‘Munich’: vicious and valid views

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 3 February 2006

Rarely has a trip to the cinema been such a political act. The last film to be treated this way — not as a movie but as an ideological statement — was Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” And that incensed Jews, too.

I am speaking, of course, about Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” a film which has dominated the editorial pages as much as the movie sections for more than a month. In the US especially, the director has been under sustained assault for his imagined account of the Mossad operation to kill the men behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. You’ve heard the key objections: that Spielberg relied on a dodgy book for source material and that he suggests a moral equivalence between Israeli intelligence and Palestinian terrorists.

I’m unsympathetic to that last charge, not least be-cause it’s just as easy to argue the reverse case: that Spielberg humanises his Israeli characters, while the film’s Arabs are two-dimensional cut-outs, never on screen for more than a minute or two.

But I have two other thoughts on my mind. The first is one I’ve had before, occasioned not by Spiel-berg but by Ariel Sharon — still, as I write, lying mute and immobile in a Jerusalem hospital bed. A year or so ago, at the height of the political battle over the Gaza withdrawal, I saw a poster morphing the image of Sharon into that of Yasir Arafat, wrapping the Prime Minister’s head in a keffiyeh. The image was the work of ultra-rightist Israelis, the same crowd who had depicted Yitzhak Rabin as an SS officer a decade earlier.

What I realised then is that it doesn’t matter how much a Jew has given to his people: there will still be some ready to cast him as a traitor. As far as the crazies were concerned, in abandoning Gaza, even the war hero and settlers’ godfather Arik Sharon had become a self-hating Jew.

Spielberg is now undergoing the same treatment: one email round-robin branded “Munich” a Nazi propaganda movie. “Schindler’s List” is forgotten; Spielberg’s establishment of the Shoah foundation, recording the testimonies of the world’s remaining Holocaust survivors, is put to one side; it all counts for nothing. In the eyes of his extremist critics, he has no moral credit in the bank.

This is useful to bear in mind, even among those of us who live at a lower altitude than Sharon or Spiel-berg. Next time you’re condemned for your opinions or accused of some vile treachery, either at a synagogue debate or around a family dinner table, re-member that even those whose Jewish commitment is total get the same mud dumped on them. What it proves is that these accusations mean almost nothing.

The second thought cuts the other way. It is the nagging feeling that one criticism of “Munich” probably does stand up. Some critics dislike the film’s subtle implication that the sole justification for a Jewish state is the Holocaust. The hero’s mother exp-lains that Jews needed a homeland, one they had to take by force from the Palestinians; after all, they had lost so many people to the Nazis.

The trouble with this, say Spielberg’s antagonists, is that it plays directly into the hands of the fiercest anti-Zionists, typified by the President of Iran and a good slice of the newly dominant force in Palestinian politics, Hamas. They insisted this week that they “shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins.” As the neo-con US commentator Charles Krauthammer puts it, “if Israel is nothing more than Europe’s guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?” If there has to be a Jewish state, why can’t it be in Bavaria?

None of this is uniquely Spielberg’s fault: plenty of Zionists make the same, rather crude cause-and-ef-fect link between the Jewish state and the Shoah. It has the benefit of simplicity and unanswerable moral force. But it may be serving us badly. I hear too often the argument that it’s unfair that Palestinians have to pay the price for a European crime — as if the whole idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine was dreamed up only after the Holocaust. We may need to spell out anew what we have always taken as read: that the Jewish attachment to that land is millennia old; that Jews had once lived on that terrain as a sovereign people; and that the modern Zionist yearning to return predated Hitler by nearly a century.

We can’t blame Steven Spielberg for failing to make that case; he had enough on his plate. But we need to do it and we need to start now.

Posted on February 3, 2006 07:07 PM

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