Miketz (and
Munich) 5766
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B’nai Israel
Toledo, OH
Does
violence beget violence?
Is
it wrong to attack those who attack you?
Steven Spielberg’s new movie “
Munich
” says, over and over
again, that violence begets violence.
Several times we are told that killing the terrorist leadership is
a pointless exercise, because they simply raise up a new leader who is
worse than the one who was killed.
I’m
not here to give you a lengthy review of the movie.
For that, you can turn to Christoper Borelli’s review in the Toledo
Blade which ran on December 23 and is still available online—or to reviews
from sources as diverse as the NY Times to the Jerusalem Post.
But the movie has people talking—I got an email on Tuesday from
someone who saw it and said they were looking forward to my sermon on the
topic. So I guess I have to
give a sermon on the topic.
But not on the cinematic aspects – let’s talk about the political
messages.
It’s
a complex movie and different people read all sorts of different things
into it. Some see it as
pro-Israel, some as not pro-Israel.
The
opening credits state the movie was “inspired” by real events.
But it is not a documentary: it is a work of fiction with a
political message. For those
who have not seen the movie, a very quick synopsis: At the Olympic games
in
Munich
in 1972, nine Israeli
athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.
Over the next several years, nine of eleven Palestinians involved
in the massacre or its planning were assassinated.
Also during this period there were a number of other Palestinian
terrorist attacks. That much
is true. The part that’s
fiction is the way things are depicted.
In the movie we are treated to scenes of Palestinians weeping when
their terrorist relative is killed, Israelis in shock when their athlete
is killed. The movie centers
on a hit team, officially unofficial, that is assigned the mission to kill
those who perpetrated the attack (
Israel
continues to officially
deny that Mossad was behind the hits).
The leader and several team members are filled with angst over the
righteousness of their mission and whether it is right to kill people in
this way. Some reviewers claim
that since the movie tries really hard to show how similar the Israelis
and Palestinians are it brushes dangerously close to the heresy of moral
equivalency, the idea that
Israel
killing terrorists is
like terrorists killing civilians.
I don’t see the movie doing that: the Palestinians are depicted as
murderers targeting innocent athletes, people who cheer when innocent
people die. The Israelis are
shown as being very scrupulous in only attacking the guilty, going to
great lengths NOT to harm innocent people, even questioning whether an
armed bodyguard is a legitimate target.
They have qualms about their actions, something you don’t see from
the Palestinians.
One
big time piece of fiction, in my opinion: the angst and agony of the
people on the hit team about their mission.
While there may be an occasional Mossad agent who develops a case
of second thoughts, I suspect in general they carry out their missions
professionally, unemotionally, and without stopping to wonder whether
killing people who have killed Jews and want to kill more Jews is a good
thing or not.
My
impression was there were three major (and several minor) points the
filmmaker was trying to make.
Those major points are:
1)
There is human suffering on both sides.
Both sides mourn when one of theirs is killed.
And here the Israelis are painted in a more positive light: the
Israelis feel bad when Palestinians are killed, the Palestinians cheer
when Israelis are killed.
2)
Both Israelis and Palestinians have an irrational obsession with the
physical land. A Palestinian
is asked “are a bunch of olive trees and poor soil really that important
to you?” The answer was a
resounding and emotional “yes!”
An Israeli gives a speech about the importance of having a home where we
are free to be Jews. Several
times in the film we are reminded of the sacrifices people made so the
Jews could have a homeland.
3)
Violence begets violence. The
movie’s central point seems to be that the whole exercise of taking out
the perpetrators of the violence was an exercise in futility, because they
are simply replaced by other even more violent people who carry out
attacks in revenge.
Three major questions: suffering, land, and violence.
It
is indeed proper, from a Jewish perspective, to acknowledge suffering on
the other side. One
interchange in the movie I really enjoyed was when after the successful
first assassination; the team celebrates, and debates whether it is
appropriate to rejoice. One of
the agents quotes the famous Midrash we tell at Passover, about how God
stopped the angels from singing after the parting of the
Red Sea
, because He was sad that His children were drowning in the sea.
I loved it. You never
heard Sean Connery spouting Scripture, let alone Midrash.
Even our secret agents are Talmidei Chachamim (sages).
In
the Bible itself we have a mention of the grief of the relatives of the
enemy. In the book of Judges,
the story is told of how Deborah and Barak defeated the enemy’s army, and
how the enemy captain, Sisera was killed by Yael.
There is a very poignant scene of Sisera’s mother worrying:
“The mother of Sisera looked out at the window, and cried through
the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why do the hoofbeats of
his chariots tarry (Judges
6:28
)?”
One
of the characters on the hit team, Steve (played by the next James Bond,
Daniel Craig) is unabashed at rejoicing over the successful
assassination—but he is seen as something of an aberration amongst his
more reticent and thoughtful colleagues.
It
is certainly true that there is suffering on both sides, and there is
nothing wrong with depicting it.
The movie does show the Jews as morally superior, being concerned not only
about the suffering of innocent people on their side, but even having
qualms about pursuing their mission of killing the murderers.
