Munich
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
With Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Daniel Craig, Hanns Zischler
REVIEW BY KIM BULLIMORE
Steven Spielberg's film Munich, on the aftermath of the kidnapping and killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, has been hailed in some quarters as a cinematic masterpiece, and condemned by others as a betrayal of Jews and Zionism. From a purely cinematic perspective, Munich is enjoyable but flawed, both aesthetically and politically. And it is not "a prayer for peace" as some have claimed.
The performances by Eric Bana (Avner), Ciaran Hinds ("clean up man" Carl) and Mathieu Kassovitz (Robert, the bomb maker) are outstanding. And while the movie is close to three hours in length, Spielberg does well to hold our attention. However, Munich also includes one of the worst sex scenes in recent cinematic history and at times the script is corny and unbelievable. In trying to draw out the political underpinnings of Munich, chief writer Tony Kushner, who wrote the award winning play Angels in America and co-wrote Munich with Eric Roth, at times presents us with clumsy and implausible dialogue.
Both Spielberg and Kushner have come under a barrage of criticism from pro-Israel and Zionist groups, both inside and outside of Israel, despite the approval of the film by the families of the slain Israeli athletes. In December 2005, the Zionist Organization of America called for a boycott of the film because it drew a moral equivalency between "Arab terrorists" and the Mossad agents sent to hunt them down. According to ZOA, Munich "dehumanised Israelis" while "humanising terrorists". However, despite the hue and cry by Zionists and supporters of Israel, Munich is not a pro-Palestinian film, it is a pro-Zionist film.
Yes, Spielberg allows the audience to experience, albeit briefly and possibly for the first time in a Hollywood blockbuster, Palestinians as fathers, mothers and as families, who yearn for freedom and a homeland. However, Spielberg and Kushner rarely break from the Zionist mantra of Israeli innocence of purpose, persecution and victimhood.
Utilising continuous flashbacks of the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics, we're never allowed to forget that despite Israel's military power, years of brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the killing of thousands of Palestinian innocents, Israel is still the "real" victim.
And yes, Spielberg questions and highlights the fruitlessness of violence. As veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk noted in the British Independent on January 23, in Munich "for the first time, we see Israel's top spies and killers not only questioning their role as avengers but actually deciding that an 'eye for an eye' does not work, is immoral, is wicked". However, this questioning never leaves the Zionist framework.
Spielberg painstakingly tries to draw an equal sign between the "morals" and "violence" of the Israelis and the Palestinians, between the state-sponsored violence of a brutal occupier and the violence born of resistance to a repressive occupation. Spielberg and his writer are only able to draw this equal sign between the two because they refuse to acknowledge that it is the creation of Israel by force on stolen Palestinian land that is the original catalyst and the ongoing source of the violence in the region. The primary concern of Spielberg and Kushner's Munich therefore, remains not the effect of state-sponsored violence on the Palestinians, but on Israel and what Jewish American anti-Zionist writer Norman Finkelstein calls the "Jewish soul" and its "reluctant, tragic warriors".
Finkelstein notes in Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995) that the ethical qualms besetting these reluctant warriors and the state they represent "arise not from what Israel may have done to the Arabs, but from what it may have done to itself". This "moral anxiety", writes Finkelstein, "is due not the effects of the violence on the victim, however, on the victor: the corruption of the Jewish soul". Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who is idealised in Munich as a kindly leader forced to do the unthinkable, encapsulated this idea when she once said to Anwar Sadat, "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours." It is this Zionist narrative, this desecration as a result of what the "Arabs" supposedly "force" Israel and its warriors to do, that is the primary focus of the film.
So, despite Munich breaking with the stereotypical portrayal of Palestinians, something for which it should be commended, it doesn't break with the Zionist narrative. Instead, it strengthens it. Even while questioning Israeli policy, Spielberg fails to show the full brutality of it. We aren't shown the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps and the killing of more than 200 innocent Palestinians in retaliation for the terrorists' attack on the Munich Olympics. We're only told about them fleetingly.
Also deliberately left out of the film is any reference to the Lillehammer affair, where Israeli assassins mistakenly assassinated Ahmed Bouchiki — an innocent Moroccan waiter — in front of his pregnant wife in 1973. As Ilana Romano, the widow of the first of the Israeli athletes to be killed at Munich noted, "Had Spielberg wanted to harm Israel's image, he would have included the Lillehammer affair".
Munich, however, is worth seeing because it does explore the issue of Jewish and Israeli morals and because it breaks with the normative depiction of Palestinians. However, just as we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that Ariel Sharon has suddenly become a dove instead of a hawk, we shouldn't be fooled into believing that just because Munich allows Palestinians to be seen as humans, that it is a "pro-Palestinian film", because it simply isn't.
[Kim Bullimore is a member of the Socialist Alliance. In 2004, she lived and worked in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories with the human-rights organisation the International Women's Peace Service. Visit .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 15, 2006.
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