In his good films — for he has released some pretty bad ones in his time, including “Amistad” and “Terminal” — Steven Spielberg has always brought a rhythmic assurance to his directorial style where he never failed to impose his own way of seeing the world on you. They are fine-drawn, accomplished and lyrical, as his two iconic movies, “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” would attest to.
His new drama, “Munich,” which arrived in theaters nationwide in the US last Friday, has already drawn a backlash from Israel’s partisans, who feel outraged that the director and his scriptwriter (the Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner) created “moral equivalency” between the antagonists where, they believed, one should not exist, and from Palestinians who feel equally outraged by how Israeli assassins are romanticized as tragic figures grappling with the morality of what they are ordered to do by their government.
The whole thrust of “Munich” is the assignment given to an Israeli hit squad tasked with hunting down and killing surviving members of Black September in Europe, who had been fingered by Mossad for planning the assault at the Munich Olympics in 1972 that resulted (with some help from a bumbling team of German snipers) in the death of 11 Israeli athletes.
In the opening credits, “Munich” is presented as a movie “based on true events,” adapted loosely from George Jonas’ book “Vengeance,” a book however whose credibility as an authentic narrative is now questioned. Other books, such as the recently published “Striking Back,” by Time magazine reporter Aaron Klein, tell another tale.
No matter. In cinematic art, a filmmaker can take liberties to suit his own artistic needs. What is important here is how Spielberg sympathetically portrays his Israeli assassins, men imbued with moral rectitude, who, as they go about their deadly business, are beset by moral qualms and driven to wage a titanic battle with their conscience. That is especially the case with Avner, the team’s leader (played by Eric Bana, of “Troy” fame) who is the son of a Holocaust survivor, no less. Even Golda Meir, who gives the order for the killings, is shown as a motherly, soft-spoken, kindly figure. (Hello, Golda Meir in that mold? Hardly.)
So they kill the first Palestinian in Rome, Wael Zuaiter, a poet, writer and literati, who turns out to be a case of mistaken identity — though we are not told that in the movie. They move on to the second killing in Paris of Mahmoud Hamshari, a professor and intellectual. To show us how morally upright these killers are, Spielberg has their team leader frantically aborting the operation at the last minute because it may result in the tragic death of Hamshari’s pre-teen daughter, and trying again only when she’s no longer in harm’s way. There’s a third killing in Cyprus followed by a triple killing in Beirut. And we are two hours into this almost three-hour movie already.
And how long is this mayhem going to go on? That’s probably why Spielberg opted not to show how, in real life, these Mossad agents (reflective, idealistic and, oh, so competent) assassinated an innocent Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, mistaking him for a Black September Palestinian. (Three of the bumbling agents were caught and served time in a Norwegian jail.)
By this time, PLO operatives begin to strike back. One of the Israeli assassins is killed in a hotel room after being caught in a “honey trap” involving a pretty girl working for the Palestinians. Another is knocked off as the poor dear takes a walk at dawn, allegedly rocked by moral anguish over what he had been doing. Another is stabbed to death. And yet another, the team’s bomb-maker, is himself blown up.
Here Spielberg resorts to flashbacks of the Munich killings to remind us, I suspect, of two points: What Mossad agents are doing is not morally repugnant — “vengeance is mine,” after all — and that in the end violence begets violence.
All well and good. But what Spielberg and his scriptwriter have not researched, however, is that “targeted killings,” as they are euphemistically known, are not a new Israeli phenomenon, that began in 1972, but an are in fact an old tradition. It began as early as the 1940s, before the establishment of Israel in Palestine. Israeli death squads are as old as Zionism, and are still in business in the West Bank and Gaza today.
Jewish undercover units began operations in Palestine — indeed even in some of the surrounding Arab countries as well -in 1942. The goal of these units was to carry out assassinations of Arab political activists by infiltrating Arab towns disguised as natives. Almost always, members of these death squads were Jews who hailed from Arab countries and spoke fluent Arabic. They were known as “mistarivim,” literally “Arab pretenders.”
Shimon Somech, commander of Mistarivim from 1942 to 1949, admitted in an interview in Ha’aretz, that appeared June 23, 1991, that murder, pure and simple, was the name of the game of his unit, though in the interview he referred to it as “being ordered to eliminate individuals.” I have the text of the interview before me, and nowhere in it does Somech evince the kind of moral doubt and existential anguish that Spielberg imputes to his characters.
“Munich” is a good movie — not a great movie to be sure, but a decent movie that strains at being fair. And that’s a lot coming from the most famous Jew in America today, who made “Schindler’s List” about the Holocaust and devoted all its earnings to his Shoa Foundation, which has been collecting the oral histories of the Holocaust.
In a scene that takes place in a safehouse in Athens — a scene, however, where you have to suspend your logic to believe it, for its improbability — Avner’s team, posing as leftwing Red Brigade activists, engage a group of young, well-armed Palestinians in political badinage. One of the Palestinians tells Avner: “Home is everything.” Perhaps Spielberg, a Jew in touch with his roots, understands what it means to be a homeless wanderer, how the territorial mystery of the native ground speaks to the native son, and why statelessness is the most corrosive form of alienation, the ultimate severance of a man from mankind and the self.
See “Munich” by all means. Expect not a great film but, at best, a cerebral thriller — decidedly a pro-Israeli movie, but not an anti-Palestinian one.
And its structured arguments will fit easily in how you frame your questions about a sad conflict in a sad strip of holy land.
