In today's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, the finest columnist writing today on any subject, published his analysis of Steven Spielberg's "Munich." I think the best part of what Krauthammer says, and what I had been trying to put my finger on about the movie, is this:
"Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. "Munich," the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. No longer is it crude, grainy TV propaganda. "Munich" now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended message to every theater in the world."
I think that's the point that disturbs me. Spielberg, a Jew, attempts to re-argue the terrorists' case in a much better manner than the original terrorists were able to do. In so doing, he furthers their cause and dishonors the Israeli victims. Krauthammer's article is copied in full below.
But first, a few preliminary remarks. Bear with me a moment.
People have asked me why I care so much about this. Lots of reasons I suppose. But I think it goes back to basics. What is the fifth commandment? Right up there before "thou shall not kill" or steal or "covet thy neighbor's ass." It's "Honor thy Father and Mother." That's what I think it's about. I'll explain.
As a lawyer, I like to think that most things are subject to reason. Again, as the good book and LBJ always used to say: "come let us reason together." Thus, if you lay out a good case, they will follow. However, I have found over the years that this simply is not the case in the case of Israel. People tend to have very set views on the subject regardless of reason or facts. I have repeatedly tried to lay out the facts on this issue - - the basics of which which are not really in dispute - - for friend and foe alike to no avail.
For example, last week I had lunch with a friend and colleague. Very nice guy. Jewish. Very, very smart. This guy reads Henry James for fun. We chatted about "Munich." He brought it up. He's liberal so he mouthed the usual platitudes about "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people," etc. So I laid it out for him. Just as I had for so many others. The basics:
1. Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire for about 400 years until that entity was dissolved after the first World War. It then became a part of the British protectorate. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Jews were promised a "homeland" in this territory. In 1920, the vast majority of this land was taken away and became Jordan, the first Palestinian state.
2. In 1948, the United Nations, which had inherited the British protectorate, decided to divide the remaining land into two separate states, the promised Jewish homeland on a sliver of land on the Mediterranean Sea and a second Palestinian state in the West Bank. Israel agreed to this compromise. The Arabs, including the Palestinians, did not. They all invaded Israel trying to drive the Jews into the sea. They failed.
3. In 1967, Israel, threatened with invasion and extinction by its Arab neighbors, fought back and won the Six Day War. At that time, it took over the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai (later, when Egypt offered peace, Israel promptly returned the Sinai).
4. In 1973, Israel was again attacked by its Arab neighbors by surprise on Yom Kippur and was within days of losing the war and extermination when General Ariel Sharon (yes, that Ariel Sharon) brilliantly turned the tide, encircled the Egyptian army, and won the war for Israel.
5. In 2000, at Camp David, Israel offered the Palestinians 97% of the territories it had "occupied" since 1967 (the same land the Arabs had controlled from 1948-1967) to create the second Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Yasser Arafat rejected the offer and began a campaign of terror and suicide bombings.
6. Realizing that the Palestinians have no intention of ever accepting a "two-state" solution to the problem, Israel (via now Prime Minister Sharon) determined upon a strategy of "unilateral" disengagement, withdrawing from Gaza and planning of leaving most of the West State (creating a second Palestinian state in approximately 93% of the "occupied" territories) with a wall of separation designed to ensure Israel's security.
Now these are just facts. You can look it up in the brilliant book by Professor Alan Dershowitz
The Case for Israel. (which, by the way, contains two excellent chapters bearing on the thesis of the "Munich" film, one titled "Is Terrorism Merely Part of a Cycle of Violence?" and another titled "Is There Moral Equivalence Between Palestinian Terrorists and Israeli Responses?"). As an aside, I think I have purchased about 10 copies of that book and given it to friends and family, none of whom I believe actually read the book, underscoring my belief that facts are irrelevant to this discussion. However, you can purchase the book at the above link or, if you'd like, let me know, and I'll buy you a copy.
So I explained all this to my very smart Jewish friend. What amazed me was that he knew none of this. Zero. Zip. Had no idea that the Arabs had been in control of the West Bank and Gaza for 20 years and could have created a Palestinian state at any time during those years but did not want to do so. Had no clue that three times in our own lifetime (1948, 1967, 1973), the Jewish people in Israel had come within days of being wiped out while the world sat by and watched once again (we're not talking ancient history in the Holocaust here but events we actually lived through).
But what amazed me even more is that after I had laid out these facts, he didn't really care. He just picked up with where he left off about the "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and such nonsense as "when you make people wait in long lines at check points they become "desperate" and that naturally leads them to become suicide bombers, etc."
The conversation only underscored what I have long known. This discussion is not about the facts and reason will not prevail. There are deep psychological motives driving peoples' view on this subject. For many young people, it is about being accepted by their peers who generally take an anti-Israel line. For people of my generation, I believe it is about their relationship with their fathers. There are many, like my friend, who were so embarrassed by their immigrant fathers and grandfathers, that they have spent most of their lives trying to distance themselves from their heritage so the bullies in high school won't beat them up for being Jewish (reportedly an injury suffered by a young Steven Spielberg growing up in Phoenix).
This leads to such insane arguments as that once offered by my younger brother who contended that the second intifada in Israel which was initiated by Arafat after he rejected Israel's offer at Camp David, actually was caused by Ariel Sharon's (the same) visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 2000. Reminds me of the attitude of the frightened, self-hating diaspora Jew which is characterized by the somewhat sick joke of the Jews standing in line for the gas chamber and when one protests about their fate, another one cautions, "don't make trouble."
In any event, I realize that facts, arguments, reasoning don't make much difference in this debate. It is emotional. It is about "honoring your fathers and your mothers." That's why I continue to do it. To honor my father and my mother, my ancestors, my heritage.
Although I often despair at the attitude of my fellow American Jews, including some family and good friends, I'm comforted in knowing that Israel's security does not depend upon me or my friends or my family. It depends upon Israel. Israeli was founded on the concept that Jews stand alone and if they don't take care of themselves, nobody else will. That is why I am glad to see that Israel is finally taking the steps it should have taken long ago by itself creating a second Palestinian state behind a secure wall of separation. (In my view, Israel's only mistake is that it should have formally annexed the "occupied" territories it conquered in 1967. That's what normal countries do after they win a war. They take over the area they won and refuges are absorbed into other countries. It's been happening like that since forever. Israel, being made up of good-hearted liberal Jews, thought it could negotiate "peace" in return for the territories, so it did not do so at the time).
As I write this, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon (the same) lies hospitalized from his recent near fatal second stroke. May he recover and be well. However, whether it is Sharon or a successor, the process of unilateral disengagement will continue. It is the only way. Let the Arabs have another yet another state in the Middle East (I believe that would make 23 Arab states, including two for Palestinians). Zee gezunt. But they cannot go on indiscriminately murdering Jewish men, women, and children. Never again.
Oh yes, Krauthammer's article:
'Munich,' the Travesty
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, January 13, 2006; Page A21
If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction "Munich" and root it in a historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Once you've done that -- evoked the killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would today be not much older than Spielberg himself -- you have an obligation to get the story right and not to use the victims as props for any political agenda, let alone for the political agenda of those who killed them.
The only true part of the story is the few minutes spent on the massacre. The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the opening credits, "inspired by real events."
By real events? Rubbish. Inspired by Tony Kushner's belief (he co-wrote the screenplay) that the founding of Israel was a "historical, moral, political calamity" for the Jewish people.
It is an axiom of filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know. In "Munich," the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history, no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die.
The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite translator of poetry giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward an Italian shopkeeper -- before he is shot in cold blood by Jews.
Then there is the elderly PLO member who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by Jews.
But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli way, I suppose.
Even more egregious than the manipulation by character is the propaganda by dialogue. The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: The Jews stole our land and we're going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back. Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say . . . the same thing. The hero's mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says: We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.
Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? 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?
It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine" from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. If the Jews were just seeking a nice refuge, why did they choose the malarial swamps and barren sand dunes of 19th-century Palestine? Because Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terrorism.
And Munich. Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. "Munich," the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. No longer is it crude, grainy TV propaganda. "Munich" now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended message to every theater in the world.
This is hardly surprising, considering that "Munich's" case for the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli cause -- not just the campaign to assassinate Munich's planners but the entire enterprise of Israel itself -- is so thorough that the movie concludes with the lead Mossad assassin, seared by his experience, abandoning Israel forever. Where does the hero resettle? In the only true home for the Jew of conscience, sensitivity and authenticity: Brooklyn.
