Jewish History in Film: 'Munich' - a mediation on the cycle of violence

It was just 36 years before the Munich Olympics in 1972 when Hitler used the event as a means to push Nazi propaganda onto the world. It was now Germany's moment to show the world how much they changed, they even called it "The Olympics of Peace & Joy." They needed to show as little military as possible in order to showcase how peaceful they had become, and this meant a significant lack of security.

It had not been 27 years since the horrific events of the Holocaust, which made the Israeli presence quite significant. Many of those athletes had lost relatives in the Holocaust and the location of the event was just six miles from the Dachau concentration camp. The Israeli flags being waved was an incredibly strong symbol of the resilience of the Jewish people as well as their acceptance of this changed Germany.

It is here where Spielberg's highly overlooked 2005 thriller opens. Co-written between Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and Academy Award winning screenwriter Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump"), we watch as the eight terrorists jump an unguarded fence and descend on the Israeli athletes' apartment building, dressed in track suits and carrying duffel bags with various weapons and explosives. Two athletes try to fight them off to no avail, and the brutality of their murders is shown in great detail here. The nine hostages are taken with the threat of execution and the demand that Israel release 234 Palestinian prisoners.

We see this play out as it did for families all over the world: on the screens of their televisions. This was significant for the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, there was no way the world could ignore them. The presence of cameras also aided in the German government's failure of a rescue operation that would ensue. Germany did not have a counterterrorism unit and refused to except help from Mossad, who did. The blood of the Jewish people was once again on German ground, the nine remaining athletes murdered. As a result, Operation Wrath of God was released by Israel with the objective to hunt down and kill everyone involved in planning the attack.

Eric Bana plays Avner, a former bodyguard to Prime Minister Golda Meir and a Mossad official, who is hired to head the operation. A small team is assembled in the vein of a classic spy film. Robert, played by Matthieu Kassovitz, is a toymaker and an expert at disabling bombs, now is required to make them. Steve, played by Daniel Craig (of James Bond fame), is a driver from South Africa. Carl, played by Ciaran Hinds, is their cleaner. Hans, played by Hanns (two Ns) Zischler, is their forger. Their go-between is a man named Ephraim played by Geoffrey Rush. Their identities stripped, false passports forged, they become men without a country for the purpose of protecting it.

In a moment between Avner and his mother at the beginning of this film, she turns to him and says, "We had to take it because no one would ever give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth at last."

They discover their targets with information given to them by a mysterious Frenchman who goes by the name of Louis, played by Mathieu Amalric. His boss? A man who goes by the name of "Papa" played by Michael Lonsdale. A disillusioned vet from the French resistance, he refuses to work for any world leaders. "We paid this price so Nazi scum could be replaced by Gaullist scum. We don't deal with governments."

The most compelling moments of the film occur with each assassination. One brilliant sequence of the film happens when the team wires up a telephone with explosives. They wait for the criminal's daughter to leave for school, not seeing her return to the apartment. When she answers the phone, it is a heart stopping moment as Avner and Carl scramble to stop Robert from setting the bomb off.

As they move between capitals, Avner begins to grow more and more paranoid, even moving his family to Brooklyn. When they are booked in the same safe house as the PLO, they begin to question the motives of their sources. An ethical dilemma occurs for our hero as Prime Minister Meir's quote from earlier in the film echoes: "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values."

"Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. If these people committed crimes, we should have arrested them."

Spielberg does an impeccable job at capturing the messiness and the confusion of this film's heroes as the operation turns into years and their own team starts to diminish, killed off one by one. How do they know they are doing the right thing? The more they kill, the more terrorists just show up in their place.

Ephraim: "Why cut my fingernails? They'll grow back."

Avner: "Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership? You tell me what we've done!"

Ephraim: "You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon. The country your mother and father built, that you were born into. You killed them for Munich, for the future, for peace."

Avner: "There's no peace at the end of this no matter what you believe. You know this is true."

This moment marks a significant shift in the hopefulness and positivity we are used to seeing in Spielberg's films. In the backdrop of this final scene, we see the twin towers, an obvious symbol of escalation and endless wars we find ourselves in. This film should not necessarily be seen as an accurate account of what happened back in 1972 but a meditation on the absurdity of this constant cycle of violence we continue to see not only between the Israelis and Palestinians but within conflicts all over the world.

Zachary Aborizk is an independent filmmaker and writer based out of Orlando, FL. His work has appeared in such publications as Adelaide Magazine in New York as well as the Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival.