Israel bans Nobel poet Grass

The poem referred to the possibility that an Israeli strike on Iran could “annihilate the Iranian people.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement saying: “Gunter Grass’s shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel, says little about Israel and much about Mr Grass.”

Referring to Grass’ admission in 2006 that he had been an SS soldier, Netanyahu said: “For six decades, Mr. Grass hid the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen SS. So for him to cast the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace and to oppose giving Israel the means to defend itself is perhaps not surprising.”

Israel’s literary community joined the criticism. The Hebrew Writers’ Association claimed in a statement that Grass’ “terrible statement cast a dark shadow over all of his writings.”

Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who took the decision to bar the writer, said he did so because of his “attempt to inflame hatred against the State of Israel and people of Israel.”

But while Yishai’s ban brought him applause from some, Israel’s leading expert on Israel-Germany relations believes it may have backfired. Moshe Zimmerman, who is currently monitoring the German response to the poem from Hamburg, told The AJN that while condemnation of Grass was at first almost universal in Germany, Israel’s response has brought a surge of sympathy for the writer. It broke the consensus belief that he was in the wrong, and opened up a public discussion about whether or not Israel has treated him fairly, said Zimmerman, head of Hebrew University’s Richard Koebner Minerva Centre for German History.

“The Israeli reaction did a disservice for those fighting for Israel and protecting Israel,” he said.