One of the most striking visual images of the era of East Germany's undeclared war with Israel was captured in a photo of March 11, 1978 in East Berlin. It shows Yasser Arafat accompanied by Gerhard Grüneberg and others walking solemnly into the memorial to “the victims of fascism and militarism” on the famed Unter den Linden Strasse. Soldiers of East Germany's National People's Army stand at attention in the background as Arafat pays his respects to the victims of Nazi Germany's war on the Eastern Front in World War II. (See Figure 11.1). The photo captures the transformation of the meaning of anti-fascism in the Soviet bloc and in East Germany that made it possible for the East Germans to ask Arafat, then at war with the Jewish state, to pay homage to Nazism's victims. Communist anti-fascism had long become compatible with ideological and military anti-Zionism. This transformation of anti-fascism's meaning in public political culture had its counterpart in continuing Soviet-bloc, including East German, military assistance to the PLO.

By the mid-1970s, the West German press reports mentioned East German military assistance to radical movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, including the PLO. The archives of the East German regime, especially the files of its Ministries of Defense, Foreign Affairs, State Security, Politburo, and Council of Ministers, offer abundant evidence of the intensification and expansion of those activities. What was sometimes called a “second Cold War” erupted in Europe as the Soviet Union expanded intermediate-range nuclear missile forces and conducted a vigorous “peace campaign” intended to block NATO's “double-track decision” of 1979. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, stung by Egypt's departure from the Arab “rejection front,” also went on the political and military offensive. Yet both in Western Europe and in Israel, Soviet pressure led to a Western reaction. In retrospect, Israel's June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, “Operation Peace for Galilee,” and the implementation in fall 1983 of NATO's double-track decision of 1979 in Western Europe indicated that the United States and its allies, including Israel, were shifting the “correlation of forces” in world politics against the Soviet bloc and, in the Middle East, against the rejectionist Arab states and the PLO.