Steven Spielberg's Munich, writes Joseph Massad*, legitimises Israeli policy towards Palestinians while nodding away any moral qualms "The best baklava is made by the Arabs in Jaffa," insists the Mossad case officer to his chief agent in charge of assassinating those Palestinians Israel claims planned the Munich operation of 1972. Besides being excellent baklava-makers, we learn little else in Steven Spielberg's film Munich about Jaffa's Palestinians, the majority of whom were pushed into the sea by Zionist forces in May 1948. Many drowned while the rest escaped on boats to Lebanon never to be allowed to return. But Munich is not about these Palestinians; it is, emphatically, about Israeli Jews and Israeli terrorism. In the context of Hollywood's cinematic history, Munich is not the first film to discuss Israeli terror. Otto Preminger's 1960 film Exodus was in essence a celebration of Jewish terrorism. Like Exodus, Munich poses moral questions about terrorist methods, about whether the end justifies the means as it chronicles the pangs of conscience troubling Israeli terrorists as they murder Palestinian poets, writers, and politicians across Europe and in Lebanon. To a considerable extent Munich is having the same impact on American audiences, and is playing the same role, as Exod us did in legitimising Israeli policies and the Zionist project. Exodus was the major cinematic achievement of the Zionist movement. The film popularised the Zionist cause and continues to inspire young American and European Zionists. The film was most effective in staging the determination and desperation of the Zionist leadership, depicted as having no choice but to conquer Palestine and make it the Jewish State. Exodus tells the story of the Zionist hijacking of a ship from Cyprus to Palestine by Haganah commander Ari Ben Canaan, who then threatens to blow it apart, and the 611 Jewish passengers it is carrying, with 200 pounds of dynamite. The film depicts the Jewish refugee passengers voting in favour of the plan, transforming the terrorist threat into a suicide bombing. Indeed, Jewish mothers refuse to let their children disembark when Ben Canaan asks them to, insisting that their children should die with them should they carry out the suicide bombing. Exodus insists that Ben Canaan's threat of suicide bombing is not an idle one. In the extra- fictional world the film references, the Zionists had blown up a similar ship in November 1940 killing 242 Jewish refugees. When questioned by a young American widow about the purpose of sacrificing so many lives, Ben Canaan tells her "call it publicity, a stunt to attract attention". He avers that "each person aboard this ship is a soldier. The only weapon we have to fight with is our willingness to die." Haganah, shown in the film as engaging in suicide bombings to achieve its goals, is contrasted with the terrorist Irgun which in the film targets the British -- but not Arabs! -- in non-suicide operations. Exodus finally reconciles whatever misgivings it has about Irgun-style terrorism with its approved version of Haganah-style suicide- bombings, in the interest of unifying both forces for the purpose of establishing the Jewish State. The Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, stolen from gentile Czech composer Bedrich Smetana's symphonic poems Mà Vlast, is played ad nauseam in the film to drive the message home. The major achievement of Exodus, besides disseminating the Zionist story, was to eliminate the Palestinian people, whose lands and lives were being stolen by the Zionist project, from the equation. Munich need not dabble with such existential questions, as the matter of Israel's existence on stolen Palestinian land and at the expense of Palestinian lives had been settled in Exodus. Munich simply wants to update the story. Script co-writer Tony Kushner was clear on this point in a recent article written for the Los Angeles Times : "My criticism of Israel has always been accompanied by declarations of unconditional support of Israel's right to exist, and I believe that the global community has a responsibility to defend that right. I have written and spoken of my love for Israel." Only one Palestinian, Taha, is allowed to speak in Exodus, and then only in order to praise Zionism. Taha in fact drinks a toast to the Zionist conquest of his people's land and lives. Exodus depicts Jewish colonists as ultra-civilised compared to the Palestinians, shown throughout the film in Bedouin garb, parading in village and city apparel, as a measure of their backwardness. Munich employs similar cinematic tactics, even though when it shows Palestinians in "civilised" Western garb it reminds viewers they are no different from the inhabitants of Arab villages. If Ari Ben Canaan is a cultured man who knows his way around a French menu and wine list, so Munich 's Avner Kaufman is a gourmet cook and a sensual lover, though his taste in erotic fantasies is questionable. Unlike Exodus 's more protracted focus on a number of characters, Munich focuses exclusively on the character of Avner, exploring his inner conflict, his love for his wife and yearning for his newborn child, as well as his troubled relationship with his parents -- the generational connections it makes are illustrative of an established past for Jewish colonists in Israel and an uncertain future for their grandchildren. The film also describes the moral conflicts of the other members of