Simply put, Finkelstein, himself the son of holocaust survivors, uses his book to launch an assault on the accepted orthodoxy of the Final Solution and the Zionist groups that would profit from its exploitation. Incendiary, certainly, but Finkelstein is persuasive.

He argues that contemporary interest in the death camps and their memorial arose not in the aftermath of the war itself but during the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967. The powerful American Jewish lobby, he suggests, alighted upon the events of twenty years previous as a potent weapon in the victimhood of Israel to excuse their criminal engagement with both close neighbours and the displaced Palestinian population. Martyrdom has provided a shield against accusations of aggression and effectively neutralised international condemnation of the Israeli nuclear program. "Jews", he writes, "sought their own ethnic identity in the Holocaust." The term "survivor" has itself been hijacked to include everyone from original internees to the families of anyone surviving the war. One lawyer is quoted as warning that the World Jewish Congress is "guilty of promoting...a very ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe."

Indeed, so successful is the process that a mediated view of those events - The Holocaust - has metastasised through western thinking. Vested interests - largely financial - have sought to distinguish the genocide of the Jews (in direct opposition to memorialising the disabled, gypsy, gay and political victims of the Nazis) as "unique" in history in order to preserve it as a symbol. (Celebrity survivor - and splenetic Finkelstein critic - Elie Wiesel insists that it "lies outside, if not beyond, history.") In recent years, Finkelstein writes, that symbol has been wielded to extort millions from, amongst others, Germany and Switzerland, and not for individuals but powerful institutions and elites. He likens the process to "a Monte Carlo casino," concluding that the Holocaust Industry "has clearly gone berserk."

And, yes, before you ask, there is something inherently uncomfortable about this book. At one point the text is even engaged in defending the work of shamed right-wing "historian" David Irving on the one hand while it seeks to discredit his combatant in the recent libel trial, Deborah Lipsdaht, as an organ of the Industry on the other. Chomsky (initially an early and enthusiastic supporter of Israel, incidentally) is no doubt proud of his protege’s borrowing of the scrupulously even-handed Chomskian model. The waters they swim, however, become very murky, very quickly.

Finkelstein’s book exists primarily to open debate. And it is one his numerous critics would do well to study before they counter-attack with sentiment and outraged bile. If nothing else it stands as a timely reminder that history is not always written by the winners. As former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once candidly let slip, "There’s no business like Shoah business."