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Helen Thomas (Richard Kern for Vice)

Detroit, MI - The sisters of Helen Thomas say her statements about Israel — which cost the White House correspondent-turned-Hearst columnist her job — have been widely misinterpreted.

In a telephone interview initiated by Journal-isms, three of them said Thomas was not calling for the destruction of Israel or the return of all Israelis to Europe or the United States, as has been the running narrative, but was expressing her opposition to the disputed Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

“They should stop confiscating the land that belonged to the Palestinians. We feel that there should be a two-state solution in Palestine,” said one sister, who did not want to be identified. The sisters, who spoke from the home of one of them in the Detroit area, which houses the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, range in age from 87 to 95. Thomas is 89.  A brother is 100. The family is Lebanese-American.

“Helen Thomas is for peaceful coexistence in the Palestinian territory,” said Barbara Isaac, the youngest sister. “What she does not like is that the Palestinians have been completely devastated and made to live under occupation and all the deleterious effects, and the hazardous effects of that, stripped of their ability to live normal lives.

“Helen has lived with this problem for as long as she’s been in Washington,” she said. Displaced Palestinians become waiters and cooks there, “and would talk to her, and she’s heard nothing but their stories of horror for 60 years,” Isaac said, referencing the creation of Israel in 1948. “She’s out to dinner and they find her.

“If nobody got angry about injustice, then people just go on suffering, knowing that nobody gives a damn.”

According to the sisters, the reference to going home to Poland, Germany and America refers to those who have populated the disputed Israeli settlements.

Helen Thomas was not talking calls, her sisters said, giving a hint at what her life has been like in the past few days. “She has so many bouquets of flowers they can’t get into her condo,” Isaac said.

Isaac said she was eager to talk because she believed her sister’s personality was being misrepresented.

“She doesn’t hate anybody,” Isaac said. One of the older sisters recalled that during the Holocaust, Thomas closely followed first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts to bring German Jews to the United States. “She was very upset about the whole thing, and she had fed them in her apartment building when I used to visit her back in the ‘40s. They were in the concentration camps. She’s very close to all that.

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