WASHINGTON -- If
Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological
disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine.
Instead, he decided to call this fiction ``Munich'' and root it
in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists
of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you've done
that -- evoked the actual killing of innocents who but for Palestinian
murderers would today be not much older than Spielberg himself
-- you have an obligation to get the story right.
The only true part
of the story is the few minutes spent on the actual massacre.
The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the
opening credits, ``inspired by real events.''
By real events? Rubbish.
Inspired by Tony Kushner's belief (he co-wrote the screenplay)
that the founding of Israel was a ``historical, moral, political
calamity'' for the Jewish people.
It is an axiom of
filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know.
In ``Munich,'' the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but
historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us
their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history,
no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die.
The Palestinians
who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given
-- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture,
humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the
erudite poet giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward
his Italian shopkeeper -- before he is brutally shot in cold blood
by the Jews.
Then there is the
elderly PLO man who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being
blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting
Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown
in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by
the Jews.
But the most shocking
Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical,
beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the
now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli
way, I suppose.
Even more egregious
than the manipulation by character is the propaganda by dialogue.
The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: the Jews stole our
land and we're going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back.
Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say ... the same
thing. The hero's mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says:
We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure
it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.
Spielberg makes the
Holocaust the engine of Zionism, and its justification. Which,
of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic
narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran,
who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not?
If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust,
then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their
midst?
It takes a Hollywood
ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic
Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The
first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and
received recognition for the right to establish a ``Jewish national
home in Palestine'' from Britain in 1917 and from the League of
Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
But the Jewish claim
is far more ancient. Israel was their ancestral home, site of
the first two Jewish Commonwealths for a thousand years -- long
before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The
Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish
independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return to their
home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic
because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing
claim. Which is why the Jews have for three generations offered
to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation
has been rejection, war and terror.
And Munich. Munich,
the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian
cause with the blood of 11 Jews. ``Munich,'' the movie, has now
made that success complete 33 years later. ``Munich'' now enjoys
high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven
Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended
message to every theater in the world.
This is hardly surprising,
considering that ``Munich's'' case for the moral bankruptcy of
the Israeli cause -- not just the campaign to assassinate Munich's
planners but the entire enterprise of Israel itself -- is so thorough
that the movie concludes with the lead Mossad assassin, seared
by his experience, abandoning Israel forever. Where does the hero
resettle? In the only true home for the Jew of conscience, sensitivity
and authenticity: Brooklyn.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
