Jerusalem Post rips anti-Israel "Munich"

There's a great film review of Munich, Abu Spielberg's big screen jihad against Israel's right to exist, in today's Jerusalem Post by Samuel G. Freedman. Freedman pulls no punches in exposing Spielberg and his radical homosexual/Palestinian activist screen writer, Tony Kushner, for the self-loathing Jews that they are.

Forty-five years ago, during Israel's brief turn as an object of international sympathy, the film of Exodus opened, presenting a fantasy version of the Jewish State's birth.

With their new film Munich, the director Stephen Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have supplied the antidote, the counter-Exodus, an anti-Zionist epic in which the role of a virtuous Jew is to make not aliya but yerida. Few works of art or popular culture so pointedly convey the anxiety of liberal American Jews, circa 2005, about an Israel that survives by the practice of aggressive self-defense. In Munich, Israel is not the expression of Jewish values but the contradiction of them.

Liberal Jews everywhere will likely hail this putrid film as a Spielberg masterpiece. It is even conceivable that American liberal Jewish organizations will begin actively encouraging yerida, or emigrating away from Israel, as the morally right thing for Jews to do - undoubtably with Spielberg himself as their spokesman.

Spielberg and Kushner never miss an opportunity to depict the hit team, and by extension the Israeli enterprise, as anathema to Jewishness. Of the five members of the revenge unit, Munich offers its greatest empathy to those with the gravest doubts about the morality of the mission. One of them, Carl, vividly embodies the cosmopolitan Jew with his pipe and cardigan sweaters, his cover occupation dealing antiques. Robert, an erstwhile toymaker who moonlights as a bomb-maker, declares at one point, "We're Jews. Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong…We're supposed to be righteous."

Such sentiments ultimately persuade the film's central character, Avner, the one with whom an audience is meant most closely to identify. Both the deaths he exacts from Palestinians and the deaths incurred by his own team, including those of Carl and Robert, turn Avner into a shattered specimen by the movie's final scenes.

The idea of moral equivalence between the Jews and the Arabs used to be the liberal mantra. Now, advancing the moral superiority of the Palestinians over the Israelis has become the "evolved" position of the progressives.

In Munich, it's Palestinians rather than Jews who express the deepest feelings for home. At one juncture, Kushner and Spielberg contrive to have the Israel squad wind up in the same Athens safe-house as a PLO cell. Ali, the leader of the Arab group, wears around his neck an ancient key.

While the detail is not explained in the film, it clearly refers to the Palestinian practice of holding onto keys from the homes they fled or were driven from in 1948 and 1967. "Home is everything," Ali tells Avner, who is pretending to be a Basque separatist to avoid detection.

Earlier in the film, in contrast, Avner assures his pregnant wife that she is his home. She, for her part, says that his problem as a human being is that he was raised in a kibbutz and thinks of Israel as his mother. Ultimately, Avner joins her and their newborn daughter in Brooklyn. Doing so, Munich wants us to understand, is the quintessentially Jewish thing to do. Exile is what makes the Jew Jewish, because powerlessness makes a Jew soulful and idealistic. The Israelis of Munich are the kind even Edward Said could like.

Yes, the Jew who leaves Israel behind, and, by clear inference, abandones Judaism as well, is really somehow being a good Jew and a better human being as a result.

FOR ANYONE who knows Tony Kushner's life and work, the viewpoint of Munich can come as no surprise. As a gay man who grew up in the Deep South during the segregation era, Kushner has been formed by two social conflicts that genuinely do yield to absolutes of Right and Wrong.

Kushner's sensibility, much more than Spielberg's, informs Munich. If one sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the collision of two legitimate forms of nationalism, then it cannot possibly be rendered as a matter of moral absolutes. If one sees it, however, as a matter of Western colonialism dispossessing an indigenous people, then Right and Wrong come in very handy.

When Kushner has spoken of Zionism over the years, he has often invoked the imperialism narrative. Just to cite one typical example, he told Haaretz last year that "establishing a state means f---ing people over."

All of which makes it entirely logical that the most appealing, sympathetic characters in Munich are those who criticize or even disown Zionism in the cause of being more truly Jewish. And, of course, for winning an audience's heart, nothing beats having a Jew die. Death is the ultimate proof of Jewish virtue.

L'chaim to death?? Apparantly, that's Jewish philosophy from the liberal perspective.

Sadly, whatever good Spielberg did in his Holocaust survivor documentaries and Schindler's List has now been undone by this collaboration with Kushner in producing, Munich: the Israel-hating, Palestinian loving, feel good blockbuster of the season.

His legacy will forever be stained.

-MZ