Helen Thomas — Thanks from the Heart

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” This is what venerable journalist Helen Thomas, grand dame of the Washington press community, declared at the end of last month in response to a question about Israel. In this she summed up what most of us know to be the truth but don’t say, in fear of the consequences that come with opposing the official Arab position expressed in the Arab peace initiative.

For those who don’t know of Thomas, she was the most senior correspondent at the White House. She started working there in the ’60s during the Kennedy administration and continued until her resignation last Tuesday in response to the angry reactions to her statements about Israel. She ended her professional life well with this choice to state her opinions, rightly casting aside diplomacy to speak the truth about an unjust power.

There are some things you can’t say in America. It’s true that you can criticize the president and denounce any of his positions, but in America, to criticize Israel or its narrative is unforgivable. Simply accusing a person of anti-Semitism is enough for him to become a target of public censure, possible prosecution and death threats. This persecution does not come directly from the state, most of whose offices are controlled by followers of the Zionist lobby, but rather from the influential organizations that constitute the loosely-knit Israeli lobby working in the shadows. This lobby stifles our voices too.

Then Thomas, after almost 90 years of life experience — nearly half of which she spent in the most important political center in the world — dared to stand unapologetically against it all. It doesn’t seem that it was her Lebanese roots that shaped her opinion on the Jewish issue, but simple logic; as she said in her interview with Rabbi David Nesenoff, “Remember, [the Palestinians] are occupied, and it’s their land. Not Germany. It’s not Poland,” continuing to say that the Jews should “go home . . . [to] Poland . . . Germany . . . And America and everywhere else.”

One of Helen’s most violent attackers was Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, who gave a statement to CNN in which he said her comment was comparable to stating that “all blacks should leave America and go back to Africa.” Here Mr. Fleischer forgets that blacks didn’t come to America in tanks with the intent to kill — his ancestors brought them from Africa to be slaves, stolen away, collars around their necks. We didn’t bring the Jews here as slaves and then decide we didn’t want them, nor did they come as guests to stay peacefully in our homes — they came to us with the intention of killing us, as Fleischer’s ancestors came to the American Indians. If you came to me with the intention of making me leave, I don’t understand how it’s anything less than completely moral to ask you to leave, not trying to kill you, but merely asking you to go back to where you came from.

If a person compared our fear of mentioning the Jews’ lack of a legal claim to historical Palestine with what Thomas said, he would be astonished by our intense anger about the truth alongside our fear of it. He would disapprove of the shameful number of concessions made to pragmatic considerations, even on the part of those who claim to represent the Palestinians. Nothing demands there be a conflict between pragmatism and service to a political goal, when principles aren’t totally abandoned. As for the recognition of the Jews’ right to 78 percent of historical Palestine, it’s not the type of concession that will make it equal to a Bantustan, or to what Noam Chomsky terms the “fried chicken” offer submitted to the Palestinians. I ask: What do we have left to lose if we say what Thomas said? Will they fire all of us from our jobs in our White Houses, and take away our special treatment? What special treatment would we lose, besides the shame of the white flag?

If anyone believes — even a little — that what Thomas said about the Jews is not the truth, then let him stone me. If we know in our hearts that what she said is the truth, then we deserve stoning if we don’t communicate it. Because she said what few of us dare to say, even though it’s not her responsibility, from my heart I give a thousand thanks to Helen Thomas, and to all that speak the truth in the face of power.