The occasion for Günter Grass's What Must Be Said is the sale to Israel by Germany of a submarine with the potential to carry nuclear weapons (With his last drop of ink, Grass's poem infuriates Israel, 6 April). It is a real issue amid many arms sales from the west and the east to Middle Eastern powers. What is less real, however, is the hyperbole Grass deploys when he writes of Israel's launching of "a pre-emptive strike which could wipe out the Iranian people". From where does this genocidal idea come? As far as I know, it is not even among Netanyahu's wildest fantasies.
Grass recognises that the Iranian people are "enslaved and coerced into contrived jubilation by a loudmouth leader", but makes no mention of threats this leader has in fact made to wipe out Israel. Menace against others, oppression of one's own, these gestures are often connected. In the face of the dangers of nuclear proliferation in this context, Grass proffers an agreeable vista of "surveillance of Israel's atomic potential and Iran's atomic sites by an international authority". No problem. But he then says that the "blemish" of his birth (German) must not prohibit him from "speaking the truth … to Israel" even though "the verdict 'antisemitism' is prevalent" for anyone who does so. Through this assemblage of national categories, Grass lends the authority of the author of the magnificent The Tin Drum to the appalling notion that antisemitism is an issue that can and perhaps should be ignored – whether in Europe or the Middle East.
By all means criticise the Israeli government. Its continuing occupation of Palestine, and lack of support for democracy among its neighbours are shameful and shortsighted. But let us support democrats wherever they may be, not blame a people. Grass used to know better.
Robert Fine
Emeritus professor of sociology, University of Warwick
• What is so exceptional about Günter Grass's verse that it should provoke such political and media hysteria? He merely points out what anyone who studies the Middle East knows: that Israel is trying to bounce the United States into war with Iran by wildly exaggerating Iran's alleged "existential" threat to Israel, regardless of the cataclysmic consequences.
Israel has nuclear weapons; Iran does not. Iran has not seriously threatened Israel: even rhetorically, the textual evidence of any real menace to Israel from Ahmadinejad is overinterpreted and exaggerated. Conversely, Israel is certainly threatening Iran.
Why do our commentators fall such easy prey to the machinations of the Israeli state and its supporters, and denigrate a great and wise writer who, after all, is only trying to give us due warning of a disaster in the making?
Tim Llewellyn
London
• Three cheers, or more, to Günter Grass for exposing the hypocrisy of Israel's stance and continuing complaints, with no evidence, about Iran developing nuclear weapon capability. Israel has significant nuclear-warhead capability, and it is constantly threatening to bomb Iran or organise land-based raids, thus creating mayhem across the Middle East. Grass might well have also mentioned the shocking Israeli blockade of Gaza and their illegal appropriation of land and water, and destruction of huge tracts of olive groves and orchards on the West Bank.
I note that, once again, a critic of Israeli policy is branded anti-Jewish. Is it no longer possible to criticise Israel as a nation without being accused of being antisemitic?
John Severs
Durham
• After all that has been said and done in the name of stopping weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, why is it outrageous for Günter Grass to ask for international inspections in the one state which undoubtedly does possess these weapons?
Alasdair Beal
Leeds
• My late husband, the German poet Erich Fried, was a colleague of Grass. In 1974 Erich published a whole book of poems about the Arab-Israeli conflict entitled Höre Israel, which has been republished recently by Melzer Verlag.
Grass's admission that he served in the Waffen SS in his teens serves as ready ammunition for the Zionists to use against him; for Erich it was the fact of being a Jew. For taking a critical stance of Israeli policies, he was dubbed an antisemite and even targeted by Mossad for a few years. It amazes me how this shameful – not to say quite illogical – equivalence can be so widely accepted.
Catherine Boswell
London
• Last month you published a wonderfully, poignant, bittersweet poem entitled Helmut Frielinghaus: Words in Farewell by Günter Grass (The Saturday poem, 2 March). I'd like to suggest that this poem about the death of Grass's editor may help us partly understand how such a great writer came to publish What Must Be Said – a poem that exhibits few poetic features and hugely oversimplifies issues in the Middle East.
Tristan Moss
Sheffield
• To see respected names such as Mark Rylance and Harriet Walter on a letter calling for a British boycott of Israel's Habima theatre company is shocking and profoundly disappointing. Habima was founded in 1905 in Moscow. It was performing across the whole of Palestine long before the creation of the state of Israel. These people are artists whose only motive in performing across historic Palestine is to build bridges across political boundaries at a time and in a place where many forces on both sides conspire against this. It is distressing and shaming to see artists of the calibre of Rylance and Walter joining such forces.
Thomas Adès
Paris