Avner's terrorist cell, inspired by what Robert, the explosives expert, presents as Jewish ethics. Robert, who learned his expertise at the hands of the Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet, is unable to reconcile his Jewish ethics with his Israeli training and finally quits the killing spree. He is reminiscent of Dov Landau, the young Irgun explosives expert in Exodus who learned his skills from the Nazis in Auschwitz when he had to dynamite the ground to make trenches for the burial of exterminated Jews. Unlike Munich 's Robert, Landau had no qualms about killing Jews, Arabs and Britons when he blew up the King David Hotel. Landau's major trauma, as presented in the film, was not his internment in Auschwitz or his witnessing of the gassing of Jews and participation in their burial. The only thing that made him cry was his rape by the Nazis ("they used me as you would use a woman") which impelled him to join the Irgun as a restorative act of lost manhood. Robert, in contrast, has little problem sharing a homoerotic moment of dancing with Steve to celebrate the murder of Wa'il Zu'aytar in Rome. The sexual politics of Zionism have certainly progressed, or so we are led to believe watching Munich. The moral qualms that Robert and other members of the terrorist cell express strike the educated viewer as uncanny: documentary accounts of, and interviews with, Mossad agents show them to have a strong ideological commitment and determination to kill enemy Palestinians with no moral questioning. It is diaspora Jewish supporters of Israel who -- infrequently -- feign moral dilemmas (and also, on occasion, those Israelis called upon to perform before the international media). Spielberg, being one of them, expressed his dilemmas in clear terms to the London Times : he and his family "love Israel, we support Israel, we have unqualified support for Israel, which has struggled, surrounded by enemies, ever since its statehood was declared... I feel very proud to stand right alongside all of my friends in Israel; and yet I can ask questions about these very, very sensitive issues between Israelis and Palestinians and the whole quest for a homeland." Munich is a film in which Spielberg, Kushner and similar-minded diaspora supporters, and not Israeli Mossad agents, may recognise themselves. The moral questions that Munich poses have more to do with the souls of Israeli Jews. In that, the film does not deviate much from Zionist propaganda, which has always claimed that Jewish soldiers "shoot and cry". Golda Meir, who is depicted in the film as a righteous and lovable leader, once said, "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours." It is this racist sentiment that structures the story Munich wants to tell. The fact that Palestinian violence was in response to Zionist conquest and murder is immaterial to Spielberg's reasoning, as is the fact that many Palestinians are willing to forgive Israeli Jews for the continued theft of their lands and livelihoods, the continued oppression the Israelis visit upon all Palestinian communities in Palestine and the diaspora, and for the major role Israeli and diaspora Jews play in the Israeli and Western media in transforming Palestinians from victims of Israeli terror into perpetrators of it. Spielberg, an active participant in such media depictions, humanises Israeli terrorists in Munich but not Palestinian terrorists, who are portrayed as having no conscience. It seems that unlike their Israeli counterparts, Palestinians shoot but do not cry! We see the Israeli murderers laugh, cry, make love, cook, eat, kill, regret, question authority, but we also see them lose their souls. While Munich wonders whether the policy of terrorism that Golda Meir unleashed out of anguish at the murder of Israeli athletes might have been misguided, the film insists that it is the Palestinians who forced the choice of terror on Israel. Munich 's point of contention with Meir's policy rests on its claim that because Jews have a morally superior code Israel need not respond to the Palestinians in kind, a sentiment articulated by Robert, the explosives-expert. Some of the legitimacy that Spielberg and Kushner hope the film will receive comes from Zionist dissatisfaction with it, which to the US media confirms Munich 's "objectivity". In the same manner, Sharon's policies have been presented as "fair" when opposed by Palestinians, and by Israelis to the right of Sharon. While this simple-minded tactic works with naïve US audiences, it has a harder time persuading more savvy audiences outside the country. As in Exodus, Palestinians in Munich ventriloquise the worst that Zionist propaganda says they say. If the good Palestinian in Exodus was the collaborator Taha, killed by the Palestinians for his treason, Munich offers the terrorist Ali who, in being killed by the Israelis for not being like Taha, confirms that the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. As for the rest of the Palestinian people, Munich, like the Israeli authorities, hopes that they stick to making baklava and stop the resistance to Israeli oppression that forces Israel to kill them and, in so doing, forces moral dilemmas on Spielberg, Kushner and some of Israel's other supporters in the diaspora. * The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history. His book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question will be published by Routledge in February.
