When veteran journalist Helen Thomas was asked recently if she had any comments on Israel, she shot back, 'Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.' She apologized for the remark, but, as the campaign against her escalated, she chose to retire from her position as White House correspondent.
Putting aside the edginess in her words, does Helen Thomas’s remark deserve serious consideration?
Over the years, it has been receiving just that from many tens of thousands of Israelis, who have been emigrating from Israel, applying for emigration, or staying in Israel but holding or applying for dual citizenship. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, half a million Israelis hold dual citizenship.
Although the Israel lobby expressed particular outrage at Helen Thomas’ suggestion that Israelis go back to Germany and Poland, many Israelis have done precisely that. In his book, The Seventh Million, Tom Segev writes that many thousands of Israelis have “requested and received German passports.” According to the Jewish Virtual Library, there were 118,000 Jews living in Germany in 2006. Another 49,700 lived in Hungary and 3,200 in Poland.
Disconcerting as some Zionists may find this, Jews have not stayed away from countries where they faced near extermination under the Nazis. Does this mean that these countries are now safer for Jews than Israel?
At least, that is what the record indicates. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 22,682 Israelis died in Israeli wars or as a result of terrorist attacks.
Over the same period – that is, since 1948 - how many Jews in Europe have died as a result of anti – Semitic violence?
I am not suggesting Jewish emigration from Israel as my preferred solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question. Yet, now that Israel has tapped into nearly every Jewish population in the diaspora with an economic interest in emigrating to Israel, that is what we are likely to observe in the future.
Is that how the Zionist project might end?
That is a possibility. If Israel persists in its present policies of imposing apartheid in the West Bank, of strangulating Gaza, of carrying out carpet bombing of undefended Arab populations, Israel will continue to lose the liberal segments of its population to emigration.
Should this happen, Israel would face a shrinking Jewish population, drained of much of its talent, consisting of mostly right-wing Jewish zealots, angry, nervous, and with their fingers on triggers that could launch some 200 nuclear weapons at targets in the Middle East and perhaps beyond.
Starting in 1897, an increasing number of Jews mobilized to create what appeared to be an impossible Jewish settler-state in Palestine.
Now that this project, by virtue of its successes, has become a threat to itself, to the Jewish diaspora, to the Middle East and the world, can we hope that growing numbers of Jews will mobilize their gifts to work with the Palestinians and the world community to help unwind the Zionist project, and replace it with a society that will make full amends to all its victims.
For more than sixty years, the Jewish establishment has worked strenuously to demand that the world do justice to Jewish victims of the Nazis. Justice and honesty demand that they do the same for their own victims.
- M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston. He is author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2009) and Challenging the New Orientalism (IPI, 2006). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: http://qreason.com, and contact him at: alqalam02760@yahoo.com.
Israel has been in an uproar about the comments made by Helen Thomas. The reality is Israel has been doing exactly what was inferred in those comments…. sending Jews back to where they came from. The following is written by one of those Jews, Jared Malsin. He was the English editor for the Ma’an News Agency, deported to the USA for telling the truth! A crime unforgivable in the Holy Land.
Jared ‘dug up’ the video presented to demonstrate the hypocrisy displayed by Israel. They would much rather such truths remain buried….
HELEN THOMAS AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN
By Jared Malsin
The furor over Helen Thomas’ remarks reminded me of this lecture Amira Hass gave in New York two years ago.
I wasn’t personally at the lecture, but I had a long talk with Hass in my office in Bethlehem that spring, a few weeks before she left on her speaking tour, and she expressed to me some of the main ideas contained in it.
In the talk Hass recalls an anecdote about a foreign solidarity activist who makes an ill-considered comment about Israeli Jews going back to Europe.
What she eloquently manages to do is capture the intersection between Israel’s Law of Return and the Palestinian right of return. She talks about the tension between the desire for Jewish concrete return after the Holocaust (returning to communities in European communities in Europe that no longer existed) and the abstract Zionist “return” to a place most Jews had never been, Palestine.
