Alex Callinicos on Finkelstein (was: Re: The Holocaust Industry)

["Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Socialist Worker 1706, July 22nd

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/1706/sw170609.htm

Finkelstein and the Holocaust

By Alex Callinicos

A STORM has burst out over The Holocaust Industry, the provocative new book
by the left wing New York historian Norman Finkelstein. His target is the
now vast effort-reflected in a plethora of museums, institutes, courses,
conferences and the like-to commemorate the Nazi murder of 5.1 million Jews.

For Finkelstein the Holocaust is an ideology. He believes that the dominant
representation of the Nazis' crimes, particularly in the United States, has
got in the way of any serious attempt to understand or remember it. In
criticising this representation, Finkelstein follows the lead given by the
liberal historian Peter Novick. In his recent book The Holocaust and
Collective Memory, Novick argues that the Holocaust only became a major
issue even for American Jews in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For Novick, this shift came as a result of the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli
wars. Leading American Jews believed that the state of Israel faced a danger
comparable to Hitler. Invoking the Holocaust allowed defenders of Israel to
portray their opponents as crypto-Nazis. Finkelstein dismisses this
explanation, pointing out that Israel was in much greater danger in the 1948
war when the state was founded. He argues that it was Washington's decision
after 1967 to treat the Zionist state as a major American strategic asset in
the Middle East that was responsible for the change in attitude.

"It was not Israel's alleged weakness and isolation, not the fear of a
'second Holocaust'," he writes, "but rather its proven strength and
strategic alliance with the United States that led Jewish elites to gear up
the Holocaust industry after June 1967."

A second factor, Finkelstein argues, was the increasing prosperity of
American Jews and their corresponding political shift rightwards: "Moving
aggressively to defend their corporate and class interests, Jewish elites
branded all opposition to their new conservative policies anti-Semitic."

This analysis provides the basis for Finkelstein's scathing attack on the
"Holocaust industry". Thus he denounces Nobel Prize winning Auschwitz
survivor Elie Wiesel for turning the Holocaust into "a 'mystery' religion"
that he expounds for a standard fee of $25,000 per appearance. Equally
dubious, for him, are the efforts by Jewish organisations to win
compensation from countries like Germany and Switzerland. Finkelstein claims
that in what he calls "the Double Shakedown" the compensation claims are
inflated and little of the money reaches genuine Holocaust survivors.

It's hardly surprising, then, that Finkelstein has come under vicious
attack. Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian on Friday last week that he
was "closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who
suffered it". Given that both Finkelstein's parents survived the Warsaw
Ghetto and the Nazi camps, this is an odious accusation.

All the same, in his fury at the American Zionist establishment, Finkelstein
does offer enormous hostages to fortune. How different is his assertion that
"the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain
fraud" from the Holocaust revisionist David Irving's rantings during his
recent libel case?

Finkelstein manages to praise Irving's "'indispensable' contribution" as a
historian. Worse still, he follows Novick in dismissing the significance of
Holocaust denial: "There is no evidence that Holocaust deniers exert any
more influence in the United States than the flat earth society does." But,
whatever may be true in the US, Holocaust denial is a live political issue
in Europe. When Jean-Marie Le Pen, who dismissed the Holocaust as "a detail
of history", can win 15 percent of the vote in France, and SS sympathiser
Jsrg Haider can dominate the Austrian government, ignoring Holocaust
revisionism is a dangerous luxury.

Worst of all, Finkelstein at times makes concessions to the idea that some
Jews at least are partially responsible for anti-Semitism. Thus he
approvingly quotes the claim that the World Jewish Congress, in pressing for
reparations from East European governments, is "guilty of promoting...a very
ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism".

This seems entirely the wrong place to start. To the extent that there is a
resurgence of anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, its most obvious
cause is the economic and political disruption caused by the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s. In this climate it's hardly
surprising racists have sought out Jews and others-notably the Roma-as
scapegoats, quite independently of the behaviour of these victims.

Finkelstein, like Novick before him, has raised legitimate questions. He has
highlighted some ways in which Holocaust commemoration has become a tool of
the powerful. But so exaggerated is his polemic that at times he comes,
quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to
those who dream of new holocausts.