In order to appreciate the relationship between the West German radical left and the Palestinian resistance, it may be helpful to take a brief look at the history of West German support for Israel.
Although the two countries did not exchange embassies until the mid-1960s, there had been contact and cooperation well before then. Throughout this period, this contact was understandably marked by the recent genocide that had almost ended Jewish civilization in Europe, and had led to the creation of the Israeli colonial state in 1949. Contrary to expectations, however, the two countries would quickly become close allies, for regardless of the feelings of many citizens, each one had its own reasons to use the Holocaust as a stepping-stone to future goals.
The first official agreement between the two governments came about in 1952, when the FRG signed the Luxembourg Agreement, promising to deliver a total of three billion marks worth of reparations (mainly in the form of goods) to Israel over a period of fourteen years.1 The FRG was literally building the Israeli economy, helping to provide the west with its beachhead in the Middle East.
By the end of the decade, the Luxembourg Agreement was supplemented by a plan to give—not sell—arms and materiel to the Israeli military. What started as motor vehicles, training aircraft, and helicopters was soon extended to include anti-tank rockets and other shooting weapons.2 By the mid-sixties, the FRG was delivering “aircraft including Noratlas transporters, Dornier DO-27 communication planes and French ‘Fouga Magister’ jet trainers, anti-aircraft guns with electronic homing devices, helicopters, howitzers, submarines, and speedboats.”3 Some claimed that 5,000 Israeli officers and soldiers had been trained by the Bundeswehr in West Germany.4
Right from its inception, Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing: harassing, terrorizing, and murdering Palestinians in order to free up more land for Jewish settlers. Through its financial and military assistance, the FRG was directly complicit with this process, almost right from the start.
Unlike the reparations payments, the military aid and training was kept strictly secret. The Israeli government feared that its own population, which included a large number of Holocaust survivors, would vote them out of office if they learned that they were being armed and trained by the very Germans who so recently had carried out genocide against their people. The West German government was also wary of domestic repercussions, as the idea of getting involved in an international flashpoint like the Middle East was expected to be unpopular so soon after the Second World War. But much more importantly, the West German government was worried that such military support would alienate Arab governments, especially Egypt, perhaps even pushing them closer to the Soviet Bloc.
As it turns out, this is exactly what happened.
On October 26, 1964, the Frankfurter Rundschau broke the story. Despite initial denials from both Bonn and Tel Aviv, within days, both governments were forced to admit that military arms and training had been provided since 1959. Reaction across the Arab world was quick in coming, one Egyptian journalist observing that “Germany, who wants to make up for the sins of the Nazi regime, makes the Arabs pay with their security.”5 Within a year, Egypt’s Nasser had arranged for the East German leader Walther Ulbricht to visit Cairo, and the FRG’s contacts throughout the Arab world suffered greatly.
Nevertheless, though the arms shipments were cut off in 1965, the FRG remained Israel’s staunchest European ally. The opportunity to prove this came soon enough.
On June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egyptian forces in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip with air strikes and tanks, beginning what became known as the Six Day War. (Just two weeks previously, the FRG had delivered a final shipment of 800 troop transports.)6 Soon, both Syria and Jordan entered the conflict in support of Egypt. Nevertheless, thanks to its far greater military capacity, Israel quickly routed all three Arab armies, seizing the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. As a measure of the military imbalance, barely 1,000 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in this conflict, compared to over 11,000 Egyptians, 700 Jordanians, and 2,500 Syrians.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the newly occupied territories, swelling the numbers in the hellish Jordanian refugee camps, while over 600,000 remained as newly colonized subjects of the racist Israeli state.
Back in the FRG, the Six Day War provided the occasion for a strangely unhealthy—but highly revealing—identification with the Israeli aggressors. The SPD, the CDU, and the Springer Press all went into overdrive, whipping up war frenzy throughout the country, even as Bonn professed that it would not intervene. As Chancellor Kiesinger, the former Nazi, explained it, “our non-intervention, i.e. neutrality in the sense of international law, cannot mean moral indifference or indolence of the heart.”1
City governments sent hundreds of thousands of marks in donations, and hundreds of thousands more were contributed by individual citizens to the German-Israeli Society,2 while the West German Federation of Trade Unions invested three million marks in Israeli bonds, “as a visible expression of solidarity with and confidence in Israel.”3 Parallel to this, development aid credits to Israel’s Arab neighbors were frozen and German development aid workers were flown home.4
Hundreds of volunteers were recruited and flown from Munich and the NATO Rhine-Main Airport to support Israel in the war zone.5 While the West German government insisted that these volunteers were only engaged in “non-military” activities, East German newspapers claimed that many were in fact serving as soldiers.6
In newspapers and magazines, most especially the Springer Press, the Israeli attack was described in eerily nostalgic terms. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was praised as a new “desert fox,”7 a term that had previously been reserved for Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s Commander-in-Chief in North Africa. Israel was now the “brother nation,” with the Israelis dubbed the “Prussians of the Middle East,” and Jerusalem being “the Berlin of the Middle East.”8 The Israeli offensive was approvingly referred to as a “Blitzkrieg,” and in Spiegel it was announced that “Jews are not as anti-Semites wanted to see them. On the contrary, danger seems not to develop the evil but the noble qualities”—which is the kind of compliment that isn’t one, when you think about it. A Die Welt writer was similarly forthright, admitting that Israel had “overcome our anti-Semitism.”9
Other than actual neo-nazis, the only German support for the Palestinian side at this time came from the APO. The SDS was already pro-Palestinian,10 but it was this war frenzy that pushed the entire New Left to become anti-Zionist.11 This fact, along with the odd identification with Israel on the part of the militaristic German right-wing, should be remembered when considering the assertion comrades would soon make that Israel represented the “new Nazism”: while obviously incorrect, such a claim was at least partly a reaction against a reinvigorated German chauvinism projecting itself onto the racist Jewish state.
As such, anti-Zionism became a defining element of the radical left, and, as the 1970s dawned, it was shared by the K-groups, the spontis, and most certainly the guerilla.