What Hass recognizes and I also believe is that this history and this politics is intimately bound up with the history (past and present) of Palestinian dispossession. And it is this latter, ongoing expulsion that is still unresolved.
Whenever Israel commits yet another atrocity, its defenders are quick to redirect public attention away from the grisly crime scene.
Currently, there are headlines about allegedly anti-Semitic comments made by senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Pundits across the land evince outrage at her off-the-cuff 25-second statement made to a man who appears to be holding a camera right in her face.
Thomas issued a public apology for her words, but this was insufficient to assuage the wounded feelings of powerful antagonists, and she has now retired from a long and distinguished career.
Before we examine her comments and evaluate their possible validity, let’s look at other recent events having to do with Israel.
On May 31st Israeli commandos killed at least nine unarmed volunteers attempting to take humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
According to eyewitness reports and forensic evidence, many of these aid volunteers were shot at close range, including a 19-year-old American citizen killed by four bullets to the head and one to the chest fired from 18 inches away.
Israel immediately imprisoned eyewitnesses and hundreds of other aid participants, confiscated their cameras, laptops, and other possessions, and prevented them from speaking to the press for days. Among the incarcerated were decoratedU.S. veterans and an 80-year-old former ambassador who had been deputy director of Reagan’s Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism.
When they finally emerged and were able to tell their stories, many described horrific scenes of Israeli commandos shooting people in the head, of those tending the injured being shot in the stomach, of people bleeding to death while flotilla participants waved white flags and pled for help.
They also described being beaten brutally by Israeli forces, again and again – including those on ships that, in the U.S. media’s judgment, experienced “no violence.” A 64-year-old piano tuner from California, Paul Larudee, described hundreds of Israeli commandos boarding his ship. When he refused to cooperate with them, soldiers then beat him numerous times both on board the ship and after he was imprisoned on land.
Eventually he was taken by ambulance to an Israeli hospital. He wasn’t treated, however, and Larudee believes he was taken there because Israel didn't want media to see his black eye, pronated joints, bruised jaw and body contusions.
Marine veteran Ken O’Keefe described similar beatings while in Israeli custody. In his case, the public was able to see his bloodied, battered face in video clips and still images – but only on the Internet, since American mainstream media failed to report on his press conference or to publish the many still photos of his injuries.
Other gruesome photos available to the American public only on the Internet are of Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old American student whose eye and eye socket were recently shattered by Israeli forces. She has since had her eyeball removed, three metal plates inserted in her face, and her jaw wired shut.
Henochowicz was not on the flotilla; she was taking part in a nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli assault when an Israeli soldier shot a high-velocity teargas canister into her face.
A Swedish citizen standing with Henochowicz said, “They clearly saw us. They clearly saw that we were internationals and it really looked as though they were trying to hit us. They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.”
Henochowicz is not the first to have been shot by such a canister.
Thirty-year-old Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahmeh died when an Israeli soldier shot one at him at close range while Abu Rahmeh participated in a demonstration against Israeli confiscation of Palestinian farmland. A video of this is also available on You Tube; U.S. networks have also chosen not to broadcast this.
Californian Tristan Anderson was shot in the head by a similar canister while he was taking photographs following another demonstration. Part of Anderson’s brain was removed and he was in a “minimally responsive state” for 6-7 months.
He is now in a wheelchair, has almost no movement in his left arm and leg, is blind in one eye, and his mental functioning is significantly reduced. Photos of the shooting are also available on the Internet.
Since at least 2006 Israeli forces have closed off Gaza to the outside world, essentially imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, and denying them foodstuffs, medicines, and building materials, as documented by such agencies as Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Christian Aid, which said that Israel was using food and medicine as weapons.
One of the multitudinous victims of this illegal siege is five-year-old Taysir Al Burai, who suffers from an acute neurological disorder and requires round-the-clock care. According to the UK Guardian, he could be cured if Israel would allow him to leave Gaza, but to date his parents’ repeated requests have been denied.
