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."
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