Why Norman Finkelstein's Book Still Raises Hackles of Both Israel and the US
On June 14, the day after Israel launched murderous – and completely unprovoked – airstrikes on Iran, the New York Times ran an editorial with this headline: 'Anti-Semitism is an Urgent Problem. Too many People are making Excuses.' Typically, the NYT handles its messaging somewhat more adroitly, making a great show of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. But this was one of those occasions when you couldn’t help showing your hand. After all, a ‘besieged’, ‘existentially threatened’ Israel couldn’t be left to its own, poor devices – and the NYT knew it had to rally to Israel’s defence. Hence the invocation of the escalating danger of anti-Semitism at the precise moment when the Jewish state of Israel was about to plunge West Asia into an all-out war. Recall how, when Hitler’s Sixth Army was stopped in its tracks near what was then Stalingrad, the Fuehrer cried out against the ‘Bolshevik invaders’? The great NYT was only taking a page out of the venerable Nazi playbook here.
It was the same playbook that the newspaper had turned to when it nonchalantly ran its first notice (August 6, 2000) on the Norman Finkelstein monograph entitled The Holocaust Industry. “There is…something indecent about it,” the purported review said, “something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid.” Elsewhere, it talks passionately about “the warping of intelligence” and the “perversion of moral indignation” that supposedly saturates the book’s pages, and upbraids its “shrill hyperbole” and “indifference to historical facts”. But, incredibly, nowhere does this reviewer identify the aspects of Finkelstein’s presentation that he finds flawed, indeed reprehensible, let alone refute them.
It looks as though the book under review was so trashy that it merited no real review. The question is moot: why then did the NYT commission the review in the first place? The answer is not far to seek. The NYT could not fail to review – in effect, excoriate – the book precisely because Finkelstein so determinedly lifts the veil on the ideological and financial skulduggery rife in (what the book calls) the ‘Holocaust industry’, an enterprise of which the great American liberal media (NYT included) are spirited cheerleaders. Probably beneficiaries, too.
But the Holocaust industry found its votaries elsewhere as well, notably among English liberals. Thus The Guardian’s notice of July 14, 2000 rages about the book reading “like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them (Holocaust) survivors, and vast generalisations about the whole of world Jewry”. Nowhere does the reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, point to even one of the ‘vast generalisations’, much less the ‘rants’, he claims the book is crawling with. For good measure, he titles his essay 'An Enemy of the People', and goes on to close it with this staggering malediction: "Finkelstein sees the Jews as either villains or victims – and that. I fear, takes him closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it."
Extraordinary, isn’t it, how Finkelstein, both of whose parents were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz (and most other members of whose extended family were liquidated by the Nazis), so effortlessly transmutes, in the hands of the ‘liberal’ commentator, into a Nazi, ‘an enemy of the (Jewish) people’? And how the reviewer doesn’t even condescend to tell the reader how Finkelstein earned the Nazi moniker?
So what is it about the book that gets the NYT’s goat, and The Guardian’s? A look at Finkelstein’s central thesis, best presented in his own words, excerpted here from his Introduction to The Holocaust Industry, provides the answer:
"…..“The Holocaust”is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust. Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality. The Holocaust is not an arbitrary but rather an internally coherent construct.Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, the Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood – in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified. Those enjoying this immunity, I might add, have not escaped the moral corruptions that attend it… (Emphasis added)"
For a book that was published in the US in the year 2000, such a theme was as counter-intuitive as it was incendiary. Indeed, for many prominent Jewish organisations in the US (like the Jewish Defence League) and elsewhere, and their backers in the US and Israel, it was maddeningly provocative. Only a Holocaust denier, mainstream American political (and even much of academic) opinion affirmed, could peddle such an obnoxious lie. Even before this book, Finkelstein had already been identified by the US’s powerful Israel lobby as a ‘self-hating Jew’: his books Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; The Rise and Fall of Palestine:A Personal Account of the Intifada Years; and, perhaps most importantly, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth had so irked many major Jewish groups that he was often spoken of in the most degrading terms – ‘Stinky Finky’ and ‘a sick puppy’ being among the more imaginative ones.
Finkelstein has a PhD in political science from Princeton and his work has been praised for its brilliance and intellectual rigour by such stalwarts as Raul Hilberg, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim and Sara Roy. He has held faculty positions at Rutgers University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University and DePaul University – but no institution agreed to give him a tenured position, no doubt because of his political convictions, which he never made a secret of, and his unrelenting criticism of Israel’s hostility to Palestinians and a potential Palestinian state. Raul Hilberg, the doyen of Holocaust studies, was a Republican whose worldview differed vastly from Finkelstein’s, but this didn’t stop Hilberg from paying this moving tribute to the much younger radical scholar: "Finkelstein’s place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed – albeit, it so seems, at great cost."
The Holocaust Industry grew out of Finkelstein’s review, for the London Review of Books, of Peter Novick’s important 1999 book The Holocaust in American Life which, among other things, examined how the Holocaust began to powerfully exercise the American imagination from the late 1960s onwards though it had had little traction in the US until then. Finkelstein broadly agrees with and elaborates on Novick’s assessment, but points to its limitations as well: unlike Novick, he believes that the Holocaust came to acquire primacy in the American cultural discourse not through a fortuitous set of circumstances but because it was a political project that the American elite found handy for furthering its ‘political and class interests’. The Holocaust Industry builds Finkelstein’s case assiduously, working relentlessly through contemporary and recent historical records, even cultural minutiae, to make that case iron-clad. To a polemical book like this, a reader can react in only two radically different ways: by agreeing with it in large measure, or (when there’s a preconceived bias against the subject) by denouncing it wholesale. Western liberal media couldn’t but have bristled at the point Finkelstein was making here.
The 224-page book (2003 edition) comprises three chapters and two separate postscripts to the book’s two editions. Chapter 1 – 'Capitalising the Holocaust' – traces the path taken by the champions of ‘The Holocaust’ narrative to try and transfigure the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews into an utterly unique, wholly-incomprehensible, near-mystical phenomenon which not only cannot but also mustn’t be compared with anything that came before it or can ever come after. It then shows how this mystique helps sanctify the existence of the Israeli state and legitimises Israel’s every action – however sordid or base – against Palestinians and Israel’s critics. The chapter also demonstrates how, in its anxiety to fully assimilate itself, the Jewish community in the US studiously kept its distance from Israel for as long as the US government was lukewarm to the Jewish state, but embraced Israel wholeheartedly once it became clear that Israel was emerging as a valuable strategic asset for the US in West Asia.
Chapter 1 also addresses the puzzle of why the Nazi holocaust engaged so little popular attention in the US in the immediate post-Second World War years. Cold War priorities overrode every other American concern then, pushing de-Nazification to the backburner, coopting prominent ex-Nazis to the Cold War enterprise, and making sure (West) Germany felt welcome in the ‘common cause’ against the Soviet Union. The Eichmann trial of 1961 brought the Nazi holocaust to the ordinary American, and Israel had necessarily to foreground the ‘Holocaust experience’ so that Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina wouldn’t attract adverse scrutiny. The Six-Day War of 1967 alerted the US to Israel’s strengths and its potential as a regional asset, while the Yom Kippur War of 1973 both demonstrated the limits to that potential and warranted a full-throated invocation of the danger of a repeat Holocaust by highlighting the (supposed) threats to Israel’s very existence. From then on, as the US and Israel steadily came ever closer to each other, the Holocaust came to be front and centre of the Jewish sensibility both in Israel and the US. And, for the American elite, the Holocaust became both a byword for the ultimate evil and a handy whip with which to scourge all criticism of the state of Israel.
Chapter 2 – Hoaxers, Hucksters, and History – examines how the memory of the Jewish suffering in the Nazi holocaust and its purported uniqueness drive a cringe-worthy crop of ‘literary’ and pseudo-scholarly output that is egregiously false and perfidious. Finkelstein cites three books in particular. One is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which perversely argues that all of German society had always been so viscerally anti-Semitic that the Jewish genocide had only been waiting to happen. The other two works – Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments – masqueraded as camp survivor memoirs until both of them were exposed as elaborate hoaxes with no connection to real events. Both these frauds, however, earned glowing praise from American Jewish organisations, prominent Jewish intellectuals, as well as mainstream liberal media, and were touted as ‘classic Holocaust literature’. Both books became best-sellers, and also won awards.
Indeed,even after Kosinski’s hoax had been called, the NYT stoutly defended him, alleging that he had been the victim of a Communist plot, no less. As for the Wilkomirski book, no less a man than Israel Gutman, director of Israel’s Yad Vashem, argued with a straight face that “it’s not so important” whether the book was a fake, because, clearly, Wilkomirski was “someone who lives the story very deeply in his soul. The pain is authentic…” This, despite the fact that Wilkomirski turned out to be not even Jewish!
Chapter 3 – 'The Double Shakedown' – provides a detailed account of what Finkelstein suggests was nothing short of a massive financial scam. The perpetrators were a group of combative US-based Jewish organisations led by the World Jewish Congress, aided and abetted by the Clinton administration and the US federal judiciary. The victims were a host of Swiss banks who were accused – unfairly, in large measure, as proved later – of concealing, and indeed expropriating, deposits made into Swiss banks by European Jews during the Hitler years. The Volcker Commission, headed by a former chair of the US Federal Reserve and comprising representatives of the Jewish groups and the Swiss banks, painstakingly worked for three years, and identified dormant Jewish deposit accounts holding some 36 million Swiss Francs (or $55 million) in 1999. But, much before the commission submitted its report, class-action lawsuits were filed in a US federal court against the banks, alleging serious sharp practices and opacity.
Dutifully, the Clinton administration mounted humongous diplomatic and economic pressure on the Swiss government, obliging the banks to agree to an out-of-court settlement of $1.2 billion. And this was a double swindle because most of the settlement monies never reached the survivors, but were diverted to law firms, consultants, politicians, Holocaust organisations and industry elites. Finkelstein calls it “an outright extortion racket’’ and quotes Raul Hilberg’s assessment that the Holocaust industry conjured up “phenomenal numbers” of survivors and then “blackmailed” the Swiss banks into submission. In much the same manner, German banks were also ripped off, and again “only the tiniest fraction” of the proceeds were paid out to survivors, in what Finkelstein dubs 'Monte Carlo casino’-worthy shenanigans. Curiously, the World Jewish Congress never joined issue with the US government on such reparations, though Finkelsten adduces significant evidence that US banks were big beneficiaries of Jewish wealth during the Nazi holocaust.
How does the ‘Holocaust industry’ minister to the political and class interests of the American Jewish elites? Finkelstein persuasively argues that this is achieved by branding all serious opposition to their neo-conservatism as essentially disrespectful to the Holocaust, and hence anti-Semitic. With the American Jewry having moved decidedly to the right of US politics, this extreme sensitivity (real or pretended) to the Holocaust’s memory at times helps deflect even genuine criticism of US state policy by characterising such criticism as potentially anti-Semitic.
Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.
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