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Poor Helen Thomas — and I mean that most sincerely.  I hate to see a long and distinguished career come to a crashing end as the result of an injudicious remark that leads to media crucifixion.

According to JTA, it went down like this.  What’s remarkable is that she had the bad judgment to make her statements on video to a rabbi.

Thomas was asked by Rabbi David Nesenoff on May 27 if she had “any comments on Israel.”

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she said.

Nesenoff, who was attending the first Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House, asked where Jews should go.

“Go home,” Thomas said. Asked to elaborate, she said: “Poland, Germany and America, and everywhere else.”

One of the problems with the Thomas remark is that it butts heads not only with Israel, but also with a bigger question about colonialism.  Despite its geographic location in the Middle East, Israel is undeniably a Western country and shares with other Western countries the fact that its founding could not have occurred without the displacement of other people.  In that respect, Thomas has much in common with the average Israeli.  Her story has more in common with the colonisers than the colonised.  On her own logic, she ought to get the hell out of America.

The problem is that children of immigrants (Thomas is the daughter of Lebanese immigrants) often have no place to go.  For example, where would I go if I were told to leave Canada?  My family hasn’t been in Britain since King James commissioned a new translation of the Bible.  Somehow I doubt the U.K. would feel much compunction to take me back.  While Canada is my home, I have no absolute claim to this fact.  Nor, I think, does anyone in respect of the land they call home.  Not even those who were here first.

We all take our land on loan, then give it back when we’re done.  Or more accurately:  we all are on loan from the land, and it takes us back when it’s done with us.  The insistence on ownership of land can be understood as a way in which we express our denial of death.  In collective terms, isn’t that Israel’s greatest fear?  Not simply that it will be driven from its land — but that it will be driven from it unto death?

Maybe it’s this relationship between land and mortality that accounts for the media storm that has engulfed Thomas since she opened her big mouth.

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