Mondoweiss
Radiation and ringworm: a tale of social policy, racism, and health care
Alice Rothchildon July 9, 201710 Comments
Image of Mizrahi children subject to experimental ringworm treatment in
Israel, from the documentary The Ringworm Children
On June 14, 2017, the Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, published an
extraordinary report documenting medical experiments on mostly Yemenite
children who subsequently "disappeared"; those who died were autopsied
without parental consent, the parents were often not allowed to see their
dead children, and no death certificates were provided. Since Operation
Magic Carpet, 1949 to 1950, when 49,000 Jewish Yemenites were airlifted to
Israel to grow the Jewish population and counteract the procreating
Palestinians, there have been three official inquiries exploring egregious
and unethical patterns of behavior towards Yemeni children by the medical
and social service communities. Previous Israeli committees concluded that
no children were kidnapped, although some children died or were adopted by
Ashkenazi families without the birth parents' consents. Parents were simply
told their children had died. Israel Hayomalso documented an experimental
treatment on four malnourished babies who subsequently died from the
injection of a "dry protein" created from plasma as well as an attempt to
prove (using faulty assays and assessments) that Yemenite children were of
African descent by testing dead children for sickle cell anemia, again
without consent. (There was no evidence for sickle cell but the researcher
published a scientific paper before he was proven wrong.)
Despite the Israeli state's efforts to delegitimize and silence this
information, (no investigation, no crime), the kidnapping of up to ten
thousand Yemenite babies in immigrant absorption camps for adoption by
Ashkenazi families was well documented in 2013and 2014by the Israeli webzine
+972. In the 2013 article, the information is based on the 2009 book by
Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict:
The Yemenite Babies Affair. While the Israeli press largely stood by the
official state narrative (nothing couldhavehappened and besides, data was
classified or lost), this attitude was reinforced by racist stereotypes
towards Yemenites as primitive, ignorant, and uncaring towards their
children. In short, adoption was "doing them a favor." Additionally, the
fact that the cover-up persisted for decades reflects the continued racism
within Israeli society and the medical establishment. The forcible transfer
of babies is also defined by the UN as genocide and clearly no one in Israel
is going to admit to that.
The 2014 +972article is centered on revealing and painful interviews with
adoptees about their experiences, abducted from their families via a variety
of official and unofficial mechanisms, (shall we just call this human
trafficking?) devoid of a paper trail, with devastated parents searching for
years for their biological children, a theft unchallenged by the legal
system. Some adoptive parents even registered their childrens' birth
certificates as their own biological children, retroactively with collusion
from Ministerial clerks. Of course there was always the problem for the
pale skinned Ashkenazi parents trying to explain their connection (which was
usually loving and healthy) to their dark offspring and that was how the
secret was often revealed.
Richard Silverstein in his June 15, 2017 blogadded more tortured details:
because Yemenite parents did not speak Hebrew and medical staff did not
speak Yemeni-Arabic, children were assigned a numberrather than a name,
numbers were sometimes lost or confused, leading to further mistreatment and
misidentification. More significantly, he notes the scandal involved the US
National Institutes of Health "which paid Israeli hospitals nearly
$1-million (in current value; then it was 160,000 Israeli lira) to provide
fetuses of dead Yemenite babies and corpses of adults which were used in
medical experiments to determine why Yemenites did not develop heart
disease."
Silverstein references the corollary tragedy of the Ringworm scandalwhich
led me to his 2014 blog. I was vaguely aware that newly arrived Yemenite
children were treated with radiation for ringworm, a benign fungal infection
that resolves spontaneously during adolescence. This treatment caused
longterm adverse consequences, but I have to admit, I had no idea of the
gravity of this crime. Silverstein links to The Ringworm children, a
damning investigative documentary that won the award for "Best Documentary"
at the Haifa International Film Festival and was featured as a documentary
at the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2007. (Don't say you did not
know.) In the 1950s, approximately 100,000 Jewish immigrant children from
Arab countries were taken from their parents and without parental consent,
their heads were shaved, their hair was plucked, they were placed on a
table, sometimes in restraints, and given radiation doses up to 600 rads.
The dangers of leukemia were known in the 1920s and by 1952 scientists
understood that 0.3 radswas the maximum safe weekly dosage. The now adult
victims speak with sorrow and rage of the thousands who died (buried in
unmarked graves), either as children from radiation poisoning or in early
adulthood from cancer, of a lifetime of scalp pain, open sores, high cancer
risk, epilepsy, infertility, and social and psychological damage. It was
gripping testimony that left me in tears and shock and I am hard to shock.
It is worth watching.
The program was run by Dr. Shiba, Director of the Health Ministry, Division
of Social Medicine, who was not only obsessed with ringworm as a contagious
fungus, but more as a symbol of a social disease, a "black plague," and of
children that needed to be decontaminated, medically and socially. He was
part of the Israeli medical establishment that viewed eugenics as a positive
force and described Moroccans as "primitives," "backwards," "human rubbish,"
and "defective people." He believed that Ashkenazi Jews were genetically
superior to Mizrahi Jews and that health disorders reflected a genetic
weakness in the susceptible population.
Dr Shiba traveled to the US to fundraise and acquired a collection of Picker
x-ray machines, old, outdated, and possibly army surplus. Treatments were
performed by nurses with no training in radiotherapy and the machines were
certainly not designed to treat ringworm with high dose radiation. In 1952
the Israel Radiologist Union acknowledged the safe doses for radiation,
based on experiments in Nazi Germany, data from Hiroshima, and other
countries such as the US. According to the documentary, radiation was used
in the US to treat ringworm in the 1930s, but by the 1950s, the medical
establishment was well aware of the medical harm, radiation damage, and
ensuing court suits.
Beyond the obvious ethnic discrimination and undervaluing of the human life
of children of color, the other sinister issue raised by the film involves
the US military's desire post-Hiroshima to understand the effects of high
levels of radiation exposure. (Remember US troops were used as guinea pigs.)
When that became socially unacceptable in America, the documentary suggests
that Israeli officials might have been willing to offer some of their "human
rubbish" as research material. Very strangely, during a time of economic
impoverishment and rationing in Israel, more money was spent on the ringworm
radiation "treatments" than the entire Israeli national budget, and these
numbers are "off the books". It seems records were hidden or filed under
state secrets or "lost," what appears to be an official conspiracy of
silence. Picker still supplies Israel with x-ray machines and efforts by
victims to open records, prove state culpability, and receive compensation
have been stymied by the Knesset and the bogus Ringworm Victim Law.
To put this in historical context, eugenicswas very popular in the US in the
early 1900s, in fact we were a model for the Nazis. Lower doses of
radiation were used to treat ringworm elsewhere in the world and elite
Ashkenazi Zionists continue to share their racist views toward people of
color and Arabs in particular with much of the Western world. US health
care is guilty of many egregious practices. During my residency in the
early 1970s we fought against sterilizing poor women, African Americans, and
Native Americans without their consent, and then there were the decades of
forced sterilizations of people with low IQs, "imbeciles." And let's
remember similar racist and outrageous adoption practices for Native
American children in the US who were wrenched from their "inadequate"
families. Many recall horrendous medical experiments in the US like the
Tuskegee Syphilis Studywhere for decades, African American men, without
their consent, were observed rather than treated for syphilis which is a
devastating disease.
Beyond these human, social, and political tragedies, important questions
remain. Internationally, the Israeli medical system is considered first rate
and the source of significant therapies and research, but no amount of
success can mask the egregious treatment of Yemeni children and the
subsequent cover-up. How can the adoption and radiation victims gain access
to whatever records remain? If this is how the Israeli establishment treats
Jews from Arab countries, can we imagine how they treat Palestinians? What
is the US contribution to and complicity in this crime? And for me as a
physician, why didn't one doctor just say, NO.
