The Holocaust Industry (4 page)

"There were surprisingly few explicit references to the Holocaust in American Jewish mobilization on

behalf of Israel before the war."
32
The Holocaust industry sprung up only
after
Israel's overwhelming

display of military dominance and flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism.
33
The standard

interpretative framework cannot explain these anomalies.

Israel's shocking initial reverses and substantial casualties during, and increasing international

isolation after, the October 1973 Arab Israeli war — conventional accounts maintain - exacerbated

American Jewish fears of Israel's vulnerability. Accordingly, Holocaust memory now moved center

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stage. Novick typically reports: "Among American Jews . . . the situation of a vulnerable and isolated

Israel came to be seen as terrifyingly similar to that of European Jewry thirty years earlier.... [Tlalk of

the Holocaust not only 'took off' in America but became increasing [sic] institutionalized."
34
Yet

Israel had edged close to the precipice and, in both relative and absolute terms, suffered many more

casualties in the 1948 war than in 1973.

True, except for its alliance with the US, Israel was out of favor internationally after the October 1973

war. Compare, however, the 1956 Suez war. Israel and organized American Jewry alleged that, on the

eve of the Sinai invasion, Egypt threatened Israel's very existence, and that a full Israeli withdrawal

from Sinai would fatally undermine lsrael's vital interests: her survival as a state."
35
The international

community nonetheless stood firm. Recounting his brilliant performance at the UN General

Assembly, Abba Eban ruefully recalled, however, that "having applauded the speech with sustained

and vigorous applause, it had gone on to vote against us by a huge majority."
36
The United States

figured prominently in this consensus. Not only did Eisenhower force Israel's withdrawal, but US

public support for Israel fell into "frightening decline" (historian Peter Grose).
37
By contrast,

immediately after the 1973 war, the United States provided Israel with massive military assistance,

much greater than it had in the preceding four years combined, while American public opinion firmly

backed Israel.
38
This was the occasion when "talk of the Holocaust . . . 'took off' in America," at a

time when Israel was less isolated than it had been in 1956.

In fact, the Holocaust industry did not move center stage because Israel's unexpected setbacks during,

and pariah status following, the October 1973 war prompted memories of the Final Solution. Rather,

Sadat's impressive military showing in the October war convinced US and Israeli policy elites that a

diplomatic settlement with Egypt, including the return of Egyptian lands seized in June 1967, could no

longer be avoided. To increase Israel's negotiating leverage the Holocaust industry increased

production quotas. The crucial point is that after the 1973 war Israel was not isolated from the United

States: these developments occurred within the framework of the US Israeli alliance, which remained

fully intact.
39
The historical record strongly suggests that, if Israel had truly been alone after the

October war, American Jewish elites would no more have remembered the Nazi holocaust than they

did after the 1948 or 1956 war.

Novick provides ancillary explanations that are even less convincing. Quoting religious Jewish

scholars, for example, he suggests that "the Six Day War offered a folk theology of 'Holocaust and

Redemption.'" The "light" of the June 1967 victory redeemed the "darkness" of the Nazi genocide: "it

had given God a second chance." The Holocaust could emerge in American life only after June 1967

because "the extermination of European Jewry attained [an] — if not happy, at least viable — ending."

Yet in standard Jewish accounts, not the June war but Israel's founding marked redemption. Why did

The Holocaust have to await a
second
redemption? Novick maintains that the "image of Jews as

military heroes» in the June war "worked to efface the stereotype of weak and passive victims which .

. . previously inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust."
40
Yet for sheer courage, the 1948 war

was Israel's finest hour. And Moshe Dayan's "daring" and "brilliant" 100-hour Sinai campaign in 1956

prefigured the swift victory in June 1967. Why, then, did American Jewry require the June war to

"efface the stereotype"?

