Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 30 July 1996
Daniel Sternoff

The committee recommended an end to wholesale dumping of such donations and proposed strict guidelines for screening blood donations from Ethiopian Jews and other high risk groups.

"We do not anymore regard the entire Ethiopian community as a community of risk but we have to treat them as individuals who comply with certain conditions," commission president Yitzhak Navon told reporters.

Ethiopians, who rioted in January when they learned from newspaper reports of the blood dumping they called "racist," were livid Sunday that not only did the discarding of their blood go unpunished but that the commission was recommending the donations still be subject to special requirements.

"The Navon Commission did not arrive at personal conclusions toward those responsible," Ethiopian lawmaker and activist Addisu Messele told reporters.

"We thought the Navon Commission would give the community the right to donate blood like every citizen in the State of Israel without exceptions but this was not done," he said.

The commission recommended that blanket refusals of Ethiopian blood based on "ethnic criteria" must cease.

It instead proposed that blood banks not accept donations from anyone, black or white, who had lived for at least six months of the last 10 years in places where AIDS was "endemic," including Ethiopia.

Ethiopians called the change "superficial" and said their community was still wrongfully stigmatized.

"We will fight to the finish in order to have the right to donate blood," Messele said.

The commission said of 1,400 reported AIDS cases among Israel's 5.57 million people, 550 were from the 60,000 strong Ethiopian Jewish community, most of whom were secretly airlifted to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s.

After the blood scandal erupted in January, former health minister Ephraim Sneh ordered blood banks to stop discarding Ethiopian blood and to freeze it.

Navon presented the commission's findings and proposals to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his consideration earlier Sunday.

Navon also called on Netanyahu to address the social grievances of the Ethiopian Jews, not least of which is their demand for religious equality.

"We asked the prime minister today that they should make an effort that the official rabbinical religious institutions would recognize the Ethiopians as Jews without reservations," he said.

Orthodox rabbis in charge of Jewish marriages, divorces and burials in Israel question the Jewishness of the Ethiopians and require them to undergo symbolic conversions.

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