7

Israel and Reframing Siege Warfare into Counter-Terrorism

From the time of its foundations in May 1948 Israel was always a media event. Robert Capa, on contract with Life magazine in the United States, photographed the inaugural ceremony where David Ben Gurion proclaimed the new state’s existence. Capa, as much as anyone, helped entrench a mythology regarding Israel and Zionism that has endured into the present. Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith have seen this mythology containing three dominant narrative strands: firstly, that Israel is an upholder of western values against uncivilised Arabs; secondly, that Israel is the location for a highly masculine narrative of tough Jewish pioneers and an idealized image of native-born sabras reconstructing Jewish identity very different to the weak stereotypes of ghetto Jews in Europe; and, thirdly, building up Israel involves establishing close connections with the land on which Jewish settlers have a right to settle based on an historical myth of return.¹

This mythology behind modern Zionism has shaped some of Hollywood’s cinematic representations of the state and its people, at least in the early years. In this chapter, I will explore the evolution of a cinematic Zionist subgenre from the late 1940s and early 1950s that has continued into recent films such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005). I will concentrate on how these films represent unconventional war and counter-terrorism in three parts: the first part will look at the initial phase of movies into the middle 1960s when film making in Hollywood on Israel temporarily halted following the release of Cast a Giant Shadow (1966); the second part examines the rise of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-terrorism in the 1970s, leading to the emergence of several Hollywood action movies with Palestinian terrorist nemeses; while the third part will examine two films that explore the morality of Mossad counter-terrorism operations, The Little Drummer Girl and Munich. The chapter will conclude by arguing that Israel’s ambiguous position as a western-orientated state in the Middle East has given vent to a debate about the purpose and moral framework of counter-terrorism that acted as a precursor for later films on war and terrorism in the Middle East.

Exodus and the first phase of the Hollywood Zionist subgenre

Hollywood’s interest in Israel was initially based on a small number of films from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, most notably Sword in the Desert (1949), Exodus (1962), Judith (1966) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) These films reveal an outlook broadly supportive of Israel as well as a general wariness over getting too closely involved in the politics of a state whose future did not seem all that assured. There was, after all, no close military alliance between the United States and Israel for the first two decades of its existence. The United States began to support Israel only in the 1967 June war, though even then relations were not that close, evidenced by Israel fighters severely damaging a US navy spy ship the USS Liberty in the Mediterranean, killing thirty-four servicemen and intelligence analysts (the event was hushed up, unlike the publicity surrounding the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo the following year).2 It was in the 1970s that the United States established closer relationships with Israel, leading to a pre-emptive doctrine of counter-terrorism that, arguably, later influenced the Bush administration’s concept of ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Well before this, Hollywood’s first phase of involvement with Israel had come, somewhat abruptly, to an end with Judith and Cast a Giant Shadow in 1966. The movie subgenre had been momentarily important, but had always been dwarfed by Hollywood’s preoccupation in the 1950s with hugely expensive biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). Both these movies had the non-Jewish actor Charlton Heston supplying a new image of Jewish masculinity that overrode the wasted and defeated image of Jews surviving the horrors of German concentration camps. They helped to create a revitalized image of resolute Jewish resistance to imperialist oppressors, whether these be the Egypt of the Pharaohs or the Ancient Romans.³ The movies served as moral templates for the Zionist struggle against the British colonial administration in Palestine in the 1940s as well as hostile Arab neighbours in the Middle East. Some later films such as Exodus and Judith piggybacked on the sword and sandal and biblical epic movie genres, though they largely recycled themes from westerns and war movies to fit a situation where a new European-type colonial settler state and people battle for survival in a desert setting.

Hollywood’s wariness with these themes might seem, at first sight, rather surprising given the way that a good majority of the film studios had been established by Jewish men who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia. Starting quite modestly in fashion and retail these men had been drawn to cinema in the early twentieth century at a time when it presented no serious social barriers to Jews. But, in building up a huge cinematic empire in Hollywood, the Jewish movie moguls were never that keen to assert their ethnic origins. They had mostly escaped from the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century where the Zionist dream of escape by settling in Palestine had come out third behind the other two options of emigration to the United States or staying and getting involved in revolutionary politics, usually of a Marxist kind. Making a commercial success of cinema also meant that championing the American dream, an idea that Hollywood cinema did much to invent. If there was any sort of collective mission by the Jewish moguls in Tinseltown, it was social acceptance and assimilation into the mainstream at a time when American nativism and anti-Semitism were all too evident.⁴

There were also political dangers in being too closely aligned in the post-war years with the Zionist cause. The creation of Israel in 1948 was not due simply to the power of the Zionist lobby in Washington but a narrow window of opportunity in the United Nations in the late 1940s, at a time when there was a huge fund of guilt in relation to the holocaust in Europe in the early 1940s and Stalin saw some payoffs in championing a state he believed would be a socialist threat to the position of Britain in the Middle East.5 The Israeli state also emerged during rising anti-communist hysteria in Hollywood, accompanied, on occasions, by vicious displays of anti-Semitism. There were few obvious payoffs in being seen to be too close to the Zionist project, which many on the Right in the United States associated with communism. Moreover, the Zionist cause and the struggle for Israeli independence had involved a bitter insurgent war against Britain, the holder of League of Nations Mandate in Palestine after the First World War. Given that Britain was a close American ally in the Cold War, there were problems in releasing too many films portraying Britain in a negative light; the same could hardly be said, though, for the Arabs where the subgenre initiated a pattern of vilification on screen that spread into later action movies in the 1970s and 1980s.

