Makor Rishon reporter Arnon Segal this week donated a kidney as part of a cross-transplantation that involved Beilinson and Soroka hospitals, at the end of which kidneys were transplanted in three people. Segal’s only condition was that his kidney must go only to a Jewish person. He told Ynet on Tuesday that it could be a leftist or an LGBTQ person, as long as they were Jewish.
Before we go into the torrent of curses that were heaped on this man, from people who never themselves donated or are planning to donate any body part, let’s consider the possibility that an individual donated a lot of money and insisted that the recipient would only be one organization or one social group – would that have raised so many objections, some of them startingly vile?
The most despicable response by far came from the caretaker chair of the Meretz Party, Zehava Gal-On, who tweeted: “Even two kidneys are not enough to clean the poison flowing through his body, so what does it matter?”
It should be noted in this context that the settlement of Yitzhar holds the record for donating kidneys and that there is a secret competition among many national-religious communities over who would give away the highest number of kidneys. No such competition has been reported regarding leftist enclaves, and Gal-On, who in the recent election went down with the ship, is, to the best of my knowledge, a two-kidney Israeli.
The Torat Lehima group tweeted: “It’s nice that the communists also take ownership of the kidneys and decide for the donors whom to give to.”
And Michal Agmon tweeted: “Scoop: the High Court of Justice invalidated Arnon Segal’s kidney donation and ordered it to be divided equally between a Jew and an Arab.”
Information Minister Galit Distel Atbaryan (Likud) explained: “Arnon Segal’s sin lies in the fact that he sees you as family. Family for real, not as an empty phrase. He is commanded to act this way. We are brothers and sisters in a huge Jewish family. Blood brothers and sisters. And he does what any good brother would do in his place: family first, then everything else. His motivation is not hatred of the other. It is a love of the relative.
The National Center for Transplantation clarified that “from our point of view, saving a life is a supreme value regardless of religion, sex, or any other characteristic of the donor or recipient. We manage the system of organ donation and organ distribution in Israel professionally and following the waiting lists. When it comes to living donors, the donor has the right to choose the recipient.”
Here’s another point: when a sibling donates a kidney to a brother or a sister, does anyone suggest this is nepotism? Then why shouldn’t a person be able to donate to all his brothers and sisters?
