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THE HISTORICAL FACTS YOU WILL NOT LEARN ABOUT IN SPIELBERG'S MOVIE THAT MOTIVATED GOLDA MEIR'S POLICY OF AGGRESSIVE DETERRENCE

THE MURDER OF ISRAELI athletes was coolly planned in the summer of 1972 at the pleasant cafes on the Via Veneto in Rome by the leaders of Black September. In July they were in a fit of pique at the International Olympic Committee, which they felt had insulted the PLO by not allowing it to participate in the upcoming games in Munich. The leaders, Abu Daoud and Abu Iyad, had been among a handful of sophisticated PLO activists who wanted to continue their terrorist activities without jeopardizing the increasing political stature of Arafat's PLO and Fatah. By creating a fictitious organization -- Black September -- they were able to provide plausible deniability to Arafat. "Who, me? I don't know anything about terrorism." In fact, the leaders of all the Palestinian groups were frequently in contact and assisted each other whenever possible. (The name Black September was taken from the period around September 1971 when the Jordanians, in the service of their own political interests, forced the Palestinian terrorists out of Jordan.)

The Black September leadership had failed in several earlier terror projects and were searching for some dramatic act that would catch the world's attention and put them on the terror map as the Japanese Red Army had done several months earlier in May 1972 when three members of the group had machine-gunned to death 24 Puerto Rican religious pilgrims and wounded 78 other passengers in the Tel Aviv airport. To Daoud and Iyad the Munich Olympics sounded like just the ticket. They formulated the plan to capture and hold as many Israelis hostage as they could and threaten to kill them one by one unless their demand to release 234 of their fedayeen brethren from Israeli prisons was met, even though they knew from previous experience that such a demand was a non-starter for the Israeli government. How they thought such a scenario would play itself out is not clear -- but they knew that by September the world would have heard of Black September.

Without the circle of sophisticated leadership of Black September there would have been no massacre. The media in America and Europe often purvey the foolish notion that acts of terrorism are spontaneous outbursts of an oppressed people like the recent events in the Paris suburbs -- a downtrodden mass of people breaking their bonds. Nothing could be further from the truth. Spielberg, take note.

Abu Iyad took the most important first step by choosing the commander of the group that would execute the Munich terror operation. It was this man, "Issa," small, tense, and wiry, who maintained iron control of the seven other young terrorists and kept their focus until the final denouement. Without him there would have been no possibility of carrying out such a plan. The foot-soldiers, the fedayeen, did not have the sophistication, the language, the adaptability, or the intelligence.

"Issa," a nom de guerre, was in reality Luttif Afif, a Palestinian militant whose mother was Jewish and whose father was a wealthy Christian Arab businessman. In 1958 he had moved to Germany to study engineering, and learned the language. He moved around Europe easily, enjoying a playboy life. At some point he returned to the Middle East, joined Fatah and fought in some battles against Israeli soldiers. By 1972, however, he was in Berlin engaged to be married to a young German woman.

Ironically, Spielberg and Kushner remain in the grip of the naive idea that the reason the Israeli-Palestinian problem still exists is that the two peoples don't understand each other and if only they could see how much alike they were -- that they have the same human qualities -- their intransigencies would diminish and disappear.

"I never like to draw lessons for people," says screenwriter Tony Kushner about the Middle East question. "It's not an essay; it's art." (A self-delusion, at best, as anyone can tell you who has spent six tedious hours listening to the essays and lectures in Angels in America.) "But I think I can safely say the conflict between national security and ethics raised deep questions in terms of working on the film. I was surprised to discover how much the story had to do with nationality vs. family, and questions about home and being in conflict with somebody else over a territory that seems home to both people."

There is an entirely fictional scene in the movie in which Avner, the protagonist, and his Palestinian opposite number meet and talk calmly, with the latter getting a chance to make his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. That scene means everything to Kushner and Spielberg. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills," says Spielberg. Without that exchange, "I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie -- good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture." In fact he has made that picture over and over -- what are the Indiana Jones films but good guys vs. bad guys? Spielberg's problem is that he cannot allow himself to see the Israelis as good guys as long as they refuse to allow themselves to be victims anymore.

Spielberg doesn't seem to grasp the fact that although the leader of the terrorist murderers, "Issa," was a man who loved his family, was not a Muslim, was not poor, was not deprived, was worldly and sophisticated and understood who and what Jews and Israelis were like, it did not matter at all -- he still ordered the cold-blooded murder of eleven innocent young men who also had families.

Even before the Israeli athletes arrived in Munich, the Israeli government, understanding that their young citizens might be at risk on foreign soil, asked for permission to provide their own security and were turned down. Furthermore, it was part of Germany's policy to have minimal security protecting the athletes and grounds. This was because West Germany and Bavaria wanted to demonstrate to the world that German militarism of old and Nazism were gone forever.

Even after the eleven athletes were captured and two of them were shot to death and their bodies were dumped out of a second story window, there was little or no sympathy or cooperation provided by the Olympic Committee. There was no way that old Avery Brundage, autocrat of the Committee, was going to allow anything to rain on his parade. "The organizers of the Games naturally wanted the Games to resume as soon as possible," the Police Chief of Munich, Manfred Schreiber, said in an interview. "The organizers...want peace and quiet, they want the event to take place unhindered, they want the event to continue without any delays...." The Olympic Committee refused to cooperate with the rescue attempts or acknowledge the danger that the hostages were in. The Israelis were treated like bad sports who were interfering with everybody's fun.

IT SOON BECAME APPARENT that the German officials handling the negotiations with the terrorists were in way over their heads. But when the Israelis petitioned then-Chancellor Willy Brandt to allow Israeli commandos, who had experience with Palestinian terrorists, to assist the German police Brandt refused to allow them to take part in the crisis.

Baffled by the unconventional and intransigent attitude of "Issa" and the terrorists, and inexperienced in rescue operations, the West German authorities organized a clumsy and transparent attempt to rescue the nine remaining hostages at a military airfield on the outskirts of Munich which was so incompetently handled that a horrendous fire-fight broke out, resulting in the deaths of all of the hostages as they sat in two helicopters awaiting their rescue. In addition one German policeman and five of the eight terrorists, including "Issa," were killed. The Palestinians took pains to kill all the Israelis, who were bound and gagged -- one group by hand-grenade and one by machine gun fire.

The details of the botched rescue attempt and shootout were never revealed to the press at the time but can be seen in a superb documentary film, One Day in September, based on many hours of interviews with those who participated in the events of that day (click here). An excellent book with the same title (click here) but much more detail, written in association with the documentary but independently by Simon Reeve, a British journalist, appeared in the same year, 1999. In it he tells the shameful story of the German cover-up and the true Israeli response to the Munich Massacre. Spielberg, take note.

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