Last Sunday 2,500 protesters walked in a “March of the Living” from the rose garden outside Israel’s parliament to the prime minister’s office. The march was highly emotive and politically explosive although the number of participants was small for an Israeli demonstration, even in conservative Jerusalem which is not as restive as Tel Aviv.

The event was sensitive because the demonstrators had taken to the streets to castigate the government of Premier Ehud Olmert for offering to boost by a mere $20 a month financial assistance to 1,20,000 needy Holocaust survivors.  Amongst the marchers were elderly men and women, their children, grandchildren and supporters. A few wore the yellow Star of David badge, Jews were obliged to wear by Hitler’s Third Reich. One donned the striped pajama he wore as an inmate in a death camp during World War II. Although Holocaust survivors on welfare receive pensions ranging from $240-1,390 a month, many complain that they do not have money to buy proper food and medicine or pay water and electricity bills.

Some 6,000-8,000 are estimated to be in acute distress. An inter-ministerial committee has recommended that survivors should receive an additional $1,040 per month rather than the $20 offered which most survivors consider humiliating and insulting.

The marchers were also protesting the inclusion on the roll of recipients 60,000 Jews who lived in the Soviet Union during the war and were not taken to labour or extermination camps. Polish, Czech, Romanian and French Jews argue that these people are not true Holocaust survivors.

Instead, Holocaust survivors argue that these people must be treated as survivors of the war like any other citizens of the Soviet Union. Olmert is accused of putting their names on the list to curry favour with voters of Russian origin. Olmert charged the demonstrators of “being politically motivated” and Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog said the protest was an insult to the memory of those who died in the Holocaust.

While this protest was the first march by Holocaust survivors, their grievances have been simmering for 60 years, as long as they have been living in Israel. They argue that the $80 billion paid in reparations by Germany to the Israeli government should have benefited Holocaust survivors not the Jewish state. Most of this money was spent on the Israeli military and infrastructure rather than providing medical treatment and psychological counselling to Holocaust survivors, many of whom are still traumatised by their experiences in the camps. Thirty-five elderly survivors are said to die each day.

Survivors have also been incensed by the delay by Israel’s Bank Leumi transferring sums paid several years ago by Swiss banks to Jewish holders of accounts frozen during the war. Finally, they are infuriated by government subsidies and tax breaks enjoyed by Israeli settlers living in the occupied Palestinian territories and the $5,00,000 paid as compensation to Israeli colonist families evacuated from Gaza in 2005.

The protest is political dynamite because the Zionist movement and Israel have exploited the Holocaust to secure massive political advantage over the Palestinians and Arabs and extract massive financial “compensation” from Western countries with guilt complexes over the Nazi elimination of six million European Jews. Pro-Israeli activists also campaign for criminalisation of Holocaust denial and promote Holocaust awareness in Israel and abroad.

The Holocaust issue is particularly sensitive in the US at this time because of a case involving academic freedom. Norman Finkelstein, son of survivors, was denied professorial tenure at the Catholic De Paul University in Chicago because he has written critically of Israel’s exploitation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in highly controversial books entitled The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. He argues that Israel cannot claim the high moral ground as heir to the Holocaust as long as it persecutes Palestinians and denies them their legal rights in geographic Palestine. Powerful pro-Israeli personalities led by Alan Dershowitz, a criminal lawyer and professor of law at Harvard, conducted the campaign for the rejection of tenure for Finklestein and the dismissal of a colleague, and a defender.