BERLIN, (Reuters) – Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that led one German newspaper to brand him “the eternal anti-Semite”.
Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions such as Iraq, also condemned German arms sales to Israel in his poem “What must be said”, published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily yesterday.
His words were criticised in Germany, where any strong condemnation of Israel is taboo because of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Grass’s own moral authority has never fully recovered from his 2006 admission that he once served in Hitler’s Waffen SS.
“Why do I say only now … that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow,” Grass wrote in the poem.
“Also because we – as Germans burdened enough – may become a subcontractor to a crime that is foreseeable,” he wrote, adding that Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust were no excuse for remaining silent now about Israel’s nuclear capability.
“I will not remain silent because I am weary of the West’s hypocrisy,” wrote Grass, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for novels such as “The Tin Drum” chronicling the horrors of 20th century German history.
Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear weapons, which it neither confirms nor denies. These could be carried by Dolphin submarines it has bought from Germany. The Jewish state has threatened to take military action, with or without U.S. support, to halt what it sees as a nuclear threat from Iran. Tehran says it is developing nuclear technology for purely peaceful purposes.
Germany said recently it would sell Israel a sixth Dolphin submarine and shoulder part of the cost – but also warned its ally that any military escalation with Iran could bring incalculable risks.
“ETERNAL ANTI-SEMITE”
The poem called for an international ‘agency’ to take permanent control of both Israel’s nuclear weapons and Iran’s atomic plant. The Welt newspaper called Grass “the eternal anti-Semite” in a front page article commenting on the poem, which was widely circulated in advance of its publication.
“Grass is the prototype of the educated anti-Semite who means well with the Jews. He is hounded by guilt and feelings of shame and at the same time is driven by the wish to weigh up history,” the newspaper wrote yesterday.
