Israel joins in German Nobel literature laureate's condemnation for writing poem describing Israel a threat
Israel's foreign ministry described as "pathetic" on Thursday a poem by Germany's Gunter Grass, which accused Israel of plotting Iran's annihilation and threatening world peace.
"The transition of Grass from fiction to science fiction is in very poor taste; his poem is pathetic and totally lacking grace," ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP.
Israel's Haaretz daily took the same tone, with historian Tom Segev writing that the German Nobel literature laureate was "more pathetic than anti-Semitic."
"The comparison between Israel and Iran is unfair because, unlike Iran, Israel has never threatened to wipe another country off the map," Segev wrote, referring to 2005 comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad widely translated into English as meaning the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map."
In Grass's poem "What must be said," the 84-year-old longtime leftist activist wrote of his concern that Israel "could wipe out the Iranian people" with a "first strike" due to the threat it sees in Tehran's disputed nuclear programme.
"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.
Grass, author of the renowned anti-war novel "The Tin Drum," sparked outrage in 2006 when he revealed, six decades after World War II, that he had been a member of the notorious Waffen SS.
Israel, the sole if undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East, has said it is keeping all options open for responding to Iran's nuclear programme, which it says is aimed at securing nuclear weapons, posing an existential threat to the Jewish state.
Iran has consistently denied that its sensitive nuclear work is aimed at making weapons.
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