Up until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the New Left in Western Europe and America maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Zionism; thereafter, it embraced the anti-Zionism of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments. Jeffrey Herf explains East Germany’s continuous record of hostility to Israel, the adoption of the same attitude by the radical Left in West Germany following the Six-Day War, and the anti-Semitism that persisted just below the surface in both countries:
One striking feature of both the East German Communist regime and the West German radical Left was a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older anti-Semitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist, and even exterminatory. . . .
[Another] distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel, first in the Soviet bloc and then in the global New Left, was the indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel’s enemies spread lies about Zionism’s racist nature and their willingness to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of anti-Semitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel’s victory in June 1967. . . .
[L]eftist Holocaust inversion [link to Kramer] rested on very old and false [claims] of enormous power and great evil that religious and secular anti-Semites had attributed to the Jews. Rather than acknowledge that the Jews, like any other nation with a state of its own, had defended themselves against a real threat and won a war, the Communists and the radical Left applied to the state of Israel the negative [stereotypes] once applied to the Jews of Europe. While anti-Semites before 1945 had described the Jews as the center of a powerful international conspiracy, the anti-Zionists of the cold-war era described Israel as the spearhead in the Middle East of a conspiracy led by the U.S. and supported by West Germany. . . . In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the idea of the powerful and evil Jew, so familiar in the history of European anti-Semitism, assumed a new form of a powerful and evil Israel.
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/1967-and-the-global-left-the-case-of-the-east-german-regime-and-the-west-german-radicals/