AAARGH
July 1999
He's a Jewish author - but
his accusation that Zionist groups profit from hijacking the history
of the Nazi genocide has made him a hate figure.
Tomorrow he's at a conference in Britain.
As Norman Finkelstein's flight from New York touches down tomorrow
morning in London, it lands the Brooklyn-born writer and Holocaust
academic in the middle of a major storm.
As he arrives, one of Finkelstein's many enemies in the Jewish
Establishment, and one of many targets in his latest book, will
be addressing a major international Holocaust conference in Oxford.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the Nobel-prize winning author
whose book Night is held as one of the most important of Holocaust
texts, is one of the major speakers at the Remembering for the
Future conference. So is Finkelstein, who says Wiesel is a hypocrite,
responsible for the 'sacralisation of the Holocaust ... for his
standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine)'.
It is believed the fierce foes are unlikely to come face to face
in Oxford, but Finkelstein will sail into a storm of controversy
there as his new book The Holocaust Industry is published in the
UK.
Last week, it was condemned here as 'nauseous'. Some columnists
branded him 'extreme' and a 'conspiracy theorist'. Others damned
him for giving succour to anti-Semites and manipulating the facts.
Norman Finkelstein, the son of concentration camp survivors, has
launched a personal pogrom with The Holocaust Industry, attacking
almost every orthodox tenet of the study of the genocide of the
Jews by the Nazis.
And an awful lot of people now
hate him for it.
'His approach is totally destructive,' says Greville Janner, chairman
of the Holocaust Educational Trust. 'I find it revolting.' Elan
Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress in
New York, agrees. 'I believe he is pathetic. I simply don't accept
him as a researcher.' That his arrival coincides with the beginning
of the Remembering for the Future conference, one of the largest
gatherings of international Holocaust scholars ever held, will
only add a searing heat to the argument.
His incendiary book, published in the US last Thursday and here
this week, argues that interest in the Holocaust arose after the
1967 Arab-Israeli war not because survivors found a voice but
because an all-powerful American Jewish lobby realised it could
now be used to lend a kind of moral victimhood to an Israeli state
engaged in criminal acts against the Palestinians. Further, he
says efforts have been made to stress the 'uniqueness' of the
genocide of the Jews, not for any moral reason, but simply to
protect its power as a symbol.
Most recently, he says, it has been used to extort money from
Germany, Switzerland and others in the name of Holocaust survivors
who do not need it, the funds staying with Jewish institutions
and not those very few living survivors who might need it. He
adds the number of Holocaust survivors has been grossly inflated,
and that there are now more survivors than at the end of the war.
'The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money
from Europe in the name of "needy Holocaust victims"
has,' he writes, 'shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom
to that of a Monte Carlo casino.'
What really defines the short, footnoted text is its style. Intoning
the memory of his Holocaust survivor parents, and raging about
the paltry $3,500 compensation that his mother received, Finkelstein
lashes out in all directions with a torrent of invective. He has
many targets: the World Jewish Congress, the Claims Commission,
the Israeli government and almost every other academic in the
field of Holocaust study.
Intriguingly, the day Finkelstein lands in London, Wiesel will
be in Oxford for the opening session of the Remembering for the
Future conference. Although Finkelstein will later be part of
a debate at the conference, there is, according to the organisers,
no likelihood of the two meeting.
The Holocaust Industry began its turbulent life as a review in
the London Review of Books of a highly regarded work by Peter
Novick, an academic at Chicago university, called The Holocaust
in American Life . Novick was trying to explain why the Holocaust
suddenly became a subject for discussion and study in the late
Sixties after so many years of silence. He concluded that the
Arab-Israeli war of 1967 had led to concerns that a second Holocaust
could occur and that there was a duty to remember the events of
the Second World War to stop such an atrocity occurring again.
In his review, Finkelstein argued his entirely opposing thesis
that it was a reaction to Israeli strength.
'I saw the piece in the LRB ,' says Colin Robertson, managing
director of Verso books, publisher of the Finkelstein volume,
'and I thought there could be a book in it.' Did he not think
it might cause a row? 'We're an unashamedly radical publisher.
It's our stock in trade. But our main thing was that, as a left-wing
publisher, we should not be seen as anti-Semitic.
With Norman's background as the son of Holocaust survivors, we
could refute any such allegations.'
Finkelstein is more than used to taking on the Holocaust establishment.
In the mid-Nineties he published a scathing critique of Hitler's
Willing Executioners, a book by Daniel Goldhagen, Harvard Professor
of Jewish History, which claimed the entire German nation had,
through ingrained anti-Semitism, been eager accomplices in the
genocide of the Jews.
As Finkelstein gleefully recounts, he became the target of abuse
and hate mail. At one point in The Holocaust Industry he even
quotes a letter from Leon Wieseltier, influential literary editor
of the US magazine New Republic, to his publisher. 'You don't
know who Finkelstein is,' Wieseltier wrote. 'He's poison, he's
a disgusting self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a
rock.'
While Finkelstein's style is unique, the arguments in his book
are not. This newspaper echoed his views on the problems of over-stating
the uniqueness of the Holocaust when the Imperial War Museum opened
its permanent Holocaust Exhibition a few weeks ago. Likewise journalist
Tom Bower, who has written extensively on attempts to get compensation
from the Swiss over the Holocaust, says some of what Finkelstein
claims about the machinations of the international compensation
process are correct.
The idea of a Holocaust racket
surfaced years ago when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban quipped:
'There's no business like Shoah business' ('Shoah' is Hebrew for
'Holocaust').
Rabbi Julia Neuberger says: 'There is a sort of industry going
on around the Holocaust which grows on itself. Elie Wiesel does
charge a fortune and do the wide, sad eyes thing. But because
Finkelstein does it as a rant, the validity of those points get
lost.
'He's so angry with the American Jewish establishment that he
doesn't listen to real people. You can't just think in terms of
systems with the Holocaust.'
Others are more vicious. 'The language he is using is anti-Semitic,'
says Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress. 'His facts are wrong.
His language is intemperate. He quotes me but he never spoke to
me.'
Deborah Lipstadt, the US expert on Holocaust denial and a defendant
in David Irving's recent failed libel trial has similar complaints.
'In the book he says that by writing about Holocaust deniers I
give them credence. That's ridiculous. I didn't create them.'
At one point he accuses Lipstadt - also in the UK for the Oxford
conference - of saying that doubting the testimony of survivors
is a form of Holocaust denial. 'I never said that,' she said.'It's
ridiculous. It makes me wonder how accurate he is on other things.'
It is certainly true that Finkelstein only emphasises that which
suits his case. He mentions repeatedly that his mother received
only $3,500 by way of compensation, but buries in a footnote the
fact that his father received a monthly pension of around $600
for years.
Indeed, gripes about money, and the Byzantine compensation claims
that procured it, appear to lie at the very heart of Finkelstein's
argument. In 1998, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion in
settlement of a class action brought by Jewish claimants.
Finkelstein complains that no money reached the victims. Tom Bower,
who has written extensively on Swiss compensation to the Jews,
disagrees. 'None of the Swiss's $1.25bn has been transferred to
any Jewish organisation,' he says. 'So far, the American courts
have not approved a system for distributing the money and no money
has been transferred from Switzerland.' Finkelstein claims that
the World Jewish Congress now has a fund of $7bn. 'The $7bn fund
is a myth,' says Bower. Finally Finkelstein states that half a
$200 million fund set up for immediate distribution to victims
has not been handed out and will end up going to Jewish groups
and lawyers. Elan Steinberg of the WJC says this is rubbish. Only
on one claim, that there are tens of millions of dollars in German
compensation funds languishing in bank accounts, does Bower say
that Finkelstein's account come anywhere near the truth. Even
so he says Finkelstein's interpretation of those events is 'flawed'.
Finkelstein is unrepentant. 'When I want to invoke the memory
of my parents I am accused of using it. There is something plainly
revolting going on. There are people claiming to be working in
the name of Holocaust victims, getting money on false pretences
and then not distributing it.
'I was probably unusually close to my parents so I do what I can
now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves
to be remembered.' He just hates the way the remembering is done.
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
Claim and counter-claim about the Holocaust
Finkelstein's claim: If, as is agreed, there were only 100,000
Jewish survivors of the concentration camps at the end of the
war, many of whom died shortly afterwards, there cannot be hundreds
of thousands of survivors
still living deserving to be compensated by the Swiss and the
Germans.
Counter-claim: The definition of a survivor has moved to take
in not only those who were in the camps but also those who were
forced to flee their homes and their country, those who lived
out the war in the forests and, in some cases, victims' descendants
who suffered psychological and/ or financial problems.
Finkelstein's claim: Jewish organisations are sitting on $1.25
billion paid over by the Swiss banks, none of which has been distributed
to Holocaust
victims.
Counter-claim: Although a settlement has been agreed no money
has yet left Switzerland because the US courts have still to approve
its distribution.
Finkelstein's claim: Most of the money will never go to individuals
but to Jewish organisations.
Counter-claim: The division of the funds is yet to be agreed.
Finkelstein's claim: Nobel prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel is
a fraud saying that, after liberation from the camps at 18, he
read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish. Finkelstein says
it was never published in
Yiddish.
Counter-claim: It was published in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1929.
Finkelstein's claim: US academic Deborah Lipstadt said that to
question the testimony of a survivor was Holocaust denial.
Counter-claim: Lipstadt denies having said any such thing.
Finkelstein's claim: Lawrence Eagleburger earns $300,000 a year
as chair of the International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance
claims, money that should be going to Holocaust victims.
Counter-claim: His salary is paid by the insurance companies not
from compensation money.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
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