Massacred history

In a long, incisive and well-reasoned critique, Gabriel Schoenfeld discusses Spielberg's Munich. Schoenfeld has little good to say about its message. Some excerpts:

But to indict Spielberg on this basis [moral equivalence] is to miss something far more disquieting and repugnant that is going on. Pace David Brooks, there is evil aplenty in Munich, and Spielberg is hardly reticent or “equivalent” in pointing it out. It is the evil of the Israelis.

Thus, although the Palestinian violence that opens the film is exceptionally brutal, it is by no means the only, let alone the worst, brutality that Munich wants us to contemplate. To begin with a relatively small detail that is a foretaste of things to come, there is the suggestively immoral way in which Avner is assigned to a death squad by the governmental machinery of Israel. He is asked to accept this posting without knowing what it is. “You are an Israeli officer; that’s your only loyalty,” is how his Mossad supervisor will later put it to him. In other words, he is expected to show blind obedience to authority, to follow orders without questioning them—cardinal evils of the 20th century indelibly associated with the war crimes of Nazi officers.

Another foretaste: at a cabinet meeting where Golda Meir makes the case for Israel’s assassination campaign, she appears blithely uncomprehending of the adversary and his motivations. “Who are these Palestinians?” she asks in a slow sneer, drawn out for emphasis. Incapable of perceiving the world except through the distorted prism of Jewish suffering, she answers her own question: they are nothing more than Nazis in Arab garb, “the same as Eichmann.” This hyperbolic comparison— murderers of eleven “the same” as a murderer of millions?—is left to hang in the air as an example of how Israel is trapped by its past.

Never once in all this does any Israeli present us with a reasoned argument for striking back against terrorists who have hit once and—wandering around Europe virtually unmolested by European governments—may be planning to hit again. National security? Self-defense? Deterrence? Justified retribution? None of these considerations is invoked in all the film’s talk and debate. On the contrary, what Israel is proposing to undertake is made to seem a departure from justice, and especially a departure from traditional Jewish values—even in the eyes of the Israelis themselves. . .

This discreditable rationale is, furthermore, the loftiest offered for what Israel intends to do; others, lower and uglier, are on display as well. Avner’s mother, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe (and hence also trapped by the past), insists that absolutely anything is permissible in Israel’s name: “Whatever it took; whatever it takes.” Steve, the South African driver on the team, argues for the mission in terms even cruder in form (“Don’t f— with the Jews”) or nakedly racist (“The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood”). And there the whole issue is allowed to rest.

* * *
Shortly before Munich was released, Steven Spielberg told an interviewer: “I worked very hard so this film was not in any way, shape, or form going to be an attack on Israel.” This is a truly curious formulation. Why should he have had to work “very hard” to avoid turning a film intended to commemorate the murder of Israeli civilians into a film attacking Israel? And if he did work very hard, why is the film he made still so blatant an attack on Israel in virtually every way, shape, and form?

And the inestimable Mark Steyn has interesting analysis of his own:

. . . if you’ve seen any of Spielberg’s other recent films on big subjects, you’ll know what his worst sin is. In War of the Worlds, he turned a Martian invasion into an exercise in parental bonding between Tom Cruise and his alienated son and whiney daughter. As I wrote at the time, ‘Spielberg seems to be reversing the priorities of Casablanca: this crazy world don’t amount to a hill of beans next to the problems of three little people.’ The reductio ad absurdum of this approach, you’ll recall, is that Tom Hanks pep talk to his men about how, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll see that ‘maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’. Good to know defeating the Third Reich wasn’t a complete waste of time then.

Spielberg’s limitation as a film-maker is his inability to overcome this ludicrous boomer narcissism. He’s utterly incapable of understanding that there are tides in the affairs of men when your levels of self-esteem are less important than just getting on with it. He’s lost the big picture — there’s just you and your feelings and even in the midst of a critical national mission you can sit around yacking about your self-doubt as if it’s some gabby chick flick.