 "Israel-Hamas, Gaza, Palestine")
A little more than halfway through Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005), Hans (Hanns Zischler), a Mossad agent on a mission to assassinate Palestinian militant group Black September’s leadership, gets into a reflective mood on the ethical demands of his job. “In seven months, we’ve killed six of the 11 names,” he says, as fellow agent Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) cooks an elaborate dinner on a stormy night. “We’ve killed one replacement. …One of our own has fallen. Since we began, the other side has sent letter bombs to 11 embassies, hijacked three planes, killed 130 passengers in Athens, and wounded scores more, and killed our military attaché in Washington. …Black September’s original leadership has been decimated. But new leaders are emerging for whom Black September wasn’t violent enough.”
As Avner and a third agent, Steve (Daniel Craig), eat, Hanns refuses to touch the food but keeps drinking. “And to dispatch our six dispatched targets we must have spent something close to two million dollars, right?” he says. “Mrs. Meir (former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir) says to the Knesset, ‘The world must see that killing Jews will be from now on an expensive proposition.’ But killing Palestinians isn’t exactly cheap.” Even though he does not say it, his real concern is not the money they have burned through in their mission, but the emotional cost of espionage and assassinations.
Hans, Avner, and Steve are part of one of the several teams put together by the Mossad for a covert mission — known variously as Operation Bayonet or Operation Wrath of God — to avenge the killing of 11 Israeli athletes by Black September operatives during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. Adapted from the book Vengeance (1984) by Canadian writer George Jones, Spielberg’s Munich has been described as “a contemporary allegory of the Western construct of ‘the war on terror’” by film and media studies scholar Yosefa Loshitzky.
The last image of the film is a view of the Twin Towers in New York on a grey, cloudy day from across the Hudson River. Obviously generated through special effects, the towers are a spectral presence in the visual space of the film, released in 2005 — four years after the 9/11 terror attacks removed them from New York’s skyline and prompted former US president George W. Bush to launch vengeful War on Terror that killed millions and failed to achieve most of its stated goals.
US President Joe Biden referred to the US response to the 9/11 terror attacks last month when he advised Israel not to repeat the mistakes Americans had made. “Justice must be done,” Biden said. “But I caution that, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” This advice does not seem to have had any effect, with Israel continuing with its bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip and initiating a ground offensive despite warnings from the international community that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to militant group Hamas’s 7 October attacks on the country had created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After Israel bombed the Jabalia refugee camp earlier this week, several South American countries withdrew their diplomats from the country and severed diplomatic ties.
Throughout the film, Avner and his companions are constantly confronted by questions of the ethics of vengeance — both at the individual and national levels. Early in their mission, the team is at pains to ensure that they do not harm anyone except their targets. In Paris, they plant a bomb at the home of Mahmoud Hamshari, the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in France. But even as they are about to detonate the bomb, the unexpected return of Hamshari’s minor daughter to the flat prompts a desperate abortion of the event.
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Even before Hamshari, as the Mossad agents celebrate the assassination of Wael Zwaiter, a Palestinian poet and translator, in Rome, Carl, one of the agents, expresses his doubts over what they are doing through a reinterpretation of the Biblical story of the prophet Moses parting the Red Sea: “Angels are rejoicing because the Egyptians have just drowned in the Red Sea. And God said to the Angels: ‘Why are you celebrating? I have just killed a multitude of my children.’” Avner responds: “The angels respond to God. They say, ‘God, we’re celebrating because when the people hear what happened to the Egyptians, they will understand your point.” “Don’t fuck with the Jews,” chips in Steve.
This certainty, however, is gradually eroded as the bodies pile up — of their targets as well as collateral victims — and they learn that while they are hunting Palestinians, they are themselves also being hunted. By the end of the film, Avner is so disillusioned by his mission that he moves his wife and newborn child to multicultural Brooklyn. “There are more churches here than in Jerusalem,” his wife complains.
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic described the film’s moral interrogation of the Mossad agents as a “hollow Hollywood… dream of peace”, ignorant of the ground realities in West Asia, the dilemma of national leaders forced to take distasteful decisions, and lacking sympathy of the project of Israel. American Jewish historian Kenneth Waltzer takes a broader view of the film and tries to understand the historical implications of the Munich massacre and Israel’s counterterrorism strategies. He points out Israel convicted Mossad agents who, under the impression that they were targeting senior PLO leader Ali Hassam Salemeh, killed young Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in Lillehammer, Norway. “There was indeed rough justice in these hits and, contrary to the filmmakers, Mossad agents ordered to carry them out… never had second thoughts or ethical questions about most actions,” he writes.
Perhaps, as Waltzer argues, Mossad’s post-Munich operations somehow reduced Black September’s activities. Perhaps, there is little space for empathy or self-reflection in realpolitik. But Wieseltier and Waltzer asserting that a fictional work like Spielberg’s film should abandon compassion in favour of verisimilitude is reductive. In recent weeks, as the world has witnessed the fallout of Israel’s military action in Gaza in images and videos of the death and suffering of thousands of helpless Palestinians, the power of alternative narratives, like Munich, does seem compelling. Even if it cannot provide solace, it can perhaps plant a seed of hope.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based journalist and writer. He teaches journalism at O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat
