Playing the anti-Israeli card proved beneficial to the East German regime. In 1954, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer adopted a policy named for Walter Hallstein, his state secretary in the Foreign Ministry. According to what was called “the Hallstein doctrine,” East Germany had no moral or political legitimacy because it was a dictatorship kept in power by the presence of the Red Army. In the hopes of winning a political battle that would culminate with the collapse of the East German regime, Adenauer and Hallstein insisted that the Federal Republic would refuse to have diplomatic relations with any government that established diplomatic relations with East Germany. Thus a primary goal of East German foreign policy was to shatter the Hallstein doctrine by finding states beyond the Warsaw Pact that would be willing to open diplomatic relations with East Germany and thus risk the anger of the much larger, more economically powerful Federal Republic. East Germany's partisanship for the Arab states and against Israel played a central role in its successful effort to shatter the Hallstein doctrine, break out of global isolation, and establish diplomatic relations with states in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Otto Winzer, East Germany's foreign minister, led the successful diplomatic breakthrough of spring and summer 1969. His political activity began in 1919 when he joined the new German Communist Party (KPD). In the 1920s, he worked in Communist-affiliated publishing firms in Berlin and Vienna. He fled from Nazi Germany in 1934 to Paris, where he edited a Communist youth magazine. In 1935 he traveled to Moscow, where he again worked in publishing. From 1941 to 1945, he was editorial director of the Soviet German-language radio broadcast “The Home Front Calls the Front” (Die Heimat ruft die Front) and was a member of the National Committee for a Free Germany, the Communists’ effort to appeal to German soldiers and POWs. He returned to Berlin in 1945 with the group around Walter Ulbricht and became a member of the KPD Central Committee in 1947. From 1949 to 1956 he was the chief of staff in the office of East German President Wilhelm Pieck. There he joined in the attack on the veteran Communist Leo Zuckermann, who, with Paul Merker, supported restitution payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and warm relations with Israel.