Munich

The key motive for the hero in the great book is missing in the film to save Spielberg casting a poor light on Israel

by Junius

Steven Spielberg’s Munich is nowhere near as good as the book on which it is supposedly based, George Jonas’s Vengeance (1984). Jonas, a novelist, poet, journalist, producer for the CBC, a Canadian since his emigration from Hungary in 1956, wrote an exciting and fascinating book, having been given the chance to talk exclusively to the Israeli secret service operative who led the five-man unit given the job of assassinating eleven Palestinian terrorist leaders in reprisal for the eleven Israeli athletes massacred at the Munich Olympic Games of 1972. Anyone who has read Jonas’s superb book will not enjoy the clumsy and pig-headed adaptation Spielberg has made of it.

Others coming fresh to Munich will not have the pain of comparison with the book, but will anyway detect the film’s lack of vitality, which comes largely from our being given no chance to get to know the five men who seem to take on assassins’ roles so readily. Even the leader—his father is mentioned but nothing of how the son grew up to be a Mossad operative like his dad.

And more importantly the film gives us nothing about how the father in retirement is bitter and disillusioned about “them,” the Israeli intelligence bureaucracy. He predicts his son will end up the same way. This theme of the hero striving against his fate supplies a true tragic narrative to the book. Getting eleven names and trying to bump them off has little in it for us to relish. The film’s Zionist patriotism lacks depth and the full betrayal of the hero by the system his father curses is left out.

What Spielberg, for reasons best known to himself, suppressed is the following: Because the hero wants out, wants to live in America and won’t take on any more spy jobs, when he goes to the Geneva bank deposit box where his danger pay for the two years has been accumulating, he finds that the Mossad has retaliated by confiscating it. Though now penniless, he is still defiant. He and his wife live in Brooklyn and take on menial jobs to try to make a life. But there is more. Two men (who talk to each other in Hebrew) try to kidnap his daughter from her daycare. The attempt fails but the hero is in a state of shock. He falls back on his old spy mode and surveillance skills. After two weeks he walks into the Israeli embassy and lays out on the Consul’s desk photographs he has taken surreptitiously of the embassy staff’s children coming out of their respective schools and daycares. He says, “You hired me for my stubbornness; now beware of it.”

What a horror it is to think of him having to threaten those children to save his own child from the forces threatening him. This is the real drama: the fate implicit from the start when revenge is the sole motive. Golda Meir established that no Jew’s murder would go unavenged, but the means of accomplishing that eye-for-an-eye produces a vengeful monster that turns on its own. The film Munich has hints of this, but Spielberg prefers not to show Israel in such bad light. George Jonas, no less of a Zionist, tells the whole truth and writes a great book that Spielberg claims to have filmed, but claims falsely.

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