Munich and the Kushner Connection

Many of the themes of Munich appear to reflect Tony Kushner’s deeply ambivalent attitudes toward Israel — and his willingness to distort key facts and history in support of his extreme charges. For example, he repeatedly blames Israel for supposed “ethnic cleansing” and “dispossession” of Palestinians, casting the alleged action of denying Palestinians a homeland as the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is a central message of the Spielberg film.

On the other hand, Kushner and Munich virtually disregard the reality of the Arab world’s rejection of a non-Arab, non-Muslim Jewish homeland in its midst and Israel’s repeated peace overtures. Nor is there any hint of Palestinian Arab responsibility for the flight of Palestinian Arabs during the war in 1948. (See CAMERA on Palestinian refugees.)

Likewise the Arab assault on Israel over many decades up to the most recent terror campaign by Palestinians that peaked in the spring of 2002 elicits little or no comment from Kushner. Indeed, during April and May of that year as Israel reeled from the violence against its men, women and children, and launched a military counter-offensive, he assailed the Jewish state, deploring “the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israeli Defence Forces in the occupied territories.”

Kushner’s repeated declarations that Israel does not represent him personally in any way are also apparent in the message of Munich. He has said Israel is “a foreign country” that no more represents him than does Italy. This estrangement is emphasized in the movie when the hero early on moves his wife and child to Brooklyn, a place that is inviting and sun-filled and where church bells sound in the background. (In comparison, scenes in Israel are mainly set in darkened, colorless and gloomy interior rooms.) Despite entreaties of a fellow Israeli in the closing scene, the embittered and alienated hero renounces Israel for America.

In Kushner’s Own Words

 ♦The founding of the state of Israel required the dispossession of an indigenous group, the Palestinians. 
—Wrestling With Zion (Grove Press, 2003) Edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon; Introduction by the editors, p.2

 

♦[Israel was] founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing, and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people.
—Yale Israel Review (winter 2005)

 

(Although Kushner espouses affection for Israel in the same interview, his charge of “ethnic cleansing” is defamatory and baseless.)

2) Kushner has said repeatedly that the creation of the state of Israel was a mistake and should not have happened.

♦I’ve never been a Zionist. I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened.
—The New York Sun reporting Kushner comments made at a conference in NY(10/14/02)

♦Kushner: Establishing a state means fucking people over. However, I think that people in the late 20^th century or early 21^st century – having seen the Holocaust, having seen the 20^th century and all of its horrors – cannot be complacent in the face of that.

Ha’aretz reporter: But you are saying that the very creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea.

Kushner: I think it was a mistake.
—Ha’aretz (4/7/04)

♦Zionism aimed as the establishment of a national identity is predicated on a reading of Jewish history and an interpretation of the meaning of Jewish history I don’t share. Insofar as Zionism is an idea that the solution to the suffering of the Jewish people was the establishment of a Jewish nation, I think it is not the right answer.
—Ha’aretz (4/7/04)

♦“I am not a Zionist, in case you haven’t noticed.” Kushner cited “the shame of American Jews” for failing to denounce Israel.
—Chicago Tribune (4/10/02)

3) Kushner goes so far as to blame “the existence of Israel” for world “peril” generally:

♦The existence of the state of Israel, because of the terrible way that the Palestinian people have been treated, is now in great peril and the world is in peril as a consequence of it. And we have now the spectacle of Jewish people all over the world, who in the past century had an absolutely magnificent tradition of rejecting barbarism and right-wing murderous politics, rallying behind Ariel Sharon who 10 years ago would never have been acceptable anywhere.
—In These Times interview (3/4/02)

4) Kushner emphatically rejects the noti
on that Israel represents him in any way.

♦Israel is a foreign country. I am no more represented by Israel than I am by Italy.
—Ha’aretz (4/7/04)

♦I have huge problems with Zionism. As a Jew, I have always said the promised land seems to me to be the Constitution of the United States of America.
—In These Times (3/4/02)

5) Kushner advocates radical policies toward Israel, contrary to the views of the mainstream in Israel and America.

