Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”

I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.

In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”

I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.

In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on Grass’s statement that Israel is a threat to world peace. Since we are dealing with a poem, we ought to also consider the form and language of the poem. Silence (Schweigen) is repeated five times, concealment (Verschweigen) twice, and the formulation “what must be said” and speech (Rede) three more times. Barring or forbidding (Untersage) once. “Outspoken truth” once. Mr. Grass here liberates himself from a long, allegedly nationally imposed, silence about Israel. This silence, he maintains, is due to the threat of being called an anti-Semite, which he is ending now because “tomorrow might be too late.” But here I focus on the performance of national narratives by Grass, about the discourse of silence. It resembles the opening of Foucault’s History of Sexuality about the repressive hypothesis that creates and marks more discursive mechanisms affording speech and control of speech about sex.

What is the role of writing about breaking the silence? How can a Grass poem stir such discussion? Stephen Evens wrote for the BBC:

“In the years after the war, Guenter Grass’s writing gave him a status of Conscience of the Nation, and in a nation which takes its soul-searching very seriously indeed […] For more than 60 years after the war, he showed a zeal and what seemed like a searing honesty in the way he berated those who refused to admit their own dark pasts. But this reputation was dented when it emerged in 2006 that he had kept quiet about his own past as a member of the Waffen-SS (a branch of the military under the direct control of the Nazi party). Even then, he was not universally discredited. Some took this as evidence of the complexity of the psyche of the man (and by implication of the nation).”

With this reputation it is easier to understand the context of the discussion in the German press and how easy it was for the Israeli press to also pick up on the stained, repressed past of Grass as a Waffen SS member.

Concerning the content and form of talking about silence, Grass is actually onto something quite disturbing here, as Michael Naumann, the former culture minister under the Red-Green coalition of Schroeder, recognized in an article on Monday in the Tagesspiegel. Namely a way of speaking, which I heard time and again in reaction to the Holocaust Memorial, often from right-wing radicals, but also from other Memorial visitors: they are not allowed to say what they think about Israel. Israel stands, at least for these actors, for the Jews. Naumann declares the “Poem” (quotation marks in the original) a moral and political scandal. He asks: what motivates Grass? What speaks through him? And he answers:

“…once, just once, to have a vacation from the German ‘responsibility history’; once, just once, to shout at the Jews that they can also be perpetrators; once, just once, like Martin Walser did, to withdraw from the memory the photos, handed down to us, of the concentration camps […] but this exactly we have already heard. What, for the sake of God, speaks there in Guenter Grass?”

Who picked up on the poem’s language? The AJC (American Jewish Committee) condemned using the verb “Verbrechen” or “perpetrator” to describe Israel’s security policy. Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister wrote yesterday in the popular Bild that positioning Israel and Iran on the same moral level is absurd.

The Left party, historically connected to the SED (the former ruling party in the GDR), supported Grass, providing the only outspoken supporter of his views.

As for German Jewish symbolism and the timing of the poem’s publication, Haaretz reports:

“Emmanuel Nahshon, a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, said the allegation – just before the Jewish feast of Passover – that Israel wanted to wipe out the Iranian people belonged to a European anti-Semitic tradition of accusing Jews of ‘ritual murder.’ ”

Meanwhile, a cartoon in Haaretz shows two young men on a roof with their garden of marijuana plants, and one guy is saying to the other “I thought Grass was already banned.” Haaretz’s editorial reacted to Yishai’s declaration of Grass as persona non grata by stating that he “just wrote a poem” and people are free to express their views. What I find interesting about the drama following the publication is the talk about formerly understood taboos: “What Must be Said” is Grass’s reaction to his compulsion to stay silent because of Germany’s responsibility toward Israel after the Holocaust.

All in all, it must be seen as something positive that so much attention and interest has come to light from the publication of a poem, however weak in content and form. At the same time, it is worthwhile to mention and recall just how weak it in fact is. Perhaps the most important lesson in this episode, however, has not to do with the poem itself so much as the way we (in speaking about it, or in neglecting to do so) extend underlying narratives about the political significance of silence and speech, about certain subjects (the Holocaust, Israel, nuclear power and weaponry), in certain places. Or, indeed, anywhere.

In Israel, for over three weeks, there have been demonstrations initiated by young people. They were first directed against the high cost of living, but they seem to be developing into something much larger, a movement for a systematic social change, addressing  the growing disparities between rich and poor and the difficulty of living well, concerned about issues of social security and the deterioration in the provision of education and health care. What had begun with a consumer uprising against the high prices of cottage cheese over a month ago, leading to a boycott on dairy products (since in Israel they operate as a cartel, not open for competition), appears to be  the beginning of what Rosa Luxemburg describes as ”an exercise in democratic action.” I observe the exercise as an Israeli living in Berlin, basing my commentary on newspapers, blog posts and conversations with friends at home.

The “cottage cheese revolt” is no trivial or accidental thing. Israeli dinner tables usually contain this staple, together with a salad. The most popular cottage cheese, Tnuva, has an illustrated home on its package and a well known advertising trope: “the cheese with the home.” Fighting for home is not only for affordable housing or the cost of living. The protesters also talk about the quick decline in the freedom of speech and of the Israeli democratic system under the current government.  However, the demonstrators delay, for the time being, what they see as “political demands” for possible negotiation with the government.  They fear this would compromise the call for “social justice,” and more immediately, could scare off some of the right-of-center demonstrators. According to Ha’Aretz today (August 2), “a document setting out the demands of the tent protesters in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health and economic policy is being drawn up by the movement’s leaders.”

The tent city in Tel Aviv was started by a twenty five year old, Daphne Leef,  who demonstrated against the cost of housing and living on Rothschild Boulevard, calling on her Facebook friends to join her. These demonstrations spread and have been non-violent (she compared them to Woodstock), the first massively successful demonstrations in Israel not connected to the military, wars or specific laws. I would be happy to hear more connections made between the decline in democracy and respect for human needs and the occupation, but that, apparently and unfortunately, cannot be addressed now by a generation that must declare itself “not political” in order to be listened to. Yet, ironically, the demonstrations are of profound political import.

A few of the commentators pointed to the fact that the young leading this uprising is nihilist and self-centered. For example, Eva Illouz in Ha’Aretz sees calls for social change to improve their own hedonistic consumer power, and not in solidarity with the weak and silenced groups, certainly not comparable to the social commitment seen in historical revolts in the fifties and sixties. That might have been true of the first round of the cottage cheese revolt, but it’s no longer the case. The periphery and the poor parts of Tel Aviv are as central and strong to the movement as the wealthy Tel Aviv quarter. The major labor unions, the municipal employees’ union, and the student union have all joined in the protests. The difference between the first protests,predominantly transpiring on Facebook and “at home,” in the form of an economic boycott by private individuals of a mass produced consumer good,and the later actions, in which hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets, remaining for hours of the day and night, in some cases sleeping in spaces coded as “public,” is precisely the one that Arendt illuminated in The Human Condition. In her terms ,the movement has turned from the social to the political, from concerns over “political economy” to a movement of the spontaneous action of human beings in their plurality addressing issues of common concern, Israelis not as settlers or pioneers but as citizens of a state with problems. As David Grossman said in the demonstration on Saturday, the chief problem is: “people are loyal to the state but the state is not loyal to them”. Daphne Leef stated that it is not the government but the “rules of the game” that they wish to change.

In looking at the “tent cities” protest as it has developed, one certainly does not just see the Ashkenazi leftist elite living in Tel Aviv, bragging about how expensive it is to sustain the good life they got used to. Not that that should be so damning a critique: why not live well, consume culture and have individual opportunities for growth?  Avigdor Lieberman and other conservatives called the protesters “spoiled,” perhaps meaning that it is better to not live well, that one should fight for the basics, as the settler  do in the territories, or the way that their predecessors did as young people realizing the Zionist dream.

The Zionist dream was questioned long ago first by intellectuals and minorities, including Palestinians. Now fundamental questions are being raised by a majority that needs to carry the burden for groups (the ultra orthodox) that do not work or serve in the military, in a concentrated market economy that is stable due to high taxes on the hard-working middle class, who feel crunched by the privatization of public services in the past twenty years. This “consumerist occupation” of the public space, in cities large and small all across Israel, calls all that into question in a manner that already appears irreversible.

I have been thinking about the ubiquity of paranoid politics, as I wonder whether the Israeli – Palestinian peace process has any chance for success, and as I read the news from Israel concerning a bill that would require non -Jewish immigrants to take an oath of allegiance to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

If we aren’t paying close attention, this amendment may seem to be no big deal.  After all, hasn’t Israel all along been the Jewish homeland and a democratic state?  But a loyalty oath that commits to the official formulation of Israel as a Jewish state is clearly directed at the rights and citizenship status of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origins.  Although they are twenty per cent of the population, they are being asked to demonstrate their loyalty, publicly confirming their second class status facing this symbolic act and a variety of other oaths of allegiance.

There is a sense that they are being assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, and they have to demonstrate their innocence repeatedly.  Many Israelis and friends of Israel, elected officials, including those inside the ruling coalition, are deeply worried.

The same politicians who came up with this oath have additional proposals,  as Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, puts it “a loyalty law for Knesset members; a loyalty law for film production; a loyalty law for non-profits; putting the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, beyond the scope of the law; a ban on calls for a boycott; and a bill for the revocation of citizenship.”

Some might suggest that Levy is a left wing critic who exaggerates.  But Eli Yishai, the Interior Minister, has apparently been working to show that Levy’s worst fears are a reality, bringing paranoid politics to its logical extension, proposing to strip Israelis of citizenship for disloyalty.  “’Declarations are not enough in fact against incidents such as [MKs] Azmi Bishara and Hanin Zoabi,’ Yishai said in reference to two Israeli Arab lawmakers, one who is suspected of having contacts with enemy states and the other who took part in a Gaza-bound aid flotilla. “Anyone who betrays the state will lose his citizenship.”  (link)

Yishai defines his opponents as enemies, including legitimately elected members of the the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and the prospects for the continuation of democracy dims.

Levy identifies the looming threat: “Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran…From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country… ”

Even paranoids have enemies.  Israel, to be sure, is threatened by its neighbors and there is ambiguity and ambivalence in the attitudes of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.  But the paranoid style of politics leads threatening problems to define political identity, and makes it next to impossible to deal with complex political challenges, insisting on resolute clarity and steadfastness, where openness to ambiguity and flexibility are the only ways to a democratic and just outcome.

The breakdown of the talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis over settlements is an immediate looming crisis for the Obama administration.  It is soberly explained in the American press that Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot be as flexible as the American administration would like because if he is, his coalition will collapse.  But it is that coalition, which includes political extremists, some call them Fascists, that is probably the largest obstacle for peace.  Think of the people carrying the craziest signs at Tea Party Demonstrations and at the town hall meetings last summer, imagine them included in a governing coalition, with their leader (Avigdor Liberman) as the Foreign Minister.  This is the most significant threat to the peace talks, indeed the threat to Israeli and Palestinian democracy and dignity.