An atmosphere enabled Helen Thomas to feel she could float her bigotry with impunity

The issue in Helen Thomas’ reprehensible remarks is not her remarks; not her career; not her forced resignation; and not even whether her remarks represent a stratum of opinion much wider than her own warped brain. The issue is: How is it that she felt free to make these remarks at this time?

Thomas said: Let the Jews get out of Palestine. Let them go “home” to Europe. This is no ordinary run-of-the-mill anti-Israel sentiment. Thomas said: Jews have no roots in Palestine, no history there. It is not their land. Their “home” is in Germany and Poland and “everywhere else,” not the Middle East.

Who else has said that recently? Besides the usual suspects — the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, the leaders of Hamas, the leaders of the 22-country Arab League — the leading light who said that recently, albeit by default, was President Barack Obama.

In his “outreach” to the Arab world in June, 2009, in Cairo, Obama made an admirable plea to the Arab world to come to terms with Israel, but why? Only because of the Holocaust. Not because Israel is the Jewish home, not because Jews have inherent rights in the land of Israel, not because Jews have a history there. Read the complete news coverage

Now, Obama is a decent man, not an anti-Semite, not a Helen Thomas, whose words were rightly condemned by Obama’s press secretary as “offensive and reprehensible.” However, the president needs to be more sensitive about the messages he sends, wittingly or not. His Cairo speech affirmed the Arab “narrative” at its purest: the Jews were colonial interlopers, without historical memory of, rights to, or history in the land of Israel. That is what, by default, Obama affirmed.

It would be difficult to call this an understandable omission in a speech designed, after all, to address the Arab world. It would be difficult because one year has passed since that speech. Leave aside for the moment that Obama’s request of the Arab world to make a couple of positive gestures to Israel has gone totally unheeded; that the speech totally failed even to begin to instill some sense of balance within the Arab world on the Israel question. Rather, observe only this: In the year since the speech, President Obama has made no effort, in any context, to affirm the Jewish roots in and rights to the land of Israel. Why not?

Obama has called for a “two-state solution” — as a pragmatic solution. He has uttered not a word about the essential Jewish, not merely Israeli, right to that solution. He has had many meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu, but afterward, has uttered not a word about Israel as a Jewish state. He has had innumerable meetings with Arab leaders and American senators and congresspeople, but has not plucked a metaphor from Jewish lore — from the Hebrew Bible, the destruction of the Second Temple, Judah Halevi, the focus in Jewish prayer on Jerusalem, the early Zionists pioneers who cleared the swamps of Palestine — you name it, Obama has not taken any metaphor, on any occasion, to correct the imbalance in his Cairo speech.

Add to this the rest of the imbalanced critique of Israel from this administration — often hammering on Israel, not the Palestinians, not the Arab counties — and a message takes hold. So why shouldn’t an anti-Semite like Helen Thomas feel emboldened to set forth her bile?

Look back at Harry S Truman. There’s a president who connected Israel to the Bible. Look back at Bill Clinton. There’s a man whose Christianity gave him a gut instinct for a re-born Israel — not merely a 20th-century creation, but a reborn, resuscitated, renewed Jewish corporate presence on the Holy Land. Look back at George W. Bush. There’s also a president who “got it.”

Not to get it is not merely to have a different political orientation. Not to get the Jewish link to Israel is to undercut the entire legitimacy of Israel. And this, as we have sadly seen, is to embolden the traditional enemies of Israel in the Middle East. As far as Helen Thomas’ response is concerned, we hope it proves to be an aberration.

The main point is that without a bedrock acknowledgement of an inherent Jewish right to Israel, an inherent legitimacy to the enterprise, there will never be peace. If the Arabs cannot acknowledge the Jewish legitimacy of Israel, there will never be a two-state “solution.” There may be two states, but not a solution. Only a new framework for more hostility.

President Obama needs to articulate the Jewish right to Israel, not only as a history lesson, but as an indispensible ingredient to an Israel-Palestinian peace, not to mention, as a corrective to the Helen Thomases of the world.