Helen Thomas Retires Effective Immediately

[Helen Reyes]

Whether she was quoted out of context I don't know, I immediately assumed she had said "Get out of Palestine" meaning occupied territories and that the "Go back to Europe" stuff was added. Here's what I make of it:

1. It's offensive to Holocaust survivors to tell them to go back to Germany and Poland, equivalent to saying "go die."

2. Helen Thomas has been around long enough to have personally seen that the majority of Israelis did come from Germany, Poland, USA and Russia. There were Jews, Zionists, who made aliyah before WWII but there weren't all that many, compared to later waves of emigrants.

3. If Helen Thomas thinks Jews should go back to Europe, she's entitled to her opinion. Since when are people hounded from their jobs for holding the wrong ideology regarding a newish foreign state?

4. She made the comments to people she perceived as Jews, meaning she was being quite honest about her position and taking the bulls by the horn.

5. Mossad has used "students working on high school projects" in the US before to collect intelligence. This came up with the famous "art students" spy ring before 9/11.

Also, I can't resist commenting on this:

Poor woman. I can't blame her. At her age I'm sure she is way too old to have to put up with this bull shit. A pity though because we need people like her.

Well, she did bring up an interesting point.
We are all immigrants. We all came here from some other country. Humans were not indigenous to the Americas.
I myself can only trace my family lineage back to the second ship to reach my state, the Fortune, not the Mayflower. So here is my Modest Proposal. Every single person should be deported back to their original country.
So I'd be lucky to land back in the middle of England. Native Americans would be sent back to Asia. That's one way to reverse the diaspora.

That's nonsense often used by apologists for Israel.

You can't equate the colonisation of the Americas (or Australia) with Israel's colonisation of Palestine.

You can if you try! And also with the Boer trek in South Africa.

The latter was an artificial construct by UN resolution to implant an outside population into a new neighbourhood. A failed experiment.

And Sir Bacon's New Atlantis, the Hudson's Bay, Massachusetts and all the other corporations in North America? Please name me one "organic" state. I can counter that every state is an artificial construct. The UN also had little to do with it. The forces of Zionism assembled before the UN was even created. Ben-Gurion made his unilateral declaration of independence before the UN had a chance to declare a two-state formula. From the Zionist perspective they didn't get the UN the satisfaction of co-opting their movement toward a new state.

If the UNs motives were pure, it was underpinned by a disastrously naive assumption that the new colonists would harmoniously blend into such a hostile environment, while the displaced indigenous race would just sit back and say that's fine with us. More likely Britain and the US wanted a foot in the door to the oil rich region, as I think Paul Rigby has stated elsewhere on the DPF. In either case, it has been a total failure.

I think it's more complicated than that. It sort of goes back to Wilson's "self-determination of nations" except for people with brown skins. The Jews were left out of all the new nation-states arising in Europe following WWI, although they had a population in Europe comparable and even larger than a lot of the new nations that were created. The British promised Arabs recognition of their nationalist aims in exchange for support against the Ottoman Empire. The British then went back on those promises and found themselves defending Arabs in Palestine against influxes of mainly European Jews, whom they considered slightly higher on the totem pole and ahead in the queue for nationhood because of the European fiasco. Instead of a Yiddish state in Europe, it was simpler to promise a Jewish state in the Levant at some vague future period. The Brits pursued a different policy toward oil domination: they installed royal houses, and in the places that actually contain oil.

I don't think the UN was much interested in how Jews got along with Arabs in Palestine/Israel. The point was to impose a new order on the post-WWII world based on prior decisions by the Great Powers. What Ben-Gurion did is actually very interesting. By declaring independence before the UN adopted its partition plan, Ben-Gurion was in a way mirroring what Charlemagne did by seizing the crown the Pope was ready to place on his head anyway. The point is, sovereign states don't ask permission to exist, they exist by virtue of their own will. It's a fine point, and it leaves out the entire "problem" of previous tenants, but there it is.

Ghandi opposed it and Einstein declined an offer to become Israel's first President. They were right.

Gandhi also thought the Czechs would do best to sacrifice themselves before the onslaught of the Third Reich and Einstein wasn't much interested in politics, but did enjoy Yiddish music from what I hear.

I reject the idea that Israel is illegitimate because it is an "artificial state." All states are constructs of the imagination with the adherence of a plurality of belief. People invest the imaginary concept with a mythos, allegiance and symbols of power, and then either worship or seek to destroy the idol they've built. I also think all "nations" in the sense of peoples are equally imaginary. The problem arises when people override their basic sense of right and wrong and humanity in service to these false gods. In terms of international and accepted jurisprudence, Israel has acted outside the law in many many cases. In terms of humanity, Israel the state has betrayed the principles that led to that state's international recognition. Therefore I think Israel can be forced to rethink certain basic matters through diplomatic isolation and it wouldn't be unfair for the same sort of blockade Israel practices against Gaza to be applied to Israel itself by the outside world.