by As'ad AbuKhalil,
reprinted with permission from the Angry
Arab Blogspot
It reminds me of a line that George Carlin—yes, that Carlin—used to use in his
comedy routine and went roughly like this: “why do “we” call Israeli terrorists
commandos, and we call Palestinian commandos terrorists?” That line never got a
laugh the two times I saw him use it with a live audience. The thrust of the
Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare notwithstanding: Israeli killers are
conscientious and humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter
what--killers. But a Spielberg movie about current affairs is like a Thomas
Friedman’s column about…Emanuel Kant.
What do you expect. But you know? Did you notice how one lone critical opinion
of the movie by one Israeli diplomat, which only mildly criticized the movie,
got so much press in the US? It was needed; and it even helped to promote the
movie to give a “balanced” cast to the narrative, that it of course does not
deserve. This one critical opinion reminded me of O’Reilly; how he every night
finds one email from somebody in Montana who tells him that he is too liberal.
He needs to that to maintain an image that does not exist, just as Spielberg
needs to maintain an image that he does not deserve.
This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing
machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. I
mean that. In fact, it is a celebratory movie of Israeli murder of
Palestinians. Israel killing is always moral, and always careful, and always on
target.
Today, yet another New York Times reviewer who also thinks that Spielberg was
not sympathetic enough to the Israeli killers, even had the audacity to
describe Israeli killings at the time as "targeted assassinations"
when even Israel had not invented that propaganda term back then. He must have forgotten
to remember.
That's all. Where do I begin. I mean yes, I was quite angry watching it; and I
got more angry as I watched the Berkeley liberal audience react sympathetically
to the movie, rooting for the Israel head killer, as he went about his "civilized"
killing. I watched the audience root for an Israeli killing team, and this WAS
a true story, and Palestinian victims were real people, with real blood.
The most emotional moment for Spielberg, and presumably for American audiences
was when the head killer talked with his baby daughter in New York, that he
missed very much. Oh, ya. That was the point at which you were expected to shed
a tear or two; the music got particularly sentimental at that point. It had to
be.
But where to begin; the movie was based on a book that took the Israeli account
as it was delivered. But the book was honest and more accurate at least on one
count: in the book by George Jonas titled Vengeance (only Israelis are entitled
to vengeance as you know, the more violent the better as far as some US movie
audiences are concerned), the killers did not express regret or
second-thoughts. None. In the book but not in the movie, the killers, according
to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." How could
Spielberg miss that. Well, he just managed. Hell, that was the whole movie, and
the whole political project behind it.
Of course, it was not easy for me to watch this movie, I mean not only at the
political and intellectual levels, but also at the personal level. I can
connect to the story, in its details and personalities. The first victim of the
movie was Wa’il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan
Salamah’s son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the
three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that NONE of
the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich--but more on that
later. NONE.
But why should this movie, a Spielberg’s movie for potato’s sake, bother with
facts, especially if they come in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative?
But this movie is intended for mass audiences who know nothing about the facts
of the conflict. That is exactly why it will work, and why it will deliver the
(propaganda) goods.
Let me start by saying this: this, Munich that is, was not as planned an
operation as has often been maintained. This was not planned months in advance,
as Abu Iyad maintained in his account with Eric Rouleau (translated into
English as My Home, My Land by dear Linda Butler). Abu Iyad for years
exaggerated the claims about the “carefully planned” operation, and PLO media
at the time lied about how the PLO gunmen threw grenades into the helicopters,
so as to make the last shootout more of a fight that it actually was.
Angry Palestinians who were being hit by Israeli fighter jets in their refugee
camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO had to give them some, even if
they were not legitimate heroes. The German troops were going to take them out,
no matter what, and no matter how much they, the Germans in this case,
endangered the lives of the hostages, and they presumably had Israeli consent.
The Arab League diplomat talked about this recently when he broke his silence
in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the
negotiator with the Palestinian team in Munich. Yes, I know. It can be argued
that the Palestinian attackers risked the lives of the hostages by taking them
hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is like
hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held
responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. That
is true. But it is also true that the State of Israel has taken a nation as a
hostage, and has been endangering the lives of Palestinians since the inception
of the state of Israel. This is why it is all a question of who is retaliating
against whom?
