This issue of the Ledger focuses on the movie “Munich”-not because we want you to go see it nor to prepare you for it if you do, but because we believe that this movie cannot be allowed to pass without notice. Absent critical comment, it, like the insidious lies of Holocaust denial, would find its way into the historical record. That can’t be tolerated.
The outpouring of commentary about this film spans the spectrum of Jewish thinkers and writers. (See www.jewishledger.com for a list of articles about “Munich.”) Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, David Twersky of the New York Sun, Andrea Levin of CAMERA, David Brooks of the New York Times and dozens of others write incisively on this movie. Presented as being based on fact, there is far too much license taken to distort what actually took place and there is much too much liberty taken with the narrative to be deemed anything but fiction.
Walter Reich, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995-99, describes the movie in The Washington Post:
“’Munich’ isn’t a documentary, of course, and it’s hardly the first film to present an unbalanced view of complicated political issues. The trouble here is that Spielberg is a brilliant director with an extraordinary ability to shape the emotions of his audience and their impression of reality. Tens of millions of people around the world, perhaps hundreds of millions, will watch his film. And instead of just asking questions, as he says he hopes they’ll do because it’s art and not history, they’ll be coming to conclusions — conclusions that, because of what he put into this very artful film or because of what he left out, will shape what they think ‘…”
If history matters, then Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner have given us a fiction that needs to be clearly marked as such. If you think we make too much of this, another tragic death in Israel last week is used by the media to deliver the same message that “Munich” does.
IDF Lt. Uri Binamo, age 21, was killed by a suicide bomber last week a couple of miles outside of the Arab city of Tulkarm. He commanded a newly placed check-point put in place that day because Israeli intelligence got word of an imminent suicide mission targeting Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv’s children were celebrating Chanukah in gatherings all over the city. When Binamo approached the occupants of a car at the checkpoint, one of them, Soheib Ibrahim Yassin, detonated 10 kilograms of explosives, killing Uri and two other Arabs, one of whom was his accomplice. A number of Israelis and Arab bystanders were also injured, one critically. Just as in so many other bombings like at the Sbarro Pizza Restaurant and the nightclub in Tel Aviv, the bomb was packed with nails and other bits of metal, intended to do as much killing and maiming as possible. Binamo knowingly gave his life so children could live. Yassin knowingly gave his life so some might die.
Predictably, the media gave us the “Munich” message: all deaths are the same. For example, the Associated Press pictures of the funeral of this young lieutenant were paired with images of Yassin’s sister in tears. Newspapers were quick to label this as “Bound in Grief.”
How would Spielberg-Kushner depict this killing at the checkpoint? No doubt they would focus, as did AP, on the grief of the relatives and friends of both the bomber and the soldier treating them equally. No matter that the grieving sister and her family will get a $2,500 payment from the Palestinian Authority as do other families of suicide bombers. No matter that the bomber was immediately called “martyr” by the terrorists who sent him to kill Israelis and that most of Arab society favor this kind of thing. No matter that rejoicing in the death of their young is embedded in the killer’s culture.
Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister during Munich, said, “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Peace will only come when free peoples are able to sort out the differences between killers and those who attempt to stop them. Spielberg-Kushner missed the point that deterrence against future terrorism was as much a motivation for the Israelis in Munich 30 years ago as it was for Uri Binamo (z”l) on a road in Israel last week.
To them, all deaths are the same.

-nrg

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