Like many others in Malta, I couldn’t resist the strong temptation of going to see Munich, Steven Spielberg’s litigious movie that owes much of its publicity to the torrent of criticism it has received both in Jewish and Palestinian circles. Before giving my comments on the film I feel I have to make a vital confession; being a Palestinian myself makes it very difficult to be an objective critic on the subject. People usually have their personal convictions, their own biases and identities when they go to watch a particular film, which is why I had to see the film more than once and from different aspects. The first time I went as a Palestinian, holding firm to the belief that no matter how Spielberg portrays us, Israel should hand back to us the exact territories it had captured in 1967, as this – in my opinion – is the only sufficient basis on which any kind of decent peace agreement can be hammered out. People who had this opinion during the Munich saga had predicted with stunning accuracy that unless this was done, the misery of this tiny people could burn until its flames reach the whole world, and eventually that is exactly what happened.
Therefore, to see the movie from a Palestinian perspective I went with another Palestinian. The second time, I watched the film with Maltese friends, who wanted to watch the film for another good reason; to see how Malta featured through Spielberg’s powerful optical tools. This time, and the times that followed, I tried to be – as much as I could – a neutral spectator. I cannot claim however, that I was completely successful sitting on the fence by any means.
The film, as everybody knows, was inspired by the real events that took place on 6 September 1972 in the Olympic Village at Munich when Palestinian guerrillas, members of the Black September Organisation, invaded the Israeli’s Olympic quarters, killed two of them and held another nine hostages; those nine, and most of their captors were later killed during a failed rescue operation.
The Israeli government, at that time led by Iron Lady Premier Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen), sends a team of assassins to hunt down the 11 men allegedly behind the attack. She gives this mission of vengeance her blessing and eventually the licence to kill by saying: “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”
Avner (Eric Bana), a former Meir bodyguard, is appointed leader of this group; Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz, who gave one of the film’s most striking performances) is a toy-maker and an expert at building bombs, Carl (Ciaran Hinds), who removes the evidence after every action; Steve (Daniel Craig), the trigger man, and Hans (Hanns Zischler), an expert at forging documents.
Avner and his men are managed by a middle-man named Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), they have no official existence. We are not told why it is necessary to deny their existence, since they were carrying out Israeli policy and Israel had repeatedly stated that its long arm would reach those who kill an Israeli even in their beds. They even used powerful bombs to make their presence dramatically public.
They travel with fake names and false passports and discover the whereabouts of many of their targets after making huge payments to a mysterious Frenchman named Louis (Mathieu Amalric), who in turn takes instruction from an even more shadowy ‘Papa’ (Michael Lonsdale). Nothing at all justifies the role of Papa and his organisation since most of the victims were actually easy to find; they were mostly public, indeed prominent PLO representatives.
As Avner and his team start liquidating their victims some of them develop doubts about the morality of what they are doing. The heart of Spielberg’s drama – and Tony Kushner’s script – is based on these moral doubts and disputes of the Israeli agents. But we are not told enough, not shown enough contexts, convincing material, reasons or motivations why they did so. Still more damagingly, the characters are given almost no depth or voice. With the only exception of Avner, they are characterless on screen. We never learn enough about them to care about them or their doubts over killing, even when they themselves are killed.
The most ruthless hit-man is Steve (Daniel Craig). He is South African, blond, and doesn’t look Jewish at all, as if Spielberg wanted to make this seemingly most amoral Jewish killer not a Jew at all, but a pseudo-Afrikaner. The South African is the only one left unmoved by what they are doing, he says flatly: “The only blood that counts for me is Jewish blood!”
Nothing at all rationalises the very distressing scene when the Israeli squad executes the young, naked, beautiful Dutch woman with small-calibre bullets; the scene was visibly humiliating for the viewer. One could legitimately wonder: if Spielberg is so obsessed with reality, why didn’t he zoom in on the bombing of refugee camps, where numerous innocents have been repeatedly slaughtered?
Also in two unrelated scenes, obviously intended to shock, and induce reflection, the shots of Avner making love to his wife are intercepted with the climactic slaughter in Munich. It’s another weak cliché: rough sex and violent death merged together in a Freudian way. And if, as one supposes, the Munich scenes are supposed to be running through Avner’s head, we are offered no reason why he should be so haunted. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t witnessed anything and those scenes weren’t even on TV!
Munich can be regarded as Spielberg’s responsibility towards his Jewish identity and history; he acknowledged that he was walking through a mine-field but he still wanted to tell the story by morally questioning the country which he passionately loves and supports. Questioning here does not necessarily amount to betraying or turning against it as many have thought. He doesn’t want the Israeli to fall into the same trap his enemy was caught in. In Munich, the Palestinian wanted to appeal to the world’s conscience but he turned into a murderer, when Avner and his team started striking at their targets, they also became murderers. One character is made to confess: “We do what they do!” The nightmare of moral equivalence emerges. “Have we descended to their level?” Spielberg however, wanted the Israeli agents to be somehow morally superior to their victims, and that’s why he insisted on humanising them by showing how extremely careful they were not to hurt innocent civilians when in reality, 14 bystanders – including nine children – were killed in the 2002 assassination of one of the Hamas leaders in Gaza City.
Palestinians do appear in Munich but Spielberg isn’t necessarily concerned about them, altough they are allowed to talk briefly but impressively about their love for their land. One of the Palestinian figures (Ali) volubly explains to Avner, “We want to be a nation, home is everything.” But apart from this scene and some shots of families watching television as the Munich tragedy unfolds, the Palestinians we see are almost exclusively terrorists or targets, in the same way as the Vietnamese figure in some American movies where they only serve as corpses.
The film doesn’t plainly or exclusively condemn the policy of carrying out extra-judicial executions, which Israel still practises on an almost daily basis; it stops at questioning the morality, accountability and perhaps the usefulness of such policy. In the film’s powerful conclusion, Avner meets Ephraim in Brooklyn where the twin towers once stood – and here is another powerful signal about the efficiency of fighting terror with terror; a debate going on right now in the United States. Avner vainly asks for evidence that the men he killed were involved in planning the Munich attack. The last scene shows Ephraim declining Avner’s invitation to break bread with his family and the scene sadly illustrates Avner’s – or, rather, Spielberg’s – disappointment with the State of Israel, which consistently violates the law as well as Jewish values while waging a war it originally helped to aggravate.
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