JANUARY 2006
angry review of Spielberg's 'Munich'
The Angry
Arab News Service
Monday, December 26, 2005
It reminds me of a line that George Carlin—yes, that
Carlin—used to use in his comedy routine and went
roughly like this: “why do “we” call
Israeli terrorists commandos, and we call Palestinian
commandos terrorists?” That line never got a laugh
the two times I saw him use it with a live audience.
The thrust of the Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare
notwithstanding: Israeli killers are conscientious and
humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter
what--killers. But a Spielberg movie about current
affairs is like a Thomas Friedman’s column
about…Emanuel Kant. What do you expect. But you
know? Did you notice how one lone critical opinion of the
movie by one Israeli diplomat, which only mildly
criticized the movie, got so much press in the
This one critical opinion reminded me of O’Reilly;
how he every night finds one email from somebody in
Today, yet another New York Times reviewer who also
thinks that Spielberg was not sympathetic enough to the
Israeli killers, even had the audacity to describe
Israeli killings at the time as "targeted assassinations" when
even Israel had not invented that propaganda term back
then. He must have forgotten to remember. That's all.
Where do I begin. I mean yes, I was quite angry watching
it; and I got more angry as I watched the Berkeley
liberal audience react sympathetically to the movie,
rooting for the Israel head killer, as he went about his
"civilized" killing. I watched the audience
root for an Israeli killing team, and this WAS a true
story, and Palestinian victims were real people, with
real blood. The most emotional moment for Spielberg, and
presumably for American audiences was when the head
killer talked with his baby daughter in New York, that he
missed very much. Oh, ya. That was the point at which you
were expected to shed a tear or two; the music got
particularly sentimental at that point. It had to be.
But where to begin; the movie was based on a book that
took the Israeli account as it was delivered. But the
book was honest and more accurate at least on one count:
in the book by George Jonas titled Vengeance (only
Israelis are entitled to vengeance as you know, the more
violent the better as far as some US movie audiences are
concerned), the killers did not express regret or
second-thoughts. None. In the book but not in the movie,
the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no
qualms about anything they did." How could Spielberg
miss that. Well, he just managed. Hell, that was the
whole movie, and the whole political project behind it.
Of course, it was not easy for me to watch this movie, I
mean not only at the political and intellectual levels,
but also at the personal level. I can connect to the
story, in its details and personalities. The first victim
of the movie was Wa’il Zu`aytir, and I knew his
niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah’s
son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building
where the three PLO leaders were massacred in
Let me start by saying this: this, Munich that is, was
not as planned an operation as has often been maintained.
This was not planned months in advance, as Abu Iyad
maintained in his account with Eric Rouleau (translated
into English as My Home, My Land by dear Linda Butler).
Abu Iyad for years exaggerated the claims about the
“carefully planned” operation, and PLO media at
the time lied about how the PLO gunmen threw grenades
into the helicopters, so as to make the last shootout
more of a fight that it actually was. Angry Palestinians
who were being hit by Israeli fighter jets in their
refugee camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO
had to give them some, even if they were not legitimate
heroes. The German troops were going to take them out, no
matter what, and no matter how much they, the Germans in
this case, endangered the lives of the hostages - and
they presumably had Israeli consent.
