Jeffrey Herf argues in this monograph that, after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, extraparliamentary radical leftists systematically violated a West German civic “tradition” of “coming to terms with the Nazi past.” This tradition, Herf asserts, was embodied in an all-party “eleventh commandment” (1) that Germans must not again cause harm to Jews. Even more consequentially, Herf notes that no such civic tradition pertained in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Like many Western radicals, the East German regime retooled antifascism by marrying it to anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism in order to deny to Jews the national rights it claimed to champion for other oppressed peoples. Citing mounds of evidence and numerous specific examples, Herf documents not just anti-Zionism but also hoary antisemitic stereotypes in the radicals’ and Communists’ own declarations.

The GDR was long isolated diplomatically as a result of Bonn's Hallstein Doctrine, which compelled states that valued West German foreign aid to forgo diplomatic relations with the other German state. In the mid- and late 1960s, however, the GDR successfully used anti-Zionism as a means to gain Middle Eastern diplomatic recognition. Over the next twenty years, writes Herf, the Soviet bloc built a network of lockstep diplomacy, “political warfare” (passim), and massive military aid for the Palestinians and their Arab allies. Far from condemning the Palestinians’ engagement in terrorism against civilian Jews in Israel, the GDR armed, funded, and defended attacks on Jews while blaming the Israeli victims and calling them out as racist colonizers, purveyors of “genocide” (425), and “fascists” (passim).

Herf devotes considerable space to recounting the many deliberations and resolutions of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on the Palestinian-Israeli matter. In the fall of 1974, just two years after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and just months after the massacre of Israeli children in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, a gun-toting Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), drew a standing ovation as he addressed the Assembly. Shortly thereafter, the UN granted “observer status” to the PLO. By “lop-sided” majorities (309), the Assembly routinely condemned Israel while adopting the language and rationales of the PLO—in effect, says Herf, functioning as the latter's “diplomatic arm” (262). This development also translated into a diplomatic triumph for the GDR over West Germany, which was consistently found on the other side of the issue. For the GDR, support for the PLO and the terrorist affiliates who sat on its Executive Board—the purported autonomy of which Arafat asserted only when he needed to deny responsibility—was both ideological and opportunistic. The German-German far left's vitriolic rhetoric and massive complicity in the murder of Jewish civilians, avers Herf, was the most disgraceful chapter in postwar German history.

The book's argumentative contributions lie in the sheer weight, and (more controversially) the framing, of its documentation. Herf is adept at following source trails, not only consulting the archives of the former GDR but also deciphering the regime's euphemisms and examining source collections devoted to the Western radicals and to the Jewish community that still lived in West Germany. If Herf's book has, at times, the feel of a prosecution, it is because the record largely warrants it. In the West, the Socialist German Student League (SDS), the “K Groups” (communist offshoots), and the Red Army Faction (RAF) and Revolutionary Cells (RCs) all used ideological rationales and insults that likened Israelis to Nazis. Meanwhile, the RAF and the RCs carried out hijackings, “separated” Jews from non-Jewish hostages, and plotted to murder Jewish community leaders, such as West Berlin's Heinz Galinski.

Distinctions matter: not all West German radicals advocated such violence. And the provocative spread of Israeli settlements during the period certainly ought to have been included in Herf's analysis. Nevertheless, as Herf demonstrates, the radical left displayed a broad rhetorical readiness to tar the Israelis and to discount their right to defend themselves. Further, a wide variety of leftists attacked pro-Israeli West Germans as “racist[s]” (81), as stated by the SDS in 1967—racists who suffered from a “Jewish complex” (105), according to the West Berlin Tupamaros in 1969. While the fact of left-wing anti-Zionism is hardly a revelation, Herf shows that the breadth and tone of this discourse in Germany belie the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This record problematizes the frequently stated viewpoint that the West German radical left felt a special or constructive need to engage the Nazi past. Furthermore, the GDR's documentation reveals that East German officials fully understood that they were abetting a campaign involving the murder of civilians, for the antifascist dialectics they deployed in public gave way to a franker internal discourse. Their only hesitation resulted from Western warnings that the harboring and aiding of terrorists who attacked Jews in Western Europe risked the process of détente. Stasi files reveal an internal discussion over how to reign in these “extremists” while still supporting the deliberate targeting of civilians within Israel and the occupied territories.

A number of problems mar the book. The writing is repetitive and verbose. Ungrammatical sentences, garbled passages, and faulty punctuation suggest a rushed author and inattentive copy editing. Carelessness extends to statements of fact: for example, several figures are identified as holding offices they held either earlier or later than at the time in question (this includes Andrei Gromyko, Hafez al-Assad, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Walter Scheel, and Hans-Jochen Vogel). Long list-like passages that detail Soviet-bloc arms shipments to Middle Eastern countries and the PLO appear in several chapters, but only at two junctures is any of the information tabulated (133-38, 361). These numerous passages certainly do make the point that the arms shipments were massive. But a better method of presentation might have improved readability while permitting greater analytical transparency and attention to change over time. Obvious typographical numerical errors (e.g., on p. 69) raise the suspicion of additional errors. At one point, a document from 1967 is used to make an argument about a fundamentally altered diplomatic context in 1969 (125). At another point, it is unclear whether a document is actually referring “to thwart[ing Israeli] settlements” or (as claimed) to a Palestinian wish to prevent “a negotiated settlement” (167-68, emphases added).

This type of carelessness is not helpful when one is “swimming against the current” (xiii). Yet, it must also be said that, with regard at least to the East Germans, Herf is very careful in another way that inspires confidence: he acknowledges seemingly contrary evidence (such as the curtailment of support for attacks in Europe) and then works to understand its significance. Herf also notes the West German government's temptation to prioritize oil over the “eleventh commandment” at the most dire moment in the history of the Jewish state: the Israeli brush with defeat in the first stage of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. All in all, Herf systematically mines his sources and pulls no punches in interpreting their significance. But he does not engage in low blows. His book thus provides a controversial but commendable brief for further discussion.