Undeclared Wars With Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 by Jeffrey Herf (review)

In a fitting sequel to his book Divided Memory: The Nazi Past and the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Jeffrey Herf provides a mountain of evidence documenting how the Communist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the extreme-left opposition in West Germany supported Palestinian terrorists who murdered Jews both in Israel and in numerous other countries for more than two decades, from 1967 to 1989. If the 11th commandment of West German politics was to bolster the Jewish state or at least do no harm to Jews, the East German regime and the West German extreme left felt bound by no such strictures. The GDR provided weapons, training, medical care, vacation spots, and steady support in the United Nations (UN) for Israel’s enemies. The West German far left offered a steady drumbeat of propaganda about the evils of Zionism and occasionally backed up their rhetoric with violent acts against Jews.

How did these Germans justify violence against Jews so soon after World War II? Herf points to a combination of Realpolitik and ideology. West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine left East Germany isolated and desperate for diplomatic recognition. Once the Soviet Union threw its full weight behind the Arab side after 1967, the GDR (which alone among the Warsaw Pact states had never established diplomatic relations with Israel) became the most ardent backer of the radical rejectionist states: Syria, Iraq, Libya, and—until Anwar al-Sadat’s break with the USSR in 1972—Egypt. By consistently backing these states and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), including the most violent factions within the Palestinian movement, the East Germans ultimately succeeded in breaking the diplomatic blockade.

The West German extreme left faced a different dilemma. Having formed within the student movement in Frankfurt and elsewhere, its problem was less political (since it had no real power) than moral and ideological. The question of violence against Jews could be justified only with astonishingly twisted dialectics. The far-left depicted Israel as an imperialist state, a product of colonialism and U.S. power, and argued that Germans had to get over their “Jewish complex” to support the oppressed Palestinians in their armed national liberation struggle against Israel (they remained silent on Zionism itself being a national liberation struggle). Jews, so the argument went, would ultimately benefit from this anti-Jewish violence (even if carried out against synagogues, Jewish old age homes, Jewish kindergartens, and Jewish communal institutions in Germany) because Zionism was bad for the Jews, just as it was bad for everyone. The logic was strained and some on Germany’s far left rejected it. But not everyone did, and the West German extremists plotted or participated in violence against Jews within Germany and as the lead hijackers at Entebbe, which involved coordination and planning with Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin, an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler. The German hijackers even designed a small Selektion of their own à la the Nazis and separated their hostages into Jewish and non-Jewish groups.

Ultimately, however, the West German far left’s bark was far worse than its bite; it did little damage to Israel and killed few Jews. Far more serious and deadly were the arms deliveries from the East German state. Secrecy remained paramount, but the East German regime’s fingerprints were everywhere. When the Israelis ultimately expelled the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 they uncovered a vast quantity of weapons and documents, most of which could be traced back to the Soviet bloc, above all to East Germany.

Herf has mined numerous important archives and German-language materials to show in clear detail the mendacity of the East German regime’s policy toward Israel. Not only did East German diplomats join the chorus at the UN condemning any Israeli response to terrorist attacks, not only did the regime publicly equate Zionism and Israel with Nazism (along with published...