Steven Spielberg, America’s most influential filmmaker, doesn’t just make movies. He makes statements — and takes risks, as with his latest movie, Munich. The 59-year-old director has reached a point where leaving a legacy is more important than making another billion. Amistad was a message movie about civil rights. Saving Private Ryan was an ode to The Greatest Generation. Schindler’s List made the Holocaust vivid.And while he still makes popcorn flicks, too, even a film such as Minority Report offered a sci-fi take on what might be called ‘‘pre-emptive techno-justice’’ — an Orwellian surveillance reality that looms closer every day.So when he goes on the cover of Time magazine and declares Munich is “a prayer for peace” in the Middle East, he deserves to be taken seriously. One need not agree with him, of course — and, in fact, the critics have let him have it.Munich is a fictionalised depiction of the Israeli campaign to track down and kill the Palestinians associated with the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Its core argument is un-cinematically bleak: violence begets more violence. As Spielberg told Time, “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.” The result is “a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region”. These words, as well as the film itself, led many to accuse Spielberg of asserting a “moral equivalence” between the Israelis and Palestinians. The fight has spread beyond the province of movie reviews.Leading the backlash is columnist David Brooks in The New York Times: “Recent history teaches what Spielberg’s false generalisation about the ‘perpetual motion machine’ of violence does not: that some violence is constructive and some is destructive.” Granted, violence sometimes solves problems, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II.But most conflicts don’t have a clear-cut outcome — that’s true for the Middle East. As a Israeli character in the film says, “With each one we kill, they raise six more.” In the decades since the events depicted, thousands of Israelis have died in wars and violence, many more thousands of Arabs have died. Thousands of Americans have died, from Beirut to New York to Baghdad.Meanwhile, the basic nature of the Arab world has changed. As Munich reminds us, many Olympic terror-plotters were European Marxist in orientation, spouting trendy left ideology. Like US student radicals of the ’60s who became terrorists in the ’70s, such individuals, however awful, were a passing phase.But now, three decades later, the Palestinian movement has shifted back to the Middle East, where Arabs are not only nationalistic but, increasingly, Islamist. So the bell-bottom-clad killers at Munich — who dreamed of perpetrating attacks and carrying on with Eurotrash lifestyles — have been replaced by bearded fighters who, mostly, have never been outside the West Bank or Gaza. This new crop doesn’t think of building a workers’ paradise on Earth; they think of martyring themselves to a greater paradise in the hereafter.So Spielberg has a point: the events of the past 30 years show that Israeli-Arab violence has been a “perpetual-motion machine”. In the Middle East, anti-Israeli violence has diminished only in those places where Jews have retreated to safety behind a wall. Meanwhile, religious fervor — from the West Bank to Iraq to Iran — still seems to be rising, as does the likelihod that one day nuclear weapons will become part of the Islamic arsenal.So while Munich might be too bleak to be a commercial success, the looming reality is even bleaker.LA Times-Washington Post
