The Kishon Affair burst onto the public's radar in 2000, after a report in the media described a high rate of cancer among Shayetet 13 fighters and divers from the Underwater Mission Unit, who had dived in the Kishon Port during their service.
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The Kishon Port is a small one located at the eastern edge of Haifa Bay. Over the years, it has become extremely polluted. Kishon Port, which empties near the port, channeled industrial sewage from a few of the surrounding factories, including some from the petrochemical industry. Anyone who has swum or dived in the Kishon could smell the pollution in the water.
Personally, as a young officer, I had a dubious honor of diving in the waters of Kishon Port when our vessel anchored there as part of a screening to located underwater mines. The water was very murky, and it was hard to see things, even with a flashlight. The stench was awful, and after the dive it was very difficult to wash off the layers of filth. At the time, Israeli Navy units trained and operated in Kishon Port, and there was little awareness of the pollution or the possibility that it could damage people's health.
When malignancies started to appear in a number of combat veterans from these units, all of whom had dived and trained in the polluted Kishon water, it led to the supposition that overexposure to the filthy water had caused the aberrant number of cases. In 2000, after the matter was exposed in the media, then-IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz decided to set up an investigative committee headed by Justice (ret.) Meir Shamgar and two senior medical experts to probe the affair. The committee interviewed dozens of people, including some who had contracted cancer and were already in declining health, as well as experts in the field.
Without getting into the details of the committee's work, it recommended that all diving or swimming in the Kishon Port area be stopped immediately, and in 2003 it published its conclusions. The committee could not prove a direct link between the naval fighters' activities in the Kishon and their cancer cases, partly because of the lack of studies available, but could not rule out a connection.
Justice Shamgar, who looked at the matter from a legal point of view, argued that the unusually high number of cancer cases among the Navy personnel who had served there was enough to show a connection. The commission's recommendation was that even though there was no scientific medical proof that the sailors' cancer was the results of their diving and swimming in Kishon Port, everyone exposed to the water there during their military service should be recognized as disabled IDF veterans, and be awarded care and benefits from the Defense Ministry.
Mofaz adopted the committee's conclusions, and then-Director General of the Defense Ministry Amos Yaron, at a meeting in which I took part, announced the new guidelines for recognizing the sailors affected by the Kishon Port pollution.
In 2009, apparently because there were so many affected and their treatment was so costly, then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak decided to set up a committee that would re-examine the criteria for recognizing the "Kishon disabled."
The Shani Commission, which was established as a medical committee, submitted its findings in 2010, which did not discover any direct link between the veterans' past activity in Kishon Port and their cancer, just like the Shamgar Commission had not. As a result, Defense Ministry coverage for treatments for the various types of cancer from which Israeli Navy veterans were suffering were cut back, effectively dealing a major blow to seriously ill – in some cases, dying – combat veterans.
The commission's conclusions were nothing new, but led to the defense establishment turning its back on combat veterans who had been recognized in principle by the Shamgar Commission, which chose to recognize the veterans who had been following orders all those years. The Israeli government has an obligation to its combat soldiers. Neglecting the sick sailors and their families does serious harm to the values of the IDF and the norms and values that are taught to IDF combat personnel and their commanders.
One need not mention the desperate act of Itzik Saidian to illustrate the frustration of sick combat veterans, their widows and children, and the families, who are not recognized. Defense Minister Benny Gantz must announce the government's clear commitment to all combat veterans who were acting under orders and now that they are sick and disabled, need support from the system.
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