The Ringworm Scandal: When Israeli Doctors Killed Tens of Thousands of Arab Children
by RICHARD SILVERSTEIN on OCTOBER 12, 2014
By
the early 1950s, Israel had absorbed most of the Holocaust survivors
and other immigrants from western countries. These were generally the
preferred Ashkenazi Jews, who were the nation’s elite. It was then that
Jews from Arab lands began arriving in great numbers. David Ben Gurion
knew he needed great numbers of Jews to come to Israel in order to
counter the demographic threat posed by Israel’s Palestinian population
(those who hadn’t been expelled during the Nakba). That’s why he
accepted and encouraged the Arab immigration, despite the fact that the
newcomers’ Sephardi heritage was considered defective.
The 2004 documentary, The Ringworm Children,
presents the historical context of this immigration and is dedicated to
the greatest national medical scandal in the state’s history. During
this early period, Israel looked with deep suspicion on the Arab olim.
They were viewed not only as culturally inferior, but as reservoirs of
disease. To be fair, these same views had been prominent in the U.S.
during the heights of immigration to this country.
But unlike here, Israel allowed one senior health official, Dr. Chaim Sheba,
to conduct a massive program of unnecessary medical treatments, at
enormous expense, which actually killed many of the victims. At that
time, many children developed ringworm, a non-lethal condition of fungal
origin which affected the scalp. Unlike in other countries, 100,000
Jewish (and Palestinian) Arab children were irradiated in order to treat
the condition. While medical protocol of the day directed that no
technician receive a dose higher than .5 Roentgen, those treated could
received a higher dose. A lethal dose was considered 200 Roentgen (R).
The children treated received individual doses of 350R. Sometimes they
received two doses (for a total of 600R). 6,000 of the victims died
within the first year or so after treatment. To this day, many of the
remaining victims suffer cancers, epilepsy, infertility and other brain
disorders. Even their children have been impacted through genetic
abnormalities passed on from one generation to the next.
When
the scandal was first exposed in 1994, the government reacted by
circling the wagons and refusing to admit fault or liability. Then
activists pressured the government to pass a law demanding that the
State take responsibility. It did so. But the law was not understood
by the victims at the time, who didn’t realize that it was a Trojan
Horse. It persuaded them that the State had finally accepted fault and
that it would compensate for their suffering. But in reality, the law
set hurdles so high, that very few survivors have been approved and
received any compensation. They were forced to prove they were victims,
and their treatment by the medical evaluation committees victimized
them a second time. Those who agreed to accept the government’s
conditions, could not appeal or sue once they had been denied. So
almost no survivors chose to apply for compensation under the law.
Further,
a senior health ministry official at the time of the passing of the
Ringworm law, had secreted all of the Ringworm files in his personal
archives. Thus he prevented anyone from gaining access to them:
victims, their lawyers, doctors, even other government officials. When
he died, the files were transferred to government archives. Current
health ministry officials deliberately have not examined them because
they don’t want to know what’s in them. Neither the victims nor their
attorneys can gain access to them either.
This
is a massive coverup, but one that is completely legal. The Supreme
Court itself has refused to rule on the case, arguing that the Knesset
law absolves the victims of any right to claim negligence on the part of
the government’s medical officers. Meanwhile, Dr. Sheba has one of
Israel’s major medical centers named for him and is considered one of
the founding father’s of Israeli medicine. He founded the Tel Aviv
University medical center and helped found those in Jerusalem and Haifa.
There
is one further claim the film makes that brings it all back home to the
U.S. The X-ray treatments provided by Israel were extremely
expensive. The final cost was in the range of 400-million Israeli
pounds, which at the time were equivalent to British pounds. That would
put the cost at least $800-million and possibly even higher (in 1952
dollars). That means the project cost far more than the entire national
budget. Israel obviously couldn’t afford such a massive expenditure.
The filmmakers offer one possible explanation: that the U.S. government,
which had just bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, needed an outlet to do
radiation testing. We couldn’t or wouldn’t do such experiments here
because American medical standards would not permit it. So American
officials “farmed” the operation out to Dr. Sheba and the Israelis, who
had no such ethical problems with it.
The
Arab Jewish children were viewed as defective and undesirable to begin
with by the Ashkenazi elite like Sheba. So they were suitable as fodder
for the greater good of medicine. Though Nazi medicine operated in a
context of a plan to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe, the
experiments performed in Israel were not dissimilar in nature. Sheba
knew his radiation dosage would harm children, even kill them. It turns
out it did so on a far larger scale than he may’ve imagined. But the
subjects were deemed expendable, just as Jewish subjects of Nazi doctors
were. And tens of thousands were killed, just as the Nazis did.
The
film suggests another possible explanation–that Sheba, who came to the
U.S. both to collect the X-ray machines that administered the treatment,
also fundraised among American Jews for treating the Ringworm
children. Though I doubt he raised anywhere near the sum mentioned
above, it’s possible American Jews donated generously to this cause.
This should be a warning to such donors today to examine carefully
whatever projects they’re asked to fund.
To
be fair to Israel, it wasn’t the only nation which performed what were
essentially eugenics experiments. The Nazis did so and even the U.S.,
in the Tuskegee experiments, deliberately allowed syphilis victims to
die untreated. The difference, as I noted above, is that the U.S. never
engaged in such ghoulish medical experimentation on a national level
and never with victims in such numbers. Further, when there were
victims, they could come forward and demand justice.
Israel has essentially sealed off access to justice, thus creating a monstrous stain on its medical and moral legacy.
I
want to raise a strong note of caution. There are those who view the
Ringworm project as proof that Israel’s treatment of the children
testified to its embrace of Nazi values. That is one bridge too far for
me. It’s far better to note the sheer evil of the experiment and the
suffering it induced without having to claim that it turned Israel into a
Nazi state or that Zionism itself was a Nazi ideology.
H/t Jonathan Cook.
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