Where Spielberg botched it

I saw the film “Munich” (is it titled “München” in Germany, I wonder?) shortly after it came out, and I'm not surprised that Spielberg is being chastised. The criticism has two points: one is that the film is inaccurate. The Israeli operatives that carried out the killings of the Munich terrorists were nothing like Spielberg's characters. The other is its moral message: all this killing isn't moving things forward. This is seen as apologism for terror and/or unfounded moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defence.

I suppose this is one of those movies that will be interpreted according to your point of view. Spielberg's assasination team were not psychopathic killers. They had a sense of historical and political perspective. They didn't hate Arabs and saw their moral well-being as something that needed to be sacrificed for a greater good.

But what I was left with after the movie was an overwhelmningly depressing sense of the depravity of killing people. You could convince yourself in the abstract that it sometimes is necessary to kill someone, but actually doing it just plain awful. At one point, when they are about to shoot a terrorist leader, they ask him: “do you know why we are doing this?” as if to redeem themselves to the condemned man.

The assassin is a mythical character in popular culture. What little I have read about real ones is that they are entirely focused on the job when they do the killing, suspending any reflection until later. They would never stop to ask a question.

But what bothered me the most was the implied political context of the story. The current narrative - and it is wrong - makes Israel out to be a state addicted to revenge. The truth is that retribution is aimed at either making terrorism an exceedingly expensive tactic for those who commission it, and/or cutting off its head. If Israel were to avenge the murder of its athletes of 1972, they might take out a soccer team in Gaza. And if you think that would have been a despicable act, you'd be right.

There are many things that are complicated in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but the moral character of terrorism is not one of them. Nor is the fact that Israel has had to endure such evil for a long time. Spielberg would have done better to make that clear.