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German author Günter Grass, an 84-year-old Nobel laureate, has been declared a persona non grata (unwelcomed person) due to a poem that he wrote based on Israel’s current nuclear strategies, according to a news report published in The Guardian.
According to The Guardian, Grass believes that Israel’s nuclear policies are a threat to world’s peace. In a newspaper interview Grass said, that he should have specified that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government are the prime culprits for staging the instability.
He also said that he believes in the idea of Israel’s existence but the country should focus on building congenial relations with its neighbouring countries.
However, Israeli politicians and analysts say that Grass should ideally be disqualified from making any statement regarding Israel as he served in the Nazi Waffen SS.
On Sunday, Israel's interior minister Eli Yishai quoted a law allowing a ban on entry to former Nazis to declare Grass persona non grata for his “attempt to fan the flames of hatred against the state of Israel and its people”.
Amidst the criticism following the poem written by Grass, a few Israeli analysts believe that the points highlighted by Grass are worth pondering and that objections raised against the current policies are frequently qualified as anti-Semitism.