The difficult beginnings of the Israeli state ensured that the Hollywood movies with an Israeli or Palestinian background usually lacked the sense of forward movement evident in many of Hollywood’s westerns and war movies. While it was possible to recycle some of these tropes, Hollywood’s movies could never quite emulate the mood of American victory culture in the post-war years. The establishment of Israel was obviously due to military victory in the first war of 1948–1949; but the movies failed to generate a warrior myth comparable to the American myth of war forged in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Lacking defence in depth and with a small and encircled population that could never tolerate huge battle casualties, Israel was a terrain in which the wars it fought were ones for ethnic survival, a safe haven for refugees from the holocaust in Europe and the breeding of a new indigenous population of sabras.

There was no sense here of manifest destiny over the vast open spaces of the American west, for the impulse behind the state came not from an expanding frontier but a contracting one, as the survivors of ancient Jewish communities across Europe fled for safety, on ships like the Exodus, to a territorial enclave promising some form of sanctuary. But Israel also emerged as a state at the end of the colonial era, and its efforts to claim the moral high ground of anti-colonial liberation were challenged almost from the start by a Zionist ethic of progressive ethnic colonization.⁶ In the 1950s and 1960s this colonizing project was far less visible than it has become in more recent years, and was overlain by the huge fund of sympathy and guilt in the United States and Europe over the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich, evidence for which became starkly clear at the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

Throughout its history, therefore, cinematic narratives of Israeli warfare, whether from Hollywood or in Israel itself, have very often been ones involving siege warfare. In some cases openly so, as in the film Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955) focusing on four Israeli soldiers defending a hill during the 1948 war and Beaufort (2007) centred on an Israeli contingent occupying a crusader fortress in Southern Lebanon. These siege narratives are unlike liberationist narratives of Roma Open City or The Battle of Algiers, where defeat of the enemy ensures the end of states of siege, whether this be Rome under German occupation or the Algiers Casbah. The attainment of Israeli national independence did not end the country’s encirclement and siege status, which arguably continues into the present despite the western media preoccupation with ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria. Certainly, some directors attempted in some features such as Exodus to link the death of the main protagonists with the birth of the new country, on lines comparable to Anna Magnani’s Pina or Brahim Haggiag’s Ali La Pointe, but there would always be serious doubts over how convincing this really was.7

Moreover, no movies have ever celebrated the successes of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) like many American war movies such as Guadalcanal Diary or The Sands of Iwo Jima. The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, hoped that a united IDF would emerge in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948 and incorporate disparate Jewish militias such as Haganah, Palmach, the Stern Gang and the Irgun into one united national military. He called on the American Colonel Micky Marcus to try and achieve this, as the film Cast a Giant Shadow later depicts. But the project proved hard to implement as the Irgun resisted incorporation. Matters came to a head with the landing of the Irgun ship Altalena on 20 June 1948; the Irgun refused to hand over the ship to the Israeli army and a firefight ensued in which two Israeli soldiers and six Irgun gunmen were killed. The ship sailed south to Tel Aviv, where a further firefight occurred the following day as the Irgun leadership, including Menachem Begin, refused to compromise. The Israeli army raked the ship with machine-gun fire and the ship was set ablaze. Forty Irgun gunmen were killed, though the rest were rescued and went off to fight in Jerusalem.⁸

With this sort of background, it was by no means easy to forge any sort of distinctive IDF myth and Hollywood’s movies tended to rely on alternative tropes. If this was a citizens’ war, it was anchored in heavily armed kibbutzim fighting siege warfare against large but apparently incompetent Arab armies. Alongside this were female characters, such as the American nurse Kitty (played by Eva Marie Saint) in Exodus or the bitter former wife of a Nazi commander Judith (played by Sophia Loren) in the film Judith, who both undergo a change of outlook and identity as they come to accept the purpose of the Zionist project. This conversion trope is considerably different to most conventional westerns, certainly in the 1940s, in which narratives are played out within a moral framework of close family ties, such as those of Wyatt Earp and his brothers in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), or of frontier individualism extending, on occasions, to assertive women such as Marlene Diedrich’s Frenchy in Destry Rides Again (1939) or Jennifer Jones’s feisty Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun (1946). Women in the Zionist subgenre remain far more constricted, with their role dictated by the central imperative of breeding a new society rather than pursuing wealth and adventure.

