A "fundamentalist" critic responds to Spielberg

Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic (registration required) responds to Steven Spielberg's smug assertion that the critics of Munich are "fundamentalists" who seek to deny to Palestinians the right to "have a dialogue":

It is rubbish to suggest that the animadversions (or most of them) against Spielberg's movie have been animated by nothing more than primitive tribalism, and some sort of mystagogic solidarity with the Jewish people that would deny even a voice to Israel's enemies. What serious critic of Munich believes that the Palestinians should not "have dialogue"? They should and they do, in the movie and in the real world. Spielberg has the bizarre idea that his movie is an exemplary act of defiance, a courageous expression of dissent, against the Jewish community's pitiless and monolithic denial of the rights, and even the reality, of the Palestinians. He needs to understand that there are people who were offended by his film who need no lessons in dovishness from him (or from Kushner). The fate of Palestine does not hang upon the fate of Munich. And the Jewish community, not the one that is supposed to have turned on the lonely truthteller from Dreamworks but the actually existing one, the Jewish community in Israel and in America, is in large measure fervently hoping that Ariel Sharon's rejection of the illusions of Greater Israel carries the day in Israel's forthcoming elections, the disgusting results of the Palestinian election notwithstanding.

Spielberg's problem is that he wishes to provoke, but not to offend. Finally he practices the politics of the box office. Thus he insists in Newsweek that "Munich never once attacks Israel," which is correct, but also that it "barely criticizes Israel's policy of counterviolence against violence." The latter claim is preposterous, as anybody who has seen Munich knows: The film's very subject is the dubious moral legitimacy, and the dubious practical efficacy, of counterterrorism. If Munich is not about that, it is not about anything. And then Spielberg delivers himself of the oldest weasel words in Hollywood: "It simply asks a plethora of questions." An innocent Socratic exercise, for the consideration of the Academy. No answers, just questions--as if certain kinds of questions are not themselves certain kinds of answers. But Munich asks its questions in ways that make its preferred answers perfectly clear. Spielberg will not own up to any of this. He wants the glamour of seriousness without the responsibility of seriousness. People should not engage the perplexities of morality and history if they are prepared only to be loved.

(Hat tip: Robert KC Johnson at Cliopatria)