Munich 1938, 'Munich' 2006
| Posted on Thu, Jan. 19, 2006 |  | |
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| As a Hebrew-school teacher, I try to make use of popular culture to illuminate issues of Jewish concern, and I try to use current events to launch into explorations of history, both recent and ancient. Steven Spielberg's Munich offers such a "teaching opportunity." When Time magazine put Spielberg on its cover in advance of the movie's opening, I brought the cover into my 10th-grade classes, mentioning the controversy that was brewing, and elicited class discussion about the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. I also solicited their views about the subsequent Israeli counterterrorism effort that was the subject of Spielberg's movie. But then I asked my students what other major historical event took place in Munich in the 20th century. And I received no answers. To people of my generation and certainly my parents' generation, Munich is synonymous with "appeasement" - the policy of trying to accommodate, in the interests of peace, an enemy whose objectives make any form of accommodation impossible. Such an enemy might be a Hitler, a bin Laden, or a leader of Hamas. It was, of course, at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, trading away a chunk of Czechoslovakia called Sudetenland (populated largely by ethnic Germans) in exchange for peace. This infamous "land for peace" deal followed Hitler's military buildup, his occupation of the Rhineland, his takeover of Austria, and the publication of his hate-filled tome Mein Kampf. Believing that Germany had well-founded grievances stemming from the settlement of World War I that, if ameliorated, could serve to prevent the outbreak of a new war, Chamberlain came home from Munich proclaiming that he brought "peace in our time." We know now - and Winston Churchill knew then - that Chamberlain had misread his adversary. It is too bad that our children are not familiar with (are not taught?) the details of Munich 1938, and especially the larger lesson this episode teaches: that there are some enemies with whom peace is not a choice, and the only real choice is to kill or be killed. It is a harsh lesson, but we do our children no favor by sugarcoating history. We also do our children no favor if we treat good and evil, or truth and falsehood, evenhandedly. Even worse, these lessons seem to have escaped Spielberg. Why else would he make a movie that appears to place the terrorist and the counterterrorist on the same moral plane? Why else would he portray Israeli counterterrorists who are filled with such self-doubt that the movie's protagonist (one of the two surviving members of the counterterror team) severs his relationship with Israel altogether? Why else would he employ as a screenwriter a man who has suggested that the creation of Israel was a mistake? In screenwriter Tony Kushner's view, the Palestinians also have well-founded grievances stemming from the settlement of that same World War I, and if Israel would only cede the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians, then those grievances would likewise be ameliorated. Or, as Spielberg says, "The only thing that's going to solve this is ... a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills." That might be true if the Arab world ceased teaching their children hatred of Jews. That might be true if the Arab world stopped disseminating the "blood libel" myth hatched in medieval Europe, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion dreamed up by agents of the Russian czar at the turn of the last century. That might be true if Hamas, whose charter describes all of Israel as occupied territory, were no longer tolerated by the Palestinians. The spirit of Munich 1938 lives on, and not just in Spielberg's Munich. Another popular movie - Syriana - is a barely coherent story of politics, oil and terrorism that has a stunning finale, the import of which seems to have escaped the reviewers: In the closing scenes of the movie, the CIA assassinates an Arab reformer and an Arab suicide bomber blows up a ship. The viewer is left with the impression that America has brought terrorism upon itself. Translated into real life, it means there's only one entity to blame for 9/11: America itself. At a moment when the civilized world is at war with an enemy catalyzed by a fascist ideology dressed up in religious guise, we don't need more Neville Chamberlains; we need more Winston Churchills. Alan Luxenberg (Alanfpri@aol.com) is director of the Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, a project of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. | ||