The identity issue applied rather less to men, as became clear in the first film of the subgenre Sword in the Desert. The movie was directed by George Sherman, best known for a series of low-budget westerns for Republic Pictures. The film centres on a hard-bitten American captain of a freighter, Mike Dillon (Dana Andrews), who is, in modern parlance, a people smuggler illegally landing a group of Jewish refugees into Palestine for a fee of $8,000. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca, he is a reluctant hero who eventually undergoes a change of heart and ends up fighting for the Zionist cause, suggesting that while women in the Zionist subgenre need to undergo a full conversion to the Zionism to become the breeders of the new Israeli nation, while for men the issue is more one of moral engagement with a self-evidently righteous cause.

Sword in the Desert stands apart from the conventional British army image familiar from many Second World War features, as well as later cinematic images of a focused and determined military fighting in colonial ‘emergencies’ in Malaya and Kenya. The British retain many human qualities as they hunt for Jewish refugees and leaders of the Zionist resistance; but they are viewed from outside in and are involved in operations normally associated with the German Wehrmacht as they speed around in trucks full of armed soldiers. They also listen in to Jewish radio signals like the war-time Gestapo, though they do not torture any prisoners. They ultimately lack the same determination of the war-time Germans since this is 1947 and the British mandate in Palestine will soon end. They try, as best they can, to enforce government policy on restricting Jewish immigration to maintain good relations with surrounding Arab states, though they are not all that competent. At one point, a Jewish resistance leader disguised as a British officer manages to persuade a British officer to release into his hands some of the top Jewish prisoners; there is a sense that the British lack true military resolve compared to the Jewish insurgents, even if they are mostly paras. As the Christmas of 1947 approaches the men sing Christmas carols, while the Jewish insurgents plan an attack to rescue the prisoners. The insurgents, after all, are embroiled in a bitter struggle for a homeland and a moral cause, exemplified by the suffering faces of the refugees in Sherman’s boat.

Despite the narrative of British weakness and the inevitable end of the mandate, Sword of the Desert tried to make more of the Zionist cause by linking it to wider anti-imperial movements. The movie was written by George Bunker, who had been a correspondent in London in the 1920s for the New York World before turning to movie scripts such as the controversial pro-Soviet Mission to Moscow in 1943. His experience in Britain made him familiar with the Irish war of 1919–1921 and Sword of the Desert includes an Irish nationalist, McCarthy (Liam Redmond), who rationalizes, if only comically, the violent actions of the Jewish resistance. He sympathizes with the rights of subject peoples, asking Sherman, when he demands payment, ‘What do you use for a heart captain?’ He also supplies an Irish blarney to cover the more doubtful actions of the Zionist terrorists by describing them as ‘a fine healthy breed of simple dishonest men.’ When he is eventually killed in the final shoot-out with the British he dies saying ‘they’ finally ‘got’ him after thirty years of struggle.

McCarthy’s inclusion ensured that the film did not have to probe too deeply into the agenda of the Jewish insurgents, though it had a positive image of female Jewish fighters such as the aptly named Sabra (Marte Torren). It established a kind of false complexity by focusing on three separate groups: insurgents, the British and the two outsiders Sherman and McCarthy. During the movie, Sherman acquires a heart and becomes an active sympathizer like McCarthy, though he lacks any overtly anti-imperial purpose. The triadic formula ensures that the film avoids dealing with Arabs, who remain largely invisible in the movie. Indeed, the only two speaking ‘Arabic’ characters are Jewish insurgents, who have dressed in Arab dress and speak Arabic to get past a British checkpoint. The film’s anti-imperial claims end up being highly spurious, though the inclusion of an Irish nationalist undoubtedly contributed to the widespread irritation with the movie in Britain.

Sword in the Desert established many of the tropes that would be become familiar in Otto Preminger’s Exodus in 1962, which also focused on the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. The film was based on a novel by the Jewish American writer Leon Uris, who had worked as a war correspondent in Palestine in 1956. The novel Exodus was published in 1958 and became the most successful American novel since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, remaining for eight months at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Given this huge American interest, it was not surprising that Hollywood proved keen to film the novel, and a script was commissioned by the head of MGM, Dore Schary, before Uris’s novel was even published. This script was abandoned, probably because of fears of offending British opinion in the 1950s, and was rediscovered by Preminger in the office of his brother Ingo, who was Uris’s literary agent. Preminger secured the approval the new head of MGM Joseph Vogel (who had earlier fired Schary) to make the film, which proved a major hit.9

The delay in making the film is easy to understand, given how Palestine became such a sensitive international issue in the post-war period. Jewish hardliners in the British-mandated territory launched a guerrilla war in October 1945 against the British colonial administration. The insurgents were angered by the refusal of the British government to increase the numbers of Jewish refugees entering Palestine from 18,000 a year, as well as the delay in implanting the 1939 British White Paper setting out plans for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab spheres. The insurgency enjoyed widespread support among the Jewish community – the Yishuv – and met with a strong British military response. Casualty rates on both sides rose in 1946 as units of the underground Irgun attacked various British installations. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery, instigated a military crackdown leading to large numbers of arrests of the Jewish elite and the military arm of Haganah known as Palmach. This led to the reprisal bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing ninety-two soldiers, policemen and members of the British administration: an event that has come to be viewed as seminal in the emergence of post-war terrorism.¹⁰

The crisis in civil–military relations in Palestine led to the appointment of Colonel William Nicol Gray to take charge of the Palestine Police Force. Gray had led 45 Royal Marine Commando in the Normandy landings in 1944 and favoured the establishment of commando-like units among the Palestine Police. He called in a former Chindit, Colonel Bernard Fergusson, to run the unit which began to become operational in early 1947, though later in the year the Attlee government in London abandoned the issue by handing it over to the United Nations: The following May a vote in the UN General Assembly favoured the creation of an Independent Israeli state.

