Revisiting Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich,’ after the attack in Israel

The 2005 film looked at Israel’s response to a national calamity- and how cathartic violence can corrode the soul of a man and nation.

Image: Universal Pictures

Time to reach out, grab the third rail, and discuss the most controversial subject on planet Earth…

For probably obvious reasons, I’m thinking a lot this week about Steven Spielberg’s Munich. That 2005 film told the story of the massacre of Israel’s entire Olympic team during the 1972 games by a Palestinian terrorist group Black September, and Israel’s response. This entailed sending a covert team — led by Mossad agent Avner (Eric Bana) — around Europe to assassinate the perpetrators one by one. 

A lot of filmmakers might have positioned this story as an unambiguous tale of cathartic heroism, one that put the audience in a position to root for the killing of the terrorists. After all, this was just four years after the 9/11 attacks, and 24 — a show in which the hero frequently killed or tortured terrorists, without ever having time to regret anything — was in full swing at the time. 

That’s clearly not what Steven Spielberg and his writer Tony Kushner, in their first of many collaborations, had in mind. The film does indeed feel, a lot of the time, like a traditional spy thriller — a very good one in fact, complete with informants, betrayals, and exciting action sequences. On that level, it absolutely works.

But Munich also has the team debating amongst themselves whether what they are doing is right, with some of them harboring more and more doubts as the film goes on.  

South African Jew Steve (Daniel Craig, in one of two movies from that era in which he plays a Jewish guy even though he’s the world’s most gentile-looking actor), is less of a skeptic; he’s taken to comments like “the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood.” (“Spoken like a true Likudnik,” a cousin once said to me, after that line.) Others on the team, like Carl (Ciaran Hinds), Robert (Mattieu Kassovitz), and Hans (Hanns Zischler) ultimately start to lose faith in the mission- as does Avner himself.

The missions are successful until they’re not. In the end, Avner realizes that even if Israel manages to kill everyone (or almost everyone) responsible for the Munich assassinations, there won’t be any ultimate victory. And it’s going to do bad things to the souls of the people — and the nation — who did it. 

Ultimately, Munich is the story of an Israeli man slowly realizing that vengeance for crimes against his people and nation doesn’t actually solve anything.

“There’s no peace at the end of this,” Avner says at the end of the film, which makes it clear he’s begun an estrangement from Israel that might end up as permanent.

Shooting and Crying

Munich is a fictionalized version of what’s known in Israel as the “shoot and cry” genre, in which ex-soldiers write memoirs and make films about how bad they feel about the killing they did as soldiers (the great 2008 documentary Waltz With Bashir is another example while American Sniper, which Spielberg nearly directed, is an American shoot and cry film) It’s worth noting that all sorts of top officials in the Israeli Army and security services — as seen in the 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers — have, like Avner, concluded that the conflict cannot go on as it has.

When Munich was released in 2005, it was attacked, by different people, as both too Zionist and not Zionist enough. A very different film from that period about an Israeli commando and the quest for peace, Adam Sandler’s 2008 comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, was met with a strikingly similar reception. 

Like Zohan, Munich is a liberal Zionist movie. It centers Israel, its protagonists are Israeli, and it’s primarily concerned with what the tragedy of the Munich massacre in 1972 and the years afterward did to Israel. It even builds a scene of suspense out of the team of assassinations rushing to save the life of the daughter of one of their targets.

There is a scene in which the film gives a Palestinian named Ali (Omar Metwally) his say, which some right-wingers at the time, somewhat dishonestly, positioned as the worldview of the film itself. Ali says a lot of things, almost word for word, that I've heard this week:

The film challenges a lot about Israel, its worldview, and its mindset, but it does not ever challenge the Zionist ideal itself. 

“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values,” Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen, the best-ever on-screen Golda) says early in the film. And that informs the rest of what we see in Munich. 

The film is not arguing for pacifism. Spielberg, who has directed and produced countless projects extolling war heroes, is not a pacifist. But it is arguing for peace, and for the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not one in which either side can ever kill their way to final victory. 

“Eric Bana, Kicking Fucking Ass”

There’s a scene in Judd Apatow’s movie Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogen and his friends say of Munich that “every movie with Jews we’re the ones getting killed, Munich flips it on its ass- we’re capping motherfuckers” and “if any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana and Munich.”

The scene, which was supposedly improvised, is very funny, but it’s also a wild, wild misreading of what Munich is about. Spielberg, who later cast Rogen in The Fabelmans as the uncle figure who runs off with his character’s mother, didn’t appear to mind much- nor did he mind when Rogen made some comments back in 2020 about how he’d started to question some of the things he learned about Israel growing up. Since it came while he was promoting the Jewish-themed comedy An American Pickle, that interview likely highly irritated the publicists who repped it, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt Rogen’s career.

There are things about Munich that I won’t defend. The film was based on a book, George Jonas’ “Vengeance,” that has been widely discredited as untrue; there really was an Israeli-backed team that killed the members of Black September, in the rough order and in some of the same circumstances that the film depicts, but it’s less clear that the assassins had any doubts or guilt about what they were doing. And while Avner depends on a mysterious French underworld figure (Mathieu Amalric) to supply him with names, that part didn’t really happen either.

Like every movie of the aughts that touched in any way on the Middle East, Munich begins with the sound of a wailing woman singing, which was already a tiresome cliche by 2005. The decision to cut the actual massacre with Avner having sex with his wife never made any sense — sexuality is one thing Spielberg has never been great at in his movies — and that climactic shot of the World Trade Center towers may be the most unsubtle thing in the director’s entire filmography. (I still can’t believe that person, interviewed in the HBO Spielberg documentary, who said it took her multiple viewings to notice the Twin Towers in the shot.) 

