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| Dorothy Thompson at the White House in Washington, D.C., following a visit with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in May 1940. |
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5324672/dorothy-thompson-hitler
"... "Dorothy was an avid, convinced, devoted Zionist, but she hadn't been [to Palestine]," Kurth says.
Walther says that Thompson visited Palestine in the summer of 1945, days before Germany's surrender from World War II.
"Dorothy went to Palestine and saw refugees of the Palestinian population being forced off their own land," says Kurth. "She saw a people uprooted."
Walther adds that it reminded Thompson of "the kind of hatred and violence that she'd seen in Germany."
"She said that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a 'recipe for perpetual war,'" says Kurth.
Thompson returned to the United States and began to ask questions about the Zionist movement.
"The situation there is not the way it has been presented by many of the Zionists," Thompson wrote in a 1946 letter to Ted Thackrey, editor at the New York Post.
In 1947, the Post promptly dropped her column. In the aftermath, Thompson wrote of being targeted by "radical Zionists."
"She faces really immediate pushback from American Zionist organizations, as well as newspaper editors, and they accused her of antisemitism," says Walther.
In "Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism," Walther writes that Thompson's advocacy for Palestinian refugees even extended to lending her voice to relief films. She participated in one called Sands of Sorrow, calling on the United States to intervene in the Palestinian refugee crisis. She also founded the American Friends of the Middle East, to encourage dignified relations between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries. However, she found her job prospects decreasing."
