Prayer for peace or Israel-Palestine firestarter? The controversy behind Spielberg’s Munich

Before the release of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the director and his cast – including Eric Bana and the incoming-007 Daniel Craig – avoided interviews and the standard publicity duties. Spielberg would talk about Munich once people had seen it. He wanted people “not to have preconceptions, to see the movie and not make up their own minds,” said Spielberg’s publicist, Marvin Levy.

Released in December 2005, Munich tells the story of Operation Wrath of God, an Israeli counter-terror campaign against the Palestinians who planned – supposedly – the kidnap and massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games.

Spielberg had been wary of the contentious subject matter and turned down the film multiple times. “I’ll leave it to somebody else,” he once said. “Somebody braver than me.”

Once production began, secrecy was paramount. No journalists were allowed on set and some actors didn’t get the full script. The crew was made up of trustworthy Spielberg veterans. Spielberg pre-empted controversy by hiring key professionals: crisis public relations consultant Allan Mayer; former White House press secretary Mike McCurry; and former presidential envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross.

There were criticisms that Spielberg would be too pro-Israel for a balanced account, though the Zionist Organization of America called for a boycott of the film. “Unless you like humanising terrorists and dehumanising Israelis,” it said.

Indeed, Munich set off a series of controversies: that Spielberg was too naïve (the film, he said, was a “prayer for peace”); that he omitted key events, such as the Lillehammer affair; and that Munich portrayed a “moral equivalency” between the Palestinian terrorists and Israeli operatives – 11 Palestinians killed for the 11 murdered athletes.

“And so it’s 11 for 11,” said Ehud Danoch, the Israeli general consul in Los Angeles, after seeing the film. “It's equal, it’s balanced. It’s these for those… those were Olympic sportsmen who were murdered in the most disgusting and horrible way, and these were the guys who did it.”

Danoch added: “There is no moral equivalency. The attempt to balance between victims of terror and those who killed them, the attempt to balance between a government sworn to defend its people and a terrorist organisation identified by the world as a terrorist organisation, is to make light of the issue.”

Spielberg did speak to Time magazine, which had seen Munich and was rightly full of praise. Controversies aside, Munich – co-written by the director's West Side Story collaborator Tony Kushner – is a stunning, searing piece of cinema and the most engrossing film from Spielberg’s transition period, from director of five-star blockbusters to thoughtful four-star thrillers and dramas.

Eric Bana stars as Mossad agent Avner Kaufman. He leads a small team (which includes Daniel Craig and Ciarán Hinds) to track down and eliminate members of the Palestine Liberation Organization – and others – believed to have orchestrated the Munich massacre.

Like Avner himself, the film exists on the precipice of danger – packed with visceral, gut-thumping violence, and tension that cranks to unnerving levels by the simple ringing of a phone (there is a bomb in it, after all).

For Spielberg, the film was about the cyclical non-resolution of violence – as Mossad hit their targets, Palestinian militants fire back with letter bombs. “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine,” Spielberg said. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end?” That prompted criticism too. Spielberg’s version of the Middle East situation – which he believed could only be solved by “rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills” – was, according to New York Times writer David Brooks, a “fable”.

Munich is partly based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by the Canadian journalist George Jonas. The book itself was based on the much-questioned testimony of “Avner” – a pseudonym for Juval Aviv – a self-confessed member of the Mossad hit team and a consultant for the film. Another former Mossad agent said the closest that Juval Aviv ever got to the action was working as a baggage handler for an Israeli airline.

By the time Munich was released, some Mossad figures maintained that Operation Wrath of God had never happened. Some assassins, however, came forward for a BAFTA-nominated documentary, Munich: Mossad’s Revenge, which aired on Channel 4 shortly after Spielberg’s film landed in cinemas.

Spielberg and producer Kathleen Kennedy insisted their film was “historical fiction” – particularly, admitted Spielberg, in the relationships between the Mossad agents. “I was very careful to start the movie by saying ‘inspired by real events’,” Spielberg told Time. “Because until the files are opened up nobody will really know who actually did what.”

The most accurate scenes are the recreation of the Munich hostage situation, which plays out episodically throughout the film. On September 5, 1972, eight gunmen from Palestinian terror group Black September scaled a fence into the Olympic village. They killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine more hostage, demanding the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners.

The following day, as the terrorists tried to escape with the hostages on an aeroplane, they realised that German authorities had laid a trap, so killed the hostages – 11 victims in total. All but three of the terrorists were killed. The three surviving terrorists were later released by West Germany authorities as part of a hostage exchange.

Aaron J. Klein – author of Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response – argued that Spielberg left out an all-important detail: a disastrous rescue attempt by the Germans that ultimately led to the massacre.

“The impact on Israel was huge,” said Klein, speaking on the Munich documentary. “For the first time after the Holocaust, Jews are being killed on German soil… the atmosphere in Israel needed revenge. The people in the street needed revenge and everybody wanted the Israelis to do something – to react, to revenge, to retaliate, in some way that would be painful.”

