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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Focus Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A new kind of thriller
By Edward Said
During the Oscar ceremonies last March only one award (Best Documentary) was given to a 1999 film that had neither been released, nor seen by anyone outside the academy (for some of whose members special screenings of the film had, I gather, been hastily improvised). To say the least, this was an unusual set of circumstances for so important an award. At last, though, One Day in September was released in London last month. Directed by Kevin MacDonald and produced by John Battsek and Arthur Cohn it is a 92 minute account of what is supposed to have occurred when a group of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games was held hostage by eight Palestinians who on September 5, 1972 seized the unsuspecting men at 4.40am, and held them for 21 hours. The end of the ordeal came at Munich airport when five German snipers opened fire on hostages and captors, thereby instigating an appalling bloodbath that drew in a considerable number of basically untrained and undisciplined German police. Eleven Israelis were killed, as were five Palestinians (three were seriously wounded but survived and later escaped) and one German.
MacDonald's film is described by him as "a new kind of thriller," although its techniques and aims are pretty conventional and transparently political. As he received the Oscar, co-producer Arthur Cohn (the main money-man) gave a heavily-accented speech emotionally endorsing his film's importance, effectively crowding out his co-winners, who were ushered off the stage without having had an opportunity to say anything. Cohn's grandstanding volubility quite on its own drew attention to the film's suspect political agenda which in the various press and production notes its makers disingenuously claim not ever to have had. I predict that after its release this extraordinarily brazen fiction will be just a little harder to pronounce than it was when no one had seen the film.
I don't imagine that there is a Palestinian who does not think that the Munich adventure was a total disaster for the cause and the people, who remain stateless and either under Israeli occupation or as refugees, 28 years after the Munich Olympics, 52 years after most of them were driven out --indeed, ethnically cleansed-- by Zionist forces. Over 400 villages were destroyed in 1947-8, uncounted numbers of innocents either massacred or forcibly evicted, and an entire society effectively destroyed in order that Israel could come into existence. That is the tragic nub of the Middle East conflict, enacted as I write these lines on a daily basis in West Bank and Gaza towns and villages, as youngsters battle Israeli settlers and soldiers who represent a state still in the process of demolishing homes, holding a large number of prisoners, taking more land, all the while remaining adamant in its official unwillingness to acknowledge any responsibility for what was and is being done to the Palestinian people.
One of the shortcomings of the Oslo accords is that, thanks to the servile acquiescence of Yasser Arafat, the damages of 30-plus years of Israeli occupation of the rest of historical Palestine that began in 1967, are casually written off without so much as a word about reparations which by comparison with Iraq's relatively short, but no less illegal occupation of Kuwait, are still being extracted from Saddam Hussein's dreadful regime and his long-suffering people. Still, as I said, the Munich action was a net loss, morally, politically, militarily. Not only were its foolish perpetrators apparently, and in my opinion unforgivably, ignorant of what such a reckless escapade would mean in that particularly fraught setting, they were also manifestly unprepared for what in fact transpired. There was an unacceptable loss of life, the goal of getting 200 political prisoners released from Israel (which was their declared aim from beginning to end) was not achieved, and ever since, thanks as much to this one incident as to all the others combined, it permanently affixed the label 'terrorist' so implacably to 'Palestinian' as to displace and even to efface the tragedy of Palestine almost completely. But this latter result is largely due to the unrelenting mills of political propaganda, and this is where One Day in September, in its crudely deliberate manner ('style' being too strong a word here), comes in. To make of the awful Munich episode "a new kind of thriller" is in the first instance to eliminate the Palestinian narrative that antecedes and in some way illuminates if not the idiocy of the outrage but the desperation and horror that gave it inception and nourishment. Nowhere in the film is there focused attention paid to Israel's antecedent role, its daily, hourly, minute by minute persecution, in the maiming, bombing, dispossessing, humiliating of Palestinians from top to bottom, right across the board, from eviction, to wiping out of every possible trace of Palestinian life, from the beginning to the end of the last 52 years.
Demonstrators marching through downtown Bonn in protest against the expulsion of Palestinian citizens from West German territory following the Munich operation in Sept. 1972 (photo: UPI)
True, we are informed by the publicity for the film that the last remaining Palestinian, Jamal Al-Gashey was located and interviewed, but what he has to say is completely overwhelmed by the other narratives, most of his comments are either abbreviated, mistranslated, or kept to a bare functional minimum and, worst of all, he is seen to possess no life, no background, no humanity of the sort allowed to emerge for the Israelis, whose children, wives, widows and friends appear in testimonial abundance. Very near the film's beginning, there are about 30 seconds of miscellaneous footage, mostly of anonymous crowds, giving the Palestinian story in a pretty banal and even shabby miscellany of scenes representing dispossession and refugee camp life that one supposes are meant to 'explain' Jamal, but those are quickly left behind and literally never returned to. They are designed, I believe, to leave no lasting impression on the viewer, and at the same time to get MacDonald off the hook for being so unbalanced. 'Look,' one can imagine him saying, 'we did talk to the terrorist, we showed something of his background: so what more do you want? They were terrorists after all!'
