Paying Günter Grass More Attention Than He Deserves
April 9, 2012 § Leave a comment
Israeli politicians have had some fun at Günter Grass’s expense, and rightly so. When a former member of the Hitler Youth and (until 2006) secret Waffen-SS member pronounces Israel as the preeminent threat to world peace and then claims that his comments were misunderstood, it is understandable that Israeli leaders fall over each other to see who can denounce him in the loudest and most creative ways. Grass is a buffoon who deserves to be lampooned after drowning himself in the shallowest of foreign policy pools, and it is just the latest reminder of why artists should stick to what they know rather than pontificating on global politics. Now that the piling on is done, Israel cannot just walk away with a win but rather is doing its usual job of beating a dead horse, and doing so quite unproductively. Not to be outdone by his cabinet colleagues, Interior Minister Eli Yishai has announced that Grass is not welcome in Israel, where he now joins an illustrious list including academics Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein and the famed Spanish clown Ivan Prado.
Note that none of these people presents a security threat. They are not terrorists and they are not alleged to have committed violence against Israel. They have all made headlines with nothing more than over the top comments and positions on Israel, and by banning them from the country, Israel guarantees them a renewed dose of attention and notoriety. Instead of letting them fade away into irrelevance as they twist themselves into verbal knots and increasingly outrageous positions, Israel makes sure that everyone knows who they are by responding to their taunts and then loudly and publicly barring them from entering Israel’s borders. Furthermore, Israel’s overreactions occasionally blow up in its face by embroiling other countries in what should be a contained dispute. Prado, who is both literally and figuratively a clown, was deported immediately after landing in Israel and deemed a security threat, which would be funny if it hadn’t created needless rancor between Israel and Spain and made Israel look like a bully abroad. With Grass, Israel has again overplayed its hand, prompting a predictable response today from the German Health Minister who called out Israel’s banning of Grass as “utterly exaggerated.”
Democracies need not be afraid of critical speech. The proper response to someone such as Grass is not to grant him martyr status on the left by meeting his childish and ill-informed words with overwhelming and disproportional force. It is to spend a day pointing out the absurd inconsistency of his position, remind everyone that former Nazis are not particularly well-suited to criticize the actions of the Jewish state, and then move on. If Grass wants to come to Israel and make an even bigger fool of himself, then by all means let him do so. Treating him as if he is a dangerous figure worthy of Israel’s concern rather than a comical imbecile to whom no further attention should be paid is precisely the type of Israeli response that always backfires in the end.
Guenter Grass’s Notion of Threat Perception
April 5, 2012 § 2 Comments
Günter Grass, the German nobel laureate, is in the news for publishing a poem yesterday declaring that Israel is a threat to world peace and that it is Israel’s nuclear program that is suspect rather than Iran’s. I will leave it to others, such as Bibi Netanyahu, to rail against Grass’s anti-Semitism, nor will I harp on the irony of a former Waffen-SS member who for decades lied about his past accusing Jews of lying about their true intentions and criticizing Israel’s warlike nature. Rather, I’d like to briefly point out some flaws in Grass’s theory of threat assessment.
Grass believes that Israel’s nuclear program and its alleged claiming of a right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran makes Israel a threat to world peace. In contrast, he finds no proof that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear capability for anything other than peaceful purposes, IAEA assessments be damned. There are two glaring problems with this analysis. First, it entirely ignores threats directed by Iran toward Israel, acting as if Israel has threatened Iran with military action entirely unprovoked. One can debate whether Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s blustering about Israel and Zionists is merely empty rhetoric (which is my view) rather than a signal of true intentions to nuke Israel given the chance, but there is no reasonable question that the Iranian leadership consistently threatens Israel and its government (this long list of examples via Jeffrey Goldberg is already three years old). States evaluate threats in a number of different ways; Stephen Walt famously listed strength, proximity, capabilities, and intentions as the four most salient factors, and certainly Iran presents a credible threat to Israel based on proximity and intentions, and to a lesser extent based on strength. Just because Israel might be seen as presenting a credible threat to Iran, it does not automatically follow, as Grass seems to assume, that the reverse is not also true. So while Grass may not see Iran as posing any sort of threat to Israel whatsoever, it must be because his command of international relations theory is more highly evolved than the current state of thinking in the field.
Second, Grass’s allegations of Israeli willingness to launch a first strike and his exhortation of Germany not to sell Israel submarines capable of launching nuclear weapons ignores the fact that Israel has had nuclear weapons since the late 1960s and has fought subsequent wars with Egypt and Lebanon along with suffering Scud missile attacks from Iraq, and yet has in every instance exercised restraint and not used its nuclear arsenal. This is not to laud Israel for any special behavior; no nuclear state has utilized its cache of atomic weapons since the U.S. against the Japanese in ending WWII. It is to point out that Israel should not be treated with heightened suspicion or accused of being a threat to world peace just because it is a nuclear power. Indeed, Israel’s history of not using its nuclear weapons makes it less suspect than Iran, which has no similar track record of responsible nuclear behavior.
Grass may think that Israel is wrong for its treatment of Palestinians, or may not like its current government, or maybe he just has a problem with Jews (let’s not forget that he was, after all, a Nazi). His grasp of threats and nuclear behavior, however, do not back up his polemic.
