The preceding chapters confirm that the East German government combined hostile words with secret military assistance to the Arab states and the Palestinian terrorist organizations at war with Israel. In West Germany, the terrorist activities of the Revolutionary Cells, the Red Army Faction, the June 2nd Movement, their collaboration with Palestinian terrorist organizations, as well as the anti-Israeli propaganda of the other radical leftist organizations, were public knowledge at the time. These assaults on Israel were never merely a criticism of Israel's policies. At its core, the Communist regime in East Berlin and the radical Left in West Germany rejected Israel's moral legitimacy and thus its right to exist as an independent state. In contrast to the German tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, they tried to do a great deal of harm to the Jews and to Israel. Had their Arab and Palestinian allies been successful, Israel would have been destroyed by force of arms. Though it remained undeclared, East Germany and the West German radical leftists were, in effect also at war with Israel. Without moral qualms, they abetted those who made no secret of their desire to kill, injure, harm, and terrorize Israelis. East German diplomats emitted a rhetorical fog about moderation and negotiated solutions based on United Nations resolutions while placing the entire blame for the Israel-Arab-Palestinian conflict on Israel. Simultaneously, and in secrecy, the flow of weapons, military training, and intelligence cooperation from East Germany solidified alliances with Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the various Palestinian terror organizations represented on the PLO's Executive Committee.

A great and bitter irony of the Communist and leftist war against Israel was that its advocates often presented it as a second war against fascism, this time embodied in the Jewish state. During World War II, the Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany with the slogans of anti-fascism. While “the Jewish question” had always been a marginal theme for the Communists even during that war, the emergence of Communist and leftist anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the postwar decades replaced marginality with open hostility. Both the East German state and the members of the radical Left in West Germany seemed not to have known that the Nazi regime had been an emphatic enemy of Zionism and that it too hoped that its hatred of Zionism would gain it friends among the Arabs.