Munich and the Swelling Gray Line of Terrorism

by Christopher Barr

“Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that human beings are rational and are made to seek truth.”

  - Timothy Radcliffe 

 

“We kill for our future.  We kill for peace.”

Munich is a magnificently shot film directed by Steven Spielberg, his last great film to date.  The events of the film take place during the aftermath of Black September, a massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics perpetrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).   The Israeli government forms a secret retaliation task force which they call Operation Wrath of God.  

The issue here is how do you defend against this form of terrorism, how do you maintain civility in the wake of the uncivilized?  What laws are available above book that can defend against this madness, there aren’t any, so the issue now becomes; to keep madness from the door the civilized must become mad as well.

“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Says Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir as she sanctions a black-box operation to hunt and kill all involved.  11 men had a hand in the Munich assassinations and they must be all killed.  Avner, a low-level Mossad techie, is team leader with four specialists, the wheel man, the bomb maker,  the document forger and the cleanup man, all assigned to help execute this undercover operation.

The men keep their search in Europe, avoiding all Arab countries.  They hunt down their first mark and sloppily kill him thus beginning their long retaliation campaign.  As they hunt down these men, it becomes apparent that they don’t know what they did and what capacity were they involved in the Munich massacre.  They are following orders passed down by the Israeli government and those orders are not to be questioned.

One of the most fundamental fallacies of war is the majority on the ground fighting don’t even know what they are fighting for.  Maybe they are told generalizations like, ‘you are fighting for your freedom’ or ‘you are fighting for someone else’s freedom’.  The issue here is the concept of following orders without question, turns an often gray situation into a black and white one.

This upsets what’s right-from-wrong into what’s right-for-us and wrong for them.  This is a blow for blow boxing match between two opponents that keep getting mad each time they take a hit to the face.  This is the unfortunate nature of man; this is our legacy and future because that’s all we know.  We are not going to do what it takes to bring actual peace to the world because we can’t, that project is too big.  The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, for what is right is right for those in power, not for what is right for the world.

After the squad kills their second target, the Palestinians retaliate against this Israeli retaliation with letter bombs mailed to various Israeli officials around the world.  Most of which were discovered before opening but not all, causality continue to affect both sides of this ongoing war.  The result of this line of thinking is the encroachment on the territory from one group upon another.  This rivalry of such groups becomes a battle for the soil, a war for the land and the division of the classes, breaking one city into two, the city for the poor and the city for the rich.   In the case of this war the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is where the bulk of the Palestinian territories are located and the wealthier, more prosperous Israelis reside on the land north, east and south of the region.

Avner and the group go to a safe house where they are confronted at gunpoint by PLO members, things calm down and Avner and one of the Palestinian men have a heartfelt conversation about the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in a stairwell.  The Palestinian, believing that Avner and the group are Germans, states that the world will be rid of all Israelis as Palestine and other Arab countries align to defeat them.  He says that the rest of the world will see what the Israelis do to them and will welcome their defeat.

Avner tells him that he will never get the land because they have nothing to bargain with, it’s simply not their land.  The Palestinian says that they will fight forever; there will always be more generations of Palestinians to make the world unsafe for Jews.  Avner tells him that the world will see them as animals to which the Palestinian explains; the world will want to know why they are animals and how they have become that way.  This conversation just as the conflict itself never meets a middle ground.  The Palestinians want the land that is currently Israel and Israel understandably doesn’t want to give it up, so the bombs will continue dropping.

This peaceful conversation in a stairwell during the middle of the night between a Palestinian and a Jew, sums up the conflict people have always had with each other - home.  Wars are fought over homes, the land that generations of people fought to keep.  Nations are invaded for a number of reasons; usually it’s to spread the territory of an empire like in the cases of Alexander the Great or Napoleon, often it is to destabilize for access to resources, like in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Sometimes it’s just about the land itself, a place to call home.

During the getaway, after blowing up their next target, Avner comes face to face with the very Palestinian he had a conversation with in the stairwell.  That Palestinian was then shot and killed in the street by one of Avner’s team members as they drive away.

The squad continues to deal with the moral implications as they shoot and kill their targets while they zig-zag across Europe.  They struggle with implicating innocent bystanders while they blow up hotel rooms and embassy offices.  Their struggle is that they are Israeli men but first and foremost they are human men, with moral codes.  They don’t want a little girl to blow up in the place of her father, they don’t want their bombs to destroy buildings, killing everyone one in sight.  They see that the job is morally dirty so they want to keep it as clean as they can.  

Avner goes to a bar in his hotel for a drink and meets Jeanette, a beautiful woman who propositions him to come up to her hotel room.  Avner declines the offer and goes up to his room but then later finds Carl, his clean up man, dead in his bed.  It turns out Jeanette is an independent contract killer. 

This world is a place of intersecting secrecies, Avner and the group are among many that operate performing various clandestine attacks as they cross paths with the CIA, MI6, KGB and the Mossad itself, who are unaware of Avner and what he and his team are doing in Europe.  They go to a Dutch river boat and kill Jeanette for killing Carl.  They shoot her while she’s naked and leave her that way on her porch, exposed and disgraced for what she did.