In the film, Eric Bana’s Mossad agent is summoned by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who charges him with the mission – to assassinate the Palestinians responsible. In real life, Golda Meir invited the widows of the murdered athletes to meet with her and promised them revenge.

Ehud Barak – a future Israeli prime minister who was involved in the operation – confirmed the story. “There was no real doubt about Golda Meir’s decision to order basically the elimination of those people who were responsible,” he said. Aaron J. Klein explained that it wasn’t just a revenge mission, but a preventative operation to stop future threats on Israelis.

Munich depicts a five-man crew of assassins who are skilled but flawed: the dedicated but hesitant group leader (Bana); a gung-ho shoot-first-worry-later South African (Craig); an expert “cleaner” (Ciarán Hinds); a toymaker-turned-bomb expert (Mathieu Kassovitz); and a Dutch forger (Hanns Zischler).

“The assassins in Munich are presented as quintessential everyday guys – patriots who want to defend their country and who gradually grow disillusioned, guilt-ridden, and paranoid,” wrote Klein. “The Mossad teams did draw from the ordinary Israeli population, but they were well-trained professionals intent on their missions.”

The team is given rogue status in the film. Bana’s agent has to officially leave Mossad, so he can’t be officially connected, and reports to a Mossad handler played by Geoffrey Rush.

There’s an air of truth – that Mossad couldn’t leave a “smoking gun” behind – though the off-the-books five-man crew is fictitious. The operation was in fact much larger – run by a secret government group known as Committee X, headed by Golda Meir.

“Assassination teams were the head of a spear,” wrote Klein. “Behind them were analysts and informational gathering units in Israel and in Europe, a whole network that was focused on both supplying the agents with information and properly directing their operations.”

Indeed, the film’s most fanciful element is that all intel on the PLO targets comes from a clandestine French group that’s led – rather satisfyingly – by a pair of Bond villains: Mathieu Amalric, the baddie from Quantum of Solace, and – even better – Michael Lonsdale, the space age megalomaniac Hugo Drax from Moonraker.

Speaking on the Munich documentary, Mossad expert Ronen Bergman described how 90 per cent of the information came to Mossad from Palestinian informants. Sometimes information came via “walks ins” – people who literally walked into Israeli embassies or approached Mossad to offer information and secure better lives for their families.

Also fictional is Bana’s list of predesignated targets. At one point in the film, his character refuses to kill someone who isn’t on the list – though he becomes more lenient as the bodies pile up and the paranoia takes hold. In truth, intel was gathered and targets were approved for assassination on a case-by-case basis by top officials, including Golda Meir. “Assassination teams were sent out, mission by mission, as evidence and opportunity warranted,” wrote Klein.

Spielberg’s depiction of the assassinations are – according to accounts in the documentary – relatively close to the truth: one target, the translator Abdel Wael Zwaiter, is shot as he waits for an elevator; another target, PLO representative Mahmoud Hamshari, is killed by a telephone bomb (though in reality, agents replaced the marble in his tabletop with explosives – then phoned him to ensure he was standing next to it). They also storm an apartment building in Beirut to kill three targets, while some Israeli troops – as in real life – are disguised as women.

In both the film and reality, the Beirut incident was a turning point. Civilians and Israeli soldiers were also killed in the strike. It was the moment that the operation transcended from a revenge mission to a more general campaign against any Mossad enemies.

Mossad killed 11 targets in total and branded them all as architects of the Munich massacre. But questions were asked about whether their victims were really involved in Munich.

Rami Adwan, son of Palestinian politician Kamal Adwan – one of the men targeted and killed in Beirut – explained that his father had nothing to do with Munich but he had organised resistance on the West Bank. “The Munich attack was a godsend opportunity for the Israelis to actually kill people,” Rami said.

Even the widows of the massacred Olympic team expressed anger about the number of Palestinians being assassinated. Could they all be behind the Munich massacre?

Conspicuous by its absence in Spielberg’s version is the Lillehammer affair, in which Mossad assassins shot and killed an innocent man. Mossad had tracked down – or so they thought – prime target and Munich mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh to Lillehammer, Norway. But it was a case of mistaken identity. Mossad had been led there via disinformation from a Palestinian spy and mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchikhi. Six Mossad agents were arrested while others escaped. The incident brought an end to Operation Wrath of God.

In the film, Bana’s agent becomes disillusioned with the operation – and Israel itself – when his men are killed one-by-one in retaliation and he fails multiple times to assassinate Ali Hassan Salameh. It’s suggested at one point that the CIA is protecting Salameh (who in real life was killed by a car bomb in 1979). Returning to Israel a broken man, he threatens to go public while in the grip of PTSD-driven mania.

Aaron J. Klein explained that he interviewed more than 50 veterans of the Mossad and military intelligence. “I found not a single trace of remorse,” he said. “On the contrary, Mossad combatants thought they were doing holy work.” As he also told NPR: “They are very proud of what they did. They still see themselves as the carrier of the sword, the people who did a holy work, a holy job, in this whole apparatus of assassinations.”

Munich is available to stream on Netflix