A Nation is Not a Family: Reconsidering Munich
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Post and Read Comments Steven Spielberg's Munich ignited a lively and often contentious discussion about questions of moral equivalence in the Middle East (see, for example, Leon Weiseltier's The Case Against Munich, and Henry Seigman's The Killing Equation). These debates (for or against moral equivalence) have broken down according to party lines and are quite polemical. But the film is not about Israel and Palestine (or Israelis and Palestinians). The film is about Israel, and the parameters and limits of nationhood more specifically. Therefore, the questions about moral equivalence, while interesting, are to some extent misplaced. There is another question that has gotten buried under the political posturing: the struggle and failure to transform peoplehood into statehood. What is the price of the success of the Jewish state and is that success the attenuation, or even erasure, of Zionism? To me, this is the more interesting question that underlies this film.
The categories “people” and “state” are often conflated regarding Israel but represent very different realities. As Immanuel Wallerstein has put it, “A ‘nation’ is supposed to be a sociopolitical category, linked somehow to the actual or potential boundaries of a state. An ‘ethnic group’ is supposed to be a cultural category, of which there are said to be certain continuing behaviors that are passed on from generation to generation that are not normally linked to state boundaries.” Zionism and Israel, of course, challenge that assumption, Israel defining itself as a “Jewish state,” believing in the possibility of a fluid transition from peoplehood (or ‘ethnicity’) to nationhood – a transition that has resulted in a complicated category called “ethnic democracy.” In many ways (especially during the years immediately following Israel's independence) this worked quite well. But there is a tension in this transition that will not go away – a tension that Tony Kushner and Eric Roth magnify in their screenplay. Over time, is the concept of peoplehood threatened or even undermined by statehood? Can peoplehood survive the transition to nationalism? Put differently, when the cultural base of any people comes to serve the material aspirations of a political machine, who wins and who loses? And, more broadly, what is the cost?
States like Israel may have an ethnic base, but that ethnicity is fictive at best. Etienne Balibar explains this in general terms. “I apply the term ‘fictive ethnicity’ to the community instituted by the nation-state. This is an intentionally complex expression in which the term fiction…should not be taken in the sense of a pure and simple illusion without historical effects, but must, on the contrary, be understood by analogy with the persona ficta of the juridical tradition in the sense of an institutional effect, a ‘fabrication.’” A nation-state has an ‘ethnicity’ but it not is an ‘ethnicity’ determined by a myth of origins as much as a pragmatic expression of the state’s needs and desires. The state creates the parameters of the fictive ethnicity of its citizens. This is one reason why there is a conflict between diasporic and Israeli determinations of “Jewishness” for state purposes. Israel gave the Israeli Rabbinate the right to set the parameters of “Jewishness” but in doing so they serve as state functionaries and not halakhic authorities. Diaspora Jewry’s non-hegemonic religious structure has different, and conflicting, determinations. The state - even a democratic one - ultimately holds the power to control its own (fictive) ethnicity, its populations, and its individual citizens. The paradox is that while states define the family they cannot afford the compassion of a real family structure.
Munich does not deal with the theoretical concept of ethnicity (fictive, mythic, or real) or the category of peoplehood per se. Rather, Kushner and Roth place these categories in the life of one individual whose myth of origins is shattered by the realization that he is, in the end, merely a ‘fabrication,’ a tool of something/someone who raised him from childhood (in the kibbutz) but does not, and cannot, love him as a parent.
In an early scene of the film, the main protagonist, a young Mossad officer named Avner, and his pregnant wife are lying in bed in conversation about their future life together. Discussing issues of state and family and the mission he was just assigned, she confirms his intuition about accepting the assignment that will take him away from her and their unborn child by saying, “you think Israel is your mother” (Avner was put in a kibbutz by his mother at an early age after his father disappeared – thus she is, in one sense, literally correct). There is something romantic about this assertion – it breathes the myth of Zionism where an orphaned people found refuge in the comfort of newly found sovereignty. “It takes a village,” becomes “it takes a state.” It is this myth the film calls into question.
Family metaphors and cozy imagery abound early in the film. After Avner is chosen for his secret mission he meets briefly with Golda Meir, the quintessential Jewish grandmother, whom we find sipping tea. But Golda telegraphs the rupture that is about to take place when she tells Avner “you don’t look much like your father,” referring to his heroic parent whom she knew well and he did not know at all. His father is depicted reverently as a hero of the state but never as his loving parent. While the scene resembles a clandestine political gathering, the lighting is soft and the meeting takes place in a living room and not a board room (an expression of the paradox between state and family that Israel wants to project). Not quite understanding the implications of Golda’s remark, Avner begins his mission as one who is defending his family, but here in both senses. Maybe this is why he decides to leave his pregnant wife, but also why he temporarily abandons the mission to be there for the birth of their child. Kushner has Golda reciting the platitude “every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” This is a statement not only of Realpolitik but also of the fragility of the relationship between statehood and peoplehood. Compromise indeed.