♦The Israeli-built security wall should come down, the homeland for the Palestinians should be built up, with a strictly enforced peace, not enforced by the Israel Defense Forces, but by the United Nations.
—Baltimore Jewish Times (6/4/04)

(While many Jews may support the creation of a Palestinian state under circumstances that assure the safety of Israel, few oppose construction of the protective security barrier and most reject inviting the U.N., known for its entrenched pro-Arab policies, to enforce “peace.”)

6) Kushner routinely levels incendiary and baseless accusations against Israel and its leaders.

♦People change. I believe deeply in the possibility of people changing. But Bush? Sharon? Nine months have passed [since September 11, 2001] and look at the mess the feckless blood-spattered plutocrat and the unindicted war criminal have wrought in the Middle East….

I deplore the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israeli Defence Forces in the occupied territories. I deplore the occupation, the forced evacuations, the settlements, the refugee camps, the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people; Jews, of all people, with our history of suffering, should refuse to treat our fellow human beings like that.
—London Times (5/7/02)

♦Playwright Tony Kushner said Israel is involved in ‘a deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people.’
—New York Sun (10/4/02)

♦…the savagery of Operation Defensive Shield… [launched by Israel in response to terrorist attacks in 2002].

One hardly justifies suicide bombings by pointing out that there’s also no “equivalence” between a dispossessed people resisting a thirty-six-year-old occupation and a massive military machine enforcing that repressive occupation, nor by noting that IDF attacks on civilians are themselves sometimes far less than careful or innocent. (Take the official policy of house demolitions, for example. Or Chris Hedges’s report in Harper’s magazine that he observed soldiers taunt Palestinian boys into throwing stones and then open fire.) [see CAMERA’s refutation of the fallacious Hedges account]

To avoid facing up to such atrocity, to sustain the refusal of any Israeli share in culpability, Zionism has produced a long, shameful, and debilitating history of denial…
—Wrestling with Zion – Introduction p.5

7) Kushner’s ambivalence about Israel, preoccupation with his own feelings and lack of historical awareness is apparent in a typically rambling passage written as an accompanying essay for the release of a CD by the Klezmatics entitled “Possessed.”

I want the State of Israel to exist (since it does anyway) and I want the cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs honored and I want to shokl with Jews at the Wailing Wall and at the same time (and I’m afraid this won’t help sales of your CD) I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity. Contemplating the possible destruction of Israel (civil war?) I feel at times if I could ever kill for a nationalist cause, I might kill for that one but at the same time I wish modern Israel hadn’t been born; I am a diasporan Jew, not a Zionist; and I say this feeling that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, is, its Zionist agenda and homophobia notwithstanding, Jewish history’s best most eloquent single answer to Hitler and the Holocaust; and is so because it is in Jerusalem but I wish Jerusalem was an international city under a U.N. protectorate; and I wish the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington was a Museum of the Jewish-American Experience instead, with a holocaust wing, and I wish it stood on the Mall alongside museums devoted to the sufferings and triumphs of other ethnic-American groups.

Kushner’s Ties to Radical, anti-Israel Groups

♦Kushner sits on the Board of Advisors of the “Jewish Voice for Peace,” which advocates divestment and boycott campaigns against Israel. His name appears on JVP letterhead, including on a letter “salut[ing]” the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) for its move toward divesting from companies that do business with Israel. The letter posted on the JVP Web site not only applauds selective divestment focused on particular companies as proposed by the Presbyterians but says “we absolutely reject the accusation that general divestment or boycott campaigns are inherently anti-Semitic.” 

JVP also posted a related statement saying:

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest grassroots Jewish peace group of its kind in the United States, applauds the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) for its recent vote to explore divesting from companies who profit from the harming of “innocent people, Palestinian or Israeli.”

This is a position anathema not only to politically centrist, mainstream Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, ADL, American Jewish Congress, the Wiesenthal Center, all major synagogue groups and the United Jewish Communities (an umbrella group representing 155 Jewish Federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America), but it is also opposed by left-leaning groups such as Americans for Peace Now; Brit Tzedek v’Shalom: The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace; Meretz USA: For Israeli Civil Rights and Peace; Ameinu/Our People: Li
beral Values, Progressive Israel; the Shefa Fund. For instance, commenting on the Presbyterian divestment issue, Americans for Peace Now said they:

strongly oppose one-sided actions and statements, including divestment, that appear to solely blame Israel for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. These types of initiatives are morally and historically inappropriate and destructive to reconciliation between the Jewish state of Israel and Palestinian statehood.

