MysteriousFaith

Munich

Steven Spielberg’s most recent film Munich is not his most emotionally evocative film – which is not to say that it fails at an emotional level, only that Schindler’s List sets a high standard for raw emotional power in his movies – but Munich is probably his most relevant work to date. In Munich, the simple and yet pointedly profound question Spielberg struggles with is what a society’s response to terrorism should be: if it meets violence with more violence, can the cycle ever end, or does such a response only hold the potential for escalation? Gandhi famously said “an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind”, and while his advice resonates to our spirit, it admittedly somehow seems strangely ineffectual when we moderns wrestle with our own response to terrorism.

In one of the more powerful moments in Munich, Golda Maier - then Prime Minister of Israel - says to her group of counselors that “every country finds it necessary to negotiate with its values.” Spielberg’s fictional account of Maier is probably poetic license – those familiar with Maier’s political career and beliefs will question if she was prone to such introspection over the state’s response to terrorism. This is actually a credit to Spielberg’s portrayal of the questions he is asking since many politically active personalities in the entertainment world would have been all too happy to one-dimensionally portray the state of Israel’s response to terrorism, Munich being a point in time when many believe the state’s decisions escalated an existing problem with the terrorists into the horrible situation Israel now exists within.

Spielberg is attempting to honestly wrestle with both sides to the Israeli-Palestinian question. One of the provocative portions of the movie is when Eric Bana’s character, the leader of the Israeli Mossad assassination group, finds himself and his group in the same safe house as a group of Palestinian terrorists (the Palestinians do not know Bana’s group are Israelis). After the groups put their weapons aside and elect to spend the evening together, Bana and the Palestinian leader share a cigarette in the stairwell. The dialogue is laden with meaning as both characters struggle to understand the other’s perspective. In one heated exchange, Bana asks if the Palestinian got his father’s house and olive trees back, would it be enough to get him to stop his activities against Israel. The Palestinian’s response is passionate and yet sufficiently under control as to ensure his point is not lost in the heat of the moment: yes, it would be enough. The next evening, Bana and this man find themselves in a gun battle and Bana has to kill the Palestinian. The cycle of violence continues, but Spielberg has made his point. While not all terrorists can be reasoned with, and society is naïve to think that is the case, many terrorist movements could be marginalized if their legitimate grievances were properly dealt with.

In his movie, the horrors of terrorism are very real, as are the fears of the Jews as a result of the Holocaust and the Arab wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s. At its epochal moments, Munich asks whether a democracy should respond to violence with justice that is purely retributive, hidden from accountability, and willing to use forms of violence that are indiscriminate and hold the obvious potential of harming innocent people. Spielberg never argues that pacifism is the answer in response to terrorism; most of the obvious tension-filled moments surrounding the question of Israel’s response to terrorism do not attempt to make the terrorist’s cause legitimate, nor does Spielberg ever minimize the violence used by Black September in Munich. When the characters in his movie dialogue over their response to the terrorists, Eric Bana’s character asks why they should not respond to the Black September terrorists the same way the state of Israel did when it found Adolph Eichmann. The question of Eichmann is an important moment in the film because Spielberg believes it represents an ideal opportunity for his viewers to wrestle with the question of justice versus retribution. Spielberg does not wish that we sacrifice an ideal of justice that requires the transgressor to pay the ultimate price; rather, Spielberg wants us to ask what the real costs are when the ultimate price is forced to be paid outside a venue of accountability and restraint.

As the movie ends, the final screen shot wrests on a panorama of New York City and its stoic Twin Towers, the poignant reminder of our country’s very own struggle with terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. To take seriously the question Spielberg is asking is to ask ourselves whether our response to 9/11, in Afghanistan, Iraq and our overall policy of engagement including the use of questionable methods of detention and interrogation are going to lead to a future just like that of Israel’s. After the Israeli commando group’s first killing, they are in a garden celebrating their success. The soldiers begin telling a story about the Jews and Egyptians: an angel comes to God and says “God, your people have made it across the Red Sea.” God says “good.” Another angel who overhears this humbly asks God, “but thousands of Egyptians died in the sea. Are these not your children as well?” God replies, “Yes, they are.” The stupefied angel then asks, “but if that is the case, why are you happy to know so many of your Egyptian children died?” To which God replies, “because now everyone knows don’t f*ck with the Jews.”

It is, I suppose, a funny story (and unfortunately one well grounded in theology – but I swore to myself I would leave that alone), but it illustrates the nuanced complexity Spielberg is attempting to draw out in Munich. For all the macho protestations Americans heard after 9/11 as to who we should model our terrorism policy on, many people talked about how terrorists do not screw around with the State of Israel; the reality is obscured by this double-talk. Terrorists very much do screw around with the State of Israel. It is this point that Spielberg wants his viewers to take away from Munich: terrorism is evil, and we are not served by calling it anything other than evil. But to meet evil with a form of retributive justice that inherently cannot be held to any standard of accountability is a form of justice that is too easily corrupted. More profoundly still, such a response meets the terrorists at their level, forcing a society to respond in the same way as does its enemies, but with the vain hope that it will somehow retain its moral credibility that in doing so, is not guilty of the same problems as its enemies are guilty of. Said most simply, it is not a response worthy of a culture which elevates equality and visibility in its manifestations of liberty. Time will tell if America’s response to 9/11 exhibited the measured restraint and yet exercise of justice that Israel’s own struggle with terrorism should have taught the world.

previous post: December 2005 Bookshelf
next post: Science & Religion - Can They Co-Exist?

• Posted in Culture
• no comments
• Trackback
• January 1, 2006

• Bookmark on del.icio.us
• Bookmark on Digg

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website