Netanyahu talks of German writer’s ‘hidden Nazi’ past after Israel criticism

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday it was no surprise that German writer Gunter Grass, who for decades had hidden his membership of the Nazi Waffen SS, had described Israel as a threat to world peace.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer criticized Israel and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran in a poem published earlier this week.

“Gunter Grass’ 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,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office 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,” Netanyahu added.

But Grass hit back Thursday at what he called a “campaign” by critics of his poem accusing Israel of plotting Iran’s annihilation and threatening world peace.

The 84-year-old sparked outrage at home and abroad Wednesday when he published “What must be said” in a newspaper in which he said he feared a nuclear-armed Israel “could wipe out the Iranian people” with a “first strike.”

The longtime leftist activist told public broadcaster NDR Thursday that the media had piled on him without fully understanding his political message and that he found the personal accusations against him “hurtful.”

“The tenor throughout is, ‘don’t focus at all on the content of the poem’ but rather, conduct a campaign against me and claim that my reputation is now damaged for all time,” Grass said.

“I have noticed that in a democratic country with press freedom that people are expected to toe the line and that there is a refusal to address the content and the questions I raise here.”

Grass said he was particularly stung by the widespread accusations of anti-Semitism against him in the German media.

“That is quite hurtful and not worthy of a democratic press,” he said.

Grass’s words were also criticized in Germany, where any strong condemnation of Israel is taboo because of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Grass’s own moral authority has never fully recovered from his 2006 admission that he once served in Hitler’s SS.

“Why do I only say now, aged and with my last ink: the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace?” reads the poem, which was published in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

“Also because we - as Germans burdened enough - may become a subcontractor to a crime that is foreseeable,” he wrote, adding that Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust were no excuse for remaining silent now about Israel’s nuclear capability.

“I will not remain silent because I am weary of the West’s hypocrisy,” wrote Grass, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for novels such as “The Tin Drum” chronicling the horrors of 20th century German history.

Israel is widely assumed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed nation, which it neither confirms nor denies. These could be carried by Dolphin submarines that it has bought, at a sharp discount, from Germany.

Action against Iran

The Jewish state has threatened to take military action, with or without U.S. support, to halt what it sees as a nuclear threat from Iran. Tehran says it is developing nuclear technology for purely peaceful purposes.

“It is Iran, not Israel, that is a threat to the peace and security of the world. It is Iran, not Israel, that threatens other states with annihilation ... decent people everywhere should strongly condemn these ignorant and reprehensible statements,” Netanyahu added.

Germany said recently it would sell Israel a sixth Dolphin submarine and shoulder part of the cost, although it also cautioned its ally that any military escalation with Iran could bring incalculable risks.

One of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany, the SS was first an elite force of volunteers that played a key role in the Holocaust, operating the death camps in which millions died. But by the war’s end, most were drafted and many under 18 years old.

Grass said he was called up to join the SS as a teenager and insisted that he never fired a shot. But some critics inside and outside Germany said this explanation had come too late.

Grass made the confession shortly before publishing his autobiography “Peeling Onions” which details his war service.