Freedland on Finkelstein. posted by Richard Seymour

Jews Sans Frontieres is promising a bit of a kicking for an old bit of Freedland sophistry. This dishonest, crass and vile review of Norman Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000) indicts the reviewer more than the author. It's well worth thinking about, since I think it illustrates something about the liberal media and its reaction to serious, radical dissent.

The fact that there is so little meat in the review leaves all the more room for venom, and Freedland dishes it out by the bucketload. Finkelstein, we are told, is more critical of his fellow Jews than of the Nazis. Indeed, he uses the same arguments as David Irving, the far-right historian who has been exposed in a court case that he initiated as a charlatan and a fraud. Specifically, "He claims that Jews have made up stories of persecution and that there are too many survivors to be true - another Irving favourite." We are further told that Finkelstein's book "reads like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them survivors, and vast generalisations about the whole of world Jewry." Freedland calls Finkelstein in New York: why don't you criticise the Nazis the way you criticise your fellow Jews? Finkelstein remarks that, had been writing about the Nazis, he might well have done so. Freedland's verdict: feeble. In fact, as far as Jonathan Freedland is concerned, Finkelstein does the work of anti-Semites for them, designing a conspiracy theory in which a Jewish elite coerces a gullible American Jewry into support for Israel.

The conclusion is damning: "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." Finkelstein, then, is closer to the Nazis than to those members of his own family who were murdered by them.

I have read the book twice, which is two times more than Freedland has read it, so I'd say I'm in a good position to assess the quality of these criticisms. Finkelstein does not use the same line on survivors as David Irving at all - in fact, it is rather the opposite. His insistence is that the Nazis killed so many people so effectively that the present number of designated survivors is impossibly high. Irving, by contrast, believes that almost all Jews survived, bar a million or so killed in Einsatzgruppen-style killings and one or two gas chamber trucks, which is all he would admit to in court. Similarly, Finkelstein does not regard Jews as being pushed around by a 'wicked' Jewish elite (interestingly, it is Freedland and not Finkelstein who resorts to such polarities). In fact, he argues that the growing importance of Israel among Jewish communities had to do with sociological changes among American Jews. In particular, their growing success within America, the subsumption of many of them into the suburban middle class, and the corrolary conservatism. I can't say if he's right or not, but there's no hint of conspiracy in that. The book does not, as near as I can tell, generalise about "world Jewry", and certainly does not do so in "splenetic" terms.

But Freedland's article connotes more than it denotes. Finkelstein's arguments are overlaid with Irving's rhetoric so as to suggest some overlap where none exists. The only point at which Finkelstein is allowed an answer is carefully framed by Freedland. He called Brooklyn, parsed one reply, and concluded with a malediction. Finkelstein's arguments are not new, we are told - and then again, they are, because otherwise they would not offend. The notion that the Nazi holocaust is not unique has been widely debated among Jews, says Freedland. I don't know if it has or not, but so what? There is no harm in Finkelstein spending a penny or two on the topic. (Of course, Freedland means to convey, whether it is true or not, that this joker Finkelstein thinks he's being original, while we sophisticated Londoners have been shooting this shit for years). Freedland undoes himself from paragraph one, unfortunately, by insisting that this book has nothing new to say and has raised no debate (then why review it?), while any fool who has made any incursion into the topic at all will find that there has erupted the most heated controversy about the book, its contents, the author and his intentions. Meanwhile, Freedland's review is just a little too "crazy with fury" to make a bid for cool contempt.

What Finkelstein argued in the book was as follows: the Nazi holocaust is being usurped by apologists for Israel, typically including groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the World Jewish Congress; these apologists do not act out of ideological conviction (ie are not convicted Zionists), but out of self-interest; they extort large amounts of money on behalf of victims who rarely see a penny; they use the Nazi holocaust as an ideological bludgeon to beat critics of Israel with. The charges he makes are substantial, and disturbing. The best reply that Elan Steinberg could make when asked about the claim that the World Jewish Congress has amassed $7bn in funds was to say that Finkelstein had located this claim in a German newspaper. "And this man thinks he is a scholar?" In fact, the reference was to a conference on the Nazi holocaust in Stockholm at which Edgar Bronfman had made the claim, as relayed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Imagine it. A German newspaper.

So, to conclude where Freedland does, is it true that Finkelstein sees Jews as either villians or victims, thus propelling him in the direction of the Judeocidal villains who obliterated much of his family? Hard to see how it can be, since Freedland charges Finkelstein with considering himself a prophet of some sort, which is neither victim nor villain. But Finkelstein expends a lot of praise on fellow Jews - like Raul Hilberg, the reputed historian of the Nazi holocaust who endorses Finkelstein's book on the cover. When criticising Israel, he routinely cites from Israeli human rights organisations who he presumably is aware are largely Jewish, but are neither villains nor victims.

Nowhere does Freedland's case cohere. Nowhere does he display the remotest understanding of the text he claims to be commenting on. Yet, and this is remarkable, he was actually paid for his work where any decent editor would have chucked it across the desk at him and told him to stop fucking about. That's not a conspiracy, but a fact of life. The left-liberal media frequently interpolate themselves between the reader and truly radical texts, screening off this or that unsavoury piece ("I read this so you don't have to") with some scary rhetoric and fabrications. Far better to stick with some tepid shit that challenges no one, calls for no reform, plays it safe, uses only the most hygeinic language etc. The median is the message.