Gunter Grass’s “What Must Be Said”: Blood Libel for Our Times

The publication of Günter Grass’s “What Must Be Said” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in April 2012 made clear, yet again, that almost all leftist and many left-liberal intellectuals do not like the policies of the state of Israel and often the state itself, do not lend weight to the arguments made by its leaders and its defenders in Germany, are fed up with hearing yet again about the first Holocaust, and don’t take seriously the threats by the Iranian regime to “wipe out” Israel, which would amount to a second mass murder of the Jews in modern times.

In the next ten minutes I want to make the following three points. First, leaving aside the question of what Grass really thinks of Jews or Judaism, the structure of his argument draws on the most dangerous component of the arsenal of radical antisemitism, namely that the Jews are murderers. “What must be said” is a 2012 German version of the blood libel, the oldest and most dangerous of accusations hurled at the Jews, namely that they engage in the murder of the innocent and do so on a vast scale. Second, Grass’s comments about Israeli defense policy reflect ignorance about basic facts and strategic arguments. In so doing, they evoke the equally unfounded claims that he made about American nuclear strategy during the battle of the Euromissiles in the early 1980s. Third, despite a barrage of criticism leveled at him, Grass’s literary accomplishments and the decision of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to publish “What Must Be Said” lend importance to the publication of this text. Grass and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, as has been the case with Der Spiegel for decades, are leaders of anti-Israeli sentiment that has become a firmly embedded aspect of parts of the German cultural and intellectual establishment, especially, but not exclusively, its left wing. For those of us who have followed this antagonism since the 1960s, there is nothing new or shocking about Grass’s attack on Israel.

Grass’s key claim concerned Israeli policy towards Iran. Israel, he wrote, was claiming “a right to a first strike which could extinguish the Iranian people.” He had been silent about this impending horrific crime because speaking out would bring “punishment” and would lead one to be “immediately despised” and to be accused of antisemitism. Now, however, he felt compelled to speak out because Germany was delivering another submarine to Israel as a result of “a calculated commercial transaction with a smooth talking manner in which it invokes the discourse of restitution [for the crimes of the Nazi era (JH)].” This submarine had the ability, he wrote, “to deliver all-annihilating warheads to a country in which the existence of even a single atom bomb remains unproven.” In so doing, Germany could be “deliverer of a crime” and would thus share in the guilt were it to take place. To avoid guilt by association, he dared to speak out in spring 2012.¹

Grass’s arguments reversed the arrows of causation. In recent years, he did not feel compelled to break his silence and speak out when the leaders of Iran began to threaten to destroy the “cancer” that they called the state of Israel. In “What Must Be Said,” he said nothing about the hatred of Israel that the Iranian regime has publicly expressed since 1979, about its specific threats to “wipe it off the map” in the past decade, or the vicious Jew-hatred that is a steady diet of its propaganda. (For abundant examples, see the invaluable website of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] which translates such texts from Farsi and Arabic at the following link: http://www.memri.org/.) Grass’s earlier silence about these most dire threats to the Jewish people since Hitler speaks volumes, especially from a self-appointed guardian of Germany’s post-Nazi public conscience. While he claimed that Israel was “a country to which” he was “bound and remain bound,” this loyal friend of Israel refrained from speaking out in recent...