Harrowing

Saw Munich. It was intense, dis­tress­ing and chal­len­ging. I can see why it has so many nom­in­a­tions for Oscars on a vari­ety of levels. Bana is great, Israeli accent and all. The script is strong, and while it’s pos­sible I was emo­tion­ally manip­u­lated by Spiel­ber­g’s great arsenal of tac­tics, I was never aware of this during the film.

The story as you know relates to the 1972 host­age-taking at the Munich Olympics. I knew that there was a Mossad con­nec­tion to this story but to some extent had avoided read­ing more about it.

I’m not a fan of Holo­caust films or films about Jewish anni­hil­a­tion and the his­tor­ical wars between Jews and Palestini­ans because they evoke in me intense feel­ings of con­fu­sion and dis­gust and help­less­ness. I under­stand only too well that we must com­pre­hend our his­tory or we are doomed to repeat it but I have not felt, through my child­hood, that we as Jews were taught to under­stand and to pre­vent but rather to hate in return. My father, who oth­er­wise preaches com­pas­sion and an appre­ci­ation for the world through travel and cul­tural shar­ing, hates Arabs with a pas­sion. My mother is less hard­line and tries to address issues but has pres­sured me to visit Israel and ‘see for myself’ ever since I was young. We had a blue-and-white Jer­u­s­alem National Fund tin on the fridge in the kit­chen when I was grow­ing up and I used to put pocket money into it. 

Last night made me ques­tion how much I had helped create the con­flict, how much I had unwit­tingly funded State-sponsored ter­ror­ism. That is, in between being racked by sobs. [I know, by the way, that my fifty cents a month had noth­ing to do with the mil­lions spent by Mossad on killing sus­pec­ted ter­ror­ists. That does­n’t stop me feel­ing complicit.]

No one comes off well in this film. The Palestini­ans and the Israelis are set on ven­geance. What is fas­cin­at­ing, how­ever, is to see the argu­ment played out so coher­ently on screen: this, says one char­ac­ter, is why Israel *must* exist, *must* sur­vive… and this, says another, is why it *cannot*.

I was left shattered and still with no clear sense of what can be done, now. This is why I mostly avoid these films. I avidly watch films about Israel today, about the army and the Wall and the queer move­ment and whatever else. And movies about Palestine and Iraq and Iran, trying to under­stand, now, what needs to be done, now, for peace. Whatever it is, it is *not* another bomb, another covert assas­sin­a­tion, another act of vengeance.