This was the background to the film Exodus, though Preminger toned down some of the more overtly anti-British themes in Uris’s novel. Both the novel and film version of Exodus owed their success to the way they Americanized the Zionist narrative, creating for American Jews a mythical, if rather sentimental, revolutionary ancestry comparable to other ethnic groups such as Irish Americans.¹¹ This Americanization is confirmed by the casting of several key roles in the movie to mainstream American actors such as Paul Newman, Lee J. Cobb and Eva Marie Saint who had appeared in several successful films in the previous decade.¹² There was also a strong performance from the British actor Ralph Richardson as the sympathetic Jewish High Commissioner in Cyprus. The movie contained anti-imperial themes as it portrayed a ‘colonial war’ from the viewpoint of the Zionist insurgents, who are depicted as generally humane figures. Exodus stands out, even now, as one of the few films ever released by Hollywood that seriously attempts to get inside the culture and mind-set of a guerrilla insurgency rather than filming insurgent warfare from the external perspective of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency forces.

The film was based on the name of a real ship called The Exodus containing 4,500 Jewish refugees that was prevented by the British government for several months in 1946 from sailing from Cyprus to Palestine. This blockade is eventually lifted and the ship sails triumphantly to Palestine, although when it reached the port of Haifa, it was sent back to Hamburg. The ship’s biblical name provided a religious framework for an essentially nationalist Zionist narrative focused on the final months of the British colonial rule in Palestine. The film’s Zionism was partly offset by early scenes shot from the viewpoint of a non-Jewish American widow, Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), who aimlessly travels as a tourist across Cyprus. She gets sucked into the Zionist struggle after volunteering to work as a nurse in the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus. Later she sails on The Exodus to Palestine with the Haganah activist Ari Ben Canaan, with whom she has fallen in love.

Kitty’s character provides the film with a semi-documentary quality while she also acts as an intermediary between the British administration in Cyprus and the leaders of the Haganah resistance. Kitty is at first the voice of American common sense as she doubts the capacity of the Jews to create an independent homeland, suggesting to Ben Canaan that this will lead to 50 million Arabs defeating the Jews and throwing them into the sea. The film here confirms an entrenched Zionist myth (still widely believed) that the Jewish forces in 1948 were massively outnumbered by the Arabs, when in practice the combined Haganah and Irgun forces amounted to some 74,000 men and women (the IDF alone comprised 35,000), dwarfing the ill-prepared and poorly trained Arab forces, whose estimated numbers range from 19,000 men to 25,000 men.13

Kitty’s role disappears in the latter part of Exodus as the film turns to the insurgency in Palestine and the split between supporters of a more accommodating approach and those in favour of terrorism. The division in Jewish opinion is symbolized by the two characters of Ben Canaan’s father, Barak (Lee J Cobb), who works for the Jewish Agency and is committed to creating a Jewish state by political and diplomatic means, and the young Jewish radical Dov Landau (Saul Minao), who sails on the ‘Exodus’ to Palestine and eventually joins the Irgun. Dov is made to endure a harrowing interrogation by its leader Akiva (played by the Jewish American actor David Opatoshu), who is the brother of Barak. Akiva breaks down Dov’s account of his time in Auschwitz and it emerges that he survived there because he worked for the Sonderkommando clearing up the dead bodies from the gas ovens. Dov was also raped in the camp and is desperate to atone for his past shame by turning to terrorism to kill as many of the occupying British as possible. Akiva accepts this and gets Dov to swear an oath to the Irgun and we can see him as representing, in a somewhat professorial guise, some of the character of the real Irgun leader Menachem Begin, whom Opatoshu would eventually portray in the 1977 film Raid on Entebbe. The atonement for the shame of collaborating with the Germans also provides a moral gloss on any resulting terrorist activities.

The moral heart of Exodus does not lie in the Irgun terrorist campaign but Newman’s character Ari, who occupies a middle position between Cobb’s accommodating figure of Barak and Dov, the embittered terrorist. Ari has a biblically inspired faith in the creation of Israel and wins over Kitty to his cause; she becomes his lover and accomplice by the end of the movie. Ari is also an example of the Americanized Jew who stands in marked contrast to the Yiddish Eastern European Jewry epitomized by Barak, who lives a monastic-like existence in a simple room as he plots the Irgun’s activities and has no romantic attachments with women. In a taut exchange, Ari remonstrates with Barak’s methods and it is evident that, as far as fighting the British is concerned, Ari is mainly interested in Gandhian non-violent resistance, exemplified by The Exodus ferrying Jews to Palestine to gain international attention and a favourable vote in the UN General Assembly.

