The ostracism of Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House
press corps, over her comment that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine”
and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere is revealing in several
ways. In spite of an apology, the 89-year-old has been summarily retired by the
Hearst newspaper group, dropped by her agent, spurned by the White House, and
denounced by long-time friends and colleagues.
Ms Thomas earnt a reputation as a combative journalist, at least
by American standards, with a succession of administrations over their Middle
East policies, culminating in Bush officials boycotting her for her relentless
criticisms of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the reaction to her
latest remarks suggest that, if there is one topic in American public life on
which the boundaries of what can and cannot be said are still tightly policed,
it is Israel.
Undoubtedly, Ms Thomas’ opinions, as she expressed them in an
unguarded moment, were inappropriate and required an apology. It is true, as she
says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by
Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed. But 62
years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in
Poland and Germany – or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter. There is also an
uncomfortable echo in her words of the chauvinism underpinning demands from some
Jews – and many Israelis – that Palestinians should “go home to the 22 Arab
states”.
But Ms Thomas did apologise and, after that, a line ought to have
been drawn under the affair – as it surely would have been had she made any
other kind of faux pas. Instead, she has been denounced as an anti-Semite, even
by her former friends.
The reasoning of one, Lanny Davis, counsel to the White House in
the Clinton administration, was typical. Mr Davis, who said he previously
considered himself “a close friend”, asked whether anyone would be “protective
of Helen's privileges and honors if she had been asking Blacks to return to
Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came
8,000 or more years ago?”
It is that widely accepted analogy, appropriating the black and
Native American experience in a wholly misguided way, that reveals in stark
fashion the moral failure of American liberals. In their blindness to the
current relations of power in the US, most critics of Ms Thomas contribute to
the very intolerance they claim to be challenging.
Ms Thomas is an Arab-American, of Lebanese descent, whose remarks
were publicised in the immediate wake of Israel’s lethal commando attack on a
flotilla of aid ships trying to break the siege of Gaza. Unlike most Americans,
who were half-wakened from their six-decade Middle East slumber by the killing
of at least nine Turkish activists, Ms Thomas has been troubled by the
Palestinians’ plight for much of her long lifetime.
She was in her late twenties when Israel ethnically cleansed
three-quarters of a million Palestinians from most of Palestine, a move endorsed
by the fledgling United Nations. She was in her mid-forties when Israel took
over the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria in a war that dealt a
crushing blow to Arab identity and pride and made Israel a favoured ally of the
US. In her later years she has witnessed Israel’s repeated destruction of
Lebanon, her parents’ homeland, and the slow confinement and erasure of the
neighbouring Palestinian people. Both have occurred under a duplicitious
American “peace process” while Washington has poured hundreds of billions of
dollars into Israel’s coffers.
It is therefore entirely understandable if, despite her own
personal success, she feels a simmering anger not only at what has taken place
throughout her lifetime in the Middle East but also at the silencing of all
debate about it in the US by the Washington elites she counted as friends and
colleagues.
While she has many long-standing Jewish friends in Washington –
making the anti-Semite charge implausible – she has also seen them and others
promote injustice in the Middle East. Doubtless she, like many of us, has been
exasperated at the toothless performance of the press corps she belongs to in
holding the White House to account in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and
Israel-Palestine.
It is with this context in mind that we can draw a more fitting
analogy. We should ask instead: How harshly should Ms Thomas be judged were she
a black professional who, seeing yet another injustice like the video of Rodney
King being beaten to within an inch of his life by white policemen, had said
white Americans ought to “go home to Europe”?
This analogy accords more closely with the reality of power
relations in the US between Arabs and Jews. Ms Thomas is not a representative of
the oppressor white man disrespecting the oppressed black man, as Mr Davis
suggests; she is the oppressed black man hitting back at the oppressor. Her
comments shocked not least because they denied an image that continues to
dominate in modern America of the vulnerable Jew, a myth that persists even as
Jews have become the most successful minority in the country.
Ms Thomas let her guard down and her anger and resentment show.
She generalised unfairly. She sounded bitter. She needed to – and has –
apologised. But she does not deserve to be pilloried and blacklisted.
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