Remembering Munich

This reflection also appears at www.theThoughtfulChristian.blogspot.com, the blog site for the new ecumenical online resource center, The Thoughtful Christian (www.theThoughtfulChristian.com). The Thoughtful Christian offers an innovative adult Christian education program that contains downloadable studies in Bible and theology, Christian living, spirituality, popular culture, and contemporary issues. The Thoughtful Christian also contains a study session on Munich. For more information, visit www.theThoughtfulChristian.com.

Munich, the Oscar-nominated film from director Steven Spielberg, created a wave of controversy upon its release at the end of 2005. Although the film received a few negative reviews, it still finished the year with a higher overall rating from the nation’s top critics than Crash, which ultimately took home the Oscar for Best Picture (from a survey of thirty of the nation’s top critics in Premiere magazine’s January 2006 issue).

Munich is Spielberg’s account of the aftermath of the 1972 shootings of eleven Israeli athletes during the Olympic games in Munich. (Two athletes were initially killed and nine were taken hostage. When German authorities seized the airport, where the Palestinian terrorists were holding the Israeli hostages, shots broke out and the hostages were all killed.) The acclaimed director and award-winning writers Tony Kushner and Eric Roth based their screenplay largely from the book, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas and received Oscar nominations for their work. The film chronicles the Israeli government’s decision to hire an unofficial team of assassins to kill the Palestinians responsible for the deaths of the Olympic athletes and follows the exploits of the assassins as they travel the globe seeking vengeance. The opening sequences in the film include actual black and white footage from the original American newscast reported by Jim McKay, giving the film added authenticity.

The film is brilliant in the way that it succeeds as both a political thriller and an intelligent commentary on the uncompromising positions that serve as the catalysts for the endless cycle of violence that has persisted in the Middle East for many decades. Although there are several nicely constructed action sequences, the film is one of Spielberg’s most solemn pieces of work along with Schlinder’s List and Saving Private.

Munich suggests that the problems vexing the region are not as one-sided as either Israel or Palestine would have us believe. There are Israeli murderers, and there are Palestinian murderers. The history involving the Jewish and Palestinian occupation and entitlement to land and territories in the Middle East is long and complicated and includes numerous accounts of death and destruction. The United States government and many others believe that Israeli occupation of those territories is absolutely essential to that country’s protection from Palestinian terrorist groups. Others, however, believe that Palestinian resistance within the West Bank and Gaza Strip is justified as a result of a United Nations charter and stipulations in the Geneva conventions. The complexity of the conflict, which is the backdrop of Munich, is implied in conversations between Israeli government officials early in the film and again during a key conversation between an Israeli and Palestinian near the end of the film.

Spielberg, an American Jew, is now a paragon of commercial and critical success in Hollywood. The director is immensely respected throughout the industry, and his success has afforded him the opportunity to take the political and the commercial risks to produce and direct a project such as Munich. This film was particularly risky given the heavily Jewish Hollywood community, the changing political climate within the movie industry, and the influence and wrath of conservative commentators Michael Medved, Bill O’Reilly, and others, who were all-too eager to criticize the director. Medved and O’Reilly, in particular, devoted extensive time on their radio and television talk shows to discuss the liberalism in Hollywood immediately upon the release of the film. In one of the single-most ridiculous statements in film criticism in 2005, Michael Medved referred to Munich as one of the worst films of the year. The sociopolitical commentator and film critic was so proud of his claim that his quote indicating his disapproval of the film played repeatedly during his show’s commercials as recently as April 2006.

Munich prompts American Christians to consider the evolution of terrorism and its enormous consequences and challenges us to ponder appropriate responses to it. In addition, it is that rare film today that explores serious issues by presenting us with the black and white and the gray while moving us to experience a wide range of emotions. This is an achievement in itself, for we live in an age in which the discourse on the most important issues of the day is conducted on the simplest of levels. One of the more impressive aspects of the film is the way it depicts the transformation of Avner, the leader of the team of assassins. He contemplates the merits of his mission and questions his own Jewish faith tradition. Spielberg uses the plot point to ask the audience to consider the sins that people commit, the actions they commit in the name of religion, or how faith can move us to a new understanding. The dialogue in a memorable scene involving a Palestinian and an Israeli talking about the continuing conflict in their land is insightful. When both men finish speaking, viewers are compelled to at least seriously reflect upon Spielberg’s contention that “killing and counterkillings as a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine. There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where will it end?”

The director’s assertion became the launching point for neo-conservative commentator David Brooks’s widely-read op-ed piece in the December 11, 2005 edition of The New York Times. Brooks took Spielberg to task for creating a false world in his film, a world in which there is no evil. In true neo-conservative fashion, Brooks writes, “But in the real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by compromise between the reasonable elements on each side.” In the world of David Brooks, evil exists within all those who rise in opposition to entrenched imperialistic forces and the U.S. and the only way to rid the world of evil is to resort to violence. In a sense he tells us that he knows the Palestinians who plant bombs are evil and fanatical, pure and simple. Underlying his argument is a deep bias against the Palestinian cause and unflinching allegiance to U.S. policy, which includes supplying Israel with weapons and military. To watch the cautiously balanced Munich and to conclude that Spielberg doesn’t recognize the existence of evil is to place the term squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinians and to fail to recognize the different types of evil and the theological distinctions between them. Where are the Christian principles in this notion? As Christians we must categorically reject the notion by Mr. Brooks, for we are called to love God and our neighbors and to understand the differences between natural and intrinsic evil and physical and moral evil. Unfortunately, thousands of people may have read the column by Mr. Brooks and consciously or unconsciously accepted his view as the truth without ever exploring the theological distinctions between the types of evil. Readers of the column may have missed what I think may be one of Spielberg’s message to us, that the term “evil” can be used to describe the actions of both Palestinians and Israelis.

In the film’s final scene, Avner, the lead assassin, meets face to face with Ephraim, an Israeli government official, in a park in New York City. Avner tells Ephraim that he cannot return to work for the Israeli government after his experience but then asks Ephraim to have dinner with him and his family. “Won’t you break bread with me?” he asks. Ephraim declines his invitation. Spielberg then brilliantly draws our eyes to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that appear in the background, conjuring up images of 9/11 and the heinous attack on American soil. Munich is as much a retelling of the vengeance and counter-terrorism tactics sought by Golda Meier and the Israeli government as it is an anti-war and terrorism statement that presents in full view the powerful parallel that exists between the events that transpired after the Munich games and the U.S. government’s response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. In the final moments of the film, the two men walk their separate ways, choosing not to “break bread with one another,” reminding us of the pain and isolation associated with conflict and our own refusal to break down the walls that divide us so that we can “break bread” with all whom the one God has created.