[Marxism] Fisk on "Munich"

[Anna Fierling <anna_fierling@xxxxxxxxx>]

You have to pay for Fisk's articles on the Independent site, so I'm including 
the entire text:

  The Independent (London)

January 21, 2006 First Edition

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 35

HEADLINE: My challenge for Steven Spielberg

BYLINE: ROBERT FISK

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 cliche 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 attache 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 
recreated 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  coldblooded 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?

'Munich' suggests for the first time on the big screen that Israel's  policy is 
immoral

LOAD-DATE: January 21, 2006



Anna Fierling
Otto-Suhr-Institut
FU-Berlin

"Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden."
                        
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