BERLIN – Leading German Jewish intellectuals expressed support on Tuesday for
Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s decision to ban Günter Grass from visiting Israel
because of the writer’s anti-Semitic poem.
The Munich-based Jewish
historian Michael Wolffsohn told the daily Tagesspiegel that the ban was
“absolutely legitimate.” Wolffsohn, a contemporary history professor at
the Bundeswehr University in Munich and Israeli native, said it is important to
show the world that criticism is permitted ”but not from former SS
people.”
It is unacceptable that an author who was silent about his
history for over 60 years and has not really processed it “is now elevated to a
moral authority in general and over the descendants of the victims of the Nazis
in particular,” he said.
Grass covered up his WWII membership in the SS –
a unit that played a key role in murdering Jews – for six decades until 2006
when he confessed in an interview that he was a member of the Nazi
organization.
The Jewish journalist and author Ralph Giordano told the
Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that he could “absolutely understand the
Netanyahu government” and its reaction to Grass. Giordano survived the Holocaust
in hiding and has authored books on Germany and its failures and successes in
working through its Nazi history.
Giordano justified the ban because of
the existential threat that the Jewish state faces from the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
In his poem, published in various newspapers last week, Grass
asserted that Israel seeks to “extinguish the Iranian people” and that Israel is
the principal threat to world peace.
In contrast to Giordano and
Wolffsohn, Harvard University law Prof. Alan Dershowitz wrote a Huffington Post
opinion piece titled “Günter Grass Shouldn’t Be Barred From
Israel.”
Dershowitz argued that the interior minister’s decision is “both
foolish and self-defeating.”
“Grass’s poem has also been effectively
critiqued by Israelis across the political and literary spectrum. That is as it
should be in an open, vibrant democracy, accustomed to rancorous public debate.
But a great nation, committed to freedom of expression and dissent, should not
bar a critic, even a critic as bigoted as Grass, from its territory,” he
wrote.
“Günter Grass has always had a problem with Jews, from his early
days as a member of the Hitler youth and Nazi SS to his most recent application
of a nasty double standard to the Jewish state. But his ridiculous poem doesn’t
pose any security threat to Israel that would justify his physical exclusion
from the country.”
Dershowitz wrote he believes that Grass “should be
welcomed in Israel and shown the real facts on the ground: That Israel is a tiny
country doing its best to defend itself against existential threats posed by
Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons and by the increasing radical
Islamization of Israel’s neighborhood. He should also be shown why Israel’s
submarines, which provide a second-strike capacity, serve as a deterrent to a
possible nuclear attack by Iran. He should be made to feel shame for misusing
his literary talents in the interests of bigotry and falsehood.”
Author
Salman Rushdie also criticized the Israeli government decision on Tuesday,
calling it “infantile.”
It is “OK to dislike [or] even be disgusted by
the poem, but to ban him is infantile pique,” the Indian-born writer posted on
his Twitter feed. “The answer to words must always be other
words.”
Rushdie has been under an Iranian fatwa, or death threat, since
1989, after he published The Satanic Verses, which critics claim depicts the
prophet Muhammad in an irreverent manner.
Jerusalem Post staff
contributed to this report.