With its admission to the UN, East Germany joined in the Soviet-bloc propaganda campaign aimed at Israel and in its equally vigorous support for the Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Two months after East Germany's admission, Peter Florin (1921–2014), its ambassador to the UN from 1973 to 1982, wrote to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to comment on the 25th anniversary of the UN's “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” East Germany's domestic and foreign policies, Florin stated, were “aimed at preventing that the crimes of German imperialism and fascism perpetrated against the German people and the peoples of the world before and during the Second World War will ever recur.” East Germany reaffirmed its “solidarity with peoples struggling for freedom and independence, against [the] imperialist policy of aggression and colonialism” in Vietnam, Chile and South Africa. Further “it condemns the Israeli aggression and practices defying human rights in the illegally occupied Arab territories.” Florin recalled World War II and the crimes of the Nazi regime “against the German people and the peoples of the world.” He did not mention the crimes against Europe's Jews. Florin joined the majority in the UN General Assembly that was placing the language of human rights and anti-fascism in the service of a war against Israel.

The rearmament and training of the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces by the Soviet Union and its allies made it possible for Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, and Syria's president, Hafez al-Assad, to plan a new war that would at least regain the territories won by Israel in 1967. The extent of the Soviet-bloc rearmament effort became apparent in the first hours of the Yom Kippur War. On the afternoon of October 6, close to 100,000 Egyptian soldiers began the successful crossing of the Suez Canal. They overwhelmed Israel's Bar-Lev defense line in the Sinai Peninsula and destroyed 190 of the 300 tanks the Israelis had initially arrayed on that front. That same day, three Syrian infantry divisions supported by 600 Syrian tanks and about 80 artillery batteries attacked Israel's defenses in the Golan Heights. On October 7, two major air operations of the Israel air force failed to destroy Arab anti-aircraft positions in the north, largely because of the effectiveness of Soviet SAM-7 anti-aircraft weapons. Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Dayan feared that Israel might be destroyed.