Those attacking German novelist Gunter Grass, who wrote a poem criticizing Israel’s nuclear weapons program and arsenal, should recall what Pablo Picasso once said: “Art is not done to decorate apartments, it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.”(1) Picasso had just finished painting Guernica, a vivid yet infamous masterpiece that had captured and exposed the cruelty and destructiveness of a fascist-like war.

In 1937, Nazi Germany supported General Francisco Franco’s Spanish fascists in an effort to destroy the morale of republican and communist enemies. German bombers mounted a four-hour-long attack on Guernica, the capital of the northern Basque region of Spain. The town was almost completely destroyed. Thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children, were indiscriminately bombed and murdered from the air.

Picasso’s critical artistic painting depicts a horse, a symbol of republican Spain, screaming as it is speared through its chest. On the right, figures flee from a burning house, on the left, a mother carries a dead infant in her arms. The horrific scene watched over in the top left-hand corner by a rampant bull, signifying the military aggression of General Franco and