Poison: The use of the blood libel in the war against Israel

Raphael Israeli
JCPA
3 Iyar 5762
15 April 02

(While this was first written more than 7 years ago, the modus operandi remains the same)

An Epidemic on the West Bank

On the morning of March 21, 1983, one week before Pesach, in a high school in the town of Arrabeh in the Jenin area of the West Bank, Palestinian girls (between the ages of 15 and 17) were sitting in several classrooms when they suddenly began to faint, one after the other. They were taken to hospital and checked, but no medical reason was found for their fainting. Yet they had fainted, so a search began in order to find the reason.

Then other girls of the same age began fainting in other villages on the West Bank, in Bethlehem, and afterwards in Hebron and Halhul, Tulkarem and Nablus. Over a period of a few days approximately 1,000 girls ended up in hospital at the same time, seemingly victims of an epidemic.

Since all this occurred just before Pesach, the motif of blood libel and mass poisoning was raised. The rumors began that it was the Israelis who had poisoned the girls.


The Arab Tradition of Miracle Literature

The famous Japanese director Akira Kurasawa made a classic film in 1950, "Rashomon," based on a Japanese folk tale from the twelfth century. It told the story of the family of a Samurai who were attacked by thieves. Afterward, there are four different stories of the incident. The dead Samurai's spirit tells what happened from his point of view. There are also the stories of his wife, one of the servants, and a woodcutter who happened to witness the attack. The film is a fascinating depiction of four different points of view of the same event, and Kurasawa's message is that there is no objective truth. The truth can be given different interpretations, and everyone can see the truth from a different angle.

In the Middle Ages there was a genre in Arabic literature known as miracle literature. The author would describe his adventures on the way to China or India. He would tell fantastic stories about places with all kinds of amazing things, about diamonds, silver, and gold, about eagles that would fly with him, and afterwards it came together in the wonderful stories we know in the collection of A Thousand and One Nights.

The Palestinian-Arab-Muslim stories about what happens here simply remind one of the miracle literature. Stories come out of the imagination and are strengthened by new inventions. This is what interests the people, and whether it happened or not is not that important. In the political reality, the invented story is believed in the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim consciousness as the truth.


Accusing the Israelis

After the mass fainting epidemic in 1983, the girls claimed that they had been poisoned, although the doctors who checked them found no evidence of this. Then the Arabs began to make charges that maybe, and then certainly, it was Israelis who had poisoned the girls. They also presented the reason -- the fantastic story that the Jews have an interest in countering the high Palestinian birthrate so they specifically targeted young girls approaching the age of marriage. The poisoning was done to harm this most fertile age group in order to limit Arab demographic growth. They even said they had found medical proof, claiming that urine tests showed a high protein level, which means that something is abnormal in the fertility system.

They began to build all kinds of theories and enlisted statements from Arab doctors. Then, amazingly, the Israeli newspapers began asking why the Jews, who were killed in the gas chambers, would do something like this, and there were calls for an investigation of the actions of the then-Likud government of Menachem Begin. The Arabs saw the Israelis themselves accusing their own government and raised the tone of their accusations even higher.

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