Maybe the most revealing bit of Steven Spielberg’s politics regarding Munich, his 2005 film about Israel’s reprisal killings against Palestinians suspected in planning the abduction and subsequent massacre of Israeli athletes at 1972 Munich Olympics, isn’t anything in the film, the book it’s based on, or Tony Kushner’s ambivalent script. Instead it’s Spielberg himself, in a DVD introduction to the movie, where the director—uncharacteristically defensive in tone—states, “I am not attacking Israel. In no way, shape, or form.” The necessity he feels in saying this might read as bizarre to an American about to watch a Spielberg movie 20 years ago. But today, there’s pressure put on anyone even moderately criticizing Israel, as public opinion against the state has skyrocketed ever since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza in 2023 (amongst countless other pogroms and ethnic cleansings from before its founding all the way to the present). A parallel can be drawn—and many critics already have—between Mossad’s post-Munich assassination campaign and the IDF’s scorched-earth response to al-Aqsa Flood. Spielberg, the liberal Zionist, might be personally offended at the attacks coming from people he believed to be in his camp, but more importantly I think he’s defensive about Munich because Spielberg the filmmaker doesn’t think much about Israel and Palestine at all.
Many have rightly posited that Tony Kushner—hot off the HBO adaptation of Angels in America—was doing the heavy lifting in Spielberg’s script, which he picked up from Eric Roth and processed to write a 272-page version of. It’s clear that Kushner is interested in the real conflict between Israel and Palestine, just as it’s clear that that isn’t what Spielberg finds compelling about the story at all. Like how WWII is wallpaper for Saving Private Ryan—a movie made up of realistic textures to mask a Hollywood fantasy—Spielberg uses Israel-Palestine and the “Munich Massacre” as a backdrop for two of his key fixations: reactions and home.
Munich’s early sequences are dedicated to the event itself not just unfolding, but unfolding as a TV-product. All around the world people are watching the same thing, but are mortified by different aspects, whether the false reports of the Israelis making it out safe or the news of deaths of the Palestinians. Here’s a rupture of Spielberg’s ideal: the shared moment, the one he often elicits through wonder, wherein all the audience knows how to feel about seeing dinosaurs as Williams’ score because we’ve already seen the character’s reactions first. In Munich, it’s event, then reaction. The audience isn’t told how to feel so directly, and thus must factor in how others react into the full equation. It’s a seemingly simple inversion, but a critical and shocking one, where Spielberg allows humanity to seep into the film rather than being forced with a dolly.
One of the starkest cultural breaking points in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, is that state, its media, and countless people within the culture are so willing to refuse Palestinians any mark of humanity and would instead condemn them and their children to death. This simple act of humanity is likely cause for some of Zionist pushback against Munich, as was Spielberg and Kushner’s dramatic contemplations on the stain of violence and vengeance; again, in Spielberg’s intro, he argues that even if these things are necessary, their bitter complexities should be analyzed.
What’s strange is that, while Israel's colonial project in Palestine is discussed and weighs so heavily over the dramaturgy, it’s not the thematic center. Instead, the conflict is only important insofar as it relates to and as a means to dramatize Spielberg’s vague notions of home. Even in a stairway exchange between Eric Bana’s undercover Mossad agent, Avner, and a PLO operative, the conflict itself isn’t what is hinging the character’s positions, but the simple idea that the Palestinian doesn’t have a home to go back to, whereas the European does. The conversation is brought back to Jewish diaspora, and the impossibility of two people claiming the same literal home, and the fallout of that. Avner is trying to build a new home on legendary land, while Ali (Omar Metwally) wears a key around his neck, as many Palestinians do, to the house that was stolen from his family during the Nakba.
Like Richard Dreyfus’ search in Close Encounters, or the way E.T. begins to wither and die without the prospect of returning, Spielberg’s cinema is built on a drive for home, one that was irreparably ruptured in his childhood and he tries to find in the temporary world of the cinema where, for a couple of hours, all the shadows on the wall become real before the harsh light of the world pours back. Perhaps that’s why Spielberg puts so many of his scenes in rooms illuminated by smoky rays of light: that of the projector and of the world creeping back into the theater. When Spielberg follows the logic outward—whether that’s moving through the debris field of his parent’s divorce rather than trying to retroactively reconcile it, or from the impossible position created by Zionism’s dislocation of the Palestinian people—what he finds, to his own terror, is that the pieces can’t be put together as they once were, and he lands at the foot of his own stubborn refusal to ask for anything beyond the recapturing of what once was.