Famous litterateur Gunter Grass has been dubbed a Nazi and anti-Semitic because his poem, What must be said, published in a German newspaper early this month, challenges the basic tenets of what can be called the theory of the End of Sorrow. No academic has ever written a treatise on it, yet its postulates are well-known — man’s ability to feel sorrow, at least of the collective kind, can never surpass what the Jews experienced under Hitler.
Just as Francis Fukuyama thought the principal marker of the End of History was the “universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government”, the defining feature of the theory of The End of Sorrow assumes acceptance of the Holocaust as the greatest tragedy that no state can ever match. This assertion consequently allows for continuous reproduction of the memory of the Holocaust in the daily discourse, at least for the sake of comparison, thereby rendering it as an ever-present reality. Implicit in this theory are two other ideas — since the sorrow of the Jews is eternal, you cannot but accept them as victims in perpetuity, forever vulnerable to the primeval forces lurking in us. From it springs the second idea: victims can never become assailants, not even the state that presides over the homeland of Jews — Israel.
It is these ideas Grass undermines through his poem, What must be said, which questions the morality of the Israeli state straining at the leash of international laws to undertake preemptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This, Grass says, “because an atom bomb may be” developed by Iran, even though in “that other land in which/for years — although kept secret — /a growing nuclear power has existed/beyond supervision or verification…” Grass goes on to say he has kept quiet because of the fear of being dubbed anti-Semitic, which he has been over the last fortnight. (As proof, his critics have reiterated his belated revelation that as a 17-year-old, he had served for a short while in Hitler’s Waffen SS.)
Grass names Israel as “that other land”, and says he has decided to break his silence because he is “sick of the West’s hypocrisy”, and because his country has supplied yet another submarine to Israel, a submarine “whose speciality consists in its ability/to direct nuclear warheads toward/an area in which not a single atom bomb/has been proved to exist…” He hopes others will emulate him in breaking their silence to demand “that the government of/both Iran and Israel allow an international authority/free and open inspection of/the nuclear potential and capability of both.” The publication of the poem prompted political leaders in Grass’s hypocritical west to decry his attempt to establish a moral equivalence between Iran and Israel, which promptly declared him persona non grata.
You have to be politically naïve to disbelieve those who say Israel’s alleged possession of a nuclear weapons arsenal has inspired a clutch of West Asian countries to have N-weapons of their own. Alleged possession? Well, Israel has never accepted it has a nuclear arsenal, and the west has blithely ignored compelling evidence to the contrary. Have you forgotten Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli Jew of Moroccan origin? A nuclear technician, he smuggled in 1985 a camera into the Negev Nuclear Research Centre in Dimona, where he was employed. Over a fifty incriminating photographs of his testified to Israel’s nuclear capabilities. Through a Colombian journalist Vanunu offered his story to Newsweek, which inexplicably turned down the scoop-on-the-platter. This rejection led Vanunu to approach The Sunday Times of London, where he flew in September 1986 and gave an extensive interview to the newspaper.
Wary of the arcane world of nuclear science, The Sunday Times sought the opinion of nuclear experts to confirm whether Vanunu’s story was true. Anxious and lonely in London, waiting for his story to be published, Vanunu fell for the romantic overtures of a Mossad agent, masquerading as an American tourist. Later that month, they flew to Rome. As soon as they entered an apartment, three Mossad agents overpowered him, injected him with a drug that induced temporary paralysis, and whisked him to a location on the Italian coast. An Israeli vessel brought him to Israel, where a trial in camera banished him to 18 years of imprisonment, 11 in complete isolation.
Once the abduction of Vanunu became public, The Sunday Times published his story in October 1986. From Vanunu’s disclosure, experts estimated Israel could have an arsenal of 150 nuclear weapons. Over more than two decades now, it is only plausible to believe that the arsenal must have been augmented manifold. Released in 2004, Vanunu was picked up several times for deliberately violating the curbs imposed on his freedom and movement, and was last incarcerated for three months in 2010. At the time of his sentencing, Vanunu, much like Grass, declared, “Everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons but no one is talking about it.”
Despite Vanunu’s sensational disclosure, the west did not even attempt to bring Israel’s nuclear facilities under international inspection, presumably taking cover under Israel’s obstinate silence on the issue. Could any other country have enjoyed such an exception from the west? Will it ignore a Vanunu-like disclosure from an Iranian nuclear scientist today?
It isn’t as if the Israeli state is benign. It is palpable in its disproportionate, at times insane, responses to attacks on it; even in the manner it tries to silence peace activists. Remember the massacre in Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near Beirut? Between September 16 and September 18, 1982, the Israeli Defence Forces encircled the two camps, and allowed the Phalangist militia to massacre their inmates, even firing flares at night to facilitate the task of killing. On the morning of September 19, 1982, French writer Jean Genet visited the Shatila camp and wrote, “A photograph doesn’t show…how you must jump over the bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next.” Among the Israeli officers, there was Ariel Sharon, Israel’s future prime minister.
Apart from oil politics, the west’s hypocrisy arises because of its subconscious need to atone for the sin of what it did to its Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its early symptom was visible in the letter British foreign secretary Lord Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild, president of the British Zionist Federation, on Nov 2, 1917, promising “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish population…” Then the Jews constituted around 10-12 percent Palestine’s population. Over the subsequent decades, their population ballooned as migration of European Jews to the Promised Land was encouraged, leading to bloody skirmishes between them and the Arabs.
It’s nobody’s case to preach the destruction of Israel. But to usher in an everlasting peace in the region, the west ought to apologise for invoking Biblical history to settle a people in a region so summarily reordered, and not hypocritically discriminate against its neighbours. Till then, what Grass has said must be repeated again and again.
The writer is a Delhi-based journalist