>This is a very interesting question. Whatever the establishment reasoning
>turns out to be, I would have thought that the recent settlements between
>the World Jewish Council and various German companies and banks over
>slave-labour cases must have significantly weakened it.
Norman Finkelstein, scourge of Daniel Goldhagen, is investigating where this money is going. His interest in the whole field of German reparations was inspired by the fact that his mother, an Auschwitz survivor, ended up getting $3,000 from the German government - her sum after several scores of billions of dollars were split among something like 100,000 survivors. Norman's conclusion is that the state of Israel and establishment Zionist organizations took most of the money, leaving his mother and other survivors with crumbs. As for the latest round of reparations, Norman says that since there are very few survivors still alive, the take of the lawyers and self-appointed agents is likely to be larger.
Doug