Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged the Swedish government on Sunday to condemn an article in a Swedish newspaper last week accusing the Israeli Army of harvesting organs from Palestinians wounded or killed by soldiers.
As the furor in Israel over the article gathered into a diplomatic storm revolving around questions of anti-Semitism and freedom of speech, Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the article, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, was “outrageous” and compared it to a “blood libel,” referring to medieval anti-Semitic accusations that Jews ritually killed gentile children and collected their blood.
“We are not asking the government of Sweden for an apology,” Mr. Netanyahu said, according to an official who attended the cabinet meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We are asking for their condemnation. We are not asking from them anything we do not ask of ourselves.”
Mr. Netanyahu made his comments behind closed doors, but other Israeli ministers have publicly attacked the Swedish government’s refusal to take an official stand against the article. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s outspoken foreign minister, has led the protest, saying that the Swedish government’s silence was “reminiscent of Sweden’s position during World War II, when it also did not become involved.”
Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli finance minister, said: “Whoever does not distance himself from a blood libel such as this may not be so welcome now in Israel. We have a crisis until the government of Sweden understands otherwise.”
Sweden currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, and its foreign minister, Carl Bildt, is scheduled to visit Israel next month.
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said Sunday that Israel had no intention of canceling the visit but that the Aftonbladet affair would “cast a shadow” over it if left unresolved.
Mr. Bildt has rejected Israeli calls for an official condemnation of the article. Explaining his position, he wrote in a blog post late Thursday that freedom of expression was part of the Swedish Constitution, according to The Associated Press.
Sweden’s ambassador to Israel, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, issued a statement last week calling the Aftonbladet article “shocking and appalling” and sharing the dismay of the Israeli government and public, but the Swedish Foreign Ministry disavowed her denunciation.
As an initial step, Israeli officials said they would not rush to issue press credentials to two visiting Swedish journalists from Aftonbladet, but would instead undertake a thorough evaluation of their request, a process that could take up to three months.
“Israel is under assault,” said Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office. The Aftonbladet article, he said, was part of a “premeditated campaign to vilify the State of Israel.” He added that anti-Semitic blood libels had led in the past to pogroms and attacks against Jews. “We cannot afford to turn the other way.”
The article, by the Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom, ran on an inside page of the newspaper on Aug. 17. It was based on accusations Mr. Bostrom heard from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s, and which he published in a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2001. Mr. Seaman said Mr. Bostrom last worked here in 2006.
Mr. Bostrom apparently revived the allegations by linking them to the July arrests of 44 people in New Jersey in a major corruption and international money laundering conspiracy that included several assemblymen, mayors and rabbis. One of its members, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, faces charges of conspiring to broker the illegal sale of a human kidney for transplant.
Aftonbladet followed up on Sunday with an article about one of the Palestinian families at the center of the original accusations.
In interviews with the Israeli news media, Mr. Bostrom has said that he has no idea whether the accusations are true, but that they warrant investigation. In his Aug. 17 article, he included a denial of the claims by the Israeli military.
Jan Helin, the editor in chief of Aftonbladet, did not immediately return a call from The New York Times.
Some have raised questions about whether Israel’s reaction has been counterproductive. Lena Posner, a leader of the Jewish community in Stockholm, told the Israeli news Web site Ynet that Israel had caused a “mess” by drawing undue attention to the original article and turning the debate in Sweden into one about the need to protect freedom of expression.
“That is the eternal dilemma,” said Mr. Palmor of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “Should you try to take action or look the other way?” Israel chose not to ignore the article, he said, because it was so egregious and could end up causing “physical aggression.”
The Aftonbladet episode dominated Israeli headlines on Sunday. The columnist Eitan Haber wrote on the front page of Yediot Aharonot that “Freedom of the press does not mean the publication of lies that justify the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians.”
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