This is a very slight, rather unpleasant volume, certainly not worth its £16 cover price. Indeed, the enormous outrage in the US about it has been largely justified - Finkelstein's tone is mocking, ad hominem, violently critical of all Jewish organisations that make up the so-called Jewish establishment; this is a rant rather than a reasoned argument. He uses many arguments to support his case that there is "a Holocaust industry". His first is that the Holocaust was barely mentioned in the US or anywhere outside the State of Israel in the first two decades after the war. Most modern interpreters put that down to suppressed memory, or shock, the difficulty of assimilating into the human mind the enormity of what had happened. Finkelstein thinks the theorists of later shock are wrong. He argues that the growth of scholarship in and news value of the Holocaust are purely political constructs - to underpin US strategic interests in the Middle East, after the Six Day War in 1967. Israel was to be the US's stooge in the Middle East; domestic considerations (the Jewish vote) and international ambitions combined, and US aid to Israel was a foregone conclusion.
But Finkelstein, whose parents were themselves Warsaw Ghetto survivors, completely overlooks another cogent explanation as to why the Holocaust has become so discussed in recent years. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, my mother, and many of her generation, really began to talk, and to tell us what happened. Suddenly they wanted us to know, before they died, more of "their" story. This is born of a sense of wanting their lives to mean something, wanting those who had perished not to be forgotten. There is nothing sinister in this, and nothing political. It is a normal human response to life's experience. But Finkelstein, who sees a political motive behind everything, denies or forgets that it is the personal records, the intensely personal, almost gut-wrenching accounts, that bring the reality of the Holocaust into focus for those who read them.
Finkelstein's other strong suit, as he sees it, is about the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust. Why was it worse than any other genocide - if it was? What is different from the fate of the gypsies under the Nazis, proportionately more of whose world-wide population were exterminated even than of the Jews? Somehow, he fails to recognise the extent of the shock to Europe's self-image when it realised that the destruction of the Jews was planned and executed so efficiently in civilised Christian Europe, in Germany, home of great composers and writers. It was as if a nation that epitomised the acme of Christian civilisation had suddenly allowed itself to be overthrown by the unChristian, the forces of darkness. The role of the churches has already been much examined, and a mixed record emerges. Suffice it to say that some church leaders welcomed Nazism and its war against the Jews, and others stood up valiantly against it. Finkelstein does not even examine the Christian response to the Holocaust, considerable though it is. Perhaps that, too, in his mind, is part of the Holocaust industry.
The shock to the Christian world when it realised what had happened, and the horror at complicity in the destruction of the Jews, does not belittle other genocides, or forgive their perpetrators - the Armenians at the hands of the Turks, the East Timorese, the Cambodians, the native Americans, the native peoples of Canada, Australia, New Zealand. It does not belittle the experience of the Irish in the Famine nor the African-Americans whose history was the cruellest of slavery. But the fact that it became such an important part of Nazi ideology that it took precedence over the war effort, and skewed their strategic military thinking, makes it remarkable.
The emphasis on the Holocaust is not to deny other peoples' suffering. It is to recognise how, even in the apparently most civilised of societies, barbarism and racism lie just under the surface, and the capacity for the destruction of human beings grows ever greater. But this is not the debate Finkelstein wants to have, any more than he really wants to take on the points raised by his fellow American, Peter Novick, in a much more measured volume which appeared earlier this year, The Holocaust in American Life. Finkelstein describes that volume as "more a congeries of provocative apercus than a sustained critique", yet he fails to discuss one of its main theses. Novick argues that the featuring of the Holocaust as such a major event for American Jews a generation on is because, with the diminution of faith, the sense of belonging to the Holocaust - "If things had been different, I might have been there" - is one of the few factors that gives young Jews a sense of identity. That is quite a provocative statement, and it deserves analysis, if not agreement, something which Finkelstein singularly fails to do.
Instead, he lambasts those who campaigned against the Swiss banks for compensation for Holocaust victims and describes them as "mere hucksters", which is patently ridiculous, even if there are legitimate criticisms of how long the money is taking to reach its intended recipients. He accuses the US of being far less ready to look into its banking record on assets of Holocaust victims than it was willing to support campaigns amongst the Swiss - he may be right, but his lack of critical facts, and his vicious tone, make it impossible to judge.
Instead of a reasoned warning of the dangers of over-emphasis, of special pleading, Finkelstein mounts a frenzied attack on the State of Israel, on Jewish lawyers who "extort money" from Swiss and German banks and companies, because of dormant accounts and slave labours. His very frenzy, and his selective use of his mother as evidence, who got very little compensation, leads one to ask another question of Norman Finkelstein. There are legitimate questions to be asked of how the Holocaust is treated, taught and arguably exploited. Yet he has singularly failed to do that persuasively. Is it his mother's shadow that lingers over him, and her inability to talk about it all? Is this in the end a very personal book, about a child who never learned the truth about what happened to his parents, and therefore hates how their histories, and many others, are now used and remembered?
Julia Neuberger is a rabbi and chief executive of the King's Fund, London