My challenge For Steven Spielberg

The Independent, London


My challenge For Steven Spielberg

By Robert Fisk

23 January, 2006
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?

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