Is Spielberg's MUNICH Biased Against Israel?

MunichSteven Spielberg's Munich, a portrayal of the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympics and Israel's counter-terrorist response, has generally received praise for its cinematic qualities. However, Spielberg's film is clearly critical of Israel's predominantly military approach to Palestinian nationalism. It suggests that counter-terror dehumanizes its practitioners and hardens both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict because of inevitable collateral damage. This perspective has drawn heavy fire from defenders of Israel's policies.

David Brooks (New York Times , December 11, 2005) speaks for many when he attacks the film for morally equating the Black September terrorists and those Israeli operatives who sought revenge against them in the aftermath of the massacre. In Brooks' view there is no comparison. Moreover, he maintains that Palestinian terrorism, because its practitioners are "Evil", cannot be eradicated through negotiations but only by force.

Many other American reviewers,Jewish and non-Jewish, have come to Spielberg's defense, lauding his effort to move beyond the reflexive pro-Israeli stance which has dominated the U.S. mainstream media coverage of the Mideast.

As for commentators from the Arab world, some  give him some credit for criticizing Israeli actions, but believe he still paints too negative a portrait of the Palestinians. A well-balanced article by Adla Massoud ( Al-Jazeera ,January 1, 2006) which provides a variety of opposing responses to the work by Jews and Arabs, quotes Amar Hijazi, second secretary of the Palestinian Authority at the U.N., as saying Munich depicts Palestinians as "an angry people." Fawad Turki in Arab View (December 27, 2005), an online compendium of the work of Mideast journalists, declares the film to be "pro-Israeli but not anti-Palestinian" and recommends it despite criticism of the film's accuracy with regard to the actions of the Israeli counter-terrorists after Munich.

When a work is both praised and criticized from so many different quarters the temptation is to say it must be doing something right and leave it at that. Certainly, the film will stimulate much needed debate in the U.S. where little has existed. But, while I think Munich does try to be more balanced than any Hollywood film before it, the filmmaker Spielberg trumped the political analyst Spielberg in a way that still places the Palestinian side at a decided disadvantage.

The heart of the film is the internal moral conflict expressed by some members of the Israeli assassination team, drawn from Mossad and military inteliigence, and charged with avenging the Olympic massacre by tracking down and killing those responsible. Avner, the main protagonist,  expresses increasing unease with the mission, based on fears that some targets might not have been actually involved in the Munich events, and that others might be innocent collateral damage  whose deaths are an inevitable by-product of targetting difficult to isolate culprits. Finally, Avner senses that the counter-terrorists are only replacing those leaders assassinated with successors from within the terrorist ranks and more importantly, collateral damage will generate new recruits. (Substitute President Bush's War on Terror and Iraq invasion for Munich and Spielberg's work can be read as more than a reflection on the past or even the Israel-Palestinian conflict).

All this makes for powerful drama, but is it based on fact? If not, what are the known facts? Spielberg's film opens with the statement that the work is "inspired" by a book, George Jonas' Vengeance. Jonas himself claims to have been the head of the counter-terror effort but the author's credibility has been widely challenged. Fortunately, Aaron Klein, Time magazine's correspondent for millitary and intelligence affairs stationed in Jerusalem, has written Striking Back:The 1972 Munich Olymics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response which is by all accounts the most reliable guide to the thoughts and actions of the avengers. In Klein's interview in the online news magazine Slate (December 23, 2005) he notes "In interviewing more than 50 veterans of the Mossad and military intelligence , I found not a single trace of remorse. On the contrary, Mossad's combatants thought they were doing holy work," a sentiment that no doubt Black September members shared.

Why does the claim that Israeli  hit-men were morally conflicted matter? Obviously this claim makes the film a far richer one than if it were simply an action movie based on a true historical event. But Munich does something else. It elevates Israelis above the Palestinians in regard to their moral stature. Spielberg's Palestinians only engage in terror. They never agonize and doubt their path on or off the job. The film does, however, go beyond depictions of "the other" as irrational sub-humans, as in such films as Blackhawk Down  which deliberately omits understandable reasons why Somalis turned against Americans, even though it was mentioned in Mark Bowen's book (pp.74-76) on which the film was based.  There is, for example, the handsome young terrorist who gives an impassioned plea for a return of Palestinians to their homeland, and we do see some of the targets as fully human. One terrorist has a cute child who plays the piano; another recites literature to a sidewalk audience in Italy, and in one extraordinary scene another jokes, unbeknownst to him, with his future assassin about the noisy sexcapades of young lovers soon to become collateral damage in a nearby hotel room. These are important steps, but nowhere does a Palestinian seem to have any qualms about his actions. Only Israelis do and, in case the audience hasn't registered this, one team member, a bombmaker, explicity says that he is having trouble reconciling his killing with how Jews are expected to be. Is there an equivalent (un-Palestinian) behavior that troubles any of the terrorists?

