After we denounce the
exaggeration, after we shake off the unjustified part of the charge, we must
listen to the condemnation of these great people.
The harsh, and in some parts infuriating, poem by Gunter
Grass of course immediately sparked a wave of vilifications against it and
mainly against its author. Grass indeed went a few steps too far (and too
mendaciously ) - Israel will not destroy the Iranian people - and for that he
will be punished, in his own country and in Israel. But in precisely the same
way the poem's nine stanzas lost a sense of proportion in terms of their
judgment of Israel, so too the angry responses to it suffer from exaggeration.
Tom Segev wrote in Haaretz: "Unless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently confided in him, his opinion is
vacuous." ("More pathetic than anti-Semitic," April 5 ). Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned Grass' Nazi past, and Israeli embassies
in Germany went so far as to state, ridiculously, that the poem signified
"anti-Semitism in the best European tradition of blood libels before
Passover."
It is doubtful that Grass intended his poem to be
published on the eve of Passover. It contains no blood libel. In fact, it is
the branding of it as anti-Semitic that is a matter of tradition - all
criticism of Israel is immediately thus labeled. Grass' Nazi past, his joining
the Waffen SS as a youth, does not warrant shutting him up some 70 years later,
and his opinion is far from vacuous. According to Segev, anyone who is not a
nuclear scientist, an Israeli prime minister or an Iranian president must keep
silent on the stormiest issue in Israel and the world today. That is a flawed
approach.
Grass'
"What Must Be Said" does contain things that must be said. It can and
should be said that Israel's policy is endangering world peace. His position
against Israeli nuclear power is also legitimate. He can also oppose supplying
submarines to Israel without his past immediately being pulled out as a
counterclaim. But Grass exaggerated, unnecessarily and in a way that damaged
his own position. Perhaps it is his advanced age and his ambition to attract a
last round of attention, and perhaps the words came forth all at once like a
cascade, after decades during which it was almost impossible to criticize
Israel in Germany.
That's the way it is when all criticism of Israel is
considered illegitimate and improper and is stopped up inside for years. In the
end it erupts in an extreme form. Grass' poem was published only a few weeks
after another prominent German, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party,
Sigmar Gabriel, wrote that there is an apartheid regime in Hebron. He also
aroused angry responses. Therefore it is better to listen to the statements
and, especially, finally, to lift the prohibition against criticizing Israel in
Germany.
Israel has many friends in Germany, more than in most
European countries. Some of them support us blindly, some have justified guilt
feelings and some are true, critical friends of Israel. There are, of course,
anti-Semites in Germany and the demand that Germany never forget is also
justified. But a situation in which any German who dares criticize Israel is
instantly accused of anti-Semitism is intolerable.
Some years ago, after a critical article of mine was
published in the German daily Die Welt, one of its editors told me: "No
journalist of ours could write an article like that." I was never again
invited to write for that paper. For years, any journalist who joined the huge
German media outlet Axel Springer had to sign a pledge never to write anything
that casts aspersions on Israel's right to exist. That is an unhealthy
situation that ended with an eruption of exaggerated criticism like Grass'.
Grass is not alone. No less of a major figure, the great
author Jose de Sousa Saramago opened the floodgates in his later years when,
after a visit to the occupied territories, he compared what was going on there
to Auschwitz. Like Grass, Saramago went too far, but his remarks about the
Israelis should have been heeded: "Living under the shadow of the
Holocaust and expecting forgiveness for everything they will do in the name of
their suffering seems coarse. They have learned nothing from the suffering of
their parents and their grandparents."
After we denounce the exaggeration, after we shake off
the unjustified part of the charge, we must listen to these great people. They
are not anti-Semites, they are expressing the opinion of many people. Instead
of accusing them we should consider what we did that led them to express it..
* Gideon Levy é membro do Conselho Editorial e colunista do jornal Haaretz, de Israel.
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