Steven Spielberg's Munich is an argument against the existence of the state of Israel and for a diasporan Jewry.
The movie establishes clear dichotomies. Israel is a response to the Holocaust, to the blood of one's slain ancestors that cries out of the ground for revenge. The Diaspora (represented by Brooklyn) is a place to raise one's daughter. Israel is seeped in blood, its existence is bloody, its perpetuation requires the shedding of blood. The Diaspora is a place where one eats, where one is nourished, where one raises his daughter. To defend the continued existence of Israel, one must appeal to a thirst for blood, for revenge. Jewish values, Jewish legitimacy, recoil against the very need to defend the state. The very members of Avner's team of avengers express a Jewish revulsion against the violence they perpetuate. In the end, only two of the original five live. One, Avner, has opted out of Israeliness to live as a Jew (that is, to cook and feed, not to govern and kill) in the Diaspora. Only one of the five remains unscathed. That is Steve, a South African Jew who asserts "The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood." Noone in the movie articulates a rationale for the difficult task of protecting Israel in Jewish terms.
Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg have given us a choice: A Jew may live as a Jew in the Diaspora or as an Israeli in Israel. The state of being a Jew cannot be maintained, in Munich, in the Jewish State.
-- H. A. Massig המשיג