Spielberg, in an interview at the time of the film’s release, called it “A Prayer for Peace,” which doubled as the name of a musical piece from the film, composed by Spielberg’s usual collaborator John Williams:

As we sadly learned this week, peace in that part of the world is further away than ever. 

The horrific news out of Israel last weekend is practically unimaginable- Hamas adopted the tactics of ISIS and killed and abducted hundreds of civilians, the ones living on kibbutzes and attending raves. It’s horrible stuff,  and the kind of violence not done to Jews since the Holocaust. Some of the reactions stateside, especially in the middle of Times Square, have not been much more comforting.

The attacks this week, much like the assassination of the Olympic team in 1972, were horrible and indefensible. And much like that, they’re going to be followed by a massive, extremely violent response from Israel. 

Is Israel wrong to respond? No, they’re not. But their response is going to lead to a massive number of people being dead- and even after all the killing is over, the conflict will remain. And if you’re at the point where you’re arguing that your side’s dead children matter and the other side’s dead children don’t, that’s never a dynamic that leads anywhere healthy or good. 

10 Points on the Events of the Last Few Days

A few things I have to say about the recent events, with a rewatch of Munich still fresh in my mind: 

• My views on the conflict, I acknowledge, are somewhat all over the place. I still consider myself a liberal Zionist and think a two-state solution — while probably impossible at this point — is the least bad of a bunch of bad options. The Palestinians have suffered terribly, for a very long time, and that can’t all be laid at the feet of their leaders. There are Israelis, and there are Palestinians, and neither of them is going away anytime soon. I’ve spent a great deal of time this week getting mad at dishonest and morally obtuse opinions from people on all sides of the conflict. I agree with the great writer and author Talia Lavin:

  There’s a war in Israel and Gaza, and the left-wing orthodoxies and right-wing orthodoxies of the moment — each in their own way advocating or excusing the slaughter of unarmed civilians and whole towns — stream past me in impossible numbers, interleaved with videos of violence, with outright propaganda, with full-throated advocacy for ethnic cleansing. In this moment of peril, in which people I love are in real danger, the doubled self is present in its dark mirror. I feel the urge to speak meaninglessly, and the urge to stay silent, and the senseless notion that not speaking is the same as refraining from action. 

• Indeed, I have family in Israel, including cousins of my children who I know will grow up with this conflict as part of their lives.  While I haven’t been there since 1995, I love Israel as a place, a people, and a culture. This newsletter, in fact, is named after the flagship of the Israeli Navy, although Ben Hecht’s interest in Zionism was known to have waxed and waned over the course of his life.

• Israel’s government has been consistently bad for a long time. Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt demagogue who has long stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the worst politicians in America and the world, and even worse than that, clearly thinks himself a king or a Jewish version of the Pope. And that was before he let Kahanists — Israel’s answer to the Klan — into his government. The thing that caused the left in Israel to collapse was the right’s argument that they could keep Israelis safe after the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. That’s now, it’s clear, no longer true.

• I’ve come to see that, as Seth Rogen said, some of what I was taught about Israel growing up — especially that business about “a land without a people for a people without a land” — wasn’t exactly true. But it’s not that simple in the other direction, either. The question of which people are “indigenous” to the land is not nearly as simple as some would like to present it, and the concept that Israelis are “white” while Palestinians are “brown” isn’t exactly that neat, either. 

• There’s no defense for dividing Jewish people into boxes of “good Jews and bad Jews,” because that never leads anywhere good. It’s bad when Donald Trump does it, worse when Ben Shapiro does it, and even worse than that when (for some reason) Lenny Dykstra does it.

• It’s very possible to be anti-Israel without being antisemitic. But it’s also possible to be pro-Israel and VERY antisemitic. Not only that but there are several distinct flavors of the latter- and I don’t just mean the business about Jews needing to go to Israel to activate the Christian end-times scenario. The alt-right believes the Jews have their ethnostate, and therefore they as white Christian Americans should have our own. Richard Nixon intervened to help Israel in 1973 while saying horrible, hateful things about Jews in private.  Trump, who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and brokered a bunch of arms deals disguised as peace agreements, also can’t get through a speech to a Jewish group without talking about how good Jews are at handling his money.

• I’d like to see a bit less angry parsing of specific word choices in dispatches from Israel and Gaza by the New York Times or CNN, especially coming from journalists who are risking their lives in a war zone to bring you those dispatches. Especially when someone on the opposite side of the conflict from you may very well interpret that same sentence as evidence of bias in the opposite direction. 

• Social media, especially on the platform formerly known as Twitter, has been a particular horror show, with the Musk-era collapse of verification leading all sorts of nonsense through, whether it’s old and fake photos and videos passed off as new, or nonsense claims about “Hamas training camps” in Mexico. 

• I really don’t think it’s necessary for every single person or entity in the world to make a statement about what’s going on in Israel. Just in the last day, I’ve seen everyone from the Jewish Drake to the Palestinian DJ Khaled to Peloton, the cycling brand with much, much bigger problems, chided on social media for not saying anything about the tragedy. Why is that necessary? Does how you feel for some reason require the validation of a corporate brand, or a rapper?  Especially when ill-advised responses about the events have already ended careers.

• On a final personal note: Whether it’s a Nazi attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh or Hamas massacring people in Israel, I’ve found that such tragedy, or more often the perseverance and the coming together of the community that follows, brings me closer to my Judaism, rather than further away, and makes me more likely, not less, to wear a Star of David necklace visibly. Still- I would prefer less tragedy instead.

  I recommend that you watch Munich again, or perhaps for the first time – it’s available on all the major VOD platforms — and absorb its lessons. And remember that there are no easy answers. This wouldn’t be the most intractable conflict on Earth if there were.