Distinguished University Professor Jeffrey Herf’S Undeclared Wars With Israel Appears To High Praise

Jeffrey Herf’s most recent book Undeclared Wars with Israel was praised by Die Zeit.

Jeffrey Herf’s most recent book Undeclared Wars with Israel examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations - ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries - from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. This period encompasses the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an ongoing campaign of terrorism waged by the Palestine Liberation Organization against Israeli civilians. The book provides new insights into the West German radicals who collaborated in 'actions' with Palestinian terrorist groups, and confirms that East Germany, along with others in the Soviet Bloc, had a much greater impact on the conflict in the Middle East than has been generally known.

In the July 11 2016 Feuilleton section of Die Zeit, Richard Herzinger praised Herf’s exhaustive study for shining light on one of the darkest chapters of the history of the East German Democratic Republic (DDR) and for bearing witness to the moral equivocation and antipathies that kept alive antisemitism in the Federal Republic (BRD) under the cloak of anti-Zionist rhetoric. Herzinger is editor of Die Zeit, one of Germany’s papers of record.