Zionism and the State of Israel
Thompson had been sympathetic to the Zionist movement since she first travelled to Europe in 1920. During her visit, she had "endless discussions" about the movement with delegates who were traveling to the International Zionist Conference being held in London. In the late 1930s, as Thompson emerged as a leading advocate for Jewish refugees who were fleeing from persecution in Europe, she grew close to the Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann and to Meyer Weisgal, Weizmann's lieutenant in the US. As World War II unfolded, Thompson went from being a sympathetic commentator to being an outright advocate for the movement. She was a keynote speaker at the 1942 Biltmore Conference, and by the war's end, she was regarded as one of Zionism's most effective spokespersons.
However, Thompson's attitude toward the movement began to shift, especially after a 1945 trip to Palestine, as she grew more concerned about the activities of the movement's right-wing adherents. She was especially troubled by escalating Zionist political violence. After penning several columns which were critical of right-wing Zionist terrorism, Thompson provoked a tremendous backlash that ultimately led her to cooperate with the leaders of the Jewish anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism.
She wrote a critique of American Zionism in Commentary in 1950, accusing Zionists of dual loyalty. A response in the magazine by Oscar Handlin criticised her "totalitarian" understanding of national identity in demanding single loyalty. After her Commentary article, the backlash against her grew more intense. This included accusations of antisemitism, which Thompson strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, "almost a definition of professional suicide." She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war. As Thompson's distance from the Zionist movement grew, she became an advocate for Palestinian refugees. After she travelled to the Middle East in 1950, Thompson was involved in the founding of the American Friends of the Middle East, an organization which was secretly funded by the CIA.
Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in 2017: There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson’s later writing. Pathologizing Jewishness, in particular, became habitual for her in the 1950s. By May 25, 1950, she is writing to Maury M. Travis, darkly, of the "tragic psychosis of the Jew"... In the Commentary piece she warns: "We bring on what we fear. Any psychologist will tell you that a primary neurosis is the fear of rejection and that when that neurosis takes hold of a person he unconsciously strives to create the conditions for that rejection." The reference is to Jewish "neurosis," but the passage also rather elegantly describes the logic of Thompson’s own fears. In what well may be a case of knowing your addressee, Thompson wrote to Winston Churchill in 1951: "I have become convinced that the Jews, phenomenally brilliant individually and especially in the realm of abstract thought, are collectively the stupidest people on earth. I think it must come from cultural inbreeding—perhaps physical inbreeding also—in a desire to retain a homogeneous, in-group society in the midst of 'aliens.'"
