The Morality of 'Munich'

By Jordan Elgrably, AlterNet. Posted December 24, 2005.

In 1972, Black September, a wing of Arafat's Al Fatah movement kidnapped and then killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team during the Munich games. This set in motion a series of reprisals by the Israelis, including targeted assassinations of Palestinians, and continuing acts of terrorism by militant groups against Israeli, European and American targets. Today we are no closer to an end to the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, nor to a lasting peace agreement that addresses equally the needs of both Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

Now comes "Munich," a Hollywood feature film, co-written by playwright Tony Kushner and screenwriter Eric Roth, and directed by Steven Spielberg. Even before the film's release, neo-conservative critics have attacked what they perceive as a liberal bias in the film's portrayal of Palestinian terrorists and their would-be Israeli assassins.

Never having considered Spielberg a political filmmaker, I went to an early screening of "Munich" with low expectations, surprised that he would even tackle the subject. Yet the story that unfolded proved to be an incisive argument against the use of violence, under any circumstances, as a means to achieve political objectives. While the Munich attack brought the Palestinian struggle into millions of homes around the world and as such put the decades-old conflict on the map, it also embroiled Israeli intelligence services in black operations to assassinate its enemies wherever they might be found. Palestinian terrorism created an image problem for the Palestinian people, whose best interests I would argue were, and still are betrayed by savage acts of violence against Israeli civilians.

And by engaging Black September and other terrorist groups on their own violent terms, Israel betrayed its declared values as a Western-style democracy that eschewed the death penalty in 1954 for ordinary crimes (and only exercised the death penalty once, for Adolf Eichmann's "extraordinary" crimes, in 1962).

Like Hany Abu-Assad's recent film "Paradise Now," which humanizes two would-be Palestinian suicide bombers from Nablus, "Munich" is as much an argument about the futility of violence to resolve conflict as it is a cogent historical drama. It is shot in a gritty documentary style and may remind some filmgoers of the early work of European director Costas-Gavras, his political thriller "Z" in particular.

In fact, "Munich" is the work of a mature filmmaker--one who does not appear beholden to popular American Jewish opinion that Israel is always the underdog. The film depicts Palestinian and other Arab characters as human beings, and it chronicles the change of heart that Israeli agents experience as they go about their clandestine mission to assassinate those the Israeli state identified as responsible for the Munich operation.

Jordan Elgrably is artistic director of the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles.