By Irit Dekel, April 11th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: What Can be Said about Guenter Grass’s “What Must be Said”?
By Irit Dekel, August 2nd, 2011 
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 . . .
Read more: The Tents Movement Uprising in Israel
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 18th, 2010 
As politics have been increasingly paranoid around the world, the newest proposal in Israel amp up tensions.
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 . . .
Read more: In Israel: Road Blocks to Peace
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