One of the many false premises of the movie is that Israel only went on a
killing rampage—and only against Palestinian “killers”--after Munich. That
Munich was a watershed. Watershed it was not, except in Israeli propaganda
brochures. Israel has been going on killing rampages against Palestinians,
civilians mostly, since before the creation of the state of Israel.
And how could you even talk about Golda Meir and forget to mention
hehttp://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.htmlr
most memorable quote: that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”
Spielberg must have missed that, just as he needed to show her as grandma
goodness who was pushed into vengeance by Palestinian cruelty. More
humanization. That is why we had to see the head Israeli killer with his child:
you need to see him as a human being. Do you know that not a single Palestinian
in the movie appeared unarmed? They all were terrorists, and their murder had
to be justified, and Spielberg did a great service for the state of Israel in
that regard. They should name some stolen Palestinian property in Israel in his
honor, I argue. A street, a destroyed Arab village, or a stolen olive tree.
Anything. He deserves it.
And let us see what Israel was doing before Munich. Before Munich, NOT
AFTER—did you get that, Israel placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian
writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his niece (14). The
niece was not plotting the Munich operation when she was murdered by the
Israelis; nor was her uncle. That was BEFORE Munich. Kanafani was best friends
with my uncle; they both used to write in Al-Hurriyyah magazine during their
days at the Movement of Arab Nationalists.
Israel also—BEFORE Munich—sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif (a writer and
journalist with the PFLP), and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage,
and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who
was not a member of any group. But he was a really diligent researcher, and
Israel did not appreciate it--I am assuming.
This is not easy for me; I have shaken the hands--or what was left of their
hands--of both of those men, and Abu Sharif never had a military role—I say
this although I never liked Abu Sharif or respected him (read my review of his
memoir in Journal of Palestine Studies a few years ago). But those were
innocent victims of Israeli killing. They never held guns those two, or those
three, or four. This story is personal for me, of course. I see them as human
beings, and not as armed and vengeful characters that they appear in
Spielberg’s movie.
And typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when they speak Arabic never
need subtitles. We need them when people speak in French and German, but Arabic
is not important. It is not important to know what cheap natives say; we only
need to know what expensive people say: Europeans and Israelis. And do you
notice that Hollywood still portrays Israelis as Europeans: they still don’t
want to accept that some half of all Israelis come from Asian and African
countries. This makes it easier for the White Man to identify with them.
And there is this element that is never mentioned about Palestinian attacks:
and this is true of the present and of the past. It is not that some
Palestinian leaders recruit or compel Palestinians to attack Israelis. It is
the other way round. Palestinians, regular rank-and-file and sometimes
civilians, pressure Palestinian leaders and commanders to send them on military
or suicidal missions against Israeli targets.
Munich occurred exactly like that. Palestinians in the camps in Lebanon, those
who were trained by Fath and by other groups, were lobbying for “action.” Why?,
you may ask? Well, not only for the loss of Palestine but also because Israel
was KILLING Palestinians. In February of the same year PRIOR to Munich, Israeli
jets bombed Palestinian refugee camps, and killed tens of innocent people. This
is what is missing in the movie, among many other things. Most Palestinians who
are killed by Israelis are unarmed and are killed not by assassins who are
conscientious and sensitive—as they are outrageously portrayed in this
movie—but by pilots who bomb refugee camps filled with unarmed civilians.
Palestinians who are bombed from the air, long before Munich, are elderly and
people and children in their beds. These are the victims that you will never
see in a Spielberg movie. So Israel was killing Palestinians, and this was the
context of pre-Munich.
So a small group decided to do something, but they were not sure what, and this
was only 3 months before Munich. And one of the handful of people who knew
about this, and this will never make it into the press was Abu Mazin--yes, that
Abu Mazen the head of the puppet Palestinian Authority.
But do you notice that US/Israel always forgive the past of those who submit to
Israeli dictates? Look at how US and Israel forgave Anwar Sadat for his
anti-Semitic Nazi past. Abu Mazin was the money guy, and he dispersed the funds
for Abu Dawud, who engineered the operation. And the American public in US
media and popular culture is so enamored with the Mossad, that the image of the
Mossad does not match its actual reality.
The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession with Abu Hasan Salamah
as the “mastermind” of Munich when he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do
with Munich. To be sure, Abu Hasan was a braggart, and had a big mouth, and
would take credit for things he did not do, and would distance himself from
failed “operations” that he planned, like the Sabena failed hijacking in 1972.