Using Newman to play the character of Ari was brilliant casting by Preminger. He was, by this time, a major star and his Ari is a Hollywood macho symbol of the ‘New Jew’ as opposed to the Jew of the diaspora.14 Ari disconnects Jewish American identity from its former orientalist Eastern European moorings while at the same time integrating the narrative of Exodus into the experience of modern American Jews. By marrying the blond Presbyterian Kitty, Ari secures a close link with the United States as the Zionist campaign reaches its climax with the 1948 war of Independence. Newman, as a Democrat, also epitomized, in the early 1960s, the widespread support for the Zionist cause among liberal opinion in the United States and he provided a strong character for American Jews to look up to at a time when American WASP society still exhibited quite widespread anti-Semitic prejudice. This was a film, then, that tried to distance itself from the Irgun’s insurgency after 1946 without completely attacking its overall aims. Dov’s brutal experiences in Auschwitz, after all, ensured that any doubts about the insurgency’s aims would be tempered by massive emotional sympathy for the holocaust.

Preminger’s film consolidated a post-war myth concerning both Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel, a myth that would endure for at least the next two decades. It eventually began to be questioned by an increasingly belligerent Israeli policy towards Palestinian insurgency in the 1980s, as well as the emergence of alternative Zionist narratives challenging the image of passive, silent and completely traumatized Jewish refugees from Europe. Books such as Nechama Tec’s Defiance (1993) and Rich Cohen’s The Avengers (2000) pointed to the resistance by Jewish partisans in the forests of Poland and Belorussia during the Second World War. The implication of this was that Zionist military action was not forged solely in Palestine but began in Europe as the creed of Jewish assimilation into European culture fell apart in the face of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis and their Eastern European allies. Tec’s account eventually formed the basis of Edward Zwick’s somewhat glamorized film Defiance (2008) focusing on Jewish partisans, led by the Bielski brothers, fighting back in Belorussia and forming their own forest kibbutz. Even if this version was deeply flawed, it showed just how inadequate the narrative of Exodus was with its implication that those Jews not traumatized by the holocaust had, in some way, collaborated with the Nazis like Dov.¹⁵ Those who had resorted to more militant means of resistance were usually assumed to have been almost entirely liquidated, like those in the 1944 Warsaw ghetto uprising, an event that eventually gained extensive coverage in films such as Marvin Chomsky’s TV series Holocaust (1978), Jon Avnet’s Uprising (2001), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and the more recent Polish film Warsaw 44 (dir. an Komasa).

Exodus was released a little over a decade after the Zionist insurgency in Palestine and memories of it were still fresh in both the Britain and the Middle East. The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, had already published his accounts of the campaign in his autobiography The Revolt in 1952. Exodus was not a simple ‘insurgent’ or ‘terrorism’ movie, given that the first half of the film is preoccupied with Jewish refugees in Cyprus. It is the only the second half of the film that portrays the Irgun’s terrorism campaign, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The last combat scene is also more like a Second World War raid as it focuses on the gun battle of 4 May 1947 between Jewish insurgents and British prison guards of the prison at Acre, leading to the freeing of twenty-seven Jewish prisoners (twenty of them from the Irgun). By the last part of the film, the insurgency has morphed into a battle between Jews and Arabs, though it is the latter who are now terrorists following the murder of the young Jewish girl Karen Hansen as well as the moderate Arab figure Taha, found hanging with a star of David carved on his chest.

The 1948 Arab–Israeli war is the theme of Hollywood’s second Zionist film in the 1960s, Cast a Giant Shadow, released in 1966. The film, directed by Melville Shavelson, had an all-star cast including Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and is interesting for the way that conservative sections of Hollywood were prepared to come out openly in support of the Zionist cause behind Israel before the 1967 June War. The narrative was based on a fictionalized version of the real-life American military officer Colonel ‘Mickey’ Marcus (Kirk Douglas), who is persuaded to command units of the nascent IDF in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The film shifts the focus away from the period of Jewish insurgency before 1948 to what is often viewed as the Israeli war for national survival after the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948.

One of the main instigators of the movie was John Wayne, who was persuaded by Shavelson to take it on, perhaps because he saw it as containing a narrative not too different to his own movie The Alamo in 1960.16 Wayne was drawn to the film at a time when audiences for traditional westerns were going into marked decline (though the big-budget epic How The West Was Won in 1962 still managed to gross over $50 million at the box office). Wayne was seeking greater independence as a film producer in the face of considerable scorn by some Hollywood moguls such as Darryl F. Zanuck.¹⁷ By going off on his own, Wayne ended up projecting some of the entrenched myths of the western into non-American cultural arenas, though modern audiences no longer took them anything like so seriously as twenty years before. Wayne helped to produce two films exemplifying this externalization of the epic western myth in the form of Cast a Giant Shadow in 1966 and The Green Berets two years later.