Another victim is 7-month-old Mohammad Khader, whose swelling in the brain required specialized treatment unavailable in Gazan hospitals depleted by the Israeli siege. His distraught parents’ applications asking Israel to allow them to travel abroad were similarly denied. Their tiny son died a few days ago.
Such stories go on and on.
Thomas’s “outrageous” statement
Yet, the rage we see in the U.S. media is directed against none of this. People shot in the head, eyes and brain parts destroyed, the elderly beaten, small children and infants caused to suffer and die, parents to grieve – none of this has caused a hint of anger. In fact, most of it has been considered of too little importance even to report.
Instead, media reports are filled with outrage at “anti-Israel” words spoken by 89-year-old Helen Thomas.
In Thomas’s lifetime Israel has ethnically cleansed over a million people, replaced them with colonists from around the world, committed dozens of massacres, tortured thousands of people, killed and maimed untold numbers of children, mangled limbs, and committed outrages on women, old people, the weak and the infirm.
It has assassinated people throughout the world, invaded numerous countries, spied on the U.S., killed and injured 200 American servicemen (the anniversary is this week), and tortured and imprisoned Americans. All while receiving more American money than any other country on earth.
For years, long before her recent words, Thomas has been the target of Israel’s vicious American volunteers, the Zionist blogosphere abounding with nasty slurs on her looks and her Lebanese ancestry, this latter also consistently emphasized by the media, despite her Kentucky birth and upbringing.
One of the reasons for the ferocious animosity toward her is the fact that Thomas is one of the very few mainstream reporters to challenge the neocon engendered lies that led the U.S. into wars that have caused massive death, destruction and tragedy and to continue to expose ongoing policies of violence and cruelty.
As the same groups and individuals who pushed the US into attacking Iraq have in recent years been escalating their efforts to push the U.S. to now similarly decimate Iranians under the pretext that Iran might be developing nuclear weapons, Thomas’s questioning attempted to elicit from Obama the fact that Israel already posses nuclear weapons. While the rest of the press corps has conspired in the cover-up of this fact and others, Thomas worked to expose them.
Not surprisingly, the many people complicit in these manipulations, such as former Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer, have led the charge against her.
It is useful to examine the video and context of Thomas’s allegedly “anti-Semitic” comment.
A man, apparently holding a camera right in her face, asks for her comments about Israel. She says, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land…” He interrupts her and asks where they should go. She responds, “They should go home. To Germany, Poland, America, and everywhere else.”
While Thomas has since apologized for her hasty words and many Israelis have the right to continue living where they are, the reality is that Israeli settlers did, indeed, come from elsewhere; they are, in fact, illegally occupying Palestinian land (a fact acknowledged even by the U.S. State Department); and international law does require that they leave.
Many commentators evince particular anger at Thomas’s inclusion of Germany and Poland as places to which Israeli colonists should return, suggesting that Hitler is still in control and waiting to pounce.
The happy fact is, however, that World War II and the Nazi holocaust ended well over half a century ago. In Poland today there is a vibrant Jewish revival with a 10-foot tall Menorah being lit in the center of Warsaw during Hanukah, and Germany has become, according to the New York Times, “a country where Jews want to live.” In fact, in recent years more Jews have chosen to immigrate to Germany than to Israel.
Thomas’s call for colonists to return to America (this destination was left out of many articles) is far from outrageous given that a great many West Bank settlers are from the U.S.
Overall, reporting on the incident has largely departed from the standard journalistic practice of quoting people from both sides of an issue. Quotes from Thomas supporters are missing, even though the You Tube page featuring the infamous video contains a large number of comments supporting her. In contrast, quotes from Thomas’s detractors, almost all of them Zionists, are ubiquitous, but generally fail to divulge the speakers’ frequent conflicts of interest.
For example, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz quotes Jeffrey Goldberg without mentioning that Goldberg is an Israeli citizen who served as a prison guard at an Israeli prison that held hundreds of Palestinians without charge, some killed in cold blood by the prison commander.
