Even Israel’s unconscionable treatment of the inhabitants of Gaza pales in significance to the question Ms. Thomas's remarks should have triggered in our collective imagination. And it is this: where exactly are the Israeli Jews, whom Ms. Thomas admonished to "get the hell out of Palestine" supposed to go? I’m not referring to the wealthy Israeli elites or the nuclear physicists, or even the growing numbers of middle class citizens of the Jewish State possessing second passports to western countries, according to a 2008 report of the Jerusalem-based Menachem Begin Heritage Center. I’m talking about all the rest. And this brings me to the main point I wish to make.

Would six million innocent souls have died in the Holocaust had the United States and Western Europe opened their borders to German Jews, fleeing Nazi persecution on the eve of World War II? This may be ancient history to some and water under the bridge to others. But, lest we forget, Adolph Hitler referred to the Holocaust as "the final solution" because no other nation would take in the Jews and the Nazi leader’s scheme for resettling them in Madagascar had come to naught. In 1939, the United States refused to allow the MS St. Louis, carrying 900 German Jews fleeing the Nazis to land on American soil. The ship was forced to return to Hamburg, Germany, where many of the passengers perished in the Holocaust. A survey taken in January of 1939 revealed that 83 percent of the American public opposed a bill in Congress that would have allowed European Jewish refugees to enter the country. According to Professor Theodore S. Hamerow, the view taken by the U.S. public was that: "Jews were not like most Americans, real Americans."[Hamerow, Why we Watched: Europe, America and the Holocaust, 2008, p.xiv] Even efforts to admit orphaned Jewish children failed.

After World War II, the western world learned to its horror that 67 percent of world Jewry had perished in Nazi gas chambers. And yet, the best these nations could offer the Holocaust’s traumatized survivors was passage to a former British colony in the Middle East, populated by enraged Arabs. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine had, after all, not exploded onto the world scene in 1948. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Zionist efforts to resettle small groups of Jews in Palestine, had been met with rioting, massacres and open warfare on the part of Arabs fearful of losing control of their homeland.

It may be true as recent scholarly accounts suggest, that after World War II, the Zionists inflated the numbers of Jewish refugees in the displaced persons camps, who wished to relocate to war-torn Palestine. It is useful to give weight to the observations of Ernest Morris, a Jewish attorney and friend of the late President Roosevelt, who reported back to the White House after visiting the Jewish refugee camps:

"What if Canada, Australia, South America, England and the United States were all to open a door to some migration? Even today [written in 1947] it is my judgement, and I have been in Germany since the war, that only a minority of the Jewish DP’s [displaced persons] would choose Palestine." [Israel in the Mind of America, by Peter Grose, 1983, p.196]

Anybody in his or her right (read-unbigoted) mind at the time, would have surmised that the emotionally-traumatized Holocaust survivors, many of whom were not religious Jews, would have preferred to resettle in Europe or America. However, they were not given that option. While repudiating the anti-Semitic lunacy of the Nazis, the West hid its own anti-Jewish prejudices under Zionism’s skirts.

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Jewish State has fought seven wars, numerous armed conflicts, endured suicide bombings and countless terrorist attacks from its Arab enemies. Were the Jewish state, hypothetically-speaking, to collapse twenty years from now under the combined weight of emotional exhaustion, demographic realities, and perpetual warfare would the United States and Europe open their borders and fragile labor markets to millions of educated, well-trained, hardworking Jewish refugees? History has a diabolical way of repeating itself, if only to test whether the human species is capable of learning any lessons at all. Who knows? Maybe that’s what Helen Thomas was getting at.