But what if, as is most likely the case, both sides end up with psychologically similar operatives who aren't troubled by second-thoughts? Paradise Now, a film about two would-be Palestinian suicide bombers shows how internal conflicts exist and must be resolved if one goes forward, or chooses not to.

One might argue the Israeli assassins are only killing terrorists who slaughtered innocent Olympians. Why should those tracking them down feel remorse when there is no moral equivalence between the two acts?

  Munich shows that some innocent people were killed by the counter-terrorists. What it neglects to mention is that the first assassinated alleged Olympic plotter, the poet Wael Zwaiter, was apparently an opponent of terrorism. In another case of mistaken identity, three hit-squad memebrs served a few years in prison in Norway when they mistook a Moroccan waiter for their intended target. The Israeli government paid his widow for the error.

In fact, Klein's book maintains only one of the people actually assassinated by the counter-terrorists was directly connected with Munich. Others were simply Palestinians who believed to be organized activists who might engage in terror. Moreover, targeted assassinations of Palestinian political militants had a long history pre-dating even the founding of Israel. Ha'aretz , a respected Israeli newspaper, conducted an interview in June 1991 with Shimon Somech, commander of the "mistarvim (Arab pretenders)" who, sometimes even disguised as women, killed political "troublemakers" in Palestine and environs from as far back as the early 1940s. Somech also was proud of his work. Indeed Zionist terrorist organizations attacked the British in the pre-statehood days, bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Menachem Begin, a future Israeli Prime Minister, was the leader of the terrorist organization Irgun in that era.

Munich then actually blurs an historically significant moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli counter-terrorists by focusing on one event which is particularly repugnant, although the Black September group, unlike today's suicide bombers, apparently took the athletes not to kill them but to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. The deaths resulted from a botched rescue mission, though there is no question the athletes died at the terrorist's hands. A clear and detailed account of the events and the Israeli response( which is sometimes hard to follow in the film) can be found in Wikopedia's online encyclopedia entry, "Munich Massacre." It should also be noted that while commando squads were assassinating individual targets the Israeli air force also bombed Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, killing hundreds of people at random who could in no way be linked to Munich or even terrorist inclinations. But these innocent victims were by their sheer numbers rendered anonymous, except, of course, to family and friends.

This brings us to the question of the larger historical context which is completely missing from Spielberg's work. No doubt, in an already lengthy film an additonal history lesson would be unappealing to most audience members. But if the filmmaker wants to bring reason to this subject and promote a future of diplomacy -not- bloodshed, there should have been some greater effort to revise a critical historical misperception in the U.S.: the belief that Israel was founded without aggression by people primarily motivated by a need to protect Jews from another genocide after the decimation inflicted by the Nazis.

Zionism in fact was a 19th century ethnic nationalist movement that long predated the rise of Hitler and Israel. Moreover, the founders of the state of Israel deliberately engaged in the ethnic cleansing of approximately 700,000 Palestinians occupying land that would become part of that new state. The evidence to support this last point is based largely on the work of Israeli historian Benny Morris whose book,The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisted (2004), documented the use of violence as part of official Zionist policy in that effort. Morris views have evolved to a point that he now justifies the expulsions as necessary to forge a Jewish state (see his profile and interview with Ha'aretz in Wikopedia). He does not deny the price Palestinians paid and recognizes that his loyalties are tied to his ethnic identity. He advances a rather peculiar moral claim that the Arabs have many nations so Jews should be allowed to have one.(Unless one believes all Arabs are the same why should Palestinians willingly become members of another nation instead of their own, even if, as is unlikely,others were willing to take them? A more just policy would have given European Jews who survived the Nazi death machine prime land in Germany since German policies were responsible for their genocide. Of course, the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and immense property losses and the majority of their victims were not Jews. So there could well have been many other claimants for reparations in the form of German territory among the homeless survivors of WWII.

Jews believe, rightly, that people should never forget the Nazi genocide, but why must the Palestinians forgive and forget their own suffering and not believe the state of Israel illegitimate? If one puts the Palestinian-Israeli terror and counter-terror in this larger context one might question moral equivalence from the opposite perspective and find it easier to justify attacks even on all Israeli civilians.But one does not have to go that far unless one believes in collective guilt, which I do not. Moreover, most Palestinians are prepared to accept the existence of Israel according to respected polls, just not an Israel that chokes off their own aspirations for a geographically and economically viable nation.

Munich ultimately is not an ant-Israel film at all. It does tarnish slightly the myth of Israeli innocence and for sheltered U.S. audiences, this is a major advance. But it ducks harder choices and this is one reason perhaps why mainstream Jewish organizations have not been overly harsh in appraising the film. Perhaps next time Spielberg could fashion an even more challenging film, one that looks at the conflict from a historically rooted Palestinian perspective, an Amistad for our time.

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