Mainstream media organizations do not seem to have investigated reports that the man who videotaped Thomas, Rabbi David Nesenoff, also made an offensive video featuring himself and another man impersonating a buffoonish Catholic priest and Mexican immigrant.
Similarly, news reports that a high school had disinvited Thomas as a graduation speaker almost never inform readers that many of the school’s parents and students wished Thomas to remain, even though this unreferenced group may represent a majority of the school. Members of this group have created a Facebook page, “Helen Thomas should have been our graduation speaker,” that states:
“The purpose of this group is to quietly but firmly protest the ability of a small minority to impose its will on the larger group through engaging or threatening to engage in disruptive discourse. This group affirms a belief in reasonable discussion and feel that in this scenario, a clear minority was able to override a larger majority by distorting the issues and discussion.”
Replacing Thomas at the upcoming graduation ceremony will be CBS’s Bob Schiefer, who has close family ties to George W. Bush and has rarely, if ever, challenged administration falsehoods that sent the nation to war and that keep it there still.
Regarding his reporting on Israel-Palestine, media watchdog Fairness and Accurate In Reporting (FAIR) issued an alert in 2006 objecting to Schiefer’s “shallow, dismissive coverage of complicated and tragic events.”
It is not known who will take over Thomas’s front-row seat at White House briefings. Given the record of the current press corps, it is likely that Israel partisans are breathing a sign of relief.
One more obstacle to the Zionist juggernaut has just been removed.
#
ADDENDUM: It how come to light that Ari Fleischer apparently played a significant role in initiating and orchestrating the attacks on Thomas. According to Washington Post blogger David Weigel, Fleischer emailed numerous journalists about the video and gave quotes to anyone who asked, "a simple gesture that poured rocket fuel on the story."
"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
---British Historian Arnold Toynbee, Foreword to The Transformation 1971
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.
The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.
---Mahatma Gandhi
Indeed there is free speech in America except if the Eleventh Commandment is violated which states: Thou shall not speak ill of Jews and Israel lest you be cursed.
Your comments that Jews came from Europe to settle a foreign nation, Palestine, is absolutely true and undeniable. Many courageous Israeli politicians, diplomats, academicians and journalists such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, and Simha Flapan who used declassified Israeli documents to prove the creation of Israel by European Jews through ethnic cleansing (called then by Israeli politicians"transfer")
Here are two quotes from David Ben Gurion, Israel's founder and First Prime Minister:
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims, p. 144)
David Ben Gurion: "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
Your mistake was not historical but addressed a taboo subject--Jews and Israel--that immediately garners the ire, demands, and intimidation of organized Jewry who have easy access to a large portion of the American media to spread such attacks like wildfire until the person who made such remarks is smeared, humiliated, fired, or never to be hired again.
How inexplicably ironic that the Neocon Pro Iraq War White House press secretary Ari Fleicher should demand your firing because you spoke a truthful statement, yet he and his mainly Jewish Neocons took this country to an illegal immoral war based on total LIES that led to the invasion of a nation innocent of 9/11 or Al Qaeda times, Iraq, thus devastating the country and murdering over one million Iraqis. Iraqis are dying till this day due to that invasion. Fleischer's staunch Pro Israel support is not just due to him being a Jew but according to SourceWatch he holds a dual citizenship, American and Israeli.
According to Ari Fleischer Helen Thomas advocated for a "religious cleansing". The fact is she never mentioned religion but simply stated historical facts.
Here's Ari Fleischer, the White House Spin Doctor on WMD's on Iraq, March 21, 2003
"Well, there is NO question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of Mass Destruction, Biological and Chemical particularly"
Fleischer still defends Bush and the mass destruction of Iraq today. Not one single person in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the war crimes committed against Iraq.