That was Abu Hasan: he lived the life of a playboy, and enjoyed a unique
indulgent pampering from Abu `Ammar [Arafat] who treated him like a son. Abu
`Ammar would never say no to Abu Hasan, on anything. But Abu Hasan had nothing
to do with Munich, and this ostensibly all-knowing Mossad, did not know it, and
probably still does not know it.
Former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, once said that the Mossad is a mediocre
organization, but that it is outstanding in PR--only in PR. Former CIA man in
Beirut Robert Baer said this about the Mossad--I am translating this from an
interview he gave to Al-Jazeera: “Let me tell you something, what people most
err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is
related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or
Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that in
[he meant Norway]. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know
many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle
East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge
of those countries.”
But this can never be maintained in a country that wants to exaggerate the
prowess and knowledge of an intelligence agency not only to help feed the
Israeli propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public for more
ruthless times and ways. So a very small number of people knew about it, and of
course Abu Iyad was one of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on
the list, and yet his name was NOT on the list, just to show you about how
much--or how little-- Israel knew.
Abu Iyad spoke more than he needed not only because he wanted to send a message
to the enemy, but also because the wars of factions and "Abu"s within
Fath necessitated a game of one-up-manships, and of wild exaggerations at
times. And while Black September was a paper name, and did not have a separate
organizational existence or structure, several factions used the name for their
own ends. Nobody consulted with Abu Iyad about Abu Hasan’s use of the name for
the Sabena’s failed hijacking mentioned above.
Abu Dawud is a key person here. And while his name was mentioned in passing, it
was added after the fact in Israeli propaganda accounts. Abu Dawud was arrested
in France for another reason in 1977, and he was released because there were no
German or Israeli warrants about his involvement in Munich. That shows you.
Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of Munich. But I personally believe
the account of Abu Dawud more than I believe Spielberg, i.e. Israeli propaganda
claims, or even German police. (Abu Dawud's account is found in Abu Dawud,
Filastin: Mina-l-Quds Ila-Muikh (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1999)).
German police lied quite a bit about the case; they leaked to the press
fanciful accounts of Palestinian infiltration of the workforce at the Olympic
city, when none of that actually took place. They were too embarrassed to tell
the truth. Similarly, the Israelis wanted to back the German account,
especially as the violence at Munich was a propaganda bonanza for the Israelis
in the West, just as Munich—this is not known in the West—was a propaganda
bonanza for Fath in the Middle East, as horrific as the outcome was for all.
And in that sense, the Germans, the Israelis, and Abu Iyad (and certainly Abu Hasan)
lied about Munich, but not Abu Dawud, in my opinion.
Abu Dawud is one of those 2nd tier PLO leaders who did not get corrupted in the
messy Lebanese scene, and who did now allow the Gulf money that corrupted many
PLO leaders to affect him. This was a man who was in charge of Beirut during
the Lebanese civil war, and yet his name does not appear in any chronicle of
the war because he was too low key, and because he never bragged. (Hell, he
never talked even when the brutal mukhabarat in Jordan held him from his feet
for days, while torturing him. People who saw him in jail at the time did not
recognize him. But you know this: your reliable "moderate" friends in
Jordan are quite "good" in torture. They are probably the best; they are
helping you in that regard as we speak.)
Most Lebanese did not even know his name. But this also explains why he
survived, unlike say Abu Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss
Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois society, and he could not
get enough of that life. He developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment
on Madame Curie Street in Beirut, and the routine he developed (going to the
GYM at the same time every day), made him an easy target. Abu Hasan could get
all the money he wanted for his own group from `Arafat, and was doing a good
job of maintaining not only good relations with the CIA but also with Lebanese
right-wing groups. He became good friends with some right-wing militia leaders.
Read the novel by David Ignatius, Agents of Innocence: it is about Abu Hasan,
although the author does not admit it.
It is interesting that in the movie, the Israeli head killer (who was in the
movie Troy), was cast to be most appealing to the audience: a good looking and
charismatic figure. But say what you want about Abu Hasan (and many people in
Palestinian struggle, like Abu Dawud, did not like him) but he was a good
looking and charismatic figure in real life, but not the actor who played him
in Spielberg’s movie. But Spielberg did not want the viewer to identify with
any Palestinian in the movie: that was contrary to him and to his political
goal. He just wanted to identify with the expensive human beings: the Israelis.
