I began work on this book in spring 2011 in Maryland. Yet it had its actual beginnings in the academic year of 1978–1979 when I lived in Frankfurt/Main, West Germany while doing research for my doctoral dissertation. I heard stories about two members of the Frankfurt leftist scene who had wound up in Entebbe pointing machine guns at unarmed Jews – before Israeli paratroopers arrived to free the hostages and kill the terrorists in a firefight. Why were West German radicals doing that? Why were the East German Communists, who had fought the Nazis and celebrated their anti-fascist traditions, giving aid to Israel's enemies and embracing Yasser Arafat on the front pages of their government controlled press? As I delved more deeply into the project, my interest in why these Germans acted as they did continued but gradually gave way to a historian's desire to establish that these, to my mind, unexpected events actually took place. So this became a book about both political passions as well as a multitude of details about weapons of war and terror and political warfare. It became a book about the anti-Israeli passion in Germany as well as about the resistance to it waged by the government of Israel, Jewish leaders in West Germany, by some political and public figures in West Germany and by the United States government. Historians know that facts do not speak for themselves. They must first be found, selected and interpreted. I hope the reader will agree that the following pages shed light on a subject as heated as any of modern history.