Munich directed by Steve Spielberg, 2005, USA, Color, 2 hours 44 minutes

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif..— When I placed Munich in the DVD player last night, I braced myself for an anti-Israel diatribe.  That, after all,  was the rap on this Steven Spielberg movie.  I kept waiting and waiting, but, the movie never did become a polemic against Israel. Rather Munich turned out to be another in a long line of movies over the years that questions the price and utility of warfare.  

This doesn't portray warfare on the grand scale that Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan did; rather it takes us inside the world of terrorists and assassination squads, and makes the point over and over that for every one of the bad guys you kill, six seem to arise in their place.  It also makes the counterpoint that in the absence of peace, there really is little else that can be done.  Like weeds, or too long fingernails, or a charging enemy brigade on the battlefield, all a defender can try to do is to pare them back.

Political critics of the film have suggested that the movie undermines Israel because it seems to promote the "moral equivalence" argument, which suggests that as both the Israelis and the Palestinians have used terror and force, one side is no worse than the other. If such a viewpoint ever took hold among American foreign policy makers, it would be a victory for the Palestinians.  Such an argument leads down the road to such formulas as "one is the same as the other, so let's treat them the same as each other."

Fearing such consequences, anti-Arab hawks began what I now realize was an unjustified campaign of vilification against Spielberg and his creative cohorts.  The moviemaker who gave us Schindler's List  was viciously psycho-analyzed as a self-hating Jew, or perhaps as one who was pandering to the Arab world in an effort to promote "moral equivalence." 

But Spielberg's movie, with its screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, was not so ham-handed.  What it argues, in my opinion, is that the "cycle of violence" of terror and retaliation is neither effective, nor laudable.  It simply is a dirty business that people do because they lack the imagination to do anything else.  This deficiency, by the way, is not limited to the historical characters in the movie.  Brilliant filmmakers though they might be, Spielberg, Kushner, Roth et al have no alternative to offer.

In fact, by introducing the future Prime Minister Ehud Barak (Jonathan Rozen) as one of the young commandos participating in a joint Mossad/ IDF raid on an apartment building in Beirut where three of the Munich nine were living, the movie implied that peacemaking also is futile—although this point was more whispered than screamed.  

Barak many years later would become the prime minister who tried unsuccessfully in the waning days of U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration to hammer out a final peace treaty with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. 

Viewers begin the movie justifiably outraged by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.  When Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) endorses a secret campaign to eliminate nine Palestinian terrorists believed responsible for this massacre, we wince, but accept her maxim that "every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromise with its own values.  I have made a decision, the responsibility is mine."

At first, the movie is the good "us" against the bad "them."  As Avner (Eric Bana) leads his officially unofficial assassination team into the field, nobody questions their high purpose—except perhaps the Mossad accountant (Oded Teomi) who demands "receipts." Their plan is to surgically eliminate the terrorists one by one, without any collateral damage.  Thus, the man who is the first target is stalked in Rome from a book reading to a grocery store to a hallway of an apartment building before he is shot to death by an assassin with a quaking gun hand.  

A telephone bomb is used on the second target and, in a scene that was the subject of the oft-seen television advertisement for the movie, the schoolgirl daughter of the terrorist picked up the ringing telephone.  The Israelis had waited for the girl and her mother to leave the Paris apartment of the Palestinian official, but she ran back inside to retrieve a forgotten item.  In a mad dash to the trigger car, an Israeli spotter was able to abort the mission until after the little girl left again.  Then the phone exploded in her father's hands, sending him severely wounded to the hospital.  Ultimately he died there.

The difference between the first two assassinations was worth remarking upon.  The first, however sloppy and risky, caused the death of only one person.  On the other hand, the second, more technologically advanced, nearly caused the death of a child. Instead of concluding that perhaps they should be more patient and use lower tech weapons, as in the first assassination, the Israeli team concludes that it needs to make the bomb more powerful.

Their next man on their list is staying in a hotel in Cyprus.  The contact between the Palestinian terrorists and the Soviet KGB, he has two Russian escorts.  But the escorts take him only so far as the lobby of the building; their security does not extend to his room.  This time the bomb is planted under the man's mattress.  Once the man lies down, Avner observing from the balcony of the next room, can give the signal by turning the light of his room off.  He does, and the blast of the more powerful bomb destroys several rooms of the hotel, nearly killing Avner.  Now the escalation has resulted in civilian casualties, and this trend can only intensify.

The Israelis purchase both explosives and information through "apolitical" intermediaries who sell their wares and information to both sides. In as bizarre a scene as anyone ever has seen in a movie, the Israeli squad is housed  by their shadowy contact in the same "safe house" in Greece as a group of Palestinian terrorists. As the Palestinians believe the Israelis to be a combination of European terrorists (the Basque ETA, German Bader-Meinhof Gang) they spend the night  in the same room warily sleeping on their guns. 

This provides Avner an opportunity to question one of the Palestinian terrorists about his real motivation.  The Palestinian replies that whereas his supposed European counterparts have a home to go back to, the Palestinians do not.  "Home is everything," he says in attempted justification.  He is not very convincing.

We are persuaded, on the other hand, that "family" is indeed all important. Avner has a wife and new baby but it is far too risky for him to travel from his base in Europe to Israel.  He relocates them to Brooklyn, assuming he can visit them safely there. But following a shootout with his "roommates" at the Greek "safe house," Avner and his team, and by extension, their families, no longer have the veil of anonymity.  Hunters become hunted.

So what are to conclude from this thriller?  The story never questions the right of Israel to exist.  It simply teaches—for those who might not have realized it before—that only among fanatics is the Middle East situation colored only in black and white. For the rest of the participants—and there are pragmatic, realistic people everywhere—the conflict is filled with grays.