Is this a man who has a shred of credibility to attack you, Helen, the most honored, longest serving journalist in the White House? You've been the only courageous journalist in the White House to doggedly seek truthful answers to questions the American people, in fact the world, want answered. It's been only since the Bush Administration with Ari Fleischer as press secretary that you've been slowly marginalized due to your insistence on the truth of why we invaded an innocent nation that has cost this country close to 5,000 deaths, tens of thousands of injured soldiers, and at a cost of $1 Trillion... Hearst must remain true to its principle that free speech is a bulwark of our democracy. You did not speak as a reporter for Hearst or in any official capacity but gave your honest (and truthful) opinion that Israel was founded and inhabited by European Jews. Although most Americans and world citizens would agree with your historical statement, they don't have your honorable courage to state such truth.
The fear of a large scale media driven backlash with the powerful label of the modern Scarlett Letter, "A" for Anti-Semite, is enough to bring our government, institutions, and private citizens to withhold their tongue, or else.
It would be an unjust and total capitulation to a minority group (most Jewish Americans are not members of organized Jewry and in fact most oppose Israel's policies) if Hearst would accede to a politically motivated attack against you because you're a thorn, a gadfly, in the side of those who thrive on propaganda for their livelihood or on idealogical grounds.
Neither Fleischer, nor the Jewish establishment, nor conservatives, nor the media demanded that Dick Armey be removed from his leadership post in Congress or that Mike Huckabee be fired by MSNBC for their public remarks that Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians for a third time, this time pushing the entire population out of their occupied homeland.
Rep. DICK ARMEY: "Most of the people who now populate Israel were transported from all over the world to that land and they made it their home. The Palestinians can do the same, and we're perfectly content to work with the Palestinians in doing that. We are not willing to sacrifice Israel for the notion of a Palestinian homeland."
Mike Huckabee "There is only one place on earth where the Jewish people could have a homeland that is consistent with their roots, whereas the Palestinians can create their homeland in many other places in the Middle East, outside Israel,"
Many known and unknown personalities around the world who dared to criticize Israel's founding, its policies, or the powerful stronghold the Israel Lobby has on our government have been summarily attacked and smeared to ensure their silence and deter others from practicing their Constitutional right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the Right to Free Speech and Free Press.
Helen, you join such laudable company as President Jimmy Carter, Former Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Nobel Prize Winners Mary Robinson and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, among many European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American politicians, diplomats, academicians, and journalists.
Many persons have paid the price for daring to raise Israel's founding based on the theft of a nation, Palestine or its brutal occupation of the West Bank, inhumane siege of Gaza or its multiple wars and invasions of Arab nations. I personally lived through and survived Israel's three month siege and bombardment of Beirut from air, land, and sea that killed close to 20,000 civilians.
I urge Hearst not to acquiesce to the politically motivated attacks on Helen Thomas, a journalist in the mold of Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. There will never be another Helen Thomas and Hearst must honor her long service to this nation, her pursuit for truth and holding our politicians accountable to the Constitution and the American people, and preserve her reputation so that she may retire with dignity and nobility that she richly deserves.
America will be worse off when Helen ever decides to retire.
God bless you, Helen, and may He keep you in good health, good spirits, and continue to give you the strength to fight for truth for all our sake.
"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,"....."The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world,
"Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, supports a form of ethnic cleansing, advocating the transfer of Israeli Arab citizens out of Israel. (Population transfer is known under international law as a form of “ethnic cleansing.”) He’s argued, “The idea of land for peace is false… the guiding principle has to be exchange of populations and territories…. We will never agree to a definition of ‘two states for two peoples’.” J-Street
December 12, 2008 “The Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, has said that Israeli Arabs must leave Israel as soon as a Palestinian state is established.
"Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them 'you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere,'" Livni said during a meeting with high school students in Tel Aviv.
"Polls show that more than half of the Jewish population does not wish Arabs to live in their neighborhoods and that many Israelis would like to see the government encourage Arab citizens to leave the country."
MUST READ: Albert Einstein and Other Prominent U.S. Jews Letter to the New York Times December 4, 1984 on Menachem Begin and Founding of Israel
Excerpt:
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”
Helen Thomas Mocks Gibbs Over White House's Lack Of Condemnation Of Israel's Act Of War
The Ambush of Helen Thomas
By GARY LEUPP
Outrage!
