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Spielberg’s film “Munich” is about Israeli agents who cloak-and-
dagger around Europe murdering dark, hooked-nosed Palestinians
thought to have conducted the 1972 Munch attack on Israeli Olympic
athletes. Is Munich a morally complex film which shows us how and why
Israel has to use terrorism to stop terrorism? If one’s source of
history and international understanding and compassion is, somehow,
taken from news media such as CNN, the BBC then the film offers a
deep experience on morality and politics. However, if one looks at
Munich through Michael Neumann’s book, “The Case Against Israel,” the
film becomes a transparent work in the tradition of American film-
maker D. W. Griffith.

Spielberg is trying to feed us a view of Arabs, and the Islamic world
which stokes Western governments into legislating repressive laws.
This is happening not only in the home of the Magna Carta but also on
this side of the Atlantic. For example, the Patriot Acts enable
agents of the FBI to inspect lists of books that American borrowers,
with names like Ibn Sînâ, Abu'l-Walid Ibn Rushd, or Andrew Said, may
have taken out.

The key Mossad Jihadist is played by an actor who Spielberg
dramaturgically develops fully by showing him to have an evolving
relationship with his wife who gives birth to a child; we are
introduced to his mother, and he remains, until the end, a loveable
Jewish assassin in blue jeans with a crotch bulge equal to Benito Del
Torres’. Golda Meir is made to look like an angel of mercy shedding a
Sufi effulgence on her secret agents while offering them tea with
milk and honey. She is a bed of roses: not chief director of land
expropriations.

The Palestinians are never developed to the same extent. We get the
impression that their resistance is irrational and unfounded; they’ve
never faced the same psychic misery that Israeli Jews have. How might
a boy-soldier from Brooklyn treat a pregnant Palestinian woman at a
checkpoint? The Arabs are only given enough screen time to say a few
black and white lines. Moreover, to trick the naive into seeing
Israeli Jews as morally superior, Spielberg has inserted a cardboard
Palestinian poet who is a supposed terrorist. He is killed before he
can explain why it might have been necessary for him to use terror.
Are we to think that terrorism resides in the Arab genetic code and
not in the fact that they were subjected to the venture of Zionism?

Palestinians were large enough to have caused the events of Munch,
1972 but not important enough to be integrated in his film. The very
fact that he allows a few gutturally voiced lines to fall from their
mouths shows that he knows about their ordeal but, mysteriously, does
not consider it worthy of screen time. How one-sided can an American
film-maker get?

Spielberg’s Munich is embedded in the belief that Palestinians are
naturally terrorists. Generally speaking, for Americans, the film’s
lethal propaganda use-value will become apparent when they are given
an alternative to Zionist history. Otherwise, they will be embedded.
“The Case Against Israel,” a succinct book on Israel and Zionism
written by Michael Neumann, an American Jew whose “German Jewish
stepfather suffered greatly under the Nazis” gives us a solid
alternative to Zionism. Zionism is the engine that drives Spielberg’s
Munich. And, it is by understanding what Zionism is that we can
appreciate the sheer violence that this film encourages. Instead of
giving her secret agents tea, imagine Golda Meir ruefully looking
into Spielberg’s camera saying the following:

“Zionism has never been a movement for the defense of the Jewish
religion; on the contrary many of the most religious Jews abhor it.
It was never even a movement in defense of some cultural entity: when
the Zionist movement began, Jews had no common language and their
traditions were in many cases wildly dissimilar or simply abandoned
altogether. Zionism was a movement which advocated, not so much the
defense of an ethnic group, as the formation of such a group in
Palestine, where those thought to fit a certain semi-racial category
were to find refuge. It was a lovely dream where all Jews would
live happily together and, with typical Wilsonian obliviousness, no
one seemed to notice that those who did not pass ethnic muster had no
place in this fantasy. If they were to be tolerated, welcomed, even
loved, it was to be at the good pleasure of ‘the Jews’.
p. 18

