With the “Operation Peace for Galilee,” Israel forces crossed into Lebanon on June 6, 1982, to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure and put an end to the terrorist campaign it was waging against northern Israel. East Germany and the West German radical Left claimed that Israel's attack on the PLO was comparable to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and that Israel was adopting a policy of genocide and mass murder against Palestinians and Lebanese civilians. The East German regime made these accusations on the front pages of Neues Deutschland and at the United Nations. West German leftists repeated the charges in leaflets and at demonstrations. The accusations became standard fare in the entire Soviet bloc and the global Left. They struck a nerve, but they were not true. The television images of a modern army attacking a guerrilla force embedded near or in civilian areas also sent grim images of unintended civilian casualties. Yet the attribution of genocidal policy to the Jewish state conformed to an anti-Zionist ideology that by then had conquered the United Nations and found support in part of the media in the West as well. The murder of innocents was a theme that resonated with older accusations made against the Jews. Yet those accusations were also fueled by rage that was accompanying the collapse of hopes of the PLO and its Soviet-bloc patrons of achieving victory in the Middle East by the PLO's terrorist war.

In the pages of Neues Deutschland, then edited by the veteran journalist Gunter Schabowski, the East German regime immediately threw its support to the PLO. On June 9, ND placed Arafat's “urgent call for help” against “Israeli aggression” on page 1. On the same day, in a statement sent to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, the SED Central Committee said Israel's “renewed aggression” was “all the more detestable” as it took place when the Soviet Union, East Germany, and “other socialist states” were “insisting on having the Middle East problem solved by negotiation.” In view of Honecker's support for the right of return just three months earlier, it was a dubious claim.