by VINAY LAL
German author Gunter Grass, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature (1999). PHOTO/Gdansk Life
Günter Grass, some say, invites controversy. For many years, he excoriated his fellow Germans to come clean about their past and confront the brute facts that might help explain how Germany became the seat of most terrifying machinery of human extermination that the world had ever witnessed. However, not until Grass was nearly 80 years old did he confess that, as a 17-year old at end of the war, he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS, a paramilitary force attached to the Nazi party. Grass is in the eye of the storm again, this time with a poem, published in several European newspapers on April 4th and rendered in English as ‘What Must Be Said’, that warns the world that ‘Israel’s atomic power endangers / an already fragile world peace’. Declaring himself sick of ‘the West’s hypocrisy’, Grass hopes that with his poem
many may be freed
from their silence, may demand
that those responsible for the open danger
we face renounce the use of force,
may insist that the governments of
both Iran and Israel allow an international authority
free and open inspection of
the nuclear potential and capability of both.
Israel has, in consequence, declared Günter Grass persona non-grata. A once eminently diasporic people, formerly scattered to the ends of the earth and living their lives in exile until they could claim Palestine as their homeland, have apparently surmised that the banishment of Grass from Israel represents the most fitting punishment for the aged but unrepentant poet.
Just what, we must surely ask, was Grass’s sin? The fury whipped up in Israel, and among Israel’s supporters in the West, points to several considerations. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed outrage that Grass should have had the audacity to compare Israel to Iran. Netanyahu described the comparison as shameful, offensive, shall we say, to the dignity of every civilized person: ‘In Iran there is a regime that denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel. This comparison says very little about Israel and a great deal about Mr. Grass. It is Iran, not Israel, which poses a threat to world peace. It is Iran, not Israel, which threatens to destroy other countries. It is Iran, not Israel, which supports terror organizations that fire missiles on innocent civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which supports the massacre that the Syrian regime is carrying out on its civilians. It is Iran, not Israel, which stones women, hangs gay people, and ruthlessly suppresses the tens of millions of citizens in its country.’ No doubt, the present regime in Iran cannot be viewed as other than highly authoritarian, though there is no reason to suppose that the suppression of some freedoms has stifled all dissent, or creativity in art, music, cinema, and literature. It has not helped Iran that its most public face is provided by Mahmud Ahmedinejad, succinctly and not inaccurately described in Grass’s poem as a ‘loudmouth’ who earned undying notoriety in the West when he described the Holocaust as a fiction.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to resist the view that Netanyahu protests too much. However enormous the misgivings one may have about Iran’s political regime, Iran has never posed a threat to any other country, nor has it launched an attack on another nation. Netanyahu is no less boorish than Ahmedinejad, and it is idle for him, or indeed for any other Zionist, to pretend that Israel has not been the perpetrator of untold number of atrocities against the Palestinians –– choking, numbing, and starving them into submission in a war of gravely disproportionate resources. It is no surprise that the list of accusations hurled against Iran did not include its real or alleged sponsorship of political assassinations, since Israel is likely without peer in its mastery in this department of covert politics. But there is something else underlying the swashbuckling behavior of Netanyahu and his predecessors in high office: Iran and Israel have long fought a shadow war, and they need each other desperately. The ayatollahs in Iran say and do enough to keep states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan frothing at the mouth; similarly, the Shia clergy can always count on the presence of Israel to summon the faithful, particularly when internal dissent appears to pose grave threats to the regime. Whether or not the relationship of Iran and Israel can be characterized as one informed by what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences”, there is no gainsaying the fact that these two countries understand each other very well.
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