Haavara FAQs: Why Did Dorothy Thompson Flip From A Zionist Advocate to A Silenced Dissenter?

Dorothy Thompson,1937

Introduction: A Forgotten Voice

Dorothy Thompson is remembered today, if at all, as a pioneering woman journalist — one of the first Americans expelled from Nazi Germany, and a syndicated columnist with an audience of nearly 10 million readers at her peak (Thesis: UVM, 2009, p. 2 - 3). Yet her political journey is one of the most remarkable and neglected stories of the mid-twentieth century. She began as one of Zionism’s most prominent non-Jewish champions, embracing its program when most Americans were indifferent to European Jewry’s plight. But by the end of the 1940s, she was denounced as an antisemite and ostracized from mainstream media.

What changed? The answer reveals much about the internal contradictions of Zionism, the silences of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust, and the costs of dissent in American public life.

David Ben-Gurion's Response to the British Kindertransport a month after Kristallnacht: NY Times, July 12th, 1987, citing Ben-Gurion's official biographers showing how much he "cared" about Europe's Jews who saved themselves by immigrating to countries other than Palestine!

Champion of Jewish Refugees

In the 1930s, Thompson was one of the rare figures in American public life who tirelessly advocated for Jewish refugees when the vast majority of Jews (especially those in America and Canada) were silent (see the American Jewish Conference for the boring details). Long before the Holocaust was widely understood, she wrote and broadcast against Hitler’s racial persecution. Her columns reached millions, and her radio addresses added a moral urgency when most Jewish organizations still couched appeals in cautious or philanthropic terms.

Her Foreign Affairs essays in the late 1930s urged the West to recognize the refugee crisis not merely as a Jewish issue but as a human catastrophe demanding immediate political action. She had no patience for foot-dragging — and no interest in confining Jewish survival to Palestine. Jews, she insisted, must be saved wherever possible, with immigration quotas expanded across the Americas and the Commonwealth.

This position set her apart. At precisely the same moment, the Jewish Agency and major Zionist leaders insisted that broad rescue schemes were dangerous distractions. Thompson thus represented the path not taken: a powerful voice calling for immediate, non-Zionist solutions, with no political strings attached.

JTA Sept. 3rd, 1933 Quoting Nahum Sokolow: "Hitlerism enables us to convert all Jews to Zionism."

Zionist Propaganda and Silence

Yet Thompson was also an early and passionate supporter of the Biltmore Program of 1942, which made Jewish statehood in Palestine the official demand of world Zionism. She seems to have accepted the framing that only a state could guarantee Jewish survival. At the same time, however, she was largely silent on the question of rescue. Like most of her peers, she did not publicly challenge the fact that American Jewish organizations were lobbying against U.S. rescue efforts unless the destination was ONLY Palestine.

Historians often defend figures like Chaim Weizmann by noting their reluctance to embrace the Biltmore Program, but few reckon with the fact that even sympathetic Gentiles like Thompson were swept up in its propaganda. She was not silent because she didn’t care — she was silent because she had been persuaded that the Zionist line was the only realistic one.

Fake Valor: Daddy, what did you do during the Holocaust while you were in Palestine?

Broadcasting Against the Nazis

One of the most striking details often overlooked in her biography is Thompson’s wartime activity. During WWII, she was not merely a columnist; she became a radio voice to Europe, broadcasting directly to Germans and others under Nazi rule. She sought to counter Goebbels’ propaganda with her own appeals, exposing Nazi crimes and reminding listeners of universal values. Her NBC and CBS radio addresses reached tens of millions in America and Europe. She exposed Nazi atrocities, countering Goebbels’ propaganda, and was one of the few American voices to speak openly of extermination before most Jewish organizations dared to (Thesis: UVM, 2009, p. 72–75).

Her broadcasts were remarkable because she conveyed moral outrage at a time when many Jewish leaders kept their rhetoric muted at best. In this sense, she was far ahead of Jewish organizations, which, as Nahum Goldmann later admitted in his autobiography, were guilty of a “cowardly and myopic” failure to mount a political fight against Hitler (Nahum Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 147–149).

JFK said it BEST in 1939: Palestine Was Hardly Britain's to Give Away

Meeting the Polish Underground

Thompson was also one of the first Western journalists to meet with emissaries from the Polish underground who brought reports of the extermination of Jews. She publicized their testimonies in American outlets, giving the public some of its earliest glimpses of the Holocaust as it unfolded (Thesis: UVM, 2009, p. 88-92).

This fact underscores the bitter irony: while Jewish leadership in the U.S. and Palestine were dismissing or sidelining reports from Jan Karski and others, Thompson was amplifying them. She was ahead of the curve, warning that Jewish lives were being extinguished on a scale never before seen. Her moral clarity only deepens the shame of those who had the responsibility to act but chose to prioritize state-building.

Were the British so STUPID as to promise COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE to Palestinians in 1939 (who, of course, "didn't exist") while the Indians had been DREAMING of such a thing for 400 years?

Palestine: The Shattering of an Illusion

Thompson’s break with Zionism came after her 1945 visit to Palestine. For years, she had relied on Zionist sources and accepted their narrative: that Jews were redeeming an empty land, pioneering a democratic experiment. But in Palestine, she encountered the dispossession of Palestinians firsthand. She saw refugee camps, rising tensions, and the unmistakable reality of a colonial settler project aiming to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population. Ms. Thompson accurately predicted that if the "Jewish State" is created, it would live in perpetual war with its neighbors, and Zionism is nothing but a right-wing ideology (meaning Zionism is the opposite of liberalism).