If Spielberg could see the critical validity of the follow statement
on Israel he would have made the complex film that many tactically
pretend he made:

“Israel is the illegitimate child of ethnic nationalism. The
inhabitants of Palestine had every reason to oppose its establishment
by any means necessary...Given the life-and-death powers of the
proposed state and the intention of its proponents to maintain ethnic
supremacy within its borders, the Palestinians were justified in
taking the project as a mortal threat, and therefore to resist it by
any means necessary.” p. 187-188

Spielberg is fluent in using historical documents to make films such
as Amistad, a shallow yet multifaceted film about the slave trade.
Africans emerge as people with past and present lives. For Arabs,
Spielberg’s Munich resembles the American film-maker D. W Griffith,
who in 1915 made a racist classic “The Birth of a Nation”. For
Spielberg, the Palestinians have become what blacks were for
Griffith: Dark, threatening creatures to be eliminated with extreme
prejudice.

What was the average age of the Palestinians who conducted the Munich
attack? What happened twenty-four years before Munich 1972? What
happened on April 9, 1948 at Dier Yassin? And on 29 October 1956 at
Kafar Qasem? Anything? Something? Nothing? Spielberg knows about Dier
Yassin and Kafar Qasem. Does Zionism take us to the murders at Munich
1972?

The issues that Spielberg hides are the ones that Neumann lights in a
scholastically stark and unique manner. Thankfully, his views don’t
resemble the rampant anti-Americanism that one sees everywhere; nor
is he anti-Jewish as his detractors will undoubtedly inform us; nor
is his historical analysis anti-Israeli.

Here are some examples of potentially cinematically charged scenes
that Spielberg could have dramatized but didn’t:

“Finally, no one should be deterred from vigorous anti-Israeli action
by the horrors of the Jewish past. On the contrary: Israel’s
current policies are themselves an insult and a threat to Jews and to
Israelis everywhere.” p 190-191

Spielberg wants a one-sided victory in which Israeli Jews rest
morally high above the Arabs. What is preventing Spielberg from
traveling on the same carpet as Neumann?

“Let no one throw up the Nazi era as some excuse for Israel, or wax
sentimental about the Zionist dream. This has not been some exercise
in moral reasoning whose object is simply to find fault. The
situation is urgent, and dangerous to all involved. The lies,
obfuscations and self-deceiving nonsense that sustain Israel’s
occupation - something it could end tomorrow - cost Jewish as well as
Palestinian blood.” p.190-191

Neumann has looked at what causes terrorism. Spielberg hasn’t: he
thinks that the world will automatically sympathize with the American
War on Terrorism. Consider the 1972 athletes:

“ ‘Terrorism’, on this account, can be defined as random violence
against non-combatants. "Non-combatants" need not be civilians, but
must designate those not involved in hostilities against the
attackers: workers in defense industries are one of many borderline
cases. "Random" means only that the victims are selected, not because
of their importance as individuals, but because they are
representative of some larger population. p. 158

Ben Gurion, unlike Golda Meir, did look in the mirror:

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That
is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us,
but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs... There
has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that
their fault? They only know but one thing: we have come here and
stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” p.151-152.

Which influential Americans know the same history as Neumann? In
light of the full-blown apartheid in Palestine would these Americans
initiate a full boycott against Israel? Would Noam Chomsky? (Neumann
calls Chomsky a Zionist on page 23). Would Woody Allen? Neumann has
tried to start a boycott, but didn’t get support.

Munich is a cinematic Nuremberg in which Spielberg, along with his
producers, actors and all his crew tell us a hideous fib about
Israel. In God-fearing America such fibs can only be checked, not
corrected. Neumann’s “The Case Against Israel,” renders Spielberg’s
“Munich” irrational hate propaganda.

Julian Samuel, is a Montreal film-maker and writer
juliansamuel@videotron.ca

(Michael Neumann has written extensively on the Middle East:
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann09232004.html
http://members.tripod.com/~mneumann/mnisrael.htm)

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