If Henry Louis Gates had actually wanted to raise legitimate questions about problems of reparations, he could have discussed the case of Israel, which has received reparations, as opposed to African Americans, who have not. If he wanted to raise questions about collaboration and complicity with Western perpetrators of slavery and genocide, he could have discussed Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.
However, unswerving support for Israel is itself treated as a form of obligatory reparations and atonement for failure to prevent Nazi genocide against Jews during World War II. Gates himself, like President Obama, is a strong supporter of Israel. He offered extravagant praise for his colleague and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz’s
lying plagiarized book “The Case for Israel.” What can an examination of reparations for Jews and Israel tell us about reparations?
The global struggle against Nazism/Fascism during World War II demonstrated that hundreds of millions of people were capable of great courage and self-sacrifice to defeat a common enemy. However, in every country where this struggle took place, there were people who collaborated with the Nazis or fascists.
These traitors were often called the “fifth column,” a reference to those Spaniards who supported fascist General Franco. In Norway they came to be called Quislings, a reference to a Norwegian fascist who helped the Nazis occupy Norway. Among European Jews, some of the traitors were members of the Judenrat, Jewish councils set up by the Nazis to help them administer the Jewish ghettos, conscript slave labor, and organize genocide. Jews who resisted the Nazis called them Judenverrat, meaning Jewish traitors.
Communists led resistance movements against Nazism/Fascism and understood that it was necessary to deal sharply and swiftly with traitors. Most of the three million European Jews who survived the Nazi genocide lived in the Soviet Union and survived because of communism. Nearly six hundred thousand Soviet Jews fought in the Soviet Red Army against the Nazis.
In contrast, the Zionists (Jewish nationalists), who founded the state of Israel after World War II in 1948, often collaborated with the Nazis and imitated their racist ideology. Zionists opposed efforts to organize international economic boycotts of Nazi Germany. Zionists opposed efforts to rescue Jews by resettling them in various countries, because the Zionists were determined to settle Jewish refugees only in Palestine. Zionists declared that many Jews were not worth saving from the Nazis, and they wanted only “the best biological material” to build a Jewish state.
Hungarian Zionist Rudolph Kastner struck a secret deal with Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann in 1944: Kastner would provide Eichmann with thousands of trucks and would not warn 450,000 Hungarian Jews that the Nazis were about to transport them to the death camps. In return, Eichmann would allow Kastner and few thousand Hungarian Zionist Jews to escape to Switzerland. Kastner later became a cabinet member in the Israeli government and was assassinated in 1957.
It was this Zionist movement of collaborators in the Nazi genocide that founded the state of Israel and drove most of the Palestinian population from Palestine. This Zionist leadership received and controlled the billions of dollars of reparations money obtained from European governments. These Zionists created what Norman Finkelstein calls “The Holocaust Industry” as a profitable racket, while distributing only a small fraction of this money to Jews most in need of assistance.
Israeli capitalists have used reparations money to consolidate and expand their state and their exploitation of Jewish and other workers. The U.S. alone has provided Israel with about $100 billion dollars in military assistance since the 1967 Arab/Israeli war. Zionist Israel has been a strategic asset of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East for more than four decades, helping U.S. rulers control the governments and oil of the region.
The mixture of reparations with nationalism serves the interests of imperialism and is toxic for the working class.