Cast a Giant Shadow failed at the box office (unlike The Green Berets), though the film is interesting for the way it reveals the limits of Hollywood willingness to identify with Israel. The film was never followed up by any further movie and was centred on the character of Marcus who was mistakenly killed, on 10 June 1948, shortly before the end of the first Arab–Israeli war. The film had the same sort of nuanced tone as Exodus, though the focus moved beyond the era of Jewish terrorism against the British presence in Palestine towards the creation of a new national Israeli army. The film has a thinly fictionalized character David Ben Gurion in the form of Jacob Zion (Luther Adler) while Yul Brynner plays the Israeli military commander Asher, broadly based on the real character of Moshe Dayan, who commanded the Jerusalem front in the 1948 war before later becoming chief of staff of the IDF and Defence Minister during the 1967 June War.

The film’s narrative centres on how a Jewish American military expert is persuaded to become the first Israeli general (or Aluf) so that he can weld the disparate Jewish military formations into an army. The real Micky Marcus helped push groups such as the Haganah, The Potlach and the Stern Gang into one military force, though this is a citizen army that still lacked any real hierarchy of command at the time of his death. Citizen armies are usually defensive in nature, and motivated by some central cause or principle that all can believe in, in this case Zionism and Israeli sovereign independence.18 Such citizen armies very often evolve into a more conventional military formation with a hierarchical structure of command, as would occurred with the IDF in the two decades after 1948.

Cast a Giant Shadow, like Exodus, focuses on the construction of Jewish identity. Kirk Douglas’s own rather ambivalent identity as an American Jew resembled at points that of Marcus.¹⁹ Douglas had been familiar with making films in Israel since the early 1950s when he made The Juggler in 1952 on location in northern Israel and got to know both Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan.²⁰ Douglas’s Marcus is unlike Paul Newman’s Ari, whose Jewish identity is clear right from the start. Shavelson’s script is eager to point to the tepid support for Israel among many American Jews, and Marcus only fully identifies with the Zionist cause relatively late in the movie when it is pointed out that he at last is using the word ‘we.’ In practice, Marcus did not need to be persuaded to take on the job since he volunteered for it once no other person could be found. Though Jewish, he was not at first glance the obvious candidate since he had little actual battlefield experience. He had graduated from West Point in 1924 but had gone into legal work in the 1930s as Assistant US Attorney in New York. In the Second World War, he commanded a Ranger Combat Training School in Hawaii, teaching techniques of unarmed defence in the event of Japanese infiltration. This was followed by work in the US delegation to various war-time conferences before he finally managed to parachute into Normandy on D-Day as part of the 101st Airborne Division. He was recalled after a week and was in Germany at the war supervising displaced persons and visiting concentration camps.

Marcus was as much a military bureaucrat as a figure with extensive combat skills, though he was familiar with the theoretical and strategic aspects of unconventional war. This was probably what Ben Gurion was looking for when he invited Marcus to become the ashuf of the new Israeli Defence Force. Marcus designed a new command structure that drew on his experience at the Ranger Combat School in Hawaii. He identified the weakest points in Israeli defence in the form of the scattered settlements in the Negev as well as the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem, where the main force to contend with was the British-trained Arab Legion commanded by Lieutenant General John Bagot Glubb – better known as Glubb Pasha. Here Cast a Giant Shadow remains quite true to the facts as it shows a Jewish attack on a fortress defended by the Legion being beaten off. The only way left to secure supplies and support for the Jewish position in Jerusalem, surrounded by Arab fighters commanded by Abd-el Qadir al-Husseini, is to build a road through the mountains, one that became known as the ‘Burma Road’ evoking memories of the Second World War. Completing the road ensures the continuation of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, though the film fails to point out that the city remained divided into Israeli and Arab sectors until the 1967 June War.

Cast a Giant Shadow attempted to milk US military expertise and link this with the emerging Israeli Defence Force. Indeed, the IDF emerges as a kind of ideal model for US military offshoot among people friendly to the United States in the post-war world, the sort of model attempted in other arenas such as South Vietnam but never properly fulfilled. Marcus, after all, starts off as a military ‘advisor’ before becoming more emotionally involved after he takes a Jewish woman as his mistress in the form of Magda Simon (Senta Berger). The film has a sub-text concerning the outcomes that can be expected from military training of friendly populations by western states. The scenes showing the Jewish attack on the Arab Legion are an interesting inversion of what we normally come to expect from desert movies: it is the Arabs who are defending a fortress against the Jewish attackers rather than the French Foreign Legion. They are well disciplined and orderly, each wearing the same pink keffiyeh. They beat back the Jewish attack and we can put this down to the good training they have received from their British military advisors. But the simple military prowess of the Legion cannot overcome the wiliness of the Jewish fighters inspired by Marcus. They build the Burma Road to go around the Arab Legion and ultimately secure the Jerusalem position (though the Arab position in the city by this time had already been considerably weakened by the death of al Husseini on April 8). In effect, Marcus’s training in unconventional warfare appears to win out over more conventional British methods.

