🇮🇱Bodysnatching🇮🇱as a tool of colonial dehumanization

[u/Leftist_Pirate]

🇮🇱Bodysnatching🇮🇱as a tool of colonial dehumanization

The Israelis illegally process the bodies of dead Palestinians for a financial profit.

The Israel National Skin Bank is implicated in grotesquely exploiting Palestinians, effectively skinning the dead under the guise of medical necessity, a stark violation of human decency.

This brings serious ethical questions to Israel’s status as a global donor of skin and skin graft provider. Can one ethically participate in the Israeli organ donation program writ large?

But if we look at history we can see a deeper comparison between the historical body snatching of the Irish by the British and the alleged treatment of Palestinians by Israelis. It offers a compelling examination of the intersection of dehumanization, exploitation, and political domination.

Definition: Bodysnatching refers to the secret theft of dead bodies from graveyards, hospital beds, usually to sell them to medical schools, anatomists, or physicians for dissection and the study of human anatomy. (And in the modern era for medical and biological solutions such as skin grafts etc.)

Historical Background of Irish 🇮🇪Body Snatching: In the 18th and 19th centuries, body snatching was prevalent across the British Isles, driven by the demand for cadavers for anatomical study in medical schools. While this phenomenon primarily affected the poorer classes throughout Britain. Ireland, under British rule, bodysnatching was turned into an industrial business, giving cadavers to industrial age medical schools.* The dehumanization of the Irish under British colonial rule facilitated abuses like body snatching, as the Irish were often viewed as lesser or sub-human by the colonial powers, which justified exploitation in the minds of the oppressors*.

Contemporary Allegations Against Israel: Similarly, the allegations against Israel suggest a dynamic where Palestinian bodies are reportedly used without consent for various purposes, including medical research and military training. This is reported by various human rights groups and media, indicating a parallel in terms of the possible dehumanization and exploitation of a subjugated group. For instance in the 1990’s Israeli Dr. Yehuds Hiss and doctors underneath him pleaded guilty to illegally harvesting skin and organs from dead Palestinians and gluing the eyes shut to hide the theft of organs from Palestinians**. * [See Abu Kabir]**

These callous acts reflect a severe disregard for the dignity and humanity of Palestinians, much like the British disregard for the Irish during the colonial period.

Dehumanization as a Tool of Colonialism: The critical link between these two contexts is the use of dehumanization as a colonial tool. Just as the British may have justified their exploitation of the Irish by considering them inferior, similar dynamics are at play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This dehumanization can manifest in treating the bodies of the deceased not as humans deserving respect but as mere objects or resources to be utilized.

In light of these entrenched interests focused on domination of the Palestinian people is there any reason to believe that these abuses have stopped in the present day?

And is there any reason to trust that Israel has ceased their abuses of Palestinian corpses as outlined in the Abu Kabir case?

What does this level of dehumanization for fellow human beings mean for global stability in the short, medium, and long term?

* https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-harvested-organs-permission-families-dead/story?id=9390407

[u/miker_the_III]

Can anyone ethically participate in the Israeli-

No.

Unless it’s ’Israeli insurgency against the Zionist government” but then they would not be Israelis

Yeah this is horrific nothing to say besides that little wisecrack

[u/Advanced_Top_2169]

I read about the Abu Kabir thing years ago and it stuck with me. The detail about gluing eyes shut to cover up what they'd taken inside the skull is the sort of stuff you can't unread. Whether it's 19th century Dublin graveyards or something happening now, the pattern's the same, turn a people into a resource and suddenly all the normal rules stop applying.

People will say it's old news or isolated cases but if the underlying incentives haven't changed why would the behavior stop? Medical markets need supply and occupied populations make easy supply. There's never a shortage of rationalizations when someone else's body is worth money.

What gets me is how these practices get laundered through institutions afterward. The skin bank operates internationally, the medical schools train doctors who go everywhere, the research findings enter journals, and nobody asks where the raw material came from because asking would be inconvenient. That normalization is the long-term stability problem you're pointing at, I think. A world where certain bodies are just inventory isn't stable at all, it's just quiet until it isn't.