In the West German New Left, the turn against Israel emerged between June and September 1967. For all of its criticisms of actually existing Communist regimes during the preceding decades, the West German New Left shared much of the criticism of Israel that had been coming from East Berlin. As in the East so now in the West, radical leftist activists transformed the Jewish victims of the past into the Zionist and Israeli aggressors, expellers, exploiters, colonialists, and even racists of the present. It was in these months that leaders of the West German New Left increasingly interpreted Israel through the prism of Marxism or Marxist-Leninism and therefore placed it on the wrong side of the central global divide between “imperialism” and “national liberation.” Israel's West German New Left antagonists now placed the language of leftist anti-fascism, which had previously fostered support for the Jewish state and the survivors of the Holocaust, in the service of attacking that very same state and its people. If only, as one prominent leftist wrote, the West German Left could free itself from its “Jewish complex” – that is, supposed guilty feelings about the Holocaust – it would be able to express solidarity with the Palestinians and fight the new fascism in the form of the state of Israel. The attack on and even reversal of the meaning of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “coming to terms with the past,” was a distinctive contribution of the West German radical Left from 1967 to 1969. And for some, this redefinition was important in offering West German leftist support for Palestinian terrorist organizations in the years to come.

From 1949 to 1967, the preeminent stance of non-Communist leftist and left-liberal opinion in West Germany was emphatically pro-Israeli. The unspoken eleventh commandment of postwar West German public life – do no more harm to the Jews – was part of the Social Democratic and left-liberal political and moral engagement as well. Though they differed with Adenauer's conservative government of 1949 to 1963 on a range of issues, the Social Democrats shared Adenauer's empathy for Israel.