Marcus’s training of the IDF is not covered in detail in the movie. Indeed, the myth the film creates is that the IDF emerges almost as a replica of the conventional US military, even though there are hints of Marcus’s own insubordination from his commanding officer General Mike Randolph (John Wayne). But this insubordination is shown to be minor and, on occasions, highly beneficial such as his arranging a relief mission for a Nazi concentration camp that has been liberated by American troops. Though technically a case of insubordination his actions win the admiration of Wayne’s General Randolph. Seen more broadly, the film supports the hierarchical model of the US military and avoids any overt or close flirtation with unconventional warfare methods.

In some respects, it was rather convenient that Marcus was killed just before the UN-orchestrated armistice ending the 1948 War. The film avoids covering the conflict in any detail such the massacre of 250 villagers in the village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem on the 9th of April by the Stern Gang, still operating as a distinct military entity despite Marcus’s efforts to create a unified IDF. Likewise, the film’s portrayal of the war as largely conventional means that it avoids having to deal with ethnic cleansing; Arab villages in Upper Galilee that were occupied by Jewish fighters in early April were blown up to ensure their inhabitants would not return.21 Moreover, the IDF did not emerge over the next few decades as a completely conventional army, though it would certainly fight in three successive conventional conflicts in 1956, 1967 and 1973. Alongside these conflicts, considerable emphasis was placed in IDF doctrine on unconventional warfare involving raiding and sabotage, exemplified by the creation in the 1950s of Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon that responded to Palestinian border crossings by blowing up in retaliation Palestinian villages thought to be harbouring infiltrators.

The murky and controversial military history of Israel post-1948 was an area that Hollywood decided to avoid. Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow failed to lead to a distinct subgenre of war movies focused on the conflict in Palestine, and between Israel and its Arab neighbours. In part, this was due to the reluctance of most producers in Hollywood to film any more of Israel’s wars. John Wayne was willing to support Shavelson in making Cast a Giant Shadow since he was able to take one of the starring roles, even though he appears only for 15 minutes. But there were limits to which he was prepared to go in financially backing the film, given that he had nearly bankrupted himself making The Alamo. As he told the producer Mary St John, ‘I’ll be dammed if I’m going to give free rein to a Jewish true believer making the movie of his life-time with my money.’²²

Wayne’s caution exemplified an outlook in Hollywood that did not change even after Israel’s victory in the June War in 1967. There was a declining interest in war films in the aftermath of Wayne’s The Green Berets in 1968, and any film on the Israeli army had no real guarantee of box office success. The problem was amplified by the continuing absence of a distinctive Israeli military myth, even if the brief manoeuvre war of June 1967 was, in some ways, a throwback to some of the battles of the Second World War. But neither the 1967 nor 1973 wars ended up significantly increasing Israeli security as the added defence in depth derived from the acquisition of new territory around Israel’s former borders on the West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai became squandered with the building of further Jewish settlements. Neither war led to any major screen feature, though in 2017 a Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) triumphalist film was released on the fiftieth anniversary of the June 1967 war entitled In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem celebrating the IDF 55th Paratroop Brigade’s capture of Jerusalem, inspired, it appears, by divine guidance.²³

The absence, until now at least, of any major film on either the 1967 or 1973 wars provided some space for Israeli cinema to play with anti-war tropes, though none from a seriously radical political perspective. Unburdened by any major war myth, a few Israeli producers and directors have released films that explore the exhausting, tedious and chaotic nature of war. One early example of this was the film Cup Final in 1991 (dir. Eran Rilkis) which followed the evolving relationship between a captured Israeli soldier, called simply ‘Cohen’, and a group of PLO guerrillas in Lebanon at the time of the Israeli invasion in 1982. The soldier and the guerrillas find that they share a love of football (the World Cup is taking place in Barcelona and Cohen had tickets to go before he was called up) and the Palestinians are represented in strongly humanistic terms. The Israeli soldier is even implausibly dressed up in a suit to attend an Arab wedding, although there is a constant sense in this film that the Palestinian cause is doomed to fail in the face of massive Israeli military assets. This might be an anti-war film at a simplistic level but never seriously challenges the centrality of the IDF’s projection of Israeli military power.

By contrast, the 2000 drama Kippur (dir. Amos Gitai) finally addressed the 1973 War, though not from the standpoint of the conventional war movie genre. Far from emphasizing the war of manoeuvre involving huge tank battles and the use of air power, the movie focuses on two men who drive to the Syrian front in the north in a small Fiat. They fail to reach their unit and end up in a medical unit. They desperately attempt to retrieve wounded men from clinging mud while their helicopter eventually gets damaged by an enemy missile. The two men recover but have been considerably traumatized by the brutal experience of war, even if it is one they never openly question.

