This ‘Munich’ Moment

“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”

This line cuts right to the heart of the moral and ethical dilemmas that Steven Spielberg set out to explore in his 2005 film Munich. The dark and violent epic presents the Israeli government’s response to a surprise attack and hostage crisis that ended up claiming the lives of eleven innocent citizens of the Jewish state. Namely, the Black September raid on a compound holding athletes sent to take part in the Olympic Games in 1972. The speaker of the prophetic and resonant line above is Prime Minister Golda Meir, who has convened an emergency meeting with her cabinet members and military chiefs. 

Released nearly two decades ago, Munich hasn’t aged a day. In response to the Hamas massacre of civilians last weekend, and the terrorist group’s launching of rockets into Israel, the government in Tel Aviv has amassed forces for a ground assault into Gaza that might already be underway by the time you read these words. Israel has taken severe measures, launching air and rocket attacks of its own that are sure to inflict damage on Hamas and its resources but will also claim innocent bystanders, and cutting off Gaza from the inflows of food, electricity, and medicine on which people there depend. 

The devastation that such moves have inflicted and will continue to visit on many thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with the Hamas atrocities is not in doubt. A nation founded in May 1948 as a home for the hounded and persecuted of this world has made its neighbor uninhabitable and subjected men, women, and children to deprivation and misery.

But Israel, in the face of an attack no less brazen or unexpected than the massacre of athletes in Germany more than half a century ago, had no choice. Appear weak now, and who knows what Hamas will do with all the hostages it has taken or how it will behave toward all the Israeli men, women, and children just across the border.

“Ambushed and slaughtered again,” says Meir in Munich. “These people. They’re sworn to destroy us. Forget peace for now. We have to show them we’re strong.” 

She goes on to state:

“I don’t know who these maniacs are or where they come from. . . . You tell me what law protects people like these. Today I’m hearing with new ears.” 

In October 2023, Israel and the world are hearing with new ears, though the conflict and the rivalries behind it aren’t exactly unfamiliar. 

Some consider Munich one of the best things Spielberg has done because of the way he captures the ingredients, not just of a random incident more than 50 years ago, but of a perennial conflict, and the impossibility of easy solutions. 

When you watch John Wick Chapter 4, if you can stomach it, you take in a film with scenes explicitly derived from a video game. The characters are undeveloped and the plot next to nonexistent. After watching this garbage, you may struggle to remember a thing about it before you’re even out of the theater.

But in making Munich, Spielberg set out to capture ordinary people at the heart of a campaign to cut off the heads of the terrorist hydra. 

The movie leaves no doubt that an atrocity has happened at the Olympic compound and that the Israeli security forces are justified in going to considerable lengths to strike back. Yet few scenes in the film play out in strict accordance to the anti-terrorist playbook. When Avner, the leader of the Mossad assassination squad, and his bombmaker accomplice Robert, track down the first name on their list, the Palestinian translator and poet Wael Zwaiter, in an apartment building in Rome, the scene lacks the moral clarity of a Dirty Harry shootout. The two hit men draw their guns and confront a bewildered, scared old man at the bottom of an elevator shaft, aggressively questioning him and drawing confusing replies before they unload. 

This is not how revenge is supposed to play out. The bad guy should be a drooling fiend who must meet a clean, well-timed demise that provides a huge emotional payoff. He should fall from the top of the Eiffel Tower or something, not die in a hail of bullets while clutching a brown paper bag with a milk bottle inside.

So it goes in later scenes. Take, for example, the incident in Paris where Avner’s crew comes within a hair’s breadth of blowing up a little girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the moment when they blow up a terrorist’s hotel room in Cyprus and in doing so blind one of the young newlyweds in the next chamber. Or the raid in Beirut where one of the Israeli commandos machine-guns a woman standing beside the Black September target who opened fire on his team. Or the scene near the end where Avner and his last surviving teammate, South African driver Steve, think they have finally found the terror mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh at a house party in Tenerife, but end up shooting a teen guard in the head before they can line up a clear shot at the man they’ve come so far to kill. 

Over and over, moral ambiguity wafts to the surface, of a kind that would poison the morale of any covert operation but is all the harder to deal with given certain tenets of the faith of the men sent to hunt down Black September. 

Robert’s malaise is so acute that he cannot repress an outburst to Avner late in the film. 

“All this blood comes back to us. . . . We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong. . . . Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. We’re supposed to be righteous. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew, that’s what I was taught.” 

To lose that beautiful righteousness, he continues, would entail the loss of his soul. Spielberg deliberately leaves the fate of Robert ambiguous. We don’t know whether he blows himself up by accident or by design, but by that point in the film it is clear enough to him that he had little left to live for. 

The questions that Munich raises are as poignant as those Spielberg presented in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. A film that asked how many lives it is worth throwing away to save one man, and how you should treat a captive who, if set free, may show up later and kill off half your squad without entertaining any of the pleading to which he freely resorted when the shoe was on the other foot. 

But if Munich depicts the messiness that characterizes efforts to track down wrongdoers and mete out justice, this masterpiece also reminds us of how far apart the Israeli state is from those who would destroy it. In 2023, as in 1972, Israel has not committed acts of aggression, but has launched retaliatory and defensive strikes in response to a surprise massacre of civilians. 

Unlike Tel Aviv’s leaders, the heads of Hamas, and its rank and file, are unlikely to suffer any crises of conscience or lose any sleep over their brazen murder of defenseless Israelis. The terrorists act with zeal on the basis of a misreading of the Koran and its injunctions to strike off unbelievers’ heads and to slay idolaters wherever found. 

Munich is a paradox: a deeply conflicted film, and a manifesto for taking moral action in the real world.