פּירוש אויף יונה 1:2

and proclaim against—My proclamation.

Nineveh - the royal seat of Assyria, which is a ruin today. And the sages of Israel in Greece say that it is the city called Ortei [Ortygia, Sicily?], but I do not know. Note that God did not command Jonah to say "In forty days..." only that "their evil has come before Me." And those who explain that Jonah feared that he would be called a false prophet - by God forgiving them their evil - are incorrect, because God did not say this reason until the second time, where it says: 'the proclamation that I speak to you," - and that is when God says it will be forty days. Moreover, how could a prophet rebel against God's command out of his fear that the people of Nineveh would call him a false prophet? How would that harm him? Would he dwell among them? Further, the people of Nineveh weren't stupid. Why would God send a prophet to them for them to repent, and if they refused, the decree against them would be fulfilled - if they knew that this was so, that if they repent, God would forgive their evil - why would they then call Jonah a false prophet?! Our sages of blessed memory were correct when they said that Jonah was distressed, for Israel's sake, that the people of Nineveh would escape [their fate]. [...] The people of Nineveh had once been God-fearing, and had only begun to do evil in Jonah's time. And were it not that they used to be God-fearing, God would not have sent a prophet to them. We see that they did a complete, even unparalleled teshuvah, and we do not find any text that says they tore down their altars to Baal or their idols. And so we learn that they were not idolaters.

The questions: we do not find in any text that God would send a prophet of Israel to go to another country to get them to repent. This is specific to Israel, to whom divine providence applies, as our sages said...How was Nineveh different, that God sent Jonah? And why did Jonah not heed God's voice? He should have sprinted joyfully to get human beings to repent from their evil way, and what matter is it that they were not of Israel? And how could Jonah transgress God's command by suppressing his prophecy? A prophet who does this is liable to the death penalty! And why did God say, "Proclaim" without saying what to proclaim, and only specifying the second time "Proclaim that which I shall tell you"?