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My challenge for Steven Spielberg
'Munich' suggests for the first time on the big screen that
Israel's policy is immoral
By Robert Fisk
06/21/06 "The
Independent" -- -- Steven Spielberg's Munich is
absolutely brilliant. I can hear readers groaning already. It
won't open in Britain until next Friday. But in the United
States, Arabs have condemned the movie about the Israeli
assassination of Palestinians after the 1972 massacre of Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics as an anti-Arab diatribe that dehumanises an entire people suffering dispossession and
occupation.
Jewish groups have suggested that Spielberg has dishonoured his
Jewish roots by portraying Mossad agents as criminal,
self-doubting murderers who ultimately come to despise their own
country. There must be something interesting here, I said to
myself, as I sat down on the other side of the Atlantic to watch
the director's blockbuster of murder and bloodshed.
There's plenty to be appalled by: the killing of the athletes
interlocked with scenes of assassination leader "Avner"
copulating with his wife in a New York apartment; the Israeli
murder of a Dutch call girl who has set up a Mossad killer for
assassination - she walks naked and bleeding across the floor of
her canal barge, trying to breathe through the bullet wound in
her breast; and the Middle East cliché of the year. It comes
when "Avner" - in an entirely fictional scene - talks to an
armed Palestinian refugee whom he will later kill. "Tell me
something, Ali," he asks. "Do you really miss your father's
olive trees?"
Well, of course, "Ali" does rather miss his father's olive
trees. Ask any Palestinian in the shithouse slums of the Ein el-Helwe,
Nahr el-Bared or Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Lebanon and
you'll get the same reply. It's a staged, creepy scene in which
Avner's educated, philosophical approach is contrasted with the
harsh, uneducated Palestinian's anger.
And there's a lot else wrong. The same Mossad team's real-life
murder of a perfectly innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway is
deleted from the narrative of the film - thus avoiding, I
suppose, the embarrassment of showing one of the murderers later
hiding in the Oslo apartment of the Israeli defence attaché to
Norway, a revelation that did not do a lot for
Scandinavian-Israeli relations.
But Spielberg's movie has crossed a fundamental roadway in
Hollywood's treatment of the Middle East conflict. 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. Murdering one
Palestinian gunman - or one Palestinian who sympathises with the
Munich killers - only produces six more to take their place. One
by one, members of the Mossad assassination squad are themselves
hunted down and murdered. Avner even calculates that it costs
$1m every time he liquidates a Palestinian.
And the film's ending - when Avner's Mossad minder comes to New
York to persuade him to return to Israel, only to be rebuffed
when he fails to supply evidence of the murdered Palestinians'
guilt, and to walk away in disgust from Avner's offer to break
bread at his home - suggests for the first time on the big
screen that Israel's policy of militarism and occupation is
immoral. That the camera then moves to the left of the two men
and picks up a digitalised re-created image of the twin towers
through the haze was what I call a "groaner". Yes, Steve, I said
to myself, thank you - but we've got the message.
Yet that's the point. This film deconstructs the whole myth of
Israeli invincibility and moral superiority, its false alliances
- one of the most sympathetic characters is an elderly French
mafia boss who helps Avner - and its arrogant assumption that it
has the right to engage in state murder while others do not.
Perhaps inevitably, the author of the book upon which Munich is
based - George Jonas, who wrote Vengeance - has done his best to
deconstruct Spielberg. "One doesn't reach the moral high ground
being neutral between good and evil," he says. What turns
audiences off the movie is "treating terrorists as people ... in
their effort not to demonise humans, Spielberg and Kushner (Tony
Kushner, the chief screenplay writer) end up humanising demons".
Yes, but - that's the point isn't it? Calling humans terrorists
does dehumanise them, whatever their background. The "why?"
question - prohibited after the 11 September 2001 crimes against
humanity - is the very same question every cop asks at the scene
of any crime: what was the motive?
Presumably intended to coincide with the movie, Aaron Klein has
come out with a new book on Munich, published by Random House.
As one reviewer has pointed out, he writes of the same Mossad
hoods as cold-blooded hit squads rather than self-doubting
mercenaries. In quite another context, it's interesting to learn
that Klein, a captain in the Israeli army's intelligence unit,
also happens to be Time magazine's military affairs
correspondent in Jerusalem. I assume that august pro-Israeli
journal will soon appoint a Hamas member as its military affairs
reporter on the West Bank.
But again, all this misses the point. It's not whether Spielberg
changes the characters of his killers - or whether Malta doubles
for Beirut in the film and Budapest for Paris - but that
Israel's whole structure of super-morality is brought under
harsh, bitter self-examination. Towards the end, Avner even
storms into the Israeli consulate in New York because he
believes Mossad has decided to liquidate him too.
So now the real challenge for Spielberg. A Muslim friend once
wrote to me to recommend Schindler's List, but asked if the
director would continue the story with an epic about the
Palestinian dispossession which followed the arrival of
Schindler's refugees in Palestine. Instead of that, Spielberg
has jumped 14 years to Munich, saying in an interview that the
real enemy in the Middle East is "intransigence". It's not. The
real enemy is taking other people's land away from them.
So now I ask: will we get a Spielberg epic on the Palestinian
catastrophe of 1948 and after? Or will we - like those refugees
desperate for visas in the wartime movie Casablanca wait, and
wait - and wait?
Copyright - The Independent
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