Norman G. Finkelstein: The Holocaust Industry - Part 2/5
Dr. Izzeddin Musa
Part 2 - Extract:
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CAPITALIZING THE HOLOCAUST
... In fact, the Nazi holocaust is just about the only historical
reference that resonate in a university classroom today. Polls
show that many more Americans can identify The Holocaust than Pearl
Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.
Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful
of books and films touched on the subject.
Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including
Jewish intellectuals, paid the nazi holocaust little heed. In an
authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that
the Nazi Final Solution (as well as Israel) "had remarkably slight
effects on the inner life of american Jewry." ... No monuments or
tributes marked the Nazi holocaust in the United States. To the
contrary, major Jewish organizations opposed such memorialization.
The question is, Why?
The standard explanation is that Jews were traumtized by the Nazi
holocaust and therefore repressed the memory of it. In fact, there
is no evidence to support this conclusion... The Problem was that
the Americans didn't want to listen.
The real reason for public silence on the Nazi extermination was
the conformist policies of the American Jewish leadership and the
political climate of postwar America. In both domestic and inter-
national affairs American Jewish elites hewed closely to official
US policy. Doing so in effect faciliated the traditional goals of
assimilation and access to power. With the inception of the Cold
War, mainstream Jewish organisation jumped into the fray. American
Jewish elites "forgot" the Nazi holocaust because Germany - West
Germany by 1949 - became a crucial postwar American ally in the
US confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up th past served
no useful purpose; in fact in complicated matters.
With minor resevations (soon discarded), major American Jewish
organisations quickly fell into line with US support for a rearmed
and barely de-Nazified Germany. The American Jewish Committee (AJC),
fearful that "any organized opposition of american Jews against the
new foreign policy and strategic approach could isolate them in the
eyes of the non-Jewish majority and endanger their postwar achieve-
ments on the domestic scene," was the first to preach the virtues
of realignment. The pro-Zionist World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its
American affiliate dropped opposition after signing compensation
agreements with Germany in the early 1950s, while the Anti-Defama-
tion League (ADL) was the first major Jewish organisation to send
an official delegation to Germany, in 1954. Together these organi-
sations collaborated with the Bonn government to contain the "anti-
German wave" of Jewish popular sentiment (Wasn't the same game with
the Nazi government?).
The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for
yet another reason. Leftist Jews, who were opposed to the Cold War
alignnent with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop
harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi holocaust was tagged a
comminist cause. Strapped with the stereotype that conflated Jews
with the Left - in fact, Jews did acount for a third of the vote
for progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 -
American Jews elite did not shrink from sacrifing fellow Jews on
the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish
subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively
collaborated in the McCarthy-era witch-hunt. The AJC endorsed the
death penalty for the Rosenbergs, while its monthly publication,
"Commentary", editorliazed that they weren't really Jews.
Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home,
mainstream Jewish organisations opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi
German social-democrats as well as boycotts of German manufactures
and public demonstrations against ex-Nazi touring the United States.
Ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with US ruling elites and
dessociate themselves from the jewish Left, organized American Jewry
did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce
the USSR. "Soviet (anti-Jewish) policy opens up opportunoties which
not be overlooked," an internal AJC memorandom quoted by Novick
gleefully noted, "to reinforce certain aspects of AJC domestic
program." Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution
with Russian anti-Semitism. "Stalin will succeed where Hilter
failed," Commentary direly predicted. "He will finally wipe out
the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.... The parallel with the
policy of Nazi extermination is almost complete." Major American
Jews organisations even denounced the 1956 Soviet invasion of
Hungary as "only the first station on the way to a Russian Ausch-
witz."
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Everything changed with the June 1967-Arab-Israeli war. By virtually
all accounts, it was only after this conflict that the Holocaust
became a fixture in American Jewish life. The standard explanation
of this transformation is that Israel's extreme isolation and
vulnerability during the June war revived memories of the Nazi
extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresent both the reality
of Mideast power relations at the time at the nature of the evolving
relationship between American Jewish elites and Israel.
Just as mainstream American Jews organisations downplayed the Nazi
holocaust in the years after World War II to conform to the US
governments Cold War priorities, so their attitude to Israel kept
in step with US policy. From early on, American Jewish elites har-
bored profound misgivings about a Jewish state. Uppermost was their
fear that it would lend credence to the "dual loyalty" charge....
Indeed, the AJC supported Israel's founding mainly out of fear that
a domestic backlash against Jews might ensue if the Jewish DPs in
Europe were not quickly settled.