Let's hear a little more from MacDonald's production notes, which seem tirelessly to extol the film's total, complete, unqualified originality: "What I wanted to do with One Day in September," he rattles on yet again, "was to make a documentary different than anything I had seen before: a documentary thriller, one that would work as a film at the cinema. I wanted it to have a strong narrative grip and to pull the emotions of the audience, while at the same time investigating and revealing the extraordinary facts behind this event in a detailed way." Well, it doesn't work as a film in any locale, unless one's standards are so low as to allow that a transparent, and even caricatural quasi-staccato sequence that basically tells a well-known, thoroughly familiar story pieced together out of old film clips, predictable interviews, and gross misrepresentations that show Palestinians to be irreducibly terrorist (though clever, and a bit manipulative), Israelis brave, serious, courageous, and long-suffering, Germans (shades of Colonel Klink in TV's Hogan's Heroes) incompetent, lying, bungling, bloody-minded fools is 'original' filmmaking. And how original is it after all to parade before us the de rigeur sequences of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Riefenstahl-type reminders of Nazi grandiosity and barbarism, with the standard Hitler-face icon floating over the whole ensemble? Granted that we mustn't forget all that, but what 'original' point is being made by mining this already ideologically over-loaded film with subliminal cues planted to elicit Western guilt for Jewish suffering, at the same time condoning and even justifying Israel's horrendous practices? This at a time when an ongoing conflict, tragically unresolved between two peoples (despite what Macdonald, in an unusually grotesque image calls "the monumental peace process") is weighted preponderantly in favour of one of them, while the other enjoys no access to the mass media, no ready narrative of persecution and dispossession, no admissible and endlessly re-useable symbol for political exploitation. Once the film is finally available to viewers the distinctly unpleasant experience of viewing it will pretty much dissipate any claim about the absence of a political agenda.
Consider, for instance, that no Arab voice at all, except the unfortunate Mr Al-Gamshey's and later that of an unidentified Libyan, is ever heard. Not a single Arab name is cited in the film's credits. No music, no children, no elderly women, no mutilated bodies. Above all, no Palestinian witnesses, say, to the Deir Yassin massacre, or Qalqilya, or Kufr Kassem, or Sabra and Shatila, or the 1948 terror evictions of Palestinians from towns like Lydda and Ramleh (the latter two actions commanded by the late Yitzhak Rabin). Macdonald's keen historical sense seems to have whisked away any memory of the fact that Zionist militants introduced terrorism into the Middle East in the 1920's (see in this regard David Hirst's classic book, The Gun and the Olive Branch). On the other side, however, the film begins with a poised, fabulously articulate and handsome Dutch woman, Ankie Spitzer, widow of the Israeli fencing coach; her comments are everywhere reasonable, humane, easy to identify with, 'normal.' Her martyred husband is shown to be gentle (she tells us how even his fencing instructions are the opposite of aggressive: he teaches his students to respect the opponent), good-humored, holding an immensely appealing small child, who returns at the end of the film as a melancholy young woman bravely, even good-naturedly placing flowers at her father's grave. You wouldn't guess from all this undoubtedly authentic material that there are Palestinian widows and fatherless children, by the thousands, who have also suffered bereavement and loss. I don't want to suggest any moral equivalence here, only the need for a genuinely moving and genuinely actual Palestinian dimension, which this film in every frame blots out deliberately, by implication dehumanising and reductively distorting the Palestinian side beyond any possible recognition by an uninformed viewer.
Macdonald gloats over his achievement of persuading Michael Douglas to narrate the film. Arthur Cohn with his vast Hollywood connections surely made that possible, but that in the end is only an academic matter. Using his best imitation of quiet outrage Douglas (who cannot help sounding like the preening Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987), the film that is the most characteristic of his long, mediocre career) hammers in the point that these were, probably still are, terrorists, terrorists, terrorists: the word recurs many times, very much in the best Israeli tradition of calling every act of Arab resistance, even resistance against military occupation, the merest TERRORISM. As in official Israeli jargon, everything done by Palestinians to resist their unending oppression is collapsed into the one word 'terrorism.' And to seal it in forever, a former head of Mossad, Zvi Zamir, is a talking head in the film, equating moral judgement with what the film's publicity calls 'an official Israeli point of view.' As if that were needed at all in a piece of work so unmitigatedly dutiful in rendering that point of view.
