Ooops, Helen Thomas!

At nearly 90 years old, she was the doyenne of the White House Press Corps. And even after she had given up her daily column on the prestigious 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to become a columnist at the Hearst Group, an official place continued to be assigned to her in the very first row of the White House Briefing Room: the very same where for 57 years she submitted her rapid-fire questions to all the American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower. And what questions!

By her direct, aggressive, cheeky–to-irreverent interjections, Helen Thomas, daughter of Lebanese immigrants from Tripoli, was at the same time pampered and feared by these men passing as the most powerful on the planet. At a time when America was enthused by George W. Bush’s war fervor, this highly colorful character abruptly asked the president by what misfortune the GIs had been reduced to mercilessly bombing Iraqi civil populations. And it was also she who, just recently, cheerfully invited Barack Obama to firmly condemn Israel’s international crime of boarding a flotilla of humanitarian aid bound for the inhabitants of Gaza.

Suddenly, on May 27, Helen the veteran — visibly trapped as she was — was toppled in what has come to be called the politically incorrect by a rabbi with a video camera in the course of a Jewish ceremony at the White House. Needled by the thorny question of Israel, she invites the Jews to get the f… out of Palestine and return from whence they came: Poland, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. The clip had barely been launched on the internet before the goofball (the senile, say the most vehement) was disowned from all sides, including the White House: her employers asked her to resign, and she subjected herself to an apology and then announced her retirement.

Why dwell on the case of Helen Thomas? Firstly because any shipwreck is pitiful, especially that of an icon notoriously favorable to the Arab cause and who had for a long time made her presence felt in an American media universe largely dominated by Israel’s friends. Secondly, and especially, because her verbal boldness would have been absolutely inconceivable had there not been a growing disaffection brewing in the United States for some time against Benjamin Netanyahu’s obstructionist and audacious policies. The American Jewish community itself cannot escape this phenomenon, seeing as it is divided for the first time in a long time. The hardcore supporters of Israel who try to circumvent Barack Obama by mobilizing a traditionally complacent Congress are opposed more and more by Jewish organizations who support the President’s peace efforts and who have admirably reacted to the Israeli marines’ crazy escapade against the Gaza aid convoy.

It is this providential gap that the Palestinians, and more generally the Arabs, are bound to widen; however, it will happen differently and without Helen’s seething manner.