The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir’s painting, the Mosque, as an unidentifiable
blob. They were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed to evoke
emotions, and you were not supposed to see them bleed, and if you did, you had
to cheer for their killers. The only ones that you had to feel sorry for: were
the Israelis who get killed, including the killers when they kill. The music
that played when Israelis die, was different from the music that played when
Palestinians died.
And no speaking roles for Palestinians were necessary. Why bother. Give one a
line, and you have done your "objective" duty. And the list of
prisoners that attackers submitted to German authorities did not have “200 Arab
prisoners” on it, as the movie said. It had some 234 Arab and NON-Arab names on
them, including Japanese and German prisoners, but that was not in the movie.
And the statement that was issued by the attackers gave a name to the
“operation”: Bir`im and Ikrit, names of two (predominantly Christian) villages
in northern Palestine, the people of which were expelled by Israeli occupation
forces in 1948 for “security reasons.”
In 1972, the people of those villages petitioned the courts to return to their
villages, and the courts of course turned them down. But if you were to use the
name of the “operation” you would have to tell the audience those burdensome
details that would have distracted from the celebration of the Israeli killing
machine. But this begs the question: why is Munich more famous than the savage
bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps back in February prior to Munich? And
why did the letter bombs to three Palestinian writers not get any world
attention? Why did American liberals and PEN not notice it back then?
Could you imagine what would happen if a Palestinian threw even a rose at an
Israeli writer? Could you imagine what would happen among American leftists if
a Palestinian were to say even a bad word to Amos Oz for example? That was the
stature of Ghassan Kanafani among Palestinians and Arabs.
Now, I will not get into the military/intelligence background of the Israeli
hostages as Abu Dawud does in his memoirs because the attackers did not know
that information prior to the “operation.” Abu Dawud gives many details about
the military backgrounds of some of the hostages, but I do not think that this
is appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that before hand. I will not
get into what actually happened at the site at the airport when the hostages
were being transferred by their captors not only because the captors were
responsible by virtue of the hostage "operation", but you can raise
questions regarding the actual responsibility of the killing of the hostages.
Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the 1990s in which writers raised
questions about German responsibility, and on how the German government never
published autopsy reports of the hostages, etc. The Israeli government also did
not want to examine the bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would
have settled the question, of course. Abu Dawud stressed that the attackers
were under strict instructions to not shoot at the hostages, and you noticed in
the scene, even in the movie, that when they were storming the compound, they
clearly struggled with the door and avoided shooting, while that could have
shortened the time of entry, and Abu Dawud says that they were under strict
instructions to avoid using the grenades. And Abu Dawud raises the possibility
that the helicopter may have exploded from a bullet that hit it gas tank, but I
don’t know, and I have never relied on Spielberg, or on the silly book on which
he based his account, for historical accuracy.
And another thing comes to mind: Palestinians also have managed to assassinate
Israeli military and intelligence leaders but that never gets attention because
the trend in US media and popular culture is that you should only show
Palestinians when they are killing civilians. And it is not true that the
Israeli response was confined to the assassination of the 11 Palestinians as
was shown in the movie: Israel was also killing other Palestinians. Israeli
“response” or initiative we should call it, was more massive and brutal that
the operation of the secret team.
Three days after Munich, Israel ordered an air strike which required the use of
some 75 Israeli aircrafts (the largest attack since 1967) and the attacks on
Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon resulted in the killing of more
than 200 mostly civilians. And this is not because the Israelis knew that there
was a camp north of Sidon that was used for training the Munich attackers. That
camp was not even hit (another sign that Israelis had no information about the
real culprits of Munich) and other camps with civilians were hit. And then
while the assassinations were taking place, Israeli bombing of camps continued
uninterruptedly.
And the most glaring omission in the film, which shows you that the Israeli
team was not only savage but also ignorant of their targets, was what happened
on July 21st 1973, when `Ali Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter resting with his
pregnant wife around a swimming pool in Norway, was murdered by that
assassination team merely because `Ali resembled what the hit team thought Abu
Hasan Salamah looked like. (The Norwegian police tracked and arrested the
killers, but they were all released in a secret deal with the Israeli
government--is that not nice?) Should that not have made it to the movie? But
that would have made them look more brutally clumsy than Spielberg wanted them
to look like.
