Word: meire
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Directed by Steven SpielbergUniversal Pictures4 Stars“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values,” says Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) in Steven Spielberg’s controversial new film, “Munich.” She utters these words immediately before authorizing the assassination of the Palestinians her Secret Service hold responsible for the Black September terrorist attack against Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Her pronouncement raises a philosophical question that the remainder of the film struggles to answer: to what...
...Golda Meir didn't want to believe the news. The Israeli Prime Minister had heard media reports that West German police had rescued the Israeli Olympic athletes taken hostage by terrorists in Munich. Now Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad, was phoning from Germany at 3 a.m. to correct that account. "I saw it with my own eyes," he told her. "No one was left alive...
Vowing to hunt down the perpetrators of Munich, Prime Minister Meir set up a process by which the head of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, could make the case for a candidate's assassination. The PM and select Cabinet members would say yea or nay. If yea, the hit would be executed by a unit called Caesarea, dubbed by some media the Wrath of God team...
...first Palestinian to die was Wael Zwaiter, shot in Rome six weeks after Munich. Mossad told Meir he was head of Black September in Rome and had abetted the Munich massacre. But Klein, who based his book in large part on rare interviews with key Mossad officers involved in the reprisal missions, writes that the intelligence on Zwaiter was "uncorroborated and improperly cross-referenced. Looking back, his assassination was a mistake...
...this is why Munich works so well -- the movie is not primarily about that Munich. It is about the aftermath, in which the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Golda Meir's full endorsement, mounted a secret war of revenge against the murderers. In one of the movie's most crucial lines, she says, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." That negotiation--also carried out in the increasingly troubled mind of Avner Kauffman, leader of the Israeli hit squad on which the movie concentrates (there were several)--raises Spielberg's film above the thriller level...