The other fall guys of the film are the Germans, who basically remain unredeemable as much for their past as for their present. Zamir and his bunch stand off to the side suggesting snidely that they would have done a great deal better: we don't negotiate with terrorists (the Germans did, incompetently and dishonestly), we are at least technically competent when it comes to efficient killing and would have known how to have positioned snipers, stormed the plane, etc etc. One would have thought that almost 30 years after the event Macdonald would have at least tried to see how much of the Israeli rhetoric was true, how much simply hot air and callous bluster. Israel has always detain Palestinians prisoner without trial, with torture, without real recourse. For a period the Emergency Defense Regulations first used by the British Mandatory authorities (until 1948) were adopted without change. Then after 1967 a more complicated set of occupier's laws, as the Palestinian jurist Raja Shehadeh calls them, were implemented. Until today hundreds of Palestinians are held prisoner by Israel on charges equating resistance to Israeli occupation with terrorism. Dozens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Palestinians have passed through Israeli jails; many of these men and women have been held so as to pry information out of them, to force them to work as collaborators and informers, to get their families to promise things that make military occupation easier for Israel. In addition, since 1982 Israel has maintained a prison, Khiam, in the zone it occupied illegally in south Lebanon for the express purpose of detaining Lebanese citizens who legitimately fight against the occupation of their land. Finally, the Israeli government has openly admitted that it has abducted many Lebanese citizens (including Shaikh Obaid of Hizballah) and keeps them as civilian hostages pending the return of one or two Israeli prisoners held in Lebanon. All this is herded under the rubric of fighting and refusing to negotiate with 'terrorism.'
Now without in any way denying the fact that various bombing incidents against Israelis have taken place and roundly condemned by everyone, it is also true that there is no comparable set of systematic (as opposed to sporadic) Palestinian practices against Israelis, and I haven't in this context even mentioned the bombing by Israel of refugee camps, hospitals, schools and the like, the wanton killing of prisoners of war, the destruction of homes, olive trees, fertile farm land, and Beduin tents. Nor have I alluded to the veritable orgy of assassinations, state terrorism by any other name, that Israel has indulged in before, since, and after Munich, eg, the Beirut killing of three PLO leaders in their beds in 1973, the murder of at least a dozen other Palestinian personalities, plus numerous booby-entrapments, point-blank shootings, car-bombings, one of the most horrendous being the Beirut assassination of Ghassan Kanafani, an engaged Popular Front partisan who was also one of the most gifted writers in the Arab world. This last outrage occurred before, not as a result of, Munich.
So, in that blood-drenched context MacDonald comes along affirming Israel's refusal to negotiate with terrorism, as if it was the pristine declaration of a morally upright Boy Scout. (Incidentally, there is a particular idiocy in allowing the incomparable Golda Meir to pronounce those fatuities, Meir who only three years earlier had stated that there was no Palestinian people!). OK, so why not negotiate with 'terrorists,' and why not use hindsight to examine a policy that in its callous hypocrisy always ended in innuring Israel to its immoral inflexibility and sadism when it came to its victims. Despite all my reservations about them, the Munich Palestinians were absolutely clear in that they wanted (a) prisoners released and (b) no killing. Surely Israel's policy of macho toughness, indifference to Arab suffering, boastful bellicosity has brought more harm than good. Wouldn't you expect that 'a new kind of thriller' might take on that policy critically, instead of endorsing it mindlessly?
No, One Day in September is a tired, cliché-ridden tissue of bad cinema, bad politics, bad thinking. As history it has no status at all. It's as if nothing happened before or after 1972, just those events as constructed by Kevin Macdonald and company. Even the film's musical soundtrack made up of 'period' music from Led Zeppelin to Philip Glass trivialises what we see on the screen: it struck me as somehow moronic and insouciant at the same time, unrelievedly inappropriate and jarring from start to finish. In short, this is a film that in constructing a simplified, ideological narrative in the best (or worst) CNN style of 'you-are-there' reporting condemns the viewer to reliving the experience without learning anything new or understanding anything better. What I hope may survive of its 92 minutes of smug and maudlin narration is a sense of how unreconstructed chauvinism of the official Israeli kind accomplishes little that can speak to us in the year 2000. Mercifully there are changes among both Palestinians and Israelis today (the re-emergence of the binational idea, the positive role of Palestinian and Israeli new historians, etc.) that tell a different, more hopeful and enlightened story. Yet we must still resolutely reckon with the weight of the common, sorry past and its anachronistic misrepresentations which, alas, continue to bedevil us in films like One Day in September.
