The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
By Norman G. Finkelstein
Verso, 2001
182 pages, $29.95 (pb)
BY PHIL SHANNON
One of the great ironies (if that isn't too kind a word for it) of the Middle East conflict is the exploitation of one people's past experience of horrific suffering (the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people) to justify the oppression of another people (Israel's murderous assault on Palestinian Arabs).
Zionists, argues Norman Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry, have used the Holocaust "to justify the criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies" by converting "one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record" into a "victim" state.
Revulsion against the Nazi nightmare has been channelled by Zionist political leaders into support for a Jewish-only "sanctuary" in Palestine. Portraying the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbours as "Jew-haters", Zionists consciously use the martyrdom of Jewish Holocaust victims as Israel's ticket to immunity from criticism. Any critics of Israel's policies are rounded on as an "anti-Semites" who would herd Israelis into the sea or the gas chambers.
Fuelling the ideological thrust of Zionism is what Finkelstein calls the "Holocaust industry". Headquartered in the US, it consists of "individuals prominent in the organisational and cultural life of the American mainstream Jewish community" acting through such pro-Zionist organisations as the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (for Holocaust education).
The ideological captains of the Holocaust industry are strongly aligned, if not joined at the hip-pocket, with the US ruling class and government in their support for Israel as corporate America's watchdog in the strategically crucial and oil-rich Middle East.
Influential spokespeople such as Eli Wiesel (for a fee of US$25,000 per lecture) engage in "shameful apologetics for Israel whilst maintaining total silence on Palestinian suffering". Simon Wiesenthal rents his name to the Simon Wiesenthal Center for the tidy sum of US$90,000 a year, while former president and war criminal by any other name, Ronald Reagan, is awarded with "Humanitarian of the Year".
Finkelstein notes that, "Mainstream American Jewish organisations played down the Nazi holocaust in the years after World War II to conform to the US government's Cold War priorities", namely an anti-communist alliance with a barely de-Nazified West Germany.
There was no political point in dredging up an embarrassing past of extermination camps. Leftist Jews who did so were informed on by the Anti-Defamation League during the McCarthyite witch-hunts.
With Israel's lightning victory over Jordan, Egypt and Syria in the 1967 "Six-Day War", Israel's military might was demonstrated and radical Arab nationalism was fanned. US Middle East policy, which until then had satisfactorily relied on the pro-US Arab political elite, now swung more firmly behind Israel.
Memories of the Holocaust proved a perfect tool for deflecting criticism of the actions of the US proxy for US interests in the region. The revitalised project of Holocaust awareness "was not about understanding the past but about manipulating the present".
Two dogmas have underpinned the "Holocaust industry": (1) that the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was a unique historical event without parallel in human history (Wiesel claims that to compare the Holocaust with other suffering is a "total betrayal of Jewish history" because there was only ever one Holocaust); and (2) that it was the climax of an eternal Gentile hatred of Jewish people.
The "uniqueness" and historical "inevitability" of the Holocaust gives Zionism its "moral capital" and freedom from criticism.
The Zionist politicisation of the Holocaust is exemplified in the Holocaust industry's "educational activities". Jewish people alone are commemorated as Holocaust victims, not the Nazis' other victims: Communists, socialists, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Poles, Slavs, Russians and the Romany (known as Gypsies, who were proportionally exterminated on par with the Jews).
A holocaust is in the eye of the beholder, it seems. The Nazis' genocide against the Jews qualifies, as does the "genocides" carried out by the enemies of US imperialism.
While the Soviet Union's 1979 military intervention in Afghanistan was denounced as "another genocide" by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the US-backed regime in Guatemala at the time was perpetrating what the Guatemalan Truth Commission has recently called a genocide against the indigenous Mayan population. However, the Simon Wiesenthal Center awarded Jeanne Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN and chief apologist for US President Ronald Reagan's crimes in Central America, the "Humanitarian of the Year". Wiesel refused to intercede with Israel's government, a chief weapons supplier to the Guatemalan butchers.
The "Holocaust industry" requires funds to keep up its work of Zionist "education" and it has muscled in on the compensation racket big-time.
Finkelstein's parents survived six years in the Warsaw ghetto and the extermination camps (all his other family were killed by the Nazis), however genuine Holocaust survivors like these have received only a fraction of the "sorry money" paid out for Nazi crimes. Germany has paid US$60 million in reparations but only 15% of this has gone to survivors (Finkelstein's mother has received only US$3500).
Doing their share of queue-jumping are the "hoaxters and hucksters", those who fabricate a ghetto or camp past to be eligible for compensation money. Fake Holocaust survivors (not always Jewish people) cash in with best-selling but fictitious memoirs. Like bees to honey, US$600 per hour lawyers feed off the compensation supply.
The real thieves, however, are the Zionist organisations which have diverted the river of money to themselves and their leaders, to Zionist-flavoured museums and university chairs, to Israel's settlements in the Occupied Territories, and to "Holocaust education".
Every year, the "March of the Living" uses money siphoned from Holocaust survivors to send thousands of Jewish youth from around the world to converge on the site of the former death camps in Poland for instruction in "Gentile wickedness" before being flown off to Israel for salvation.
In recent years, says Finkelstein, the "Holocaust industry" has become an "outright extortion racket" involving a "double shake-down" of both legitimate Holocaust survivors and European governments. The World Jewish Congress had amassed US$9 billion by August 2000, first call on the money going to the Jewish elite — in the usual display of US state and Zionist hypocrisy.
On the counts of refusing Jewish heirs access to dormant Holocaust-era accounts, denial of asylum to Jewish refugees and profit-making from forced Jewish labour, the US record is as bad or worse than the European countries pressured into paying much more than is due following economic boycotts by US local and state governments, and political sanctions by Congress.
Swiss banks and German industrialists were not the only villains. The US state and the US capitalist class were also culpable in profiting from, and aiding and abetting, the extermination of Europe's Jews.
And while hyperbole abounds about the Nazi and European profit-making from Jewish misfortune being the "greatest mass theft in history", no noise about material reparations registers for Native Americans or the descendants of enslaved Africans in America whose stolen land and labour fuelled the wealth-creation for the US bourgeoisie.
Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry is a spirited challenge to the Zionist rulers of Israel (and their Western imperialist partners) who feed off the Nazis' terrible crimes and Jewish people's tragedy to defend their own vicious military conquest, and racist and genocidal oppression, of the Palestinian Arabs. Zionists inhabit a strange moral world.
From Green Left Weekly, May 1, 2002.
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