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This family (ethic/peoplehood) myth breaks down slowly throughout the film. Sitting around dinner drinking fine wine and engaging in small talk with his surrogate family (his compatriots) as he kills his targets, Avner becomes increasingly disappointed and disillusioned – not only because of the precariousness of the mission (is it moral? is it just?) but more deeply by the growing distance he feels between himself and his ostensible “family” (i.e., the state who sent him represented by his Mossad boss, Ephraim). He shares that anxiety with each of his partners. In different ways each has made peace with something Avner cannot accept – your nation is not your family. There are hints of deception by Ephraim throughout, lies by omission, misinformation, and secrecy. Avner undergoes the wrenching realization of a double truth. He is being orphaned by a family that was never his.
All of this is brought into tension with his wife who becomes more and more alienated by his mission (in fact, he moves them out of Israel for their safety). It is one thing to trade one family for another; it is another thing to trade family for state even a state that proclaims its love for you (the most dangerous kind, according to Kushner and Roth). The scene where he talks to his child on the phone and breaks down in tears caps, and momentarily releases, that tension. He fears he has traded love for obligation. Ephraim (an unsavory apparatchik and human incarnation of the state) becomes increasingly impatient as he senses Avner growing resistance. The murders for Avner are not solely about the difficulties of justice pr the complexities of moral equivalence. Each death pushes him further from both his family and the state. He increasingly feels like he is fighting alone – and he is right. His life becomes a sordid combination of separation anxiety and rejection. Even his mother, in a brief conversation toward the end of the film, becomes an appendage of the state. When he asks here “Do you want me to tell you what I’ve done?” (in a sense, begging her to be his mother and listen to his anguish) she responds by saying, “whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth, at last,” a syrupy dose of Zionist propaganda that rings hollow in Avner’s ears. She does not know that he is already deaf to that line of reasoning. She doesn’t ask him about how it feels, about what all this has done to him. In short, she can’t be his mother. It is not simply that the state is not his family - the state has taken the remnant of his family away from him (or is it that the family has given too much to the state).
As has been noted in other reviews of this film, the only death Avner believes is fully justified is the murder of the female Dutch mercenary who killed his partner (and surrogate father?) Meir. In that murderous act of pure revenge (not an act of state politics) there is no guilt – this is the act of a man defending his family. He feels justified. And, of course, this is the very act that Ephraim protests. Why? Because is serves no purpose for the state. Should Avner let her live after brutally murdering his partner? Apparently, Ephraim could care less.
As the family metaphor continues to crumble Avner realizes he may now be the hunted but he does not know by whom. He suspects the Mossad and barges into their offices in New York (like an angry child would barge into his father’s office to register a complaint) and is treated as an intruder and summarily removed by armed guards. Does Ephraim ever tell Avner that the Mossad is not after him? No. Why not? The state has no responsibility to divulge that kind of information, and surely not to an ex-patriot (in Hebrew aptly called a ‘descender’).
The breakdown of the family and the state culminates in the last scene of the film. Ephraim and Avner stand facing one another in a bleak children’s park in Queens. The visual frame of the scene is stark. In the left corner stands the Twin Towers – in the right corner the United Nations. Avner has abandoned the state for the life of a global citizen, a wandering Jew in exile (better than an alienated and unloved child at home). But Avner, unlike Ephraim is still open, his humanity is still intact. “Come break bread with me,” he asks Ephraim, echoing a Jewish – no, Abrahamic - gesture of hospitality. In other words, “accept me and my decision to be here and I can accept you and your decision to be there.” Ephraim demurs. He will have none of that. “I am not your family,” he stares blankly at him, “I am the Jewish State and, like all states, I care foremost about my own survival. If you want to come back to Israel, I am with you, if you do not, you are a stranger to me.” [this is my imagined dialogue describing the silence between them]. He then turns and walks away. Avner is left alone in an empty children’s park between the Twin Towers and the UN. He offered his clumsy version of hospitality and the state rejected him. Why? Because the state makes sure that only it draws the boundaries of relationship. All Avner can do is return to his family to create his home as best he can -- in Brooklyn.
Is any of this true? Historically, no. But as the Jewish commentator Leonard Fine likes to say “let me tell you a true story I just made up.” Is Kushner right (or am I right in reading Kushner to say) that there no easy way (or no way) for peoplehood to survive statehood? Is this a side of Zionism that needs to be explored more deeply? None of this is the fault of the Jews, or Israel. It may be a necessary by-product of sovereignty for any “people” who later become a nation-state. Nation-states have their own rules, needs, limits, and benefits. Maybe Balibar and Wallerstin are right – maybe peoplehood is, in the end, a diasporic category. In any event, these questions are quite different than questions of moral equivalence. Can a people like the Jews found a state and retain a sense of familial allegiance to their citizens? I don’t know. However, Munich surely raises that question.
For further reading:
Morris Dickstein, The Politics of the Thriller.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Construction of Peoplehood,” in Wallerstein and Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 71-85.
Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 86-106.
Sammy Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies 2-2 (1997): 198-241.
Sammy Smooha, “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel and the Jewish Democratic State,’ in Nations and Nationalism 8 (4), (2002): 475-503.
Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic?: A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic Democracy Debate,” Israel Studies 4-1 (1999): 44-72.