The Palestinians are depicted as totally lacking in any sympathy
for anyone other than themselves.
The
movie seems to claim that the reason for so much suffering on both sides
is an irrational obsession with land.
The Palestinian longing for “some olive trees and poor soil” seems
to be given the same validity as the Jews longing for a home and refuge in
the land of their ancestors.
Are they the same? Are
both sides irrational?
A
full treatment of the subject would require a book—but some of the key
factors are religious significance, and history, both ancient and modern.
The movie did not go into the religious significance of
Israel
much—but it is clearly
way more important to Jews on a religious level than to Muslims.
Jerusalem
is the number one
holiest place in Judaism—it’s only number three to Islam.
When Jews go on a religious pilgrimage, they visit
Israel
.
When Muslims go on a religious pilgrimage, they go to
Saudi Arabia
.
Three times a day observant Jews pray that we should all be
returned to
Israel
.
As
far as ancient history goes, there has been a continuous Jewish presence
in
Israel
for over 3,000
years—1600 years longer than Islam has even existed as a religion.
The number of Jews in
Israel
has fluctuated wildly,
being quite small in times when there was a great deal of persecution in
Israel
, increasing in times
such as the 16th century when there was more persecution
elsewhere.
But
while Torah and ancient history are important in our eyes, in the eyes of
much of the rest of the world they don’t count for much.
What’s more important to organizations like the UN is modern
history. However, even modern
history justifies the Jewish position.
Modern day immigration to
Israel
started up in the late
1800s. In the 1870s wealthy
Jews like the Rothschilds bought up land in
Israel
from absentee Turkish
landlords. A lot of the land
was useless swamp land that the Jews drained and made fertile.
Most of the land was put aside under the Jewish National Fund as a
trust for the Jewish people, lent or leased to kibbutzim and others.
Jews have been the majority population in
Jerusalem
since the late
1800s—long before the war in 1948.
With
successive waves of Jews making aliyah in the early 1900’s through 1920’s,
mostly Jews fleeing anti-Semistism in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, by the
time that Israel was declared a nation in 1948 there were 600,000 Jews
living in Israel. Not one of
those 600,000 Jews was living on land that had been confiscated or taken
from an Arab. It was all land
that had been bought and paid for.
Yes
there were a lot more Arabs than Jews there—about 1.2 million.
The UN proposed creating two countries, one Jewish in areas where
there was a Jewish majority, one Arab in areas where there was an Arab
majority. Despite the fact
that it would have resulted in a very small Jewish state, the Jews agreed
to the division; the Arabs rejected it, wanting ALL the land, and they
attacked the Jews and tried to destroy the Jewish state on the day it was
born. The Jews fought back,
and as in any war, there were a lot of refugees fleeing.
The Arab world refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees.
When the Arab world created hundreds of thousands of Jewish
refugees, throwing them out of places they had lived for centuries, like
Iraq, Yemen, and Morocco, the refugees were absorbed largely by Israel,
some in the US and elsewhere.
To blame the Jews for the Palestinian refugees is wrong—the Arab
countries, like Egypt and Jordan who controlled the West Bank and Gaza,
should and could have absorbed them and resettled them.
Palestinians living in
Lebanon
today, who were born in
Lebanon
, are still not
considered Lebanese citizens and they have no chance to advance in
Lebanese society. Whose fault
is that?
In
any war, people get displaced.
The Arabs don’t get to move back to their olive groves in
Israel
, and the Jews don’t get
to move back to their homes in
Poland
or
Iraq
.
If
Israel
wanted to simply annex
the
West Bank
and
Gaza
, it would be totally in
keeping with the way wars work—the losers often disappear.
There is no more Austro-Hungarian empire.
But
Israel
doesn’t want to make all
those Muslims citizens, so they will be given land to make a country.
But there is no argument, religiously or historically why the
Palestinians should be given any land in
Israel
itself.
If someone starts a war and loses, he doesn’t get to say what the
future borders will be.
Obviously the Palestinians disagree with that perspective, and so they
have often resorted to violence to make their point.
Which brings us to the third of our three major points of the
movie, that violence begets violence.
As
portrayed in the movie, the Palestinians kill the Israelis;
Israel
responds, and every time
Israel
responds, the
Palestinians respond with another terrorist attack, and the terrorist
leaders who are killed are replaced by ones we are told in the movie “are
even more violent than the ones they replaced.”
So according to Spielberg, what would be the proper response?
To do the “Christian” thing, and turn the other cheek?
There are Jewish sources for the idea of turning the other cheek—as in
Isaiah chapter 50 where we read: “The Lord God has opened my ear, and I
was not rebellious, nor did I turn away.
I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who plucked
off the hair; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”
But in the main, turning the other cheek has not been accepted as
the Jewish way of dealing with trouble.
Instead, we confront it head on.
We
are cautioned not to take vengeance.
In the book of Genesis, Jacob is very upset with his sons when they kill
the inhabitants of Shechem in revenge of the rape of Dinah.
God Himself cautions us against taking vengeance, as it is written
in Deuteronomy, “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.”
Meaning, leave vengeance to God, we’re not supposed to go there.