Two further films dealt with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath. Beaufort (2007), directed by Joseph Cedar, focused on the last period of the eighteen-year Israeli occupation of Beaufort Castle in Southern Lebanon. In a ponderous and old-fashioned narrative, the movie depicting the lead-up to the withdrawal in 2000 from the fortress in the face of escalating attacks by Hezbollah and the collapse of the main Israeli ally, the proxy militia known as the South Lebanese Army (SLA). Once more this is siege warfare, but with none of the sense of optimism of the four soldiers on Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. As with some other Israeli films, the morale of the soldiers is low and the commander, Lieutenant Liraz ‘Erez’ Librati (Oshri Cohen), undergoes a crisis of self-belief. The lack of reality of the whole occupation is brilliantly recreated in the filmset (on the Golan Heights) where the long underground tunnels the men occupy resemble more a space station than a military bunker. The science fiction quality to the film is compounded by an invisible enemy apparently capable of launching ever more sophisticated rockets, while the arrival of a young bomb disposal expert, Lieutenant Ziv Faran (Ohad Knoller), to defuse a road-side bomb also leads to disaster. The silent and morose Faran has none of the Wildman streak of Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker. He is blown up and killed by a bomb that might apparently have been blown up anyway, since it is on a road only the IDF uses.

Beaufort exposes the irrationality of military decision-making as well as the tendency, observable in some other films such as Eye in the Sky, for civilian political leaders to procrastinate when making crucial decisions involving military assets. A few extra, but clearly inadequate, concrete blocks are installed to try and protect the installation after the start of the rocket attacks. In addition, while most of the men are evacuated before the final withdrawal, the last twelve men find themselves having to spend an unexpected further night in the compound before the withdrawal is hastily completed in the rain and the installation blown up. Beaufort was less critical of the IDF and its battle-hardened, if jaundiced, recruits than the political decision-makers who put their lives needlessly at risk. At the same time, it exhibited no interest in the enemy the soldiers were facing, though this was a conflict where direct contact with the enemy was largely absent unlike earlier conflicts.

The other film dealing with the incursion into Lebanon was the movie Lebanon (2009) directed by Samuel Maoz, focused on the chaos and disintegration of war from the vantage point of an Israeli tank crew. The film was the first Israeli film to win the Leone d’Oro at the Venice film festival and reveals poor judgement and, on occasions, lack of proper military training. The tank’s gunner, it emerges, has never fired a tank cannon before and an Israeli soldier is accidentally killed in a confused situation as the tanks enters Lebanese territory. As conditions inside the tank deteriorate, the morale of the men plummets and the crew descend into bitter quarrels.

The anti-war themes of these films emerged in some Israel features, less in terms of a triumphalist myth, but of a citizens’ army doing its duty and mobilizing to protect Israeli society in times of crisis. The IDF has no major function in holding Israeli society together, given the centrality of the various interpretations of Zionist ideology, though in the 1960s and 1970s individual military leaders such as Moshe Dayan and later Ariel Sharon exerted considerable charismatic influence on domestic Israeli politics. But militarism never became a major state myth in Israel and the army became subordinated to a strategic doctrine of counter-terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s following the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. The doctrine emphasized the need for mobilizing intelligence assets, counter-terrorist hit squads and well-targeted special operations by commando units to capture or eliminate Palestinian political leaders. By the late 1970s, Israeli political leaders saw considerable payoffs in promoting the strategy internationally not only to justify Israeli policy towards its Palestinian enemies but also to link it to a wider ideological Cold War battle pivoting a beleaguered west defending itself against various forms of international terrorist attacks covertly organized by the Soviet Union. Promoting such an idea helped create myths about international terrorism and vigilant counter-terrorist responses that dovetailed with the increasingly popular genre of Hollywood action movies, though it did little in the end to reverse the tide of international opinion against Israeli policy.

Counter-terrorism and the action genre

The late 1970s were a significant watershed in Israeli politics, leading to an ideological reformulation of its dominant myth of existence. The 1973 war confirmed that future inter-state wars would be far too debilitating for the society to endure. The loss of precious manpower necessitated some form of peace with at least some of the surrounding Arab states, starting with Egypt, whose army had performed remarkably well in the early part of the 1973 War. The diplomatic tilt occurred during a period of major change in Arab and Palestinian politics, leading to the emergence of violent insurgent and terrorist movements. Before the late 1960s Israel saw itself as being at war with ‘Arab’ neighbours, leaving the Palestinian Arabs with little or no identity of their own since they were usually referred to as ‘Israeli Arabs’ or ‘Arab refugees.’24 The notion of a distinctly Palestinian identity emerged during the 1960s, in the wake of the original founding of the nationalist movement Fatah 1959. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed in 1964, though widely viewed in its early years as a body created by Arab leaders to control the Palestinian population. This changed when it fell under the control of Yasser Arafat in 1969, who would dominate the organization for the next thirty-five years until his death in 2004.

The Palestinian political struggle was accompanied by bitter factional rivalries, manipulated by a range of external actors, including the Soviet Union, the USA, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Israel. Fatah’s incursion into the West Bank eventually resulted in the expulsion of the entire Palestinian exile population from the Hashemite kingdom, leading to the emergence of the terrorist movement Black September, allied to the PLO. Alongside this was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by the Marxist George Habash. The PFLP, far more than the PLO, championed national liberation on a Chinese and Vietnamese guerrilla model, though in practