ISRAELI PRIME minister Binyamin Netanyahu has demanded that the Swedish government condemn an article in a Stockholm newspaper which claimed that Israeli troops had killed Palestinians in order to sell their organs.
The ongoing refusal to do so by Swedish officials, stressing the paramount importance of freedom of the press, has put a question mark over next month’s scheduled visit to Israel by Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt.
The article, published last week in the respected Aftonbladetdaily, implied Israel was harvesting Palestinian organs. It linked the deaths of Palestinians to the recent arrest in New Jersey of an American Jew suspected of illicit organ trafficking.
Mr Netanyahu, likening the report to medieval anti-Semitic blood libels, told yesterday’s cabinet meeting that Israel was not demanding an apology from the Swedish government, but a “formal condemnation”.
Finance minister Yuval Steinitz said bilateral ties with Stockholm, which holds the rotating EU presidency, are in crisis, and “anyone who is unwilling to condemn such a blood libel could be considered unwanted in Israel”.
A reporter and cameraman from Aftonbladetwere yesterday refused press credentials in Israel.
The Swedish foreign minister, who is due to visit Israel on September 10th, declined Israeli calls to intervene, and even reprimanded the Swedish ambassador to Israel for condemning the article. Mr Bildt explained to Israeli officials that freedom of the press was a basic value enshrined in the Swedish constitution.
However, he did write in his personal blog over the weekend that such articles could lead to anti-Semitic hate crimes .
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman argued that there was “a degree of hypocrisy” in the Swedish position on freedom of the press because in 2006 the Swedish foreign minister sent a letter to a Yemeni leader apologising for offensive caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.