And even Wa’il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in Rome. He knew nothing about
Munich, and was an academic with close ties to socialist circles in Italy.
Zu`ytir was shot 14 times. He never held a gun in his life. These Israeli team
members were killers who really relished killing, and did not seem susceptible
to moral second-thinking as was stressed over and over again in the movie.
Zu`ytir was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on
which he knew nothing. And PLO representative in France Mahmud Hamshari also
had nothing to do with Munich; Israeli propaganda later had to contend with
that, and claimed after killing him that the attackers passed through France on
their way to Munich. In reality, the attackers never stepped on French soil
when they went to Germany.
And the movie, it seems really enjoyed covering the 1973 massacre in Beirut.
Spielberg I could tell really enjoyed learning and covering that massacre by
Israeli terrorist squads. But who were the three PLO personalities killed in
that "operation"? And who cares about the details? Kamal `Udwan was
the Fath/PLO leader responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. He not only had no
responsibilities in Europe, but he opposed “operations” in Europe, and even
those by Black September. More than that, `Udwan was one of the most moderate
Fath leaders having accepted the two-state solution back in 1970, before any of
his colleagues in Fath.
Abu Yusuf An-Najjar was in charge of intelligence in Lebanon—Lebanon, not
Europe. While `Udwan had no knowledge of Munich, Abu Yusuf may have heard about
it but had no role whatever in it. The third person was a poet: and you know
how much Israelis like to murder Palestinian poets, artists, and writers. Kamal
Nasir was a poet, and was killed in his bed. The movie did not tell you that by
the time the Israeli terrorists finished with their “mission,” some 100
Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered on that day in April 1973.
I also was amused--not really--how Spielberg portrayed the neighborhood where
the PLO leaders AND others were killed: it had all the features of Orientalist
imagination. It was traditional and the houses were old styles with arches, and
the place was protected like a military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived
in a residential building in the most modern and upper class neighborhood of Verdun
in Beirut. But why bother with that detail too.
And the Fath representative in Cyprus also had nothing to do with Munich; he
was the intelligence envoy of Abu Yusuf An-Najjar. And some people on the list
of the Israeli murder team were not only not involved with Black September, but
some were not even members of the Fath organization. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a
Palestinian scholar who had just completed his PhD in political science; I
recently had dinner with Basil’s best friend in college in Canada. Kubaysi was
in the PFLP and not in the Fath organization.
The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black
September. But then again: I read that Spielberg offered the script to Dennis
Ross and to Bill Clinton to verify the “accuracy” of Middle East political and
historical references. The two are experts on the Middle East, in case you have
not heard. More than that, the movie did not tell you that on September 16th,
and 17th, Israel launched a savage invasion of South Lebanon, erasing the
refugee camp of Nabatiyyah, and the Lebanese newspapers at the time (I even
remember that as a 12 years old) had on the first page that famous picture of a
smashed civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians smashed inside when an
Israeli tank ran over the car near Jwayya in South Lebanon.
That must have been too messy for Spielberg to cover. Why bother? And the car
had stopped at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance to the
village. Were those civilians in the car also involved in Munich? Later, as the
movie ended, it was written on the screen that Abu Hasan Salamah was later
“assassinated.” Spielberg forgot to add that he was “assassinated” by a massive
car bomb in a crowded street in Beirut, which killed and injured tens of people—oh,
and those people also were not involved with Munich.
The reviews of the movie in US media almost expressed frustration that
Spielberg did not express enough sympathy for the Israeli killers. Only
Michelle Goldberg of Salon to her credit (great review Michelle) pointed out
that contrary to that lousy review by Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic “many
of those [Israelis] in Munich are, if anything, slightly unbelievable in their
constant self-interrogation and closely guarded humanism.”
I was thinking after the movie that public ignorance of the Middle East greatly
helps Israeli propaganda; this explains why Zionist organizations express
contempt and wrath at Middle East expertise and specialty (as in MESA) because
those who get to know and learn about the Middle East overwhelming find it
difficult if not impossible to consume the unbelievable dosages of Israeli
propaganda delivered via US media and popular and political cultures.
*Three of the Munich Palestinian attackers survived. One died from a heart
attack; the remaining two are...somewhere in the Middle East.