“Time is what stops everything from happening at once,” a famous physicist once remarked. Or perhaps it’s from a bumper sticker, I’m not sure. Anyway, the fact remains that there are occasions when time — or at least the way it measures passing events — fails to achieve even this basic task when history seems to fold in on itself.
Take today, for example. Thirty-six years ago on September 4, 1972, eight Palestinians belonging to the terrorist group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Olympic Village in Munich. The 20th Olympiad — with the motto “The Happy Games” — had originally been awarded to West Germany as a symbol of its reintegration into the European fold, closing a door on the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Instead, and with some irony, it now fell to the German government to save the lives of members of the same race Hitler had previously tried to eradicate.
The attempt to secure the hostages’ release was doomed from the outset. German officials were powerless to meet Black September’s demand for the release of more than 200 “political prisoners” being held by Israel, with Israel refusing to negotiate on principle. After 18 hours of fruitless talks, the terrorists instead took their hostages to an airport from where they intended to fly to an Arab nation. At that point, German troops attempted an ill-fated rescue mission that resulted, eventually, in the deaths of all 11 hostages and three of their captors.
“The games must go on,” declared International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, and they did, delivering the spectacle of U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz — himself a Jew — winning a record-setting seven gold medals. But it was impossible to forget images of masked terrorists leaning over the balcony of the Israeli team quarters or of the hostage-filled plane being blown up. Those images were captured both on TV and a couple years later in the tense yet balanced movie 21 Hours at Munich.
Munich ’72 marked the beginning of a new era of terrorism. Israel countered with covert operations (code-named “Wrath of God” and “Spring of Youth”) to hunt down and assassinate those who had organized the hostage taking. In retaliation, Palestinian terrorists launched a new wave of attacks on Israeli civilians and other targets. Bombings and hijackings became almost nightly news by the mid-’70s.
Here’s where history begins to fold in on itself. Thirty-six years before the massacre at Munich, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin. The choice of Germany had been made in 1931, more than a year before Hitler came to power, but inevitably the Berlin games became a fascist spectacle that reflected the unchallenged dominance of the Nazi party and Hitler’s Third Reich.
Just nine years later in 1945, Hitler’s Reich lay in ruins. Shocked by the slaughter of more than six million Jews, international pressure to recognize a state of Israel grew. In 1948, Israel proclaimed itself a sovereign state over the objections of those Palestinians who claimed the same territory. Thus the first step on the road to Munich ’72 had been taken.
Back to the present. Next Thursday marks the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the onset of the “war on terror.” Whether or not the U.S. was justified in launching that war, the heavy-handed and ill-calculated manner in which the country has responded over the past six years has, among other things, managed to unite Islamicist and Arab opposition to the continued presence of Israel’s existence as a state in the Middle East. “Why Israel Can’t Survive,” ran the headline in Maclean’s last April, echoing a growing belief that Israel — just turned 60 — is unlikely to exist in its present form for much longer.
It was against this backdrop that Steven Spielberg revisited the events of 1972 in Munich (2005), adapting George Jonas’s 1984 novel, Vengeance. Both the book and film focus on the Israeli counter-operations, but where Jonas was unambiguous in tone — “one doesn’t reach the moral high ground by being neutral between good and evil” — Spielberg sought to portray a balance between the Israeli and Palestinian actions and arguments. “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything,” he said.
Another fold. Munich really isn’t about 1972 at all. Rather, the film challenges the simplistic post-9/11 responses to what motivates terrorism. The film’s closing shot lingers on the Manhattan skyline, complete with twin towers, suggesting that violence can only breed more violence, that the past, present and future always fold over onto each other.
Of course, Spielberg might be wrong. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was possible (and even chic) for young westerners to sympathize with and support various left-leaning terrorist movements such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Baader-Meinhof Gang and even Canada’s own Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). But in the wake of 9/11 and the London bombings of July 2005, proponents of moral relativism have become harder to find and interest in the deeper, long-term roots of terrorism has declined.
In this respect, perhaps the key moment in Spielberg’s film comes when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir utters the line, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Such an outlook might reflect the realism and pragmatism that currently dominate international affairs and does much to discredit Spielberg’s own beliefs. But if that’s the enduring lesson of the “war on terror” — whether it’s 1936, 1972 or 2008 — then it’ll be a sad and hollow victory for us all.
