Posted by Rabbi Fred Guttman, Temple Emanuel, Greensboro, NC

In 1972, I was 20 years old and in July of that year I traveled for the first time to Israel. I spent my junior year abroad studying at Hebrew University. After being there for six weeks, the Munich Olympics started. The Olympic coverage on Israeli TV was quite different. There were no commercials! All the commentary was in Hebrew and every time an Israeli athlete did anything at all, it was given massive coverage.

The highlight for Israel during that first week of the Olympics had to have been Mark Spitz winning seven Gold Medals. Spitz, a Jewish swimmer, had participated in 1970 in the Maccabiah games and had done quite well. Since he was Jewish, Israelis had adopted him into their hearts and were very proud of his accomplishments.

Of course, all that changed the following week when on September 5, eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage by PLO terrorists calling themselves “Black September.” I remember sitting in a TV room with the Israelis being glued to the television. My Hebrew was not very good; I was constantly asking my friends for translations. The entire country was in shock.

Here it was less than thirty years after the Holocaust and Jews were once again being killed in Germany. Israel had viewed sending its athletes as a real statement of the fact that the Nazi Holocaust did not succeed in exterminating the Jewish people.

This event was to become one of the more formative events in my lifetime. Having grown up in Nashville, Tennessee, I had been exposed to Anti-Semitism, but I had never been exposed to the fact that Jews could be so callously killed and that the world would seem to care so little about it.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I recently went to see Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Quite frankly, I went with a little bit of trepidation, having read negative reviews about it in the Jewish Press. These reviews contrasted with the TIME magazine article that referred to Spielberg’s movie as a “Masterpiece.” My friends from the Baptist Center of Ethics had actually gone to the trouble of designing a study guide for this movie even before it came out.

I was worried that the movie might be intensely anti-Israel and would cause Israel and the Jewish community a great deal of problems.

The truth is, Munich is anything but a “masterpiece.” It is certainly not Spielberg’s best movie. The movie lasts almost 3 hours and is quite tedious and boring. Spielberg extensively based the movie on George Jonas’ book Vengeance. Spielberg never claimed that he was making a historical movie, but rather a movie based on historical events. Unfortunately, he never went to the trouble of interviewing Mossad agents, especially those who had actually been involved in the events following the Munich Massacre.

The point in which this movie really does show that it is anything but a masterpiece occurs at the end when the protagonist, an Israeli named Avner, is making love to his wife in Brooklyn and is having visions of the terrorist massacres at Munich. This was certainly an unnecessary piece of graphic and gratuitous sex. This scene is not found in the Jonas book and quite possibly, shows some serious psychological hang-ups held by the authors of the scene.

What the movie does not show in any great detail is the sad events that occurred in Munich and thereafter.

It does not fully show that the Olympic village had a terrible lack of security and that the West German government, in an effort to downplay its past militarism, had no armed guards in the Olympic village.

The film does not show that the Israelis were housed on the vulnerable first floor of the Olympic complex. The movie does not show how the East German’s actually provided the information to the terrorists as to where the Israelis would be housed.

The movie does not show how Israel asked to send in a military extraction team to save its athletes and that this request was refused by the West German government. The movie does not show how the West German government had no extraction team and sent in policeman with faulty intelligence and an incredibly incompetent plan to rescue the hostages at the airport. This plan included the fact that West German military personal were positioned within the line of fire of each other and had not been provided them with flack jackets or helmets.

The movie does not show how the West German government later worked with Black September to manufacture a hijacking of a Lufthansa plane. The plane had only twelve men on it, no women, and the hijacking of the plane was used as an excuse to release the three surviving terrorists. In return, West Germany received a promise from Black September that its actions on West German soil would be ended.

I mention these facts because they are to be found in a different movie about Munich, a movie titled, One Day in September. This movie which came out in 1999 won the Academy Award as the best documentary feature of that year. I urge all of you to come and see this important movie.

In Spielberg’s movie, Spielberg tries to make us feel compassion for the organizers of the Munich attack and other terrorist incidents against the state of Israel. The first terrorist who is targeted is a man who sits in Italy reading translations of Arabic novels in a coffee shop setting. The second is an older man who has a wife and a daughter. The man’s daughter wears a red sweater as she runs to her apartment in Paris. Of course anyone who remembers Schindler’s List, remembers that Spielberg’s red sweater technique was used in that movie for a little Jewish girl and was the only colorized part of the movie.

