The honoring of Helen Thomas at the Move Over AIPAC conference in May seems to me an important moment politically. I think it’s a mistake, politically–that it could hurt the movement in its efforts to reach out to centrists and the Jewish community, due to Thomas’s often-crude characterizations of Jewish power– but I also think there is an upside to the mistake.
Despite a career of covering 10 or 20 or 30 presidents, I can’t keep count, Helen Thomas’s meaning has been shrunk down in the mainstream to one idea, that of Jewish influence.
In her recent Playboy interview she basically said that Jews control the media and the political process and you all know it. This is what she now stands for, intellectually. She’s in her 90s and when you’re that old you get to say anything but you don’t always get a medal for it. But she’s getting honored. Again, I think this could hurt the movement. Others in that political space, more mainstream types, are bound to feel a little itchy, look for the door.
But now let me turn this around and look at it from different perspectives, from the Arab-American perspective and my own anguished-Jewish-non-Zionist perspective.
And from both these perspectives, the first thing that must be said is that Helen Thomas paid a terrible price for her bad thoughts. She lost her job a year back when she said, as an Arab-American, she thinks that the Jews should get out of Palestine and go back to where they came from. People who are accused or found to exhibit anti-Semitic feeling pay a terrible price. As Leila Buck writes brilliantly in the voice of her Jewish husband Adam in her play, In the Crossing– John Galliano gets his career extinguished in a second for stupid bigoted statements and Mel Gibson has also paid a giant price for a roadside explosion, so who has the cultural power here? You pay a huge price for anti-Semitism. Were the policy walked backward, Mark Twain would be off the shelves for his anti-Semitism, Ernest Hemingway (or Hemingstein as he liked to joke) would be gone, and any number of political figures gone from the portrait galleries.
When really what price has anyone paid for Islamophobia in this country, and how many of us have exhibited prejudice in our lives? A Jewish editor at the New Republic once said he was going to “Jew me down” on a fee. We both laughed. I’m not going into my own shabby record of repulsive statements. Some other time.
The most important thing about the Helen Thomas moment is that it seems to me that our political discourse is trying to deal with that issue of Jewish cultural and political power. It is trying to reckon with it. It is a long-uncomfortable question. Ten years ago when Lieberman ran for vice president and I tried to write in the New York Observer about issues of Jewish political power in the U.S., a powerful friend chided me that this conversation had ended in the Holocaust in Europe. I felt weirded out and very bad and yet I continued to address the question, especially after I started this site. Because it is a real and important question. Not long ago I was at a dinner party where a connected friend said that he/she had heard from someone who was in a position to know that 80 percent of Democratic political fundraising comes from Jews. The person said it was off the record. I have no idea whether it is true, I suspect it is an exaggeration, but I was upset that such a central fact of our political order had to be off the record.
And so when smart people deem such an important conversation off the record, it is the realm of 90 year olds who have been savaged and have nothing to lose.
The interesting thing politically about the Thomas invitation is that I am not alone, I am not the only one who wants to have this conversation, and that there must be a large push within the Arab-American community to have that conversation. When you go around the Arab world, you hear about Jewish influence all the time. Tom Friedman dismisses this as a conspiracy theory, powerful Tom Friedman who has still not explained the reasons he supported the disastrous Iraq war. And what I am saying is that this question that resonates throughout the Arab world is also resonating in the U.S. Walt and Mearsheimer said, We’re not talking about Jewish influence, but their critics dismissed that assertion; they said, they are talking about Jewish influence.
I say as I have said many times before, I want to have this conversation and I want to do it thoughtfully and even sensitively. I don’t think it will result in pogroms (for a few reasons: history doesn’t repeat itself, Jewish history has an amazing arc, US exceptionalism, and, that other historical principle: first time tragedy, second time farce) But this issue is too important in our foreign policy not to have the conversation, and forces inside the anti-lobby movement surely agree with me. Tom Friedman said in Haaretz and not in the American press that 25 neocons had built the (bad) ideas that created the Iraq war. I agree with him; and Joe Klein said that they were Jewish and had a crazy domino theory about democracy in the Arab world. Right again. These important statements were ignored at the time, except in the blogosphere, and still they possess great intellectual and political urgency. It is too bad that the only ones who feel that they can talk about it openly are bitter 90 year olds whose careers have been stomped.
