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I haven't read either book but just returned from the movie. There are several telling hints about the bigger and more important story that Klein reports but they're basically smothered by the spy movie stuff. Spielberg has claimed in interviews that he wants to raise questions about the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence, but other than some rhetorical dialogue it's hard to find where he did. After all, the victims in the movie are all psychotic Arab terrorists or their enablers, and the Israelis are reluctant and filled with angst about being sure to get the right guys and no civilians. Palestinians murder innocents, and Israelis murder those guys. It's the same old black-white propaganda line you see everywhere. There is one admission that maybe Israel shot some of the wrong guys, but the Mossad character who acknowledges it washes it away with the standard excuse, which goes uncontradicted: if the targets weren't involved with Munich they were involved with other specific terror acts.
All in all, Munich is just another layer of shmaltz on the ossified morality fable that constitutes popular understanding of the conflict, with all the trappings: Israel wants peace, never deliberately kills innocents, acts righteously if zealously in self-defense, cares not a fig for territorial aggrandizement, and so on. The notion that Munich bravely "humanizes" Palestinian terrorists to the point of challenging Israel is a joke.
Any real movie about this conflict would at least mention the following, all of which are forbidden in mainstream discourse:
1. Zionism was not a response to the holocaust but a direct offshoot of 19th century racial-supremacist colonialism. Israel remains a proud and determined ethnically supremacist state, unabashedly pledging perpetual adherence to the racist ideology of its founders.
2. Israel was born through an act of mass ethnic cleansing, precipitated by massacres, indiscriminate killings and rape, and throughout its history has been a serial cross-border aggressor.
3. Israel has killed more innocent civilians than all Arab terrorists in history and terrorism, defined as the deliberate use and threat of violence against civilians to accomplish political ends, has been a continuous Israeli practice since its founding and before. The worst offenders (Begin, Shamir, Sharon) rank among Israel's most powerful and respected leaders.
4. Israel has never accepted that the Arabs of Palestine are entitled to the same national right that Israel considers absolute, inviolable and even sacred for Jews: a national home in the land where they and their ancestors were born.
A movie in the 1980's,
Little Drummer Girl, an actual LeCarre story, at least mentioned Deir Yasin. Don't expect Hollywood to do that anymore. Too many people who think we're at war with terrorism will call it treason.
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I'm starting to believe Cyrus' assertion that this is the most destabalizing conflict in the world.
In the context of the conflict, one person can see Munich as "another layer of shmaltz on the ossified morality fable" heavily tilted towards Israel, while
another can see it as "the ultimate obscenity" which "judges the murderers and those who fight such criminals as morally equivalent."
Incidentally, this guy points out a few occassions where 'Munich' does manage to stray from the mainstream American misteken view of Israeli actions, through the main character's demons/misgivings and in the negative portrayal of Geoffrey Rush's character. However, I certainly agree that it could/should have been tougher on the government of Israel, while preserving the goodness of the Israeli killing squad.