White House journalist Helen Thomas, covering a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the White House May 27, is accosted on the sidewalk by someone who asks: “Any comments about Israel? We’re asking everybody today---any comments about Israel?”
Smiling in grandmotherly fashion----the way an 89 year-old woman might do when suddenly approached by an 17 year old boy who seems sincerely interested in her thoughts---she replies: “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.”
“Oooh…” responds the questioner. “Any better comments?” (A voice in the background: “Helen is fun!”)
“Hah hah hah,” laughs Helen. “ Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land, not German, and not Poland.”
“So where should they go? What should they do?”
“They could go home. Poland. Germany.”
“Where’s home? You’re saying Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”
“And America and everywhere else.”
A week later this video of the impromptu interview appears on “RabbiLIVE.com,” website of Rabbi David Nesenoff. (Who by the way is this “live rabbi”? Who is this rabbi character who’s terminated the career of a Washington press icon? How many journalists are even asking?)
The clip begins and ends with strident musical accompaniment, and concludes with the caption: “Six million Jews were killed in Germany and Poland. Does Helen know that Jews have lived in Israel way before the Holocaust. How can Helen report unbiased?”
According to one report the questioner was Adam Nesenoff, David’s son. The latter supposedly “sat on the Thomas scoop” for a week while his “webmaster son” Adam took final exams.
“So we waited,” Rabbi Nesenoff told Yahoo News. “And of course, during the waiting of it, the flotilla happened.” Nesenoff doesn’t explain how the Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla connects to Helen or the timing of the video release. But clearly it (and perhaps Thomas’s comments about it?) influenced the timing of the video. And once it was online, the White House---which was not outraged at all by the murder of 9 aid workers by the “Israeli Defense Forces” last week---immediately condemned the journalist.
Nesenoff contacted her employer, Hearst Newspapers, telling them they had “to get rid of her.” They did.
Outrage! About what? A journalist is suddenly approached on the sidewalk by two high school students who say they’re asking everybody today if they have comments about Israel. (Might I ask: Why did this happen in the first place? Was this for a school project? Are there other filmed interviews young Adam would like to share, to prove that he and his friend were really fact “asking everybody” and not just Helen?)
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” This was obviously a totally spontaneous statement, and could mean simply, “Tell them to withdraw from the occupied territories, as demanded by the entire world.”
The interviewer responds with apparent humor, asking for more comments. So the veteran journalist says, “Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land.” It is of course absolutely true that Zionists occupy Palestinian land. This fact, not the comment, is outrageous. Most people on the planet understand this.
“Where should they go?” asks the youth rhetorically, perhaps psyched for his gotcha moment. In this elliptical conversation, the “they” could have been interpreted by Helen, who has just mentioned “occupied” land, as referring to settlers on the West Bank or on the Golan Heights. The topic under discussion is Palestine, which in U.S. journalistic useage is more likely to refer to a future Palestinian state than to the state of Israel in its 1967 borders. But the video is skewed to make it seem as though Thomas said all Jews in Israel and the occupied territories should leave, and go back to places where mass murder occurred.
To those who care about fairness, I suggest that’s unfair. That’s not what Helen Thomas said. She said Israel should leave Palestine. When prompted to say where those referenced should go, she referred to countries with historically large Jewish populations. Lots of Israelis are in fact leaving Israel for those countries. (About 14,000 Israeli Jews left annually between 1990 and 2005. According to a 2007 poll, half of Israeli youth between ages 14 and 18 express the desire to live outside of Israel, which they see as having a bleak future. A huge percentage of Israelis has or plans to inquire about obtaining foreign nationality; many Europeans offer this generously to descendents of citizens who can prove their ancestry. The Berlin synagogue has 12,000 members and is flourishing. There are now maybe 55,000 Jews in Poland, many emigrating from Israel following Poland’s admission to the EU.)
It’s not clear exactly what Thomas was saying in this spontaneous, fragmentary sidewalk conversation with kids who said that they were, for some reason, asking “everyone to comment about Israel.” Rabbi Nesenoff says there are more excerpts to come, but it’s likely that the above piece is the most “controversial.”
But let’s just suppose that Thomas is saying that the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was itself a bad thing, a catastrophy for the indigenous Palestinian people. (These by the way almost surely include descendents of the ancient Judaeans. There was never a total dispersion---diaspora---of Jews from Roman Judaea. Following the rebellions against Roman rule in the province between 66 and 135, a large but undetermined number of Jews were driven from Judaea as punishment. But the Romans did not, and probably couldn’t have, thoroughly “dispersed” the Jews. Many remained, some becoming Christians and later, Muslims. It is altogether likely that the DNA of many Palestinians is closer to that of the first century Judaeans than to that of Jews with centuries of European ancestry. And by the first century there were already huge numbers of Jews outside Judaea, many voluntarily, constituting trading communities from Britain to India. St. Paul visited many synagogues in Anatolia and Greece and dreamed of preaching the Christian gospel to the Jews of Spain.)
Let’s say Thomas is saying that the Zionists should have stayed in Europe (where anti-Semitism has greatly diminished in the last half-century, typically flourishing now mainly as a result of Israeli policy towards Palestinians) rather than pursuing their agenda in Palestine under Turkish rule or the British mandate. Maybe she’s saying that it was wrong for the Zionists to terrorize Palestinians into fleeing their villages in the diaspora of 1948. Maybe she’s saying that it’s wrong for Israel to accept any Jew (as defined by the rabbinical establishment) as a citizen while denying hundreds of thousands of Arabs the right to return to their homeland. If so, many agree with her. I do, certainly.
But there are some who demand that we all accept a certain understanding of Israel. Everyone must, to avoid charges of anti-Semitism, agree on these points:
1. The establishment of the state of Israel was absolutely necessary, to prevent the annihilation of the Jewish people in a future holocaust. (This is of course an unproveable assertion. The global Jewish population today is about what it was in the 1910s---about 16 million---and if it is declining it’s mostly because of birth control and intermarriage. The prospect for future Auschwitzes seems minimal.)
2. The Jewish state must be within the boundaries of the ancient state of Israel, as it existed during the (legendary) reign of King David, as described in the Bible. It is the right of Jews to reconstitute that state, from which they were wrongly driven. It has always been theirs, no matter where they roamed. It is their “birthright” to live in Israel. (Tens of millions of Christian Zionists embrace this notion, noting that God, in the Bible, made the Jews his Chosen People and gave them that land. Enough said!)
3. The establishment of the modern state of Israel was the result of a just and humane struggle. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs was their own fault, or a consequence of propaganda from Arab regimes urging them to flee. (Israeli historians like the estimable Ilan Pappe have effectively disproven this.)
4. The occupation of the lands invaded in 1967 is necessary as a security measure against Arab anti-Semitism, irrational anti-Jewish hate. (You can maybe advocate withdrawal from the territories, and even promote a two-state solution, without being called anti-Semitic. But if you note matter-of-factly that the occupation is against international law, is cruelly implemented, and produces enormous suffering, expect charges of anti-Semitism.)
If you don’t agree that Israel is a moral exemplar and light to the world, “the only democracy in the Middle East” just attending reasonably to its security needs against a world that is (for no good reason) hostile to itself, you can be hounded, harrassed, intimidated, discredited, denied tenure, fired. Helen was fired. That’s the real outrage here.
“So we waited. And of course, during the waiting of it, the flotilla happened.” Yes. A 19 year old Turkish-American boy (among nine others) was shot to death at close range in the head and back in international waters by Israeli hijackers wo’ve subsequently claimed that that their victims wanted to “lynch” them. They effectively conveyed the message: “Don’t mess with Israel.” And then 89 year old Helen got ambushed (lynched?) by this innocent-looking kid on the street.
The message? Shut up, you critics of Israel, you terrorists, you anti-Semites!
I hope Helen Thomas keeps talking and writing. She’s understood and exposed the brutal realities of recent history, and is much too young to shut up now.