But
not taking vengeance is not the same as “turning the other cheek.”
In
the movie, one of the agents says “why can’t we just capture these guys,
like Eichmann?” The question
is left unanswered in the movie.
Let me answer it here.
When Eichmann was captured, he was no longer a threat.
The Nazi death machine was destroyed.
The trial, and subsequent execution of Eichmann was not about
revenge, and it was not about security: it was about justice, as the Torah
tells us “he who sheds blood his own blood shall be shed”—there is no
accepting a ransom for a life.
The
assassinations of the terrorists was also not about vengeance.
But in this case it was not so much about justice either.
Justice requires all of those nice proceedings of a court of law.
Taking the terrorists out was about security.
The people who were responsible for the murder of the Israeli
athletes were busy planning more attacks against Jews.
The Talmud tells us that if someone is coming to pursue you, you
should rise up first and kill him before he kills you.
This is based on a teaching in the Torah that if you kill someone
when he trying to sneak into your house, you bear no blood guilt for
killing him—the presumption is it was self defense.
The
Jewish tradition clearly says it is OK to make a pre-emptive strike
against someone planning to kill you.
The movie tries to argue that killing these terrorists is somehow
not a “Jewish” thing to do—that it is somehow wrong, or unjust.
If the terrorists had in fact retired from the terrorism business,
this would be a valid argument.
If the person is no longer a “ticking bomb,” is no longer a danger, than
the proper thing to do is to bring him to trial.
But if he is planning to kill Jews, there is no contradiction to
Jewish teachings to kill him first.
But,
the movie would have us ask, is it effective?
The movie argues that it’s a pointless exercise because all that
happens is the people we take out are replaced with someone else just as
bad, and it inspires reciprocal “revenge” attacks, so what’s the point?
I
would suggest the evidence suggests otherwise.
In the first full year of the current round of violence perpetrated
by the Palestinians, 2001, 207 Israelis were killed.
In 2002 that number rose to 452.
The number of Israeli deaths has declined dramatically every year
since then—214 in 2003, 97 in 2004, less than 50 in 2005.
Why have the Israeli deaths declined so much?
It’s
not because the Palestinians have run out of ammunition.
It’s not because the Palestinians have decided they now love
Israel
and don’t want to kill
Jews anymore. It’s not because
of the security fence—the fence is incomplete, you can stand at the
Tayelet in
Jerusalem
and see where it
ends—where anyone who wants to can walk right around it.
The answer is the military action
Israel
has taken against the
terrorists is effective. Yes,
as the movie shows, if you just kill the top rank of terrorists, someone
else will take their place.
But if you take out the top rank of terrorists three or four times, which
is what Israel has done, you now have people in charge who don’t know what
they are doing and who are going to restrict their movements lest they get
taken out next. Maybe the
attacks are down because they have figured out terrorism as a strategy is
not going to accomplish their goals.
If so, part of the way they learned that lesson was because of the price
they have had to pay.
In
this week’s Torah reading, parshat Miketz, we see an example of what
someone might assume is violence begetting violence, bad treatment
begetting further bad treatment.
When Joseph’s brothers come down to
Egypt
seeking food, Joseph
puts them through a bunch of hoops.
He makes them bring the youngest son, Benjamin, back to
Egypt
—against the wishes of
their father, Jacob. When they
come back with Benjamin, Joseph plants a cup on Benjamin as they are
leaving, chases after them, and catches the “thief.”
So
why does Joseph do all this?
Is it his way of getting revenge at his brothers, at playing with their
minds and hurting them, to give them a taste of what they did to him when
they threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery?
It
may appear that way at the surface, but the commentators explain that
Joseph had a purpose behind his activities—he was not motivated by
revenge, but rather he needed to know, beyond any doubt, that his brothers
had truly done teshuva, that they had truly repented of the evil way they
treated him. If they simply
abandoned Benjamin and left him in
Egypt
without a second
thought, he would know they had not changed since they sold him into
slavery. In next week’s parsha
Yehudah goes to Joseph and makes a most eloquent plea for Benjamin,
offering to stay in his place—and at that moment Joseph knew that the
repentance was sincere, he forgave his brothers, and they lived happily
ever after.
Just
as Joseph’s actions may have had the outward appearance of being motivated
by revenge, they were really motivated by something else—in this case the
need to know whether his brothers had repented.
Similarly, just as
Israel
’s actions in the wake of
the terrorist attacks may have had the outward appearance of being
motivated by revenge, they too were really motivated by something else—by
security considerations, by the need to do whatever is necessary to stop
further terrorist attacks.
The
Israelis and Palestinians are not the Hatfields and McCoys.
The Palestinians may claim they are doing a particular attack as an
act of revenge, but the truth is they would be attacking
Israel
with or without an
excuse.
Israel
’s responses to terrorist
attacks are not done out of a desire for vengeance: they are done out of a
desire to make the attacks stop.
The
point that Spielberg, Kushner, and Roth seem to miss is that if the
Palestinians put down their guns there would be no more violence.
If the Israelis put down their guns, there would be no more Jews.
Shabbat Shalom,
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