Hitler's Message To The West: If Jews are such noble citizens and you care about them, how come you're not letting them in?

This was a moment of revelation — almost identical to the moment Ta-Nehisi Coates described after visiting the West Bank in 2023: the realization that “the whole storytelling business had lied to me for decades.” Thompson, like Coates, had been lied to — and once she saw the truth, she could not unsee it.

Thompson's subsequent columns warned that Zionism was not a salvation but a danger: it risked embroiling Jews in endless conflict, breeding resentment, and undermining their moral standing worldwide. She began to write sympathetically about Palestinians, urging Americans to see them as a people with rights. For this, she was vilified.

Fake Valor: Jewish-Brigade, Italy April - 1945: The Impostering Hero, see me while I bomb Nazis. We wonder: were any similar selfies taken at the al-Alamein meat grinder?

Warning About Dual Loyalty

By the late 1940s, however, Thompson began to voice concerns that cut to the heart of American Jewish politics. In her columns and speeches, she warned that Zionist lobbying (on behalf of Israel) risked creating a dual loyalty problem for American Jews — a problem openly discussed within Jewish communities worldwide but rarely admitted in public.

David Ben-Gurion envisioned that Nazis' Nuremberg Race Laws would become the LEVER that would end up creating the "Jewish state," but how? Click the image for the details

She cautioned that if American Jews were perceived as pressing U.S. foreign policy toward a sectarian cause, they would expose themselves to the very charge of divided loyalty that antisemites had long exploited. This was not an attack on Jews; it was a sober warning. But in the postwar atmosphere, when criticism of Zionism was increasingly taboo, she was branded an antisemite.

Here, Thompson anticipated what Hannah Arendt would write in 1946: that Zionism was in danger of becoming a secular messianic movement, detached from reality and blind to the risks it imposed on Jews themselves. Thompson saw it sooner and paid a steep price.

"Report On The State of Palestine" issued on March 28th, 1921 by the Third Palestine Arab Congress to Winston Churchill

From Darling to Outcast

The backlash was swift. Once celebrated as a defender of Jews against Hitler, Thompson was now branded an antisemite by the very organizations she had once supported. Invitations dried up; her syndicated column lost papers; her reputation was tarnished.

She had not changed her principles — she still wanted Jews safe, free, and secure. What changed was that she refused to lie. She refused to accept the Zionist propaganda line that Palestine was empty, that Jewish statehood was the only solution, and that Palestinians did not exist.

Thompson’s punishment was a preview of what was to come. As she was canceled in the late 1940s, so too were other dissenters silenced in subsequent decades. Her case shows that Zionist hegemony over the storytelling business — in media, publishing, and politics — was not a post-1967 phenomenon. It was already operating in the 1940s, ruthless in its enforcement.

Kastner Saved Lives Too: How does justifying Haavara after the fact not resemble Rudolf Kastner's defense of what happened on his famous train but at a much larger scale? Kastner train passengers on their way to Switzerland, 1944

Moral Contrast: Thompson vs. Jewish Intellectuals

Here, the contrast with Jewish intellectuals is stark. Figures like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, and Martin Buber all harbored deep misgivings about Zionism, but chose to voice them cautiously, often only after the Nakba of 1948. Thompson, by contrast, spoke out as soon as she saw the truth, even though she was not Jewish and thus had less “cover” against the charge of betrayal.

Catastrophic Zionism at its worst: Zionists often spoke of the Holocaust decades before its time. What did Zionists do to confront it? Zionists were the FIRST to normalize trade with the Nazis!

One could argue that her moral courage exceeded theirs: she had been deceived, but once the deception was clear, she refused to play along. They, by contrast, already knew the costs of Zionism but remained largely silent until it was safe.

This is not to disparage their contributions — Arendt’s warnings about Zionism as a “catastrophic messianism” remain prophetic. But the timeline matters. Thompson’s fate shows what happened to those who refused silence when it mattered most.

The Zionist Version Of Lebensraum: A Map Of The Great Israel

Conclusion: The Canary in the Coal Mine

Dorothy Thompson’s life encapsulates the tragedy of moral clarity in a world of propaganda. She fought harder than most Jewish leaders to publicize Nazi crimes. She was one of the first to meet with the Polish underground and to broadcast directly against Hitler’s lies. She was a passionate supporter of Zionism — until she saw with her own eyes what it meant for Palestinians. Then she spoke out, warning of dual loyalty dangers for American Jews and the injustices inflicted on Arabs.

Herzl Died Thinking Israel Would Have Been in Uganda, not in "empty" Palestine

For this, she was canceled, branded an antisemite, and nearly erased from memory. Yet her story deserves to be remembered — not only as a biography but as a warning. When dissent is suppressed, when storytelling becomes hegemonic, when communities silence uncomfortable truths, they plant the seeds of future catastrophe.

In the end, Thompson’s fate was the canary in the coal mine: proof that even the loudest voice in America could be destroyed for speaking honestly about Zionism. Eighty years later, her words still echo — a reminder that the only safeguard against disaster is truth, however inconvenient.