Ambiguities – The art of the pamphlet is an ungrateful one. When writing in such a short form, one risks superficiality. Polemical verve leads to taking wrong turns with words. And, when you plunge into the logic of a diatribe, you can get derailed and reach the lowest level. The small ambiguous book by Norman Finkelstein, alas, doesn’t escape these flaws (characteristics).

Alas, because the anger of this defender of the Palestinian cause is legitimate: he wants to denounce the instrumentalisation of the Shoah, which, after being used as shield for the State of Israel, is used by the main Jewish American associations to get billions of dollars from swiss banks, big german companies and governments of central Europe, money of which only a part is given back to the victims of genocide.

This extortion enterprise has been devised and managed in the United States – it has been condemned, as is recalled by Rony Brauman in an embarassed postface, by the board of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutionsin France – Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF). Hence a first question, more to the French publisher than to the author: knowing the big difference between the American and French realities, is it responsible to translate a work of this kind as is, without even a solid explanation in a preface? Let’s take one example: lobbies are part of the ordinary social and political structure in the United States, so the expression ‘Jewish lobby’ may seem objective on the other side of the Atlantic, but here, it recalls the language of the far right speaking about an inexistant “Jewish lobby”.

No doubt it would also have been necessary to explain the oppressive climate in which radical American intellectuals have to fight. Maybe this explains the unmoderated propension Finkelstein shows for “conspiracitis”. According to him, Jewish American organisations knowingly organised the silence on the Shoah during the cold war (during which Federal Germany was allied with America) to only start reconstructing its memory starting with the six day war (which inaugurated Israel’s alliance with Washington).

So many claims, so many errors. The privileged relations between Israel and the United States go back to long before 1967. The same goes for the first attempt to have the large public confronted with the nazi genocide: the trial of Adolf Eichmann dates to 1961. No doubt David Ben Gourion had the perpetrator of the « solution finale » appraised and judged for motives relating to foreign and domestic policy (voir l’article de Tom Segev). But it was first of all necessary to revive a memory that had really been suppressed, as amazing as that may seem today.

The reason is simply that, in Israel as in France and in other countries, most of the survivors from the concentration camps, on their return home, didn’t want to speak about the horror. It was not possible: taken in the joy about the end of the war and the celebration of the heroes of the resistance, the world could not hear those who were accused of having “gone to the slaughter like lambs”. It’s rather to their children that the survivors, a lot later, started telling their stories…

Reducing the awareness of the specificity of the genocide of Jews to the machinations of an American lobby poses an ultimate and serious question. There is no living memory of a genocide that is not universelle and not clan-like: so that the tragedy of victims allows warning the whole of humanity against the crime of crimes! From this point of view, Finkelstein is absolutely right in fighting the “uniqueness” in the name of which some refuse to inscribe the Shoah in a long chain of genocides. But he is also indisputably wrong to ignore that what happened to Jews – as the German historian Eberhard Jäckel wrote – was “something unique, because never before had a state decided and announced, under the authority of their supreme leader, that a certain group of people had to be exterminated, if possible in their totality (…) and then followed that decision and applied that with all the means at their disposal”.

Many researchers, especially in Germany, strive, by consulting archives, to go deeper and with new approaches into the study of the nazi genocide. Their works are nearly unknown in France. That they are equally ignored by Norman Finkelstein is suprising. Because to the fraud of manipulators as well as negationists [*], there is only one ultimate answer: history.

[*] The appreciation and praise lavished by Finkelstein on David Irving, who has recently been condemned for his negationism, is outrageous.

September 11, 2001 – Christian New Year in Egypt – the suicide hijackings.

September 18, 2001 – Jewish New Year in Israel – the anthrax letters.

Some of the other stuff may just be noise. But I have a hard time believing that the coincidence above results from chance alone.