Gunter Grass Poem About Israel Provokes Intense Criticism The German novelist and Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass has come under intense criticism after publishing a poem saying that Israel, not Iran, was the Mideast's greatest threat to world peace, Der Spiegel Online reported on Wednesday. In the poem, titled "What Must Be Said" and published in Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung and several other European newspapers on Wednesday, Mr. Grass accused the West of "hypocrisy" for calling for an end to Iran's nuclear program while tolerating Israel's own secretive nuclear program, which has been widely discussed but never officially confirmed. Why did I wait until now at this advanced age and with the last bit of ink to say: The nuclear power Israel is endangering a world peace that is already fragile? Mr. Grass, 84, wrote, after noting the German government's recent decision to sell Israel additional submarines with what the poem described as the ability "to send all-destroying warheads where the existence of a single nuclear bomb is unproven." The poem, which also expressed Mr. Grass's basic solidarity with Israel, prompted an immediate outcry. The Central Council of Jews in Germany called it an "aggressive pamphlet of agitation." The Israeli Embassy in Berlin issued a statement accusing Mr. Grass of propagating old-fashioned blood libel. "What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder," the statement read. Earlier, it was Christian children whose blood the Jews allegedly used to make their unleavened bread, but today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state allegedly wants to annihilate. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, a strong ally of Israel, reacted more coolly. "There is artistic freedom in Germany," a spokesman for Ms. Merkel said, according to a report on the Web site of The Guardian, "and there thankfully there is the freedom of the government not to have to comment on every artistic production." The poem, which ended with a general wish for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, isn't the first time that the left-leaning Mr. Grass, best known as the author of "The Tin Drum," has come under the kind of moral spotlight he has made a career of turning on Germany's establishment, which he has long accused of failing to deal fully with the Nazi past. In 2006, he was widely denounced for hypocrisy when he revealed for the first time, in his memoir "Peeling the Onion," that he had served in the Waffen-SS at the end of World War II, when he was 17.