... To secure US interests in the Middle East, the Eisenhower Admi-
nistration balanced support for Israel and for arab nations, ...
... "The kidnapping of Eichmann," erich Fromm opined, "is an act of
lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves ...
have been guilty."
Then came the June war. Impressed by Israel's overwhelming display
of force, the United States moved to incorporate it as a strategic
asset.
For American Jewish elites, Israel's subordination to US power was
a windfall. Zionism had sprung from the premise that assimilation
was a pipe dream, that Jews would always be preceived as potentially
disloyal aliens. To resolve this dilemma, Zionists sought to
establish a homeland for the Jews (rem.: it means, there is no any
historical claim to Palestine!). In fact, Israel's founding exar-
cerbated the problem, at any rate for diaspora Jewry: it gave the
chrage of dual loyalty institutional expression.... Whereas before
1967 Israel conjured the bogy of dual loyalty, it now connoted
super-loyalty...
Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel.
After the 1967 war, Israel's military elan could be celebrated
because its guns pointed in the right direction - against America's
enemies. ... From bit players, they (Jews) could advance to top
billing in the cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as
the United States, Israel became a strategic asset.
...
After the June war, mainstream of Jewish organisations worked full
time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance. ... Coverage of
Israel in The New York Times increased dramatically after June 1967.
1955 and 1965 entries for Israel in The NYT Index each filled 60
column inches. The entry for Israel in 1975 ran to fully 260 column
inches. "When I want to feel better," Wiesel reflected in 1973, "I
turn to the Israeli items in the NYT." Like Podhoretz, many main-
stream American Jewish intellectuals also suddenly found "religion"
after the June war. Novick reports that Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne
of Holocaust literature, had once been a "sharp critic of Israel."
Israel could not demand reparations from Germany, she railed in 1953,
while evading responsipility for displaced Palestinian: "Morality
cannot be that felxible." ...
.... Naom Chomsky has suggested that these (American) "supporters
of Israel" should more properly be called "supporters of the moral
degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel."
To protect their strategic asset, American Jewish elites "remembered"
The Holocaust...
... The Holocaust industry sprung up only only after Israel's over-
wehlming display of military domonance and flourished amid extrem
Israeli triuphalism. The standard interpretative framework cannot
explain these anomalies.
... Novick typically reports: "Among AmericanJews.... the situation
of a vulnerable and isolated Israel came to be seen as terrfyingly
similar to that of European Jewry thirty years earlier....
....
While American Jewish organisations could do nothing to alter the
recent past in the Middle East, and precious little to affect its
future, they could work to revive memories of the Holocaust. So the
"fading" memories" explanation offered an agenda for action.
... Why was "reviv(ing) memoriesof the Holocaust" the only agenda
for action? Why not support the international consensus that called
for Israel's withdrawal from the lands occupied in the June war as
well as a "just and lasting peace" between Israel and its Arab
neighbors (UN Resolution 242)?
..., The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting
criticism of Israel....
It was not Israel's alleged weakness and isolation, not the fear
of a "second Holocaust," but rather its proven strength and stra-
tegic alliance with the United States that led Jewish elites to
gear up the Holocaust industry after June 1967. However unwittingly,
Novick provides the best evidence to support that conclusion. To
prove that power considerations, not the nazi Final Solution,
determined American policy toward Israel, he writes: "It was when
the Holocaust was freshest in the mind of american leaders - the
first twenty five years after the end of the war - that the United
States was least supportive of Israel.... It was not when Israel
was perceived as weak and vulnerable, but after it demonstrated its
strength, in the Six Day War, that American aid to Israel changed
from a trickle to a flood".
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There are also domestic sources of the Holocaust industry....; Jews
accordingly sought their own ethnic identity in the Holocaust.
.... In fact, identity politics and The Holocaust have taken hold
among American Jews not because of victim status but because they
are not victims.
As anti-Semitic barriers quickly fell away after World War II, Jews
rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lipset and
Raab, per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews;
sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; ... The list
goes on. Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish
identity has become the crown of that success....
... What an American Jewish child inherits, according to novelist
Philip Roth, is "no body of law, no body of learning and no language,
and finally, no Lord ... but a kind of psychology: and the psychology
can be translated in three word: "Jews are better."
...
... Just as Israelis, armed to the teeth by the United States,
courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American
Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place.
Lording it over those least able to defend themselves; that is the
real content of organized American Jewry's reclaimed courage.
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Part 3 follows ...