The Arab League diplomat talked about this recently when
he broke his silence in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah
on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the negotiator with
the the Palestinian team in Munich. Yes, I know. It can
be argued that the Palestinian attackers risked the lives
of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did
not intend to kill them. That is true. This is like
hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible,
and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment
to the lives and health of victims. That is true. But it
is also true that the State of Israel has taken a nation
as a hostage, and has been endangering the lives of
Palestinians since the inception of the state of
Do you know that not a single Palestinian in the movie
appeared unarmed? They all were terrorists, and their
murder had to be justified, and Spielberg did a great
service for the state of Israel in that regard. They
should name some stolen Palestinian property in
Israel also—BEFORE Munich—sent a letter bomb to
Bassam Abu Sharif (a writer and journalist with the
PFLP), and left him with life-long scars and bodily
damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh,
a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any
group. But he was a really diligent researcher, and
And typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when
they speak Arabic never need subtitles. We need them when
people speak in French and German, but Arabic is not
important. It is not important to know what cheap natives
say; we only need to know what expensive people say:
Europeans and Israelis. And do you notice that
In February of the same year PRIOR to
So a small group decided to do something, but they were
not sure what, and this was only 3 months before
The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession
with Abu Hasan Salamah as the “mastermind” of
But this can never be maintained in a country that wants
to exaggerate the prowess and knowledge of an
intelligence agency not only to help feed the Israeli
propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public
for more ruthless times and ways. So a very small number
of people knew about it, and of course Abu Iyad was one
of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on the
list, and yet his name was NOT on the list, just to show
you about how much--or how little--
Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of
But this also explains why he survived, unlike say Abu
Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss
Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois
society, and he could not get enough of that life. He
developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment on
The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir’s
painting, the Mosque, as an unidentifiable blob. They
were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed
to evoke emotions, and you were not supposed to see them
bleed, and if you did, you had to cheer for their
killers. The only ones that you had to feel sorry for:
were the Israelis who get killed, including the killers
when they kill. The music that played when Israelis die,
was different from the music that played when
Palestinians died. And no speaking roles for Palestinians
were necessary. Why bother. Give one a line, and you have
done your "objective" duty. And the list of
prisoners that attackers submitted to German authorities
did not have “200 Arab prisoners” on it, as the
movie said. It had some 234 Arab and NON-Arab names on
them, including Japanese and German prisoners, but that
was not in the movie. And the statement that was issued
by the attackers gave a name to the
“operation”: Bir`im and Ikrit, names of two
(predominantly Christian) villages in northern
But this begs the question: why is
Now, I will not get into the military/intelligence
background of the Israeli hostages as Abu Dawud does in
his memoirs because the attackers did not know that
information prior to the “operation.” Abu Dawud
gives many details about the military backgrounds of some
of the hostages, but I do not think that this is
appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that
before hand.
I will not get into what actually happened at the site at
the airport when the hostages were being transferred by
their captors not only because the captors were
responsible by virtue of the hostage
"operation", but you can raise questions
regarding the actual responsibility of the killing of the
hostages. Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the
1990s in which writers raised questions about German
responsibility, and on how the German government never
published autopsy reports of the hostages, etc. The
Israeli government also did not want to examine the
bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would have
settled the question, of course. Abu Dawud stressed that
the attackers were under strict instructions to not shoot
at the hostages, and you noticed in the scene, even in
the movie, that when they were storming the compound,
they clearly struggled with the door and avoided
shooting, while that could have shortened the time of
entry, and Abu Dawud says that they were under strict
instructions to avoid using the grenades. And Abu Dawud
raises the possibility that the helicopter may have
exploded from a bullet that hit it gas tank, but I
don’t know, and I would never rely on Spielberg, or
on the silly book on which he based his account, for
historical accuracy.
And another thing comes to mind: Palestinians also have
managed to assassinate Israeli military and intelligence
leaders but that never gets attention because the trend
in US media and popular culture is that you should only
show Palestinians when they are killing civilians. And it
is not true that the Israeli response was confined to the
assassination of the 11 Palestinians as was shown in the
movie:
And even Wa’il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in
And the movie, it seems really enjoyed covering the 1973
massacre in
The third person was a poet: and you know how much
Israelis like to murder Palestinian poets, artists, and
writers. Kamal Nasir was a poet, and was killed in his
bed. The movie did not tell you that by the time the
Israeli terrorists finished with their
“mission,” some 100 Palestinians and Lebanese
were murdered on that day in April 1973. I also was
amused--not really--how Spielberg portrayed the
neighborhood where the PLO leaders AND others were
killed: it had all the features of Orientalist
imagination. It was traditional and the houses were old
styles with arches, and the place was protected like a
military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived in a
residential building in the most modern and upper class
neighborhood of
Some people on the list of the Israeli murder team were
not only not involved with Black September, but some were
not even members of the Fath organization. Basil
Al-Kubaysi was a Palestinian scholar who had just
completed his PhD in political science; I recently had
dinner with Basil’s best friend in college in
Candada. Kubaysi was in the PFLP and not in the Fath
organization. The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with
Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black September. But then
again: I read that Spielberg offered the script to Dennis
Ross and to Bill Clinton to verify the
“accuracy” of
More than that, the movie did not tell you that on
September 16th, and 17th, Israel
launched a savage invasion of South Lebanon, erasing the
refugee camp of Nabatiyyah, and the Lebanese newspapers
at the time (I even remember that as a 12 years old) had
on the first page that famous picture of a smashed
civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians smashed inside
when an Israeli tank ran over the car near Jwayya in
South Lebanon. That must have been too messy for
Spielberg to cover. Why bother? And the car had stopped
at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance
to the village. Were those civilians in the car also
involved in
The reviews of the movie in US media almost expressed
frustration that Spielberg did not express enough
sympathy for the Israeli killers. Only Michelle Goldberg of Salon to her
credit (great review Michelle)[See
Below,JB,editor]pointed out that contrary to that
lousy review by Leon Wieseltier in the
*Three of the Munich Palestinian attackers survived. One
died from a heart attack; the remaining two
are...somewhere in the Middle East.
posted by As'ad @ 2:32 PM
The War on "Munich"
By Michelle Goldberg
Neoconservatives launch a pre-emptive strike on Spielberg's latest, which dares to break the rules of post-9/11 political correctness.
Steven Spielberg's "Munich" doesn't open
until Dec. 23, but a backlash charging the film with
fuzzy-headed liberal naiveté and moral relativism began
weeks ago. Political critics are berating the movie for
suggesting that the violence wracking the Middle East is
a cycle that both sides have a part in perpetuating.
Spielberg, ironically, is accused of being insufficiently
Manichaean, and the charge threatens to ossify into
conventional wisdom before the movie's audience can get
to theaters to see how misguided it is. As New York
Times media columnist David Carr wrote in his
awards-season blog, "'Munich' finds itself in a
seemingly endless spanking machine." Spielberg's
film tells the story of the Israeli response to the
massacre of its athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the
1972 Munich Olympics. The killings were the work of Black
September, a terrorist wing of Yasser Arafat's Fatah
organization. Determined to both wreak vengeance and to
project a message of strength to the world, Israel
deployed hit squads from Mossad's Caesarea unit to find
and assassinate those behind the attack. Often, the men
who were directly responsible could not be located, and
so other Fatah activists with more ambiguous involvement
were targeted instead. The story is full of moral
ambiguities -- few would dispute that Israel had the
right to retaliate, but its pursuit of revenge became an
end in itself, sometimes compromising both Israel's
ethics and its own security.
The analogy to our own time is obvious, and in some ways
the argument about "Munich" is really one about
America. Post-9/11 political correctness, which demands
that stories about terrorism and counterterrorism be
limned in starkest black and white, seemed to have
dissipated these last few years. In the debate over
Spielberg's movie, though, it's returning with a
vengeance. The result is not just the mischaracterization
of a movie; it's the resurrection of the taboo against
depicting the war on terror in shades of gray.
The campaign against "Munich" started Dec. 9,
when the New Republic made Leon Wieseltier's biting
takedown of the film available early on the magazine's
usually subscriber-only Web site (and the Drudge Report
gave it a prominent link). Wieseltier called the film
"pseudo-controversial" and said it is
"desperate not to be charged with a point of
view." Then he excoriated its politics, his angry
tone suggesting the movie's message isn't so blandly
inoffensive after all. "No doubt 'Munich' will be
admired for its mechanical symmetries, which will be
called complexities," Wieseltier wrote, trying to
preempt praise for the film by dismissing those impressed
by it as bien-pensant fools.
"Really wrong"
New York Times columnist David Brooks followed two
days later with a condescending column lamenting
Spielberg's failure to portray the "evil"
driving Palestinian terrorism. "Because he will not
admit the existence of evil, as it really exists,
Spielberg gets reality wrong," Brooks wrote,
continuing, "In Spielberg's Middle East the only way
to achieve peace is by renouncing violence. But in the
real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through
military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by
compromise between the reasonable elements on each
side."
The same day, Variety editor Peter Bart published
a dispatch about awards season campaigning. Noting that
Spielberg was lying low, he wrote, "Having gone to
such excruciating pains to explain that there is no
'right' and 'wrong' in the Middle East (thus adding to
the film's exhaustive length) the filmmaker
understandably wants to avoid the angst of the interview
circuit." (Variety had already given the
movie a scathing review.) The following day, the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz reported on Ehud Danoch,
Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, airing similar
criticisms. "According to Danoch, throughout the
film Spielberg equates the Mossad agents and the
terrorists," Haaretz wrote, quoting him
saying, "This is an incorrect moral equation. We in
Israel know this. There is also a certain pretentiousness
in attempting to treat a painful, decades-long conflict
by means of quite superficial statements in a two and a
half hour movie."