The truth is that according to a more recent and more accurate book of the events after the Munich Massacre, those who had been targeted had massive amounts of Jewish blood on their hands. This new book is entitled, Striking Back and was written by Aaron Klein. Unlike the book, Vengeance, Striking Back is actually based on a large amount of interviews with Mossad agents.

By his own admission, Spielberg, manufacturers a scene wherein a Mossad agent has a conversation with a Palestinian terrorist. The Palestinian terrorist tells the Mossad agent that no matter what happens, the Palestinians will never give up their desire to return to all of the land of Israel. Sadly, this points out the current problem that the State of Israel faces; that being the lack of a serious partner with whom to negotiate and compromise towards a peaceful two state solution.

Recent events in Gaza have shown that Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is totally incapable of maintaining control. As time goes on, the propaganda of “all or nothing” within the Palestinian community seems to be growing stronger. By contrast, within Israel, the acceptance of a two state solution by the general populace has increased greatly. This of course is evidenced by the emergence of Kadima, a new political party founded by Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

Spielberg’s movie also makes it seem as though the Israeli Mossad agents had real moral qualms about what they were doing. In a way, I suppose this is not a bad thing. It is always useful when asked to do terribly violent things for appropriate reasons to maintain one’s humanity. As a former Israeli soldier, I can tell you that in our unit there were a lot of lectures on the subject of Tohar Neshek, the “purity of arms” or how to maintain our morality of soldiers. However, it has come out that even in the new edition of Jonas’ book, Vengeance; the real Avner denies that these morality discussions actually were all that significant.

He writes the following:

“The fact is, our conceptions of morality have little power over terrorists. After all, the terrorists who killed the Israeli athletes in Munich (just like the terrorists who killed the thousands in the World Trade Center) regarded their actions as being profoundly moral -- holy, even.... The fact is that there are real differences between us and the terrorists. When terrorists attack, they shed blood indiscriminately. Indeed, killing innocent people is often the point of what they are doing -- either to send a message to those in power or to terrify the population at large....In stark contrast, when Israel exacts revenge for terrorist attacks -- whether by sending out a team like mine after Munich or by launching an air-to-ground missile in the occupied territories after a car bombing -- she aims to do it surgically, targeting only those responsible for the incident that triggered the mission....

"So it is that if I had to do it all over again, I would make the same choice I made when Golda Meir approached me more than thirty years ago. At the time -- a time long before the Camp David Accords, a time long before any meaningful "peace process," a time when the entire Arab world (including Egypt and Jordan) was calling daily for the destruction of the Jewish state and Israel's continued existence was very much an open question -- responding in kind to the violence that had been visited on us was the only course that made sense.”

At the end of his movie, Spielberg shows the protagonist standing against the New York skyline. In the background, one can see the Twin Towers. I am not exactly sure what Spielberg was trying to say by doing this. Perhaps he was trying to say that the violence from Munich has a future expression in the events in the World Trade Center?

I do know, however, that as Americans and as Jews, none of us would shed a tear or have moral qualms about our soldiers killing Osama Bin Laden.

The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 brought to an end the times represented by the Nazi Holocaust. It brought to an end the idea that innocent Jewish blood could be shed with impunity.

The message that we should take away from the movie ending with the picture of the Twin Towers may not be the one that Spielberg intended. Perhaps the message should be that Western Civilization is indeed involved in a war against Islamic radicalism.

It is significant that the movie Munich has not done all that well at the box office. After two weeks it had taken in only 15 million dollars. Contrast this to the Chronicles of Narnia which after four weeks have taken in close to 250 million dollars. Again, Munich is a tedious, boring and overly imaginative movie which does not do justice to its topic. That being said the best thing that the Jewish community can do is to ignore the movie.

Go see it if you want, but if you do, make sure that you also find some way to see One Day in September. Spielberg's movie will go away soon enough and will be recognized as a fairly insignificant attempt to deal with the very complex issues regarding the Middle East Peace process. This is a pity from a great filmmaker like Stephen Spielberg. We expected so much more.

In 1972 a terrible massacre of innocent Israeli athletes took place. The battle that Israel faced then for Jewish security, freedom, self determination and peace continues to exist.

But unlike then, there is now realization that a two state solution is the only realistic outcome of the Middle East crisis. The only question is whether or not it will be achieved bilaterally with a significant Palestinian partner or through separation which we saw in the Gaza disengagement.

Those of us in Jewish community in Greensboro, North Carolina stand firmly at this time with the State of Israel. As always, we pray for peace and security for people of Israel. May our prayers be said with sincerity and hope.