© Associated Press
Israel on Sunday declared Guenter Grass persona non grata, deepening a spat with the Nobel-winning author
over a poem that deeply criticised the Jewish state and suggested it was as much a danger as Iran.The dispute with Grass, who only late in life admitted to a Nazi past, has drawn new attention to strains in Germany's complicated relationship with the Jewish state - and also focused unwelcome light on Israel's own secretive nuclear program.
In a poem called
What Must Be Said published last Wednesday, Grass, 84, criticised what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel's nuclear program and labeled the country a threat to "already fragile world peace" over its belligerent stance on Iran.
The poem has touched a raw nerve in Israel, where officials have rejected any moral equivalence with Iran and been quick to note that Grass admitted only in a 2006 autobiography that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS Nazi paramilitary organization at age 17 in the final months of World War II.
Grass' subsequent clarification that his criticism was directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not the country as a whole, did little to calm the outcry.
On Sunday, Israel's interior minister, Eli Yishai, announced that Grass would be barred from Israel, citing an Israeli law that allows him to prevent entry to ex-Nazis. But Yishai made clear the decision was related more to the recent poem than Grass' actions nearly 70 years ago.
"If Guenter wants to spread his twisted and lying works, I suggest he does this from Iran, where he can find a supportive audience," Yishai said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Grass of anti-Semitism.
The uproar has touched upon some of the most sensitive issues in modern-day Israel: the Holocaust, Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons and Israel's own illicit nuclear program that is widely believed to have produced an
arsenal of bombs.
It also has unleashed a debate in Germany, where criticism of Israel is largely muffled because of the country's Nazi past. Grass' most famous book,
The Tin Drum, is about the rise of the Nazis and World War II as told through the lives of ordinary people. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.
According to a biography from his museum in Germany, Grass has been in Israel at least once - notably accompanying Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1973 on the first official state visit of a German chancellor to Israel.
Israel gained independence in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust and became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of survivors of the World War II Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews. Some 200,000 aging survivors still live in Israel.
The scars of the Holocaust have deeply influenced Israeli thinking over the years. Israel marks a Holocaust memorial day every year with a siren that brings the country to a standstill for two minutes. Israel's drive to maintain a powerful military has been shaped by the thought that its enemies want to repeat what the Nazis tried to do.
More recently, Netanyahu has turned to Holocaust imagery in warning the world of the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. In a speech last month to American Jewish leaders, Netanyahu said, "Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our very survival. Never again."
Israel, along with much of the international community, believes that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon. The Israelis fear a nuclear Iran would threaten its existence, given repeated Iranian calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and have threatened to attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail. A new round of talks between the West and Iran are set to begin this week in Turkey.
Rarely mentioned in the debate - except by Iran - is that Israel itself is widely believed to possess its own undeclared arsenal of nuclear bombs. That assessment, by foreign experts, is in part based on photos that were taken by a rogue technician at an Israeli nuclear facility in 1986.Israel neither confirms nor denies having nuclear weapons and has refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would subject it to international inspections.Grass' poem took exception with Israel's alleged program, and alluded to Germany's sale to Israel of submarines capable of firing "all-destroying" nuclear missiles into Iran.
He further outraged Israelis by referring to their "alleged right to the first strike that could annihilate the Iranian people" - even though Israel has not threatened the entire country, only its nuclear installations.
Tom Segev, an Israeli Holocaust historian, said he found Grass' allegations against Israel to be "absurd" but nonetheless felt the Israel response was exaggerated and reflected a troubling lack of tolerance for criticism. Israel has barred a handful of critics, including American linguist Noam Chomsky, from entering the country.
"The need to delegitimize criticism is a very dangerous, autocratic tendency which has increased in recent years. It's very demagogic. Netanyahu and Leiberman are experts in doing that.
Every word of criticism will immediately be presented as a sign of anti-Semitism,"Segev said.
"If we are really distributing entry permits to Israel according to people's political views, then we really are putting ourselves in the company of countries like Iran, and Syria," he added.
Grass' poem has also opened up some delicate issues in Germany. As a result of the country's Nazi past, German governments have made staunch support for Israel a cornerstone of their foreign policy, making the country one of Israel's most trusted allies in the EU.
For decades, criticism of Israel was largely taboo, though that has begun to loosen in recent years, particularly when discussing Netanyahu's hawkish stance on peace talks with the Palestinians.
The government, however, has resoundingly criticised Grass' poem. Politicans, leaders of Jewish groups and newspaper editorials have all accused Grass of turning reality upside-down by labeling Israel the aggressor and Iran the presumed victim. The author was also openly accused of being anti-Semitic, not least by the country's conservative mass-circulation tabloid
Bild.
Writing in the newspaper Sunday, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle on Sunday became the first Cabinet member to react publicly to the controversy. "To put Israel and Iran morally on the same level is not intelligent, it is absurd," Westerwelle wrote.
A few voices have come forward to welcome Grass' comments as a valuable contribution to public debate, by dragging Israel's nuclear arsenal into the spotlight and outlining the danger of a military confrontation with Iran - which could cause global economic and military mayhem.
"It is a war that could plunge the entire world into the abyss," editorialist Jakob Augstein wrote in Germany's top-rated news website Spiegel Online.
Germany's main opposition party - the center-left Social Democrats, whom Grass has often backed in election campaigns - said the Israeli travel ban was excessive.
"A democratic and pluralistic country such as Israel can also bear controversial opinions, especially because Guenter Grass' views are not anti-Semitic," the party's top lawmaker on foreign policy, Rolf Muetzenich, told the daily
Handelsblatt. He called the Israeli decision "a sign of hopelessness."
Source: Associated Press
Comment: Translation of controversial Guenter Grass poem
What Must Be SaidBy
Associated PressWhat Must Be SaidWhat is obvious and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to the first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people -
Subjugated by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation -
Because in their sphere of power,
It is suspected, a nuclear bomb is being built.
Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because not accessible to inspections?
The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as an incriminating lie
And coercion--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.
Now, though, because in my country
Which time and again has sought and confronted
Its very own crimes
That is without comparison
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But fear wishes to be of conclusive evidence,
I say what must be said.
But why have I stayed silent until now?
Because I thought my origin,
Afflicted by a stain never to be expunged
Forbade this fact as pronounced truth
To be told to the nation of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to stay bound.
Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
The nuclear power Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could become suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.
And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the West's hypocrisy;
In addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
Appeal to the perpetrator of the recognizable danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
By the governments of both countries.
Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
And also us, to be helped.
"To put Israel and Iran morally on the same level is not intelligent, it is absurd,"
Of course! Iran is morally incomparably higher, than that wretched zionist state, created by Rothchilds interests! The zionists claimed already 6 mln 'holocaust' after the first World War, another one after the WWII and now some of them are claiming the third one is coming...Probably also 6 mln, as it seems to have that special meaning that persists like a dogma. Just to get another world inflammation in which they hope to size all the power psychopaths always dreamed about.
But "anti-semitism" label doesn't work any longer, except for sold-out politicians and media whores. Knowledgable people rather support Semites (like Palestinians and Arabs) against turko-mongol Khazars, whose original homeland would be closer to Birobidhan, than Palestine.