The gray areas here are so thick they’re black, different people, doing different jobs, representing different countries all out killing the Other, the problem here is these men are confused as to whether they should be seeking righteousness or should be seeking power while they exact revenge.  Sometimes its business like with Jeanette killing Carl or its personal, like Avner killing Jeanette.  The Israelis blow up a refugee camp filled with hundreds of Palestinian families and the Palestinian Liberation Organization kills more Israelis.  The problem here is one can’t make any sense out of this because it doesn’t make any sense at all.  Its cyclical chaos and it’s subjective in its nature, because if they’re two sides that think they are both right, then all the fighting is so neither of them sees themselves as being immoral.

There document forger, Hans has been killed, leaving only three of them left to kill the six remaining targets.  They are attempting to plug the holes as the water keeps pouring in, but yet they continue because that is their job, that is what they have been ordered to do for God and country.  Obvious paranoia sets in, they are being hunted by the Palestinian opposition under the same military code that’s existed since the first arrow was made from rock and wood; If you kill ours than we’ll kill yours, if you kill ten of ours than we’ll kill twenty of yours, if you kill twenty of ours than we’ll kill a hundred of yours………

Avner, fearful of being retaliated upon, searches his place that he’s staying for intruders, checking under the bed, and then he cuts open the mattress looking for a bomb.  He checks the phone, taking it apart; he checks all the places that he himself with his team has planted bombs to kill their targets.  He then does what he’s heard other men such as himself do in the past, when they have found themselves a target for assassination, he takes his blanket and sleeps in the closet.  While he does this, his bomb maker is killed by a planted bomb.  Now it’s only Steve the driver and Avner left.

After a failed mission to kill the mastermind behind the Munich massacre, Avner goes back to Israel and is thanked for what he has done.  Back there he has become bit of a hero to those few that have heard of what he and his team accomplished.  This is a point in the film where Avner wonders what have they done and to what end?  The Nietzschean ‘Superman’ is never to be a man that dominates or overtakes the weak, he is a man that is able, due to his awakened mind and his ability to critique his thoughts, to overcome all our laws and breakthrough all our charms, spells and formulas that turn their backs on nature.  Courage and intelligence is what fuels this aspired man, rather than the greed and jealousy of lesser men. 

At this point all the Mossad wants is Avner’s source, the man that connected him with the locations of all his targets, the man that is to remain a secret from any government.  Maintaining his loyalty and word to that man, Avner refuses and walks out and goes to New York where his wife and child live.

The film waits until the closing scenes to show the massacre in Munich, September of 1972.  The nine Israeli men are gunned down while bound in two helicopters as the German police close in on the Palestinian perpetrators at the airport, eventually killing all of them.  It’s a demonstration of sheer madness really, something that seemingly defies definition.  

While home the paranoia doesn’t go away rather it gets worse, he begins to worry for his family’s safety as the walls close in on him.  He meets with his Mossad contact, Ephraim in the end who assures him that he is not a target or his family.  Avner wants to know if what they did was murder, he wants to know why did they kill them men for only new men, more vicious motivated men, to take their place? 

This film asks questions and provokes argument, which is a good thing.  Terrorism is not black and white and there is no real definable good versus evil because there are reasons behind terrorism.  Reasons that might not translate too well for the opposition or to rational thinking people, but never the less – reasons.

The final scene of the film slowly moves over the New York City skyline and stops and holds on the haunting image of the Twin Towers.  Here the viewers are to take a minute and realize that those towers stood during the time of the films events, but yet today they do not, they had been destroyed by the time the film was released. The scene is foreshadowing the potent terror to come by the hands of supposed terrorists.  This is to evoke a visceral, unsettling reaction which if I recall at the time of the film’s release, it did quite effectively.  Subliminally the image of these towers, ghost-like in the distance, raises the question of whether or not these events in the film are somehow linked to the destruction of the twin towers?

I would argue that in some ways they are linked because if we are to believe that terrorists attacked America on September, 11, 2001; then this attack was a retaliation for being attacked.  This is the fundamental flaw in justifying terrorism because terrorism itself breeds more terrorism; the ends never justify the means.  In the end, Ephraim offers Avner and his family to return to Israel, for him to come home.  Avner says he will not be going back to Israel and instead he’ll be staying in America, then Avner offers Ephraim to come to dinner and ‘break bread’ and he refuses.  This is a conflict of ideologies, Ephraim is an Israeli Jew willing to die for his homeland and Avner, in his eyes has just turned his back on his mother country, his political obligations, thus you don’t break bread with a non-Israeli.

Politics would be more simple if man were more simple Plato says, but he asks why hasn’t this occurred, why hasn’t any of these ‘Utopias’ happened?  Plato concludes that greed and luxury are what prevents these idealized societies from manifesting into being.  Men are not content with the simple life, they are competitive, ambitious and jealous, they soon tire of what they have and pine for what they have not.  They seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

The ‘cycle of violence’ will continue as this film leaves us with an ambiguous notion that, ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’ way of thinking.  That’s why Ephraim was disappointed when he said ‘no’ to Avner’s dinner invitation; he just lost a friend and a homeland comrade.  The unfortunate moral to this dilemma is diplomacy is the shadow of illusion, the cycle of violence will continue because the concept of the enemy doesn’t seem to know the difference of whether it is looking out the window at its perceived enemy or looking into a mirror at itself. 

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” 

- Frantz Fanon