- Title: GERMANY: Israeli critics question the authenticity of Spielberg's movie "Munich".
- Date: 22nd December 2005
- Summary: RAMAT HASHARON, ISRAEL (NOVEMBER 28, 2005) (REUTERS) CLOSE OF (SOUNDBITE) (English) GAD SHIMRON, FORMER MOSSAD AGENT, SAYING: "Here we have a story about a group of Israelis going around the world, around Europe, and executing people. It's executing people and there is something in it. Even in this kind of operation - this reprisal campaign, in this liquidation campaign - there were moral values."
- Embargoed: 6th January 2006 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Germany
- Country: Germany
- Reuters ID: LVAB28HLLD7NF307SMIXYBY49N6E
- Story Text: Steven Spielberg calls his upcoming film about Israel's reprisals for the slaying of its athletes in a Palestinian raid on the 1972 Munich Olympics a "prayer for peace" in the Middle East.
Yet weeks before "Munich" screens in the Jewish state, many Israelis are up in arms at the Hollywood espionage thriller that suggests their decades-old fight with the Palestinians is as much a matter of score-settling as self-defence.
Even veterans of the Mossad spy service broke their silence upon learning that the film is based on "Vengeance", a book purportedly chronicling the confessions of an Israeli assassin who quit in protest at his country's two-fisted tactics.
"I think it is a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should have based this film on a book that is a falsehood," said David Kimche, who served as a senior Mossad official in the 1970s.
"It had nothing to do with vengeance," Kimche told Reuters. "It had everything to do with the prevention of more terror attacks against innocent people."
Israel has never formally acknowledged responsibility for the shootings, booby-trap bombs and cross-border commando raids that killed members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) blamed for the Munich attack in which 11 athletes died.
But few Israelis hesitate to assert that the operations were a justified means of deterrence, not least as, 30 years on, Israel's armed forces still track and kill Palestinian militants spearheading a revolt in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Though such methods have been adopted in the U.S.-led "war on terror" launched after the al Qaeda hijacking attacks of September 11, 2000, much of the international community cautions that they risk merely breeding more enmity.
Spielberg, who garnered world acclaim for his Holocaust epic "Schindler's List", echoed the sentiments.
"I'm always in favour of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine," the director told Time magazine. "There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region."
Both sides of the conflict are wont to deny such a symmetry exists. Palestinian guerrillas are massively outgunned by Israel's firepower. Israelis contend with suicide bombings by Palestinian Islamists bent on destroying the Jewish state.
Mohammed Daoud, who planned the Munich attack on behalf of PLO splinter group Black September, accused Vengeance of whitewashing Israeli missions that he said were at times indiscriminate.
Historians agree that the hit-list included PLO men whom even Israel, reeling from the loss of its citizens on what was the staging ground for the Nazi genocide, did not hold directly responsible. But the distinction elicits little sympathy in Israel, as the PLO at the time rejected its right to exist.
Michael Bar-Zohar, who wrote an authorised Israeli history of the post-Munich reprisals, noted that Vengeance puts the number of Palestinians killed at 11, although other accounts suggest the final toll reached as high as 18.
According to Time, Munich includes an entirely invented scene where an Israeli assassin meets one of the PLO targets and hears his arguments for the creation of a Palestinian homeland.
Without that dialogue, Spielberg told the magazine, "I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie, good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture."
For the select few Israelis with a direct knowledge of what happened after Munich, Spielberg's film risks piquing prestige.
As with Vengeance, it depicts an all-male hit-team left to its own devices in Europe, where several agents are killed.
"The way it is portrayed in the book, and I understand that the film is based on the book, it is so absurd," said Gad Shimron, a former Mossad field operative turned journalist.
"The whole description of the modus operandi of this hitting team, really, it has nothing to do with the truth," Shimron added.
Shimron also dismissed as improbable the story line whereby the hero, "Avner", develops conscience pangs at all the killing, breaks ranks and is hounded by his vindictive Mossad handler.
The film ends with Avner beginning a new life in New York, and Spielberg includes a final shot of the doomed World Trade Centre, suggesting at least a thematic link between Israel's response to Munich and the current international conflict.
An Israeli columnist suggested that the director was using Munich to criticise U.S. government policies obliquely.
But Spielberg has at least two fans in Israel, the widows of slain Olympic athletes for whom he arranged a courtesy screening in Tel Aviv.
Elana Romano and Ankie Spitzer whose husbands were among the athletes gunned down in Munich, both said they had no real complaints about the movie.
Spitzer's husband Andre, a fencing instructor, was among the sportsmen gunned down at Munich. Spitzer said she hoped the audience would be able to differentiate between the facts and fiction contained in the movie.
"I have no complaints against the movie, because the memory of our husbands is being respected and I hope that the people that watch the movie can make the differentiation between the historical fact of Munich and the fictional fact that came afterwards," she said.
"For us Munich is not the movie. For us Munich is our personal tragedy that will remain with me till the end of my life, so I would prefer to see Munich portrayed as a documentary based on real historical facts so that the world will never forget what happened in Munich. Not only because it is my husband, but because our husbands, they went to Munich to participate in the biggest festival of love and peace and brotherhood and they came home in a coffin," she added.
Munich will open in theatres in the United States at the end of December. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2011. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: None