Focus on the blueprint for Israel's genocide and the repression/erasure of pro-Palestinian voices

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The old world is dying, and the new world

struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters (Antonio Gramsci)

Israel is a death cult... they are a nation of monsters (Norman Finkelstein)

A Case Study in the Repression of Palestinians: Dorothy Thompson

by Rena Grasso

The Sands of Sorrow (1950), the first documentary on 1948's Nakba, evokes an eerie familiarity. Its somber black and white pictures show us thousands of shocked and grieving Palestinians refugees who, then as now, have been displaced from their villages by force or by flight from massacres; who, then as now, are crowded into squalid tent encampments haunted by disease. Along with malnutrition and lack of clean water, malaria and tuberculosis prey especially on the most vulnerable, elderly women and children. Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers keen over shrouded children and infants, and traumatized orphans, their young faces crestfallen, their eyes blank with shock, wander bereft. Then and now, in these sands of desperation, the sole beacon of faith in humanity shines from the resilient compassion of Palestinian men and women caring for their people.

The film's weird contemporaneity disturbs us because we see, feel, and identify with the human suffering. Then, upon reflection, we realize that the diabolical blueprint for the creation of Israel is guiding its final solution to Palestinian existence. Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documents the cold calculating details of the Zionist plan to eliminate Palestinians by murder or forced migration. Reading Pappe, we marvel at the cunning intelligence, devoid of wisdom or feeling, that leads Israel. Art, however, interweaves mind and feeling into an experience that exceeds the sum of their parts. Sands of Sorrow delivers a reverberating shock of recognition that chills one to the bone.

Sands of Sorrow also unites the present with the past along a different axis. Like seeing the cat or squirrel hidden amongst tangled branches, my attention was caught by the journalist Dorothy Thompson. She opens and closes Sands of Sorrow with pleas for humanitarian aid. She is charismatic; her voice compelling and articulate; her passion moving.

Who is she? I had never heard of her. Yet, with a bit of digging, I found that in 1939, Time Magazine featured her on its cover and named Thompson and Eleanor Roosevelt the two most influential women in America. How was it that a well-read feminist had no knowledge of her? Like a beagle on the trail of rabbit, I followed my baffled curiosity to uncover the connections camouflaged in anonymity.

Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was the daughter of a Methodist pastor who preached the social gospel. Dorothy, the apple of his eye, like the proverbial fruit, didn't stray from her family tree. At Syracuse University (1912-14), she was an outspoken suffragist. In Buffalo, she was an organizer for the Women's Suffrage Party. Working in Syracuse's housing settlements awakened her to the indignities and ravages of poverty. These contrasted starkly with her economic and social privileges. Following the precept, 'to whom much is given, much is expected', she eventually chose journalism as the main vehicle of a life dedicated to the service of others and justice.

In 1924 she was Central European Bureau Chief for the New York Post. Her biographer (Kurth, American Cassandra) writes that Thompson was "the undisputed Queen of the overseas Press Corp, and the 1st woman to lead a major news bureau." In 1931 Thompson scored an interview Adolf Hitler. She dismissed him as "voluble, ill poised and insecure,,, the apotheosis of the little man". Unfolding events in Germany revealed her mistaken judgement of "the little man's" inconsequence. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Thompson's triweekly columns for The NY Herald Tribune and her weekly NBC radio broadcasts were platforms for her prescient apprehension of the dangers of Nazism. A measure of her influence: one night in 1934, in Berlin, the Gestapo knocked on her door.

They gave her hours to leave Germany; Hitler himself ordered her deportation.

In 1943, her political commentaries reached 10 million readers; and she was voted the most popular voice on the radio. Her politics were not, however, confined to Nazism. Beginning in the 1920s, her compassion for Jewish refugees, along with the influence of several Zionist friends, made her a full-throated spokeswoman for a Jewish homeland. Her writings echo the prevailing Zionist ideology. They are laced with vile orientalist racism against Arabs and evangelical adulation of Western supremacy.

"Let the Jews have restored to them their promises: let them peaceably colonize and cultivate their soil in justice: let the United Nations, and especially Great Britain and the United States, extend to the Arab population some of the immense benefits of western civilization."

She championed Zionism's enlightened (!) colonialism:

-- "the colonist brings to a country his own hands, his own muscles, his own back, and his own capital. He plows it all into the country itself... he is not the exploiter; he is the enricher."

Unsurprisingly, Thompson's crusading zeal won her adulation from the Zionist movement; she was courted and celebrated.

Then, in 1945, she made a fateful trip to Jerusalem. Like Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, this voyage turned her life on its head.

In Jerusalem, because the British balked at Zionists' expansionist goals, founder of the right-wing Irgun gang, Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister,1977-83), issued a 'declaration of war' against them. Along with massacring Palestinians, Israeli terrorist thugs assassinated and attacked the British and their allies. Israeli violence and hatred shocked her; it reminded her of Nazi Germany. She was equally shocked by the Zionists' violent, imperialist objectives. Atop Irgun's war declaration appeared the organization's symbol: a rifle within a map of Palestine reaching the Iraqi border and the words ONLY THUS.

The crusader morphed into a prescient critic of the Zionists' ruthless power. Friends warned she was "committing professional suicide". Thompson countered that she had a moral obligation; and she used her prominent platforms to reveal and decry Israel's apartheid state. She exposed Zionism's deceptive story,

"Zionist impulse was not... humanitarian, but was aimed at political power; that the depopulation of the territory of its native inhabitants was 'deliberate design; that Zionist leaders envisaged, not a small state of Jews who chose to live in Israel, but a Zionist state destined to become the leading power in the Middle East, as the ward of world Jewry whatever their citizenship in other countries'."

Quickly her columns and her person were protested and denounced as antisemitic. Eventually, a full-throttled campaign to bring her down was organized: "In view of the weight Miss Thompson's name carries, her misstatements and hostile propaganda must be challenged wherever she appears." (American Zionist Council, Letter to local committees, 1951.)

One by one, doors closed; her columns dropped; her broadcasts silenced. The Zionist story prevailed; Palestinian perspectives disappeared. The onslaught against her and the snuffing out of Palestinian voices alarmed her. She recognized the far-reaching implications of how a "small group in society" could exercise an overweight impact on opinion. Thompson warned, "we shall have an end of free speech in America."

In 1957, such was the Zionist reach, she was forced to resign from the Presidency of American Friends of the Middle East. Her death in 1961 did not end the suppression.

Thompson's activism on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs has largely been erased. Academics and scholars bury her legacy in fear of Zionist retribution. Accounts of her life and her legacy are generic, non-specific; they are limited to her fame as an American broadcaster and "female" journalist. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's entry on Thompson celebrates her suffrage activism, her anti-Nazi criticism, and her advocacy on behalf of the Jewish refugees. Her work on behalf of Palestinian refugees and her critiques of Israel are omitted, just as they are in the Encyclopedia Britannica's online entry for Thompson.

The story of Dorothy Thompson is the story of the longevity of Zionists' staggering power in the US. As early as the 1950s, they were able to destroy one of the two most influential women in the US. We can easily connect the dots that separate 75 year ago from the present, and thus, realize how deeply implanted the roots of Zionism in the US are.

The mainstream media controls the story in accord with Zionist objectives. Hence, obituaries and eulogies on President Carter's don't mention his book on Israel apartheid; The Boston Globe published two articles on the death and legacy of Pope Francis. Neither mention that Pope Francis called Gaza every day, or that at Easter mass, a few days before his death, he urged investigation of Israel's genocide and cried out for a ceasefire. Harvard University throws intellectual integrity overboard, kneels to Zionist power, adopting the illogical concept that opposition to Israel equals antisemitism; and, except for two women outliers, Rashida Tlaib and Cory Bush (ousted by Zionist money), no politician has the courage or principles to meet the moral obligation to name 'genocide'.

We return to Thompson for an explanation of the US's immoral agency is supporting Israel's war crimes. She understood that the Zionist blueprint for eliminating Palestine entailed a calculated effort to infiltrate and capture the US in its orbit. Thompson wrote that far from "dissolving once the state was created, [the Zionist movement] was to be a branch of the Israel foreign office everywhere and particularly in the United States, with the power and the duty to support the Zionist state, politically and financially ad infinitum".

Victoria Coates, VP of The Heritage Foundation and leader of Project Esther's efforts to crush Palestinian resistance, speaks the consequential truth: "This isn't just a battle for the Jewish state, it is also a battle for the United States."

Dorothy Thompson paid dearly for her activist virtues. She is owed recognition and respect. Restoring her to the light teaches important history; she also inspires. Thompson lived the social gospel, showed us the moral depth, courage, and intellectual integrity of which we are capable.

In this dark and darkening epoch, we must cultivate and nurture the Dorothy Thompsons amongst us and grow these qualities in ourselves.

Authors Bio:
A veteran of second wave feminism who was was actively involved in the development of women's studies when it wasunderstood as part of a social movmeent, and an activist engaged in struggles for reproductive rigths, violence against women, racism, classism, and militarism. I hold a Phd in literatue and Psychoanlatical Psychology, worked for years as a developer and director of educational opportunites for girls and women and for disadvantaged communities. I have taught women's studies at at various academic instituions, have written articles on feminist anaylysis and history,- as well as dabbling in poetry.