As the political attacks pile up, the real meaning of
"Munich" -- a flawed but powerful and, yes,
complex movie -- threatens to get lost amid all the
huffing and bleating. (Spielberg, it was reported Monday,
has even hired a top Israeli politico to help cushion the
film's release over there.) "There's been a huge
push from the people who have that kind of neocon
attitude about it to make sure that it doesn't get
grounding, to try to keep it from getting its
footing," says David Poland, editor of Movie City
News, an online magazine about the film industry.
"There is a public push to hurt the movie before it
even gets seen."
Vengeance and violence
That push won't be entirely successful --
"Munich" has already made the 2005 top 10 lists
of Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, People
and Entertainment Weekly. But the political
discussion around "Munich" has already been
framed in a way that obscures the film itself.
Spielberg's movie bears little resemblance to the
piece of mushy leftist agitprop its critics describe. It
does not suggest that terrorists and counterterrorists
are morally equivalent or that Israel is wrong to defend
itself. It is nonsense to say, as Wieseltier does, that
there "are two kinds of Israelis in 'Munich': cruel
Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without
remorse." I can't imagine how Wieseltier thinks
Israelis ideally should be portrayed, because many of
those in Munich are, if anything, slightly unbelievable
in their constant self-interrogation and closely guarded
humanism.
"Munich" is about the way vengeance and
violence -- even necessary, justified violence -- corrupt
both their victims and their perpetrators. It's about the
struggle to maintain some bedrock morality while engaging
in immorality. Spielberg goes out of his way to be
generous to Israel -- omitting, as I'll explain in a
moment, one of the Caesarea assassins' most high-profile
mistakes. But his film, co-written by engagé liberal
playwright Tony Kushner, does mourn the way Israel has
compromised its values in the fight against terrorism,
while leaving open the question of whether the
compromises were worth it. "Some people say we can't
afford to be civilized," says Golda Meir (played by
Lynn Cohen) early in the film, after the murder of the
Israeli athletes. "I've always resisted such people.
Today I'm hearing with new ears." Meir makes a
conscious decision to cross a moral line.
"Munich" is about the implications of that
choice, and its unintended consequences.
The film weaves this ethical drama into a jet-setting spy
thriller. It begins in the titular city, where a team of
Palestinian terrorists break into the apartments housing
Israel's Olympic delegation, killing one and taking 10
others hostage. The media concentration at the 1972
Olympics was unprecedented, and the drama was broadcast
around the world in real time. Spielberg largely lets it
unfold as a media event, showing it from the perspective
of rapt spectators, including horrified Israelis and
proud, ebullient Palestinians. It all culminates in a
firefight at a German airfield, seen as an explosion in
the background of a TV correspondent's report. The movie
includes the cruelly hopeful early reports, broadcast
worldwide, that the hostages were freed, which made the
truth -- that all were massacred -- even more
devastating.
The Munich massacre is but a prelude to the film, which
follows a five-man assassination team led by Avner
Kauffman (Eric Bana) as they track down and
systematically kill a list of Palestinians provided by
the Israeli government. The squad is scrupulous about
protecting innocents -- more scrupulous than their
real-life counterparts who, in a notorious 1973 case of
mistaken identity, killed an innocent Moroccan immigrant
in Norway, an incident left out of "Munich."
But some of them are also wracked with doubts and
questions about whether their mission is futile, whether
it is just, and whether they corrode the righteousness of
their own cause by aping their enemies' tactics.
Can't we all just get along
The characters' deep ambivalence about the revenge
killings they commit is actually profoundly flattering to
Israel. It is impossible to imagine such doubt, and such
an ardent desire to adhere to a higher standard than that
of one's enemies, among the film's terrorists. Indeed, I
would guess that many Palestinians would find the movie
unbearably self-congratulatory -- its central concern,
after all, is the effect of retaliatory Jewish violence
on the Jewish soul, not on the Palestinian flesh.
One of the film's most clarifying moments occurs when two
members of the team kill a European hit woman. She has
previously killed a member of their squad, and they take
time off from their official duties to have their
revenge. They find her at home, wearing a robe, and she
dies with it open, her naked body sprawled out
pornographically. Avner tries to cover her, but a
colleague yanks the robe back open. Later, this bit of
spite torments him -- "I wish I had let you close up
her housecoat," he tells Avner. These scenes
encapsulate "Munich's" concerns with the way
violence degrades both perpetrators and victims.