The Anti-Defamation League issued a detailed response to the Presbyterian move, saying among other things that:

Divestment … validates and supports Palestinian intransigence by giving hope that, ultimately, the world will allow Israel to be destroyed and Palestinian extremist dreams realized. Most Israelis feel, and we agree, that much terrorism is grounded in a rejection of Israel’s right to exist – one reason why attacks increased during the period following the signing of the Oslo Accords. Palestinian terrorism, before 1967 and since, has targeted schools, buses, cafes, discos, hotels – places where innocents, particularly children and families, congregate.

Jewish Voice for Peace also helped spearhead the campaign aimed at intimidating the Caterpillar company into refusing to sell bulldozers to Israel.

Its “Action Center Homepage” calls on the public to “Urge the Caterpillar board of directors to stop selling bulldozers to Israel.” Although a shareholder effort failed to win support, JVP indicates it will renew similar efforts in the future.

JVP’s Web site contains additional examples of its anti-Israel activity as well as press releases denouncing Israel in distorted and unbalanced language. JVP opposes Israel’s construction of a security barrier in the West Bank, opposes military aid to Israel, opposes a unified Jerusalem, recommends the notorious Norman Finkelstein’s books and much more.

In a press release apparently removed from the Web site was published on the occasion of Yasir Arafat’s death, JVP condemned Israel for not fulfilling his burial wishes, mentioning only briefly that the Palestinian leader was associated with violence. Although Arafat is the father of modern terrorism, with a grisly record that includes the killing of innocent men, women and children in Israel and beyond, his seminal role in this global scourge was omitted.

The group wrote:

JVP also expresses the hope that Arafat’s legacy will not remain mired in the unfair and false accusation that he and he alone was responsible for the failure of the Camp David process of 2000 and the beginning of the second intifada.

It should be noted that often news stories referring to JVP’s involvement in anti-Israel activity make special mention of Tony Kushner as a member of the Board of Advisors.

♦Kushner is involved with a radical anti-war group, “Not In Our Name” (NION), that opposes U.S. policy in Iraq and “Palestine.” NION places newspaper ads, such as one in 2002 for which Tony Kushner was both a signer and a member of the “statement Advisory Board.”

It included the following:

The brutal repercussions [of Bush policies] have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine, where Israeli tanks and bulldozers have left a terrible trail of death and destruction.

According to a Chicago Sun Times report (10/20/02):

The group was started and is being run by founders of a New York-based radical group called Refuse & Resist, who are closely tied to the Maoist-inspired Revolutionary Communist Party.

NION demonstration,  Central Park, October 6, 2002

The Sun reported:

[One attendee said Bush] is a puppet of the Zionists [who] control the media, the government and the economy. The Jews' book - the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - explains how they control the world and how they make people fight against each other." His reference was to a notorious Russian forgery that has been a centerpiece of anti-Semitism since Czarist times. "The American government," Mr. Asawa said, uttering another allegation frequently heard from anti-Semite
s, "is controlled by corporations and the corporations are controlled by Zionism."

By no means all of the protestors in Central Park bought into the kinds of theories Mr. Asawa was pushing. But many expressed hostility to the Jewish state while opposing the nascent war against Iraq. Pete Rupert, for one, said his condemnation of Israel was simple. "I know a lot of Palestinians, and I've hung around with too many Jews. I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel."

Another, Karen McCarthy of Staten Island, said "America's support of Israel is unconscionable." She said she didn't "want my tax dollars spent going towards Israel's disenfranchisement of the Palestinians."

A protester from Atlanta, Janx Morris, who was also wearing a kaffiyeh, said, "Israel is and has been an outpost of US imperialism throughout the region - culturally, economically and politically."

"Bush has to deal with the Israeli lobby. These corporations and business interests in the U.S. influence Bush... they try to persuade Bush to totally push the Palestinian people out of Israel. They have lots of money and have more or less bought out Bush," said Todd Wilkerson of Queens.

"Israel is the bully of the whole neighborhood," said one protester, Nihaya Dugan, a Palestinian Arab who moved to New York in 1998.