"Munich" Is NOT A Holiday Film!

The day after Christmas, I stood in line at one of the suburban cinema palaces (20+ screens) to see Spielberg's "serious film of 2005": "Munich." I thought that I would be alone (virtually) in the single venue assigned to this grim film, but it was SRO. Terrorism, Zionism, and Paybackism are tough fare for a holiday film audience. I viewed this film in the vicinity of the "People's Republic of Austin," as the red-meat, right-wing majority (outside Austin) terms it. So, the crowd — in retrospect — should not have surprised. Of course, multiple screens were devoted to "great" films like "King Kong" and "The Family Stone," and whatever. The terror visited upon the so-called Palestinian masterminds of the 1972 Olympics horror in Munich is imagined in less than "Saving Private Ryan" detail. Steven Spielberg and his scriptwriters created a plausible account of the assassins dispatched by Israel's Mossad (national security agency) to extract an "eye for an eye" penalty upon the Palestinian planners of the Munich horror of 1972. Eventually, 9 of the 11 Palestinian "masterminds" were assassinated (both on-screen and off-) and — of course — there has been no violence between Palestinians and Israelis since that time. If this is (fair & balanced) despair over the human condition, so be it.

[x The New York Times]
Connections: Seeing Terrorism as Drama With Sequels and Prequels
By Edward Rothstein

"There's no peace at the end of this," warns Avner, the morally anguished Mossad assassin, as Steven Spielberg's new film, "Munich," draws to a close. And by "this" he means the targeted killings that Israel is said to have begun after 11 of its athletes were murdered at the 1972 Olympics by members of the Palestinian Black September offshoot of Fatah.

But Mr. Spielberg, in collaboration with his screenwriters, Eric Roth and the playwright Tony Kushner, also has a different "this" in mind. The camera pointedly settles on the period's skyline of lower Manhattan, showing the World Trade Center in sharp relief.

The warning and image are meant to suggest that militant attempts to destroy terrorism lead not to peace but to cycles of violence, and that the 9/11 attacks may even be consequences of Israel's response to the Munich massacre. A war on terror amplifies terror. Moreover, the movie teaches, opposing sides begin to resemble each other. Moral credibility is destroyed along with hope.

The same argument is being made now about the war in Iraq, of course, as well as about Israel's continuing responses to terrorism. Indeed, before "Munich" opened, when it was reported that the film would emphasize the ethical qualms of the Mossad assassins, Mr. Spielberg explained, "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today." But can we? Though said to be "inspired by real events," Mr. Spielberg's film taps into a highly influential theory about terrorism that itself bears little relation to what is known about this history.

The theory asserts that terrorism is a violent and extreme reaction to injustice - the last resort of the oppressed. Typically, this injustice theory is used to explain left-wing terrorism. It not only coincides with the justifications offered by terrorists themselves, but it also accompanies a belief that a just cause lies behind the terrorist attack. The theory is never applied to right-wing terrorism - whether of the brown-shirt or Timothy McVeigh variety - and thus pre-selects its proofs.

Accepting the theory also leads to other convictions. If terrorism is solely the result of injustice, then without the injustice there would be no terrorism. So the best response is to work for justice. Threats, vengeance, security strictures - anything other than the addressing of legitimate grievances is ultimately futile. In particular, since killing terrorists does nothing to alter injustice, it will do nothing to alter terror. Instead, it only leads to more injustice, turning the victims of terrorism into mirror images of the terrorists themselves.

The theory and its prescriptions are the guiding presence in "Munich." Mr. Spielberg doesn't have to show the terrorists as sympathetic characters, and they aren't; the theory fully acknowledges that terrorism is morally grotesque. The question is how to respond to it. The film tries to show that Israel made the wrong choice. The Israeli agents are given an education in the injustice theory.

Along the way, of course, the injustice is acknowledged: a Mossad agent and a Palestinian terrorist both express their attachments to the same land. But the Israelis are tainted by blindness, by a failure to understand. Thus, Avner's mother sounds like a terrorist herself in her amoral declaration about Israel: "Whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth at last." Golda Meir shows her own lack of perception when she establishes the Mossad team. "I don't know who these maniacs are," she proclaims about the Munich terrorists.

Gradually, as the assassinations begin, the moral weight of their acts brings the team of assassins close to breakdown. Avner (played by Eric Bana) hesitates before shooting one of his targets. The Mossad agents argue about whether they should rejoice in their success. One suggests that the Palestinians learned their tactics from the Israelis. Another, pointing to increasing acts of terror around the world in apparent response to their success, says, "All the blood comes back to us." By the end of the movie, Avner thinks the Israelis are going to kill him. He renounces his country. And he warns of a cycle of violence.

But the film is so intent on its theory that it eagerly departs from previous accounts - or even plausibility about how Mossad agents might act. It supposedly takes its guidance from George Jonas's contested 1984 book, "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team," which is itself presented as an account based upon the recollections of the disenchanted head of the Mossad team. But Mr. Jonas's Avner, unlike Mr. Spielberg's, is not paralyzed by moral doubt; Mr. Jonas writes that he has "absolutely no qualms about anything they did."

Moreover, the film, to make its argument about the cycle of violence, ends up treating the Munich massacre almost as if it were the original act of Palestinian terror. The elimination of context makes the Israeli response seem intemperate, while all future acts of Palestinian terror are treated as if they were responses to the Israeli assassinations. But as the historical Meir well knew, in the years before Munich, maniacal terrorists aligned with the Palestinian cause had bombed a Swissair jet, thrown hand grenades into crowds at Israel's airport, hijacked planes and associated themselves with other terror groups trained and partly financed by the Soviet Union. These, like the attacks that followed Munich, were part of a continuing war, not evidence of an amorphous cycle of violence that developed out of Israel's attempts to undermine terror.

Aaron J. Klein's new book, "Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response" (Random House) based on interviews with unnamed Mossad agents, casts doubt even on the existence of Avner's assassination team, portraying instead a series of individual acts that had mixed success. But Mr. Klein suggests that one of the attacks portrayed in the movie actually succeeded in making a "searing impression in the Arab world," helping increase fear and deter terror. He points out: "The numbers show a steep slide in the frequency of terror attacks against Israelis and Israeli institutions abroad from 1974 to the present."

The precise truth of what happened is mired in the secrets of spycraft, but the film shapes the sources and evidence to lend support to the injustice theory. Which poses a challenge for Mr. Spielberg: How does he propose to undermine terror? Simple: by eliminating injustice and increasing understanding. Mr. Spielberg has said that he will be buying 250 video cameras and distributing them to Palestinian and Israeli children so they can share films about their own lives. Perhaps there will be peace, then, at the end of that?

After award-winning terms as music critic for The New Republic and chief music critic for the New York Times, Edward Rothstein (PhD, Chicago) is now cultural critic-at-large for the Times, writing in the Arts & Ideas section on culture, literature, music, intellectual life, and technology—in articles that move from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Fab Five to Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School in two paragraphs. "Connections," a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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