Spielberg isn't equating the Caesarea agent with the
assassin-for-hire he kills, but he is showing the way the
former loses a bit of his soul to hatred.
Yet even this much introspection and regret is considered
verboten among some of Israel's most doctrinaire (or at
least its loudest) partisans. The movie's reckoning with
the consequences of violence is being derided as mushy,
can't-we-all-just-get-along liberal pablum. Apparently,
people who really know how the world works -- people like
Brooks and Wieseltier -- know there's no room for such
sentimental qualms in wartime. "'Munich prefers a
discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of
terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same
discussion," Wieseltier wrote in conclusion.
"This is an opinion that only people who are not
responsible for the safety of other people can
hold."
Puffed up with realist wisdom, Brooks informed us that a
film about targeted assassination is a "misleading
way to start a larger discussion," because the
tactic was one that Israel soon left behind. "In
1972, Israel was just entering the era of spectacular
terror attacks and didn't know how to respond. But over
the years Israelis have learned that targeted
assassinations, which are the main subject of this movie,
are one of the less effective ways to fight terror."
Israel, he continued, "much prefers to arrest
suspected terrorists. Arrests don't set off rounds of
retaliation, and arrested suspects are likely to provide
you with intelligence, the real key to defanging terror
groups."
As with so much Brooks writes, it's hard to tell whether
he's being intentionally or accidentally misleading.
Leave aside, for a moment, Israel's many assassinations
of Palestinian militants in the occupied territories in
recent years, including that of Hamas leader Sheik Yassin
in March 2004. As Aaron Klein -- a captain in Israeli
Defense Forces Intelligence -- reports in his new book,
"Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre
and Israel's Deadly Response," the hit squads
targeting the Munich plotters, far from being an
immediate and short-lived response to that horror,
continued operating for two decades. They killed Atef
Bseiso, the last man on their list, in Paris in 1992.
Israel's global legion of denouncers
As Klein reports, Bseiso, the PLO's liaison officer, had
relationships with many security agencies, including
France's Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. His
assassination in Paris enraged the French. "The
Mossad is convinced that the French responded by
deliberately leaking the name of a high-ranking
Palestinian source in Arafat's Tunis office," Klein
writes. "The agent, Adnan Yassin, had been working
for the Mossad for years, informing them of all that
transpired in the office and among the Diaspora
Palestinian leadership. In October 1993, Yassin was
arrested, and never heard from again." The French
retribution, writes Klein, "handicapped Israel
during the sensitive negotiations leading up to the Oslo
Accords in 1993."
This episode doesn't appear in the film, but it
demonstrates that the questions raised by
"Munich" are not simply fodder for dilettante
cocktail parties. These are questions that are freely
discussed within Israel itself -- indeed, they obsess the
nation's thinkers -- and pondering them is in no way
anti-Zionist. JJ Goldberg (no relation), the editor of
the Jewish newspaper the Forward and an unequivocal
supporter of the Jewish state, called the movie "as
close as I've seen to an American film that's inside the
Israeli head." He's somewhat baffled by the attacks
on "Munich," including a negative review that
appeared in his own paper, which called the movie
"little more than a stylish bumper sticker -- well
meaning and eye catching but ephemeral, a deceptively
slight work that dissolves in its own seriousness."
Speaking of the consensus emerging around the film,
Goldberg suggested it's a kind of knee-jerk response by
people used to defending Israel against its global
legions of denouncers. Describing their thinking, he
said, "The world has condemned Israel, the world is
blaming Israel for the rise of Arab terrorism, there's
this conventional wisdom out there that Israel's
treatment of the Palestinians has created this
international wave of jihad terrorism, and so they're
looking for it" -- "it" being anti-Israel
sentiment. "They see the name Tony Kushner, and it's
like the script is written before they even get in the
theater."
Goldberg cited an apocryphal quote from Golda Meir:
"We can never forgive them for making us kill their
children." "In a way, the whole movie was an
elaboration of that line," he said. "There's
never a moment or hint that the Palestinians didn't start
it by doing something awful. And it keeps on reminding
you, the way Golda Meir did, that the people on the other
side, whatever else they are, they're also human beings.
"
In certain circles, apparently, simply calling attention
to the fact that the people killed by counterterrorists
are, in fact, people, is at best maudlin, at worst
disloyal. "It's very disturbing," said
Goldberg. "Something bad has happened. It's almost
as though Spielberg's warning about the corrosive effect
on the soul is all too true."
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