WHAT HEART?:

Spielberg’s Munich Massacre (Jason Maoz, 12/7/2005, Jewish Press)

As the Monitor noted back in July, “alarm bells went off like crazy when Steven Spielberg hired Tony Kushner last year to rewrite the script of a movie about Israel’s clandestine — and lethal — response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.”

The Monitor found cause for concern because Kushner is a radical leftist whose views on the Middle East are hardly distinguishable from the hateful screeds found on the most rabidly anti-Israel websites.

In an interview with the Times of London, Kushner declared: “I deplore the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israeli Defense Forces in the occupied territories. I deplore the occupation, the forced evacuations, the settlements, the refugee camps, the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people; Jews, of all people, with our history of suffering, should refuse to treat our fellow human beings like that.”

Kushner, the Monitor pointed out, co-edited, along with the equally far-left Alisa Solomon, an appalling volume called Wrestling With Zion: Progressives Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The Forward`s Ami Eden wrote of that book: “... reading [it] takes you to an alternative universe, where the Israel of today has reoccupied Palestinian territories and is adopting harsh security measures — but not in response to a Palestinian-launched intifada bent on blowing up babies on buses. Instead, Israel’s presence in the territories today is primarily the product of — Kushner and Solomon’s words — ‘Ariel Sharon’s mad, bloody dream of Greater Israel, which he and his comrades of the radical Israeli right have pursued for decades.’ ”

And Kushner, the Monitor noted, had said, “I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.... I wish modern Israel hadn’t been born.”

“This,” the Monitor concluded, “is the twisted creature to whom Steven Spielberg has entrusted the script of a movie that will affect the public perception of Israel — in the U.S. and around the world — for years to come.”

Apparently they were right to worry, Hits (Leon Wieseltier, 12.09.05, New Republic)

The screenplay is substantially the work of Tony Kushner, whose hand is easily recognizable in the crudely schematic quality of the drama, and also in something more. The film has no place in its heart for Israel. I do not mean that it wishes Israel ill; not at all. But it cannot imagine any reason for Israel beyond the harshness of the world to the Jews. "The world has been rough with you," the oracular gourmand godfather of an underground anarchist family, a ludicrous character plummily played by Michael Lonsdale, tells Avner Kauffman, the Israeli team leader. "It is right to respond roughly to such treatment." Avner's mother, whose family was destroyed by the Nazis, preaches this about the Jewish state: "We had to take this, because no one was going to give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes." Zionism, in this film, is just anti-anti-Semitism. The necessity of the Jewish state is acknowledged, but necessity is a very weak form of legitimacy. There are two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse. One of the Israeli killers recalls a midrash about God's compassion for the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, and keeps on killing. Another one of the Israeli killers protests that "Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong. ... We're supposed to be righteous," and keeps on killing.

All this is consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was "not the right answer," and that the creation of Israel was "a mistake," and that "establishing a state means f***ing people over." (If he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean f***ing people over.) When Avner's reckoning with his deeds takes him to the verge of a breakdown, he joins his wife and child in Brooklyn and refuses to return to Israel, as if decency is impossible there. No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive. And the progressive Jewish playwright Tony Kushner's image of Israel oddly brings to mind the reactionary Jewish playwright David Mamet's image of Israel: For both of them, its essence is power.

Perhaps you have to be as smart as Leon Weiseltier to get why it isn't self-hatred?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2005 5:38 PM