A Little Game Called “Hide The Flotilla”, by Paul Shirley

A Little Game Called “Hide The Flotilla”, by Paul Shirley

Last week, Helen Thomas, the long-time political writer, most recently for Hearst Publishing, retired at the age of eighty-nine.  It would not be a stretch to call her retirement “forced”, coming as it did a few days after the emergence of a video of an informal interview in which Thomas asserts that Jews in Israel should return to their homes in Germany and Poland.

Or such would be the lead-in paragraph, for many news services.

The problem with that paragraph is its inaccuracy.  For those afraid of the dreaded hyperlink, what follows is a transcript of the exchange between Thomas and interviewer David Nesenoff:

Nesenoff: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today–

Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.

Nesenoff: Ooh. Any better comments?

Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land, not German and not Polish.

Nesenoff: So where should they go? What should they do?

Thomas: They should go home.

Nesenoff: Where is home?

Thomas: Poland. Germany.

Nesenoff: So you’re saying the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?

Thomas: And America, and everywhere else.

The response to the Thomas interview was less a reaction and more a reaction to a reaction, with the prevailing debate being whether Thomas should be fired by Hearst.  Those who read articles about the interview were quick to call Thomas’s opinions anti-Semitic.  Even many who came to her defense called her remarks indefensible, which is a paradox I’ve yet to unwind.

As far as this writer can tell, Thomas’s remarks were not anti-Semitic.  The debate of whether or not Israelis are entitled to land granted to them sixty years ago by an international contingent would remain a valid one even if those Israelis weren’t consistently involved in deadly and antagonistic incidents with their neighbors.

But I’m not writing about Helen Thomas.  I’m writing about the power of spin and timing and the suppression of reasonable debate.

For your consideration:

On May 30, Israeli forces were involved in a deadly assault on a Palestinian flotilla meant to draw attention to the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza.

The Thomas interview was done on May 27, three days before the Flotilla Fiasco, but not posted until a few days after it.

The “interviewer” is a rabbi.  For the uninitiated, heads of religious orders are not often unbiased in the views they’d like to advance about those religious orders.

Add a dash of YouTube, the magic of the 24-hour news cycle and voila!  Any debate over the flotilla in Gaza is quickly lost in the furor over Helen Thomas’s views.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, on Thomas:

“She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.

“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

In the United States, we’ve long been taught to side blindly with Israel.  The Israelis, so the story went, were a long-suffering people who’d finally been given a homeland and, once there, had transformed what had been a desert into a successful civilization, filled with bountiful farms and free-thinking people.  The US supported Israel because it was the right thing to do.

The truth isn’t so rosy.  Arguably, Israel is better off than its neighbors.  But it also has a tendency to piss off those neighbors, many of whom resent American support of a Jewish state in their midst, seeing that support for what it probably is:  A way for the US to maintain a military presence in a region it needs to watch over, because that region has oil underneath it.

From there, we could get into whether or not the Israelis actually want to get along with their neighbors because, when you think about it, they actually need the rest of the Middle East to hate the US because then the US needs the Israelis and if the US didn’t need them, those same Middle Easterners might invoke the law of the jungle that is enacted when you continually annoy your neighbors and those neighbors have a population that dwarfs yours by about 20 to 1…

But you’d probably get bored and go off and start looking for girl-on-girl porn, so I’ll get back to the point.

The Helen Thomas controversy was a gold mine for Israelis and Zionists.  It distracted outsiders from the flotilla and allowed them to concentrate on an issue they could deal with.  Namely, whether or not the old lady on their computer screens is a racist or not.  Granted, that issue is a hot one in its own right.  But it’s one that is easily managed, intellectually.  If you haven’t, take a look at the video.  (I’ll give you another chance.)  It’s easy to vilify Helen Thomas.  She’s 89!  She’s ugly!  There’s no reason to support her – she’s going to die soon and be ugly inside a casket!

In having the debate of whether Helen Thomas should be fired, people were distracted from the real debate, which is whether Israel was right or wrong in the Flotilla Fiasco and, on a larger scale, whether Israel is right or wrong in general.

This is a conversation that Israel desperately does not want the world to have, especially in today’s political climate; Barack Obama has been as hard on Israel as any American president and now that we have things like the Internet and camera phones, it’s much harder for the powers-that-be to convince us that we should support Israel unquestioningly.

If I were to write up an essay about my opinions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, my thesis would be that both sides are assholes, but that we should be able to say that.  (You can use “jerks”, if you prefer.)  My advice, though, to Jewish people, from an outsider’s perspective, is that it starts to look a little suspicious when people are ground into public relations dust when they express an opinion to a man holding a video camera.  And, while many people won’t actually view the video in question and will take on faith the judgment that the woman expressing the sentiments is a dyed-in-the-wool, genuine Jew-hater, there are those of us who will think for ourselves, consider the dates and the times and the political benefit to one side or the other and who will think,

What are you trying to hide?

The only way to solve anything in Palestine will be through open debate.  The “here, have a cookie and shut up” strategy lampooned effectively by comedian David Cross won’t work forever.  Eventually, people start to connect the dots and see that the side they once thought to be above reproach is actually just as mean-spirited and power-hungry as the other.

Helen Thomas wasn’t the story.  Helen Thomas was just a fall girl that allowed a people – whether that people is made up of Israelis, Palestinians, Jewish Americans or Arab-Americans – to cover up the fact that they are unable to have a reasoned discussion on an important issue.

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