BLOOD MONEY ALWAYS COMES WITH STRINGS
by George Jonas
National Post
April 18, 2005

By coincidence, the issue of "blood
money" cropped up in the news last
week in two different places. In
Britain, a Channel 4 television program called The Final Insult rekindled
the debate
about Holocaust reparations. Meanwhile a lobby group in Canada launched a
campaign to empower victims of terrorist attacks to seek compensation from
groups
and states that sponsor terrorism.

Blood money, an emotionally loaded term, is used today by people who oppose
compensating victims of political conflict. Yet the term accurately
describes a
custom that goes back to ancient times when perpetrators used to pay for
their
crimes -- literally. Tariffs of so many goats or pigs compensated relatives
of victims
and prevented blood-feuds between families.

Barbaric as it sounds, redeeming a life with pigs wasn't without moral
utility. Blood
money was an early attempt at alternate conflict resolution. Unlike
compensation
today, it used to wipe the slate clean. There's still a residual feeling
that a cheque
may restore moral equivalence between perpetrators and victims -- which is
why
some dislike the concept of compensation -- but the danger is small. While
we can't
"put the money and the suffering together" (in the words of Auschwitz
survivor
Jaime Rothman), we can quite safely put the money together with a
calculable
economic loss.

Channel 4's The Final Insult touches on some of the tough moral and
conceptual
dilemmas at play. Compensating Canadian victims of international terror
would raise
similar questions.

The title of the British TV show refers to Hitler's "final solution," the
Nazi plan to
exterminate the Jews. The program takes the view that the compensation
packages --
negotiated and controlled primarily by the World Jewish Congress along with
a group
of American lawyers who had brought class action suits on behalf of
survivors --
amount to "the final insult" to Holocaust victims. The programmers contend
that the
distribution of settlements made in 1998 and 1999 with German government,
industry, as well as some Swiss banks, worth together some US$6.25-billion,
hasn't
been equitable. Disbursements are made to agencies and institutions of the
organizers' choice, while some survivors receive little or nothing.

It's unnecessary to follow Channel 4 all the way -- I certainly don't -- to
conclude that
there are valid questions to be raised about Holocaust restitution, even if
the
program raises several that are merely tendentious or unfair.
(Characterizing a
US$1.25-billion settlement with Swiss banks, for instance, as "the world's
biggest
bank raid" by a "whiskey millionaire, a clutch of top lawyers and a rabbi"
sounds like
an anti-Semitic comic strip.)

But asking whether all monies should go to individual survivors rather than
shared
with pet philanthropic or educational projects seems valid. How much should
lawyers and lobbyists skim off the top? Should compensation funds be
allocated to
Israeli projects, as they have been, including settlements in the disputed
territories?

Scholars like Dr. Brian Klug of St. Benet's Hall, Oxford, have raised
similar questions.
"On the face of it, a small number of individuals are deciding, on behalf
of the whole
of Jewry, who gets what," Dr. Klug has written. "Where is the
accountability? How
can the process be made democratic?"

How, indeed. Chumming the waters with $6-billion worth of bait attracts a
lot of
sharks, and a feeding frenzy is rarely a democratic process.

Some conundrums have only arbitrary answers. Is a "survivor" a former
inmate of a
Nazi camp, or also someone who hid or fled from the Nazis? Should people
who
weren't born at the time of some historic outrage share liability for it?

Who pays whom is the most basic question. Unless it's resolved, instead of
making
up for past wrongs and discouraging future ones, attempts at restorative
justice can
become a squabble over extorted spoils. Letting victims sue
terrorist-support groups
is all very well, but over-broad or imprecise definitions of victimhood or
terrorism
can animate frivolous lawsuits and chill charitable organization.

It doesn't take much imagination, for instance, to envisage a scenario in
which the
Canadian dependent of a bystander killed accidentally during an Israeli
anti-terrorist
action -- say, a targeted assassination -- sues an Israeli bond-drive in
Canada as a
fundraiser for state terrorism. The point isn't that such a suit would have
merit, but
that it could be launched under enlarged definitions of legal liability.
Compensatory
justice comes with a price tag.

Having been a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Europe, I blame no survivor for
seeking
just compensation, but my own feelings were summed up by a former
concentration
camp inmate who declined to file a claim. When asked why, he replied: "I
want the
bastards to owe me."

© National Post 2005

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