Misguided ‘Munich’

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The New York Sun

Surprisingly, the most pro-Israel film of the new decade isn’t Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” but Stephen Gaghan’s “Syriana.” Here’s why: Mr. Gaghan’s film explores the vast tapestry of American relations in the Middle East and wider Muslim world through the prism of oil, Islamic terrorism, the CIA, Arab reformers and Arab reactionaries and Iranian duplicity.


What puts the film at the top of my own Zionist Academy Award list is what’s missing from “Syriana”: Israel and Jews don’t merit a mention.


The failure to take note of Israel and Jews is not accidental, nor is it the result of a desire to avoid adding an additional layer of complexity to a film already burdened with excess complexity. The book upon which the book is loosely based, former CIA agent Bob Baer’s “See No Evil,” does not even list Israel in the index.


In fact, Mr. Baer says early on that “the Arab-Israeli conflict” was among the passing “fashions” in Washington that allowed the CIA to avoid the real issue – Islamic radicalism and Arab hatred of America.


Thus, the Baer-Gaghan decision to make an argument about corporate greed, the Middle East, and Islamic extremism without reference to the Jewish state is an articulate refutation of the thesis that Israel (and American support for Israel) is to blame as the principle cause of Islamic unrest and anger at America.


The view that Israel is to blame is the subtext for polls like the recent Zogby survey of opinion in Arab countries that find Arabs upset with American policies, not American values. They don’t hate us for what we are, we are told, but for what we do – among other things, for supporting Israel.


Just compare that to the inescapable message at the end of Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” As the central character, Avner, walks away from a meeting with his former Mossad handler, you see the Twin Towers in the distance: we got 9/11 because the Palestinian issue was left to fester all these years, the film is telling us. What else could that final scene mean?


Mr. Spielberg and playwright Tony Kushner must have been reading remarks by the late Eugene McCarthy, who following September 11, 2001, said, “You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen.”


Mr. McCarthy added, “No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians.” (What was he smoking? September 11 came a year after Yasser Arafat walked out of Camp David, spurning an American-Israeli offer that, had it been accepted, would have by now seen the emergence of a full-blown Palestinian state in nearly all of the territories which fell to Israel in 1967. No concern for the Palestinians? Arafat was the most frequent foreign visitor at the Clinton White House – ahead of the leaders of Russia, England, France, China, and India. No concern for the Palestinians?)


Writing in the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier says “Munich” can be seen “as a parable of American policy since Sept. 11.” But if so, it is the flawed parable so common to large parts of the left and the paleo-conservative right who share the film’s preference for “a discussion of counter-terrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or [who] thinks that they are the same discussion.”


“Munich” follows the story of Avner, a Mossad operative brought in by Golda Meir to track down and kill Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The task takes its toll – and not among the terrorists. Avner and his crew are ravaged by guilt and paranoia. Eventually, Avner questions his mission, and cannot accept his mother’s statement that he, the strong avenging Jew, is what her family prayed for when they perished in the Holocaust.


Had the film limited itself to the observation that we have become coarser and our lives more vulgar as we followed terrorists down their rat holes, it might have been a point worth making. But “Munich” tells us that the conflict over counter-terrorism forces Avner to abandon Israel altogether, estranged and paranoid, and agonized over the targeted assassinations of Palestinian terrorists in retaliation for the massacre of the Israeli athletes.


Avner rejects Efraim’s entreaties to repatriate himself and his family to Israel, while Efraim dismisses Avner’s questions about the lack of evidence against the terrorists he killed and Israel’s preference for killing them rather than bringing them to trial. Avner then invites Efraim to join him for dinner at his Brooklyn home, insisting that there is some “Jewish” thing about hosting a Jew who is a stranger in your city. Efraim turns him down and walks away.


This scene tells us that the Jew in us can no longer co-exist with the Israeli; that the humane and reflective side of the Jewish experience has split off from Israeli aggressiveness and the culture of violence.


The tension between Avner and Efraim mirrors the war within Mr. Kushner, who once wrote that “I want the State of Israel to exist (since it does anyway) and at the same time … I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.”


All that said, Munich does not deserve all of the fire it has already drawn. In his December 11 New York Times column, David Brooks faulted director Steven Spielberg for focusing on an the Israeli-Palestinian struggle through the prism of an event more than 30 years old because it allows him to avoid dealing with Islamic radicalism. But there is an important point to be made here, on Mr. Spielberg’s behalf, as it were: by today’s standards, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle back then was virtually a cricket match. Bloody as hell, to be sure – just watch the moments in “Munich” when the terrorists slaughter the unarmed Israeli athletes. But compare it to suicide bombings. Mr. Spielberg’s Palestinian terrorists wanted to live. Rather than blame Israel for September 11, as “Munich” appears to do, it would have more profitable to observe through the film the decline among the Palestinians of the secular nationalist argument and its replacement by an uncompromising Islamism.


Not that the secularists were much less uncompromising. You wouldn’t know from the case made by the Palestinian terrorist in “Munich” that, even then, the Palestinians would settle only for the complete elimination of Israel. As late as 1983, PLO moderates prepared to accept a compromise “two-state solution,” like Issam Sartawi, were shot dead by “intransigent” Palestinian rivals for the sin of having pioneered dialogue with Israeli doves.


By focusing on counter-terrorism and the unraveling of the Israeli position, the film opens itself to the bad odor of moral equivalency.


The odor is even more present in Mr. Spielberg’s remarks to Richard Schickel in the December 12 Time Magazine, that “the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.” This is what now passes for moral heroism in Hollywood – a form of cowardice based on an inability to commit to a position, to render an actual moral judgment.


This is not to say that there is no problem of intransigence on the Israeli side, only that it is marginalized as compared to dominant, while among the Palestinians the proportions are reversed. That is a distinction too difficult for Hollywood, and even for two intelligent Jews like Messrs. Spielberg and Kushner, to fathom.



Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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