Finkelstein is a Jewish political scientist who was drummed out of academia for being critical of Zionism. In this volume Finkelstein dares to take on the Holocaust, probably the most sacralized subject in the modern Western world. And we should be grateful to Finkelstein because this is a subject that was overdue for discussion and one can only imagine what would have happened if a Gentile had tried to write something like this.
It is important to realize this book is not a work of Holocaust revisionism. Finkelstein takes the standard history as given and instead deals with the use and abuse of tragedy for political and financial advantage. The core of the book is only three chapters. Although the main text is brief, it’s clear Finkelstein has read very widely and he engages substantively with numerous sources. Each page is heavily footnoted with citations and additional commentary.
Finkelstein points out that the Holocaust is an unusual tragedy in that it has increased in importance and received more attention over time. This is the precise opposite of what usually happens: the memory of an event is typically vivid in the immediate aftermath and then fades over time. Finkelstein suggests that the key point for the change was 1967, after the Six-Day War. He suggests that the Holocaust was given much greater emphasis after that at that time primarily to deflect criticism from Israel and secondarily because of the new era of identity politics. While one can debate these reasons, empirically he seems correct about the timing. If you check the Google n-gram for “the Holocaust,” you will see the term was virtually non-existent in the 50s but start taking off in the 70s and 80s. By the early 90s we had an official Holocaust museum in DC, we had Schindler’s List and many other movies, we had kids reading Anne Frank in school, and on and on. By now, the Holocaust has come to dominate WWII entirely rather than being a secondary story as it was for a couple decades after the war.
After these broader introductory points, Finkelstein moves on to more specific criticisms. He discusses dubious memoirs by such people as Kosinski and Wilkomirski and goes after Elie Weisel. This is pretty good, although surely there are more literary hoaxes than the few he mentions.
The final chapter is the truly extraordinary story of the shakedown of the Swiss. Finkelstein goes into some detail about the case and how various Jewish groups, using the US as the muscle, bullied the Swiss into paying out an amount in the billions for supposed lost bank accounts that might have belonged to Jews. All accumulated with interest of course! “It’s not about money. It’s about more money.”
Finkelstein brilliantly notes how actual Jewish survivors of the camps could not have been more than 100,000 at the end of the war and that actuarially there would perhaps remain only a quarter of them by the year 2000 (and hardly any by now). Yet when it comes to these shakedown schemes, they will claim far higher numbers which Finkelstein notes is ironically a sort of implicit Holocaust denial. At any rate, because there are few genuine camp survivors, all the shakedown money ends up going to the “Jewish community” at large, i.e., slush funds for these Jewish groups.
As I read, I could not help but compare these extraordinary demands for restitution to how harshly the Zionists have dealt with the Palenstinian situation. Finkelstein is tremendously well-read on Israel and I wish he had explored this contrast (hypocrisy). Over its history Israel has made numerous illegal terroritorial acquisitions and used terrorism to force Arabs to leave (search for “Deir Yassin” for example). Israel has intransigently refused to grant repatriation of the Arab refugees and compensation. In their minds they owe NOTHING to the people they directly abused yet they expect restitution down to the last gold dental filling. The reality is that in human history the ledger of grievances is very lengthy and it’s impossible to adjudicate who owes what to whom. If you go back further to before the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, you will learn that Jews owned about a third of the real property in the Reich, and the bulk of this was acquired opportunistically during the hyperinflation of the Weimar period. But of course the reparations door only swings one way.
This book is still very relevant as Jewish groups are trying to shake down Poland, alleging that they are entitled to reclaim all the land they owned there before the war.
If Finkelstein does another edition, I think a chapter on Hollywood would be a good addition.
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