On January 8 the Society of Professional Journalists' Executive Committee voted to retire the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. The SPJ's full board is expected to give their final approval within 10 days. In the meantime, amidst the unrelenting backlash, Helen Thomas has rebounded as a columnist for a North Virginian community paper, Falls Church News Press.

The core criticism against Helen Thomas is not so much her one comment captured on video May 27, 2010, or the subsequent round of comments shared at a diversity workshop in Dearborn on December 2 that both Wayne University and the Society for Professional Journalists assert is their reason for pulling her awards. Rather, it is what all of the comments symbolize - an opposition to Zionism.

Please how long do many of us who fight against social injustice, including a growing number of anti-Zionist American and Israeli Jews, have to engage in this tireless defense that we are not against Jews or Israelis, but a racist ideology? A racist ideology that was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of three quarters of the indigenous population of Palestine in 1948 similar in impact to the catastrophe of the dispossession of American Indians and the redistribution of the tribal lands of the Five Civilized Tribes [1887 Dawes Allotment Act]. 

Hurling accusations of anti-Semitism do not work for people, like me, who have spent time in Gaza and the West Bank, and have experienced first-hand the devastating effects of the siege, occupation, and collective punishment.  I lived for four months in the Gaza Strip, teaching university students and analyzing survey data on post-traumatic youth and adults after what some refer euphemistically to Israel's 2008-2009 War. In Bethlehem, everywhere I turned there was a sinuous, omnipresent concrete wall that separates Palestinians from their agricultural lands.

Flashback images emerge where upon entering the Jewish settlement in Hebron I was greeted with the words, "Gas Arabs signed by JDL" scrawled on a retaining wall. Further on, there is Abraham's watering hole where Palestinians are forbidden to take a dip. My Palestinian guide and a Palestinian student friend of mine could not enter, but the settlers not knowing I was of Arab American descent allowed me to descend the winding steps to the spring. The visceral racism sparked the recollection of my father's stories about his experiences in the Jim Crow South when he would travel to the car auctions in Baton Rouge. 

Trumping Truth-Telling