Book Reviews

Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars With Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 493 pp. $29.99.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kopstein, University of California, Irvine

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 Re- public (GDR) and the extreme-left opposition in West Germany supported Palestinian Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/217/700114/jcws_r_00689.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 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 a` la the Nazis and separated their hostages into Jewish and non-Jewish groups.

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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 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/217/700114/jcws_r_00689.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 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 newspaper cartoons that drew on traditional anti- Semitic tropes of Jewish grasping, greed, and hidden power), it also criticized the very use of the word “terrorism” to describe the dozens and dozens of bombings, shootings, and shellings deliberately targeting Israeli civilians in the decades after 1967. Behind closed doors, however, things were different. East German officials did not hesitate to use the word “terrorism” when talking with Arab diplomats or in internal State Security (Stasi) reports. They knew very well what they were doing. The GDR played a tricky game in supporting Arab terrorists, with the risk of angering the Western allies. Herf describes the East German doctrine regarding terrorism as “Eurocentric.” Killing civilian Jews in Israel or elsewhere in the developing world was praiseworthy “resistance.” In Europe, however, terrorism was forbidden. The Stasi insisted on this with their Palestinian clients. The U.S. government warned the Soviet authorities about security risks associated with opening a PLO embassy in East Berlin because it provided easy access to the West. The Stasi kept their Palestinians guests on a short leash. Oil wealth, however, afforded the Libyan government a degree of independence, and in 1986 agents from their embassy in East Berlin bombed a discotheque in West Berlin frequented by U.S. military personnel. The expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 marked a huge defeat for the Soviet loc’s strategy, but East Germany and its Arab partners sustained their mutual admiration until the regime’s collapse. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and PLFP founder George Habash both worried about the political changes in the Soviet bloc and the loss of their most ardent friends in East Germany. They were right to be worried because one of the first acts of the post-Communist government in East Germany in 1990, before unification, was to apologize for having supported decades of violence and to renounce all treaties with its erstwhile Arab clients. Herf ’s book is a landmark of scholarship on this understudied and tragic episode of German-Jewish relations. Two elements of context would have strengthened the book: first, some deeper discussion of the Palestinian question and Arab reasoning and, second, a more extensive consideration of how East German policy fit into the more general Soviet attitude towards Jews and Zionism. Some of my favorite passages in the book are those that ponder the motivation of the East German regime and its leaders to act as they did. It is not a simple

218 Book Reviews question. Political expediency undoubtedly drove much of their actions, but it is hard to ignore the anti-Semitic stereotypes in some of the GDR’s public stances; and senior Communist officials were certainly more than willing to indulge the not very well concealed anti-Semitism of their Arab interlocutors. In any case, twenty years after the Holocaust how can we not use the word “anti-Semitic” to describe German leaders who promoted and taught the killing of Jewish civilians? Even more profound than the (ultimately failed) policy of trying to destroy Israel by supporting its enemies may be the impact of so many years of poisonous propaganda Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/18/4/217/700114/jcws_r_00689.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 on the minds of ordinary East Germans. It is here, in particular, that historians may wish to build on Herf ’s fine study of East German policy. What were the effects of decades of distortion and moral degeneracy on the population? Did it bother ordinary East Germans that their leaders supported a terrorist organization that killed relatives of the same people their grandparents had annihilated? Those interested in answering these questions will have to start with Herf ’s study. ✣✣✣

Stephen G. Craft, American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 267 pp. $45.00.

Reviewed by Hsiao-ting Lin, Stanford University

One spring evening in 1957, in a small house outside Taipei, the wife of U.S. Army Master Sergeant Robert G. Reynolds screamed for her husband. Someone had peeped at her through a bathroom window while she was in the shower. Reynolds grabbed his pistol, rushed outside, and shot a Chinese man, Liu Ziran, who was in their garden. In keeping with bilateral agreements, a U.S. military court in Taipei tried Reynolds for manslaughter. On 23 May 1957 the court found the sergeant innocent, and a U.S. Air Force plane flew him and his wife to the Philippines the next day, provoking an uproar in the Taiwan press. Liu’s widow tearfully protested in front of the U.S. embassy in Taipei, and her woes were broadcast throughout the island. Hundreds of young demonstrators began gathering outside the U.S. embassy to protest the acquittal, and by midday the original crowd of 200 had swelled to 6,000. In mid-afternoon, rumors that Reynolds had departed Taiwan sparked riots that escalated into violent rampages against the embassy and the nearby U.S. Information Agency (USIA) facility. Order was not restored until the evening of 24 May, when 33,000 Nationalist troops were deployed. Two days later, President Chiang Kai-shek offered his personal apologies to the U.S. government, and U.S.-Taiwan relations returned to normalcy shortly thereafter. Both the U.S. embassy and the USIA subsequently received compensation from Taipei. The May 1957 Taiwan riots, which Stephan G. Craft deftly recounts in his book, provide a crucial case study of the cultural fault lines between Taipei and Washington and a poignant example of the curious intersection of state politics, nationalism, and

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