'Gunter Grass is persona non-grata in Israel,' announces Yishai

Interior Minister Eli Yishai has declared German writer Gunter Grass persona non-grata in Israel. According to Israel Radio, a controversial poem by Grass was an attempt to stir anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feelings in the world and thereby advance the cause represented by the SS uniform Grass once wore.

"If Gunter Grass wants to continue to disseminate his twisted and false work, I suggest he do so from Iran where he will find a more friendly audience," Yishai said.

In contrast to Israel's view, Iran had some positive words to say about Grass on Saturday. Iran's Deputy Culture Minister Javad Shamaqdari lauded the author in a letter posted by the semiofficial Fars news agency.

Grass, a German Nobel literature laureate and former Hitler Youth and SS member, drew sharp rebukes at home and in Israel after he labeled Israel a threat to "already fragile world peace" in a poem he published on Apr. 4.

In the poem, titled "What must be said," published in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Italy's La Repubblica, among others, Grass criticized what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel's suspected nuclear program amid speculation that Israel might engage in military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

"'What must be said' belongs to the European tradition of accusing the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration," said Emmanuel Nahshon, deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, in a statement.

"It used to be Christian children whose blood the Jews used to make matzah [unleavened bread], today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state purportedly wants to wipe out."

But Shamaqdari took the opposite view and said Grass "beautifully carried out his human and historical responsibility."

In his letter, Shamaqdari wrote that the 84-year-old poet's revelation of "truth may awaken the silent conscience" of the West.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his part denounced the former Nazi's remarks as "ignorant and objectionable." His "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," Netanyahu said in a statement on Thursday.

"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," he added.

Grass told German media on Sunday that he was singling out the Jewish state's government, not the country as a whole. In an interview published Saturday by the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Grass said he sought foremost to single out the policies of "Netanyahu's current government."

"The man who damages Israel the most at the moment is in my opinion Netanyahu - and I should have included that in the poem," Grass was quoted as saying.

The left-leaning Grass established himself as a leading literary figure with "The Tin Drum," published in 1959, and won the Nobel Prize in 1999. He urged fellow Germans to confront their painful Nazi history in the decades after World War II.

However, his image suffered a bruising when he admitted in his 2006 autobiography that at age 17 he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the Nazi paramilitary organization, in the final months of World War II.

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