means he did not understand the question. One feels this attitude also in the newspapers. With Bulgaria, also, the restitution issue is settled.

[B]itterness is widely shared among the world's 10m Palestinians, 70% of whom are refugees or their descendants. Other peoples have suffered great tragedies, but the Palestinians' trauma not only refuses to reach closure, it has a horrible habit of repeating itself. Worse yet, its effects continue to poison politics within the wider region and beyond. In annual polling over the past six years, three-quarters of Arabs consistently place the issue of Palestine among their priorities.

In other words, little has changed since 1948, when street sentiment prompted five reluctant Arab governments to send troops on a vain mission to block the creation of Israel. During the ensuing war, the Palestinians' initial nakba, more than half the native population of Palestine, some 750,000 people, fled or were driven from the territory that became the Jewish state, whose troops then barred their return and systematically razed 531 of their ancestral villages. The six-day war in June 1967 brought the remaining 22% of historic Palestine under Israeli rule, and pushed out 250,000 more refugees.