Novick's account of how American Jewish elites came to instrumentalize the Nazi holocaust is not

persuasive. Consider these representative passages:

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As American Jewish leaders sought to understand the reasons for Israel's isolation and vulnerability —

reasons that might suggest a remedy — the explanation commanding the widest support was that the

fading of the memories of Nazism's crimes against the Jews, and the arrival on the scene of a

generation ignorant of the Holocaust, had resulted in Israel's losing the support it had once enjoyed.

[W]hile American Jewish organizations 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. [emphasis in original]
41

Why did the "fading memories» explanation for Israel's post-1967 predicament «command[] the

widest support"? Surely this was an improbable explanation. As Novick himself copiously documents,

the support Israel initially garnered had little to do with "memories of Nazism's crimes,"
42
and,

anyhow, these memories had faded long before Israel lost international support. Why could Jewish

elites do "precious little to affect» Israel's future? Surely they controlled a formidable organizational

network. Why was "reviv[ing] memories of 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)?

A more coherent, if less charitable, explanation is that American Jewish elites remembered the Nazi

holocaust before June 1967 only when it was politically expedient. Israel, their new patron, had

capitalized on the Nazi holocaust during the Eichmann trial.
43
Given its proven utility, organized

American Jewry exploited the Nazi holocaust after the June war. Once ideologically recast, The

Holocaust (capitalized as I have previously noted) proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting

criticism of Israel. Exactly how I will illustrate presently. What deserves emphasis here, however, is

that for American Jewish elites The Holocaust performed the same function as Israel: another

invaluable chip in a high-stakes power game. The avowed concern for Holocaust memory was as

contrived as the avowed concern for Israel's fate.
44
Thus, organized American Jewry quickly forgave

and forgot Ronald Reagan's demented 1985 declaration at Bitburg cemetery that the German soldiers

(including Waffen SS members) buried there were victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in

the concentration camps." In 1988, Reagan was honored with the "Humanitarian of the Year" award

by one of the most prominent Holocaust institutions, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, for his "staunch

support of Israel," and in 1994 with the "Torch of Liberty" award by the pro-lsrael ADL.
45

The Reverend Jesse Jackson's earlier outburst in 1979 that he was "sick and tired of hearing about the

Holocaust" was not so quickly forgiven or forgotten, however. Indeed, the attacks by American

Jewish elites on Jackson never let up, although not for his "anti-Semitic remarks" but rather for his

"espousal of the Palestinian position" (Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab).
46
In Jackson's case, an

additional factor was at work: he represented domestic constituencies with which organized American

Jewry had been at loggerheads since the late 1960s. In these conflicts, too, The Holocaust proved to be

a potent ideological weapon.

It was not Israel's alleged weakness and isolation, not the fear of a "second Holocaust," but rather its

proven strength and strategic 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

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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" (emphasis in original).
47
That argument applies with equal force to American Jewish elites.

There are also domestic sources of the Holocaust industry. Mainstream interpretations point to the

recent emergence of "identity politics," on the one hand, and the "culture of victimization," on the

other. In effect, each identity was grounded in a particular history of oppression; Jews accordingly

sought their own ethnic identity in the Holocaust.

Yet, among groups decrying their victimization, including Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans,

women, gays and lesbians, Jews alone are not disadvantaged in American society. 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 11, 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; 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in

science and economics are Jewish, as are 20 Percent of professors at major universities; and 40

percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington.

The list goes on.
48
Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish identity has become the

crown of that success. Just as many Jews kept Israel at arm's length when it constituted a liability and

became born-again Zionists when it constituted an asset, so they kept their ethnic identity at arm's

length when it constituted a liability and became born-again Jews when it constituted an asset.

Indeed, the secular success story of American Jewry validated a core - perhaps the sole - tenet of their

newly acquired identity as Jews. Who could any longer dispute that Jews were a "chosen" peopled In

A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today,
Charles Silberman - himself a born-again

Jew — typically gushes: "Jews would have been less than human had they eschewed any notion of