Even Though the Jewish Press Doesn’t Like Them

Written by Kate Ulansky

Munich and Paradise Now Challenge Viewers in Theaters and Mirrors Alike
The movie industry has always participated in its own telling of history, often filling informational gaps with sentimental, and fictional stories. Recently, a number of films have begun to address political and social realms where Jews feature prominently. The various silver screen interpretations of Jewishness have proved a dangerous endeavor regardless of the religion and ethnicity of the filmmakers. Films that address terrorism and the Middle East seem to be a dime-a-dozen these days, with Munich and Paradise Now, at the top of the heap. Given international interest in Israeli-Palestinian politics, it is not surprising that Jews are appearing on the front lines of this new cinematic trend. But these filmmakers – even the Jews among them - are not immune to cries of anti-Semitism, some of which have recently fallen upon even the most unworthy of targets.

Munich, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of the 1972 Israeli assassination team that pursued the terrorists of the 1972 Olympics, portrays Jews who are internally divided, reflective, and questioning. Conversely, some would argue, Paradise Now, Hany Abu Assad’s portrait of two would-be suicide bombers, minimally integrates Israelis into the plot and portrays them as soldiers, or more broadly, as destructive.

While the two films address vastly different constituencies bound up in one intimate conflict, Spielberg and Abu Assad are united in at least one thing: their work has been overwhelmingly rejected by Jewish audiences and the mainstream Jewish press. Thousands of miles from the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American Jews who passionately defend all things Israel are criticizing those who challenge their complacency.

Avner, the Mossad agent in Munich, like the rest of his team, is decidedly human: scared at some moments, at others conflicted, self-assured, rejoicing or erroneous. What many reviewers find so abhorrent is the fact of questioning the moral rectitude and overall effectiveness of their strategy of “eliminating” the men responsible for the murder of the Israeli Olympic delegation. The events of the movie revolve around then-Prime Minister Golda Meir’s observation: “Every civilization has to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Throughout the course of his visually and intellectually engaging film, Spielberg traces the effects of power on the men who are sent to squelch Jewish opposition — from the bomb maker who becomes disillusioned about the true meaning of “Jewish” to Avner himself, who seems destined for a life of frantic double-checking.

Spielberg’s film underscores the underlying effect of what we may call the Jewish communal psyche: a people plagued by paranoia, however justified and/or self-perpetuating it may be. The review published in the quarterly report of The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media watchdog, points to this same reality albeit from a different angle. CAMERA is most displeased about the Mossad’s self-criticism and self-doubt.

Executive Director Andrea Levin criticizes the film, for alleging that not only, “was it futile to assassinate terrorist masterminds because new and worse replacements sprang up to escalate the violence, but eliminating terrorists ostensibly destroyed the souls of the Jewish hit team.” Golda Meir’s refrain in the opening scenes of the film offends Levin’s sense of history: “The charge that Israel believed targeting terrorist leaders compromises its values rather than affirms its obligation to seek every means to defend itself” is a “pure Hollywood concoction.” For Levin, Munich’s greatest crime is to deflate the image of “the New Jew” by introducing a dreaded diaspora characteristic: self-doubt. Israelis and their diasporic counterparts, we should believe, are strong and self-sufficient, masculine and sexy, handsome and beautiful, soldiers and rock stars - not “insecure” assassins who check themselves before “defending” their brethren with unmitigated violence.

Maybe, shout some of us from the sidelines, we can be both.

Just as Munich was blamed for Israeli introspection, Phyllis Chesler, author of The New Anti-Semitism, condemns Paradise Now for its self-critical look at Palestinian society. The real problem, she writes, is that the “close-cropped informational frame” in which Abu Assad tells the story of Said and Khaled, does not allow for an Israeli voice. In her review in FrontPage Magazine, Chesler maintains that Israelis are “depersonalized and utterly demonized…ominous, hard-eyed, helmeted, and armed or in tanks.” Israel is a presence throughout the film — and how could they not be, given its occupation of the towns in which the film is set — however, Abu Assad sticks to a mostly internal narrative. If Palestinian introspection is a symptom of anti-Semitism, then there is little hope for dissecting the Jewish paradigm of perpetual martyrdom.

Considered together, Munich and Paradise Now offer rich
material for an in-house discussion among Jews. Munich speaks to the effect of violence on “the Jewish soul,” Paradise Now’s Said and Khaled consider similar questions over the course of their preparation for a suicide mission in Tel Aviv. The same conflict that plagues the “Jewish soul” of whose-life-and-cause-matters-more-today is also present on the other side of the Green Line. Chesler banks on the assumption that the history of Jewish persecution and harassment qualifies us to be the unquestionable moral police. Unfortunately, our own self-stereotyping leaves us with a predicament: What is our line when we are no longer the victim? Is there even “a line”?

Israel and the Jewish Diaspora are in constant dialogue. The Jewish community’s reaction to Munich and Paradise Now
provide two test cases that exemplify the complex nature of this relationship. Maybe this is why it shouldn’t surprise
us that an “exiled” Jew and an “exiled” Palestinian are the masterminds behind two of the most talked about films of the last year, which have both been stuffed into the bloated category of “anti-Semitic.” But it is not without a consciousness of the world around them that either Spielberg or Abu-Assad released their films into the heat of the conflict.

Spielberg reminds us in an interview with the pro-Israel, pro-Palestine Tikkun magazine that “a campaign of vengeance, even though it may contribute towards deference and preventing terror, can also have unintended consequences. It can change people, burden them, brutalize them, lead to their ethical decline, and even Mossad agents do not have ice water flowing through their veins.” When asked by Tikkun what gives him hope for the future resolution of the conflict, Abu-Assad replied, “the Jews have been the conscience of humanity, always, wherever you go. Not all Jews, but part of them. Ethics, morality. You invented it! …This conscience is still alive…Thank God!”

Since Munich and Paradise Now are quietly decaying in dumpsters behind most Jewish Community Centers, it is safe to speak about something else they have in common. Spielberg and Abu Assad have performed a single task: they have successfully humanized those who are routinely demonized. Avner, Said, and Khaled don’t fit the molds that their respective cultures have fashioned for “their types.” Avner, despite his Mossad status, is not made of stone and as it turns out neither are Said and Khaled. Both films end in the same place: heartbreak and disenchantment. If these are things purported to undo the underpinning of “Jewish solidarity,” then we’d better get comfortable, for there is a long road ahead for such a stiff-necked people. Instead of directing our anger at Spielberg and Abu-Assad for projecting their versions of reality onto the big screen, it might do us good to crane our necks around and look at each other for a change. And while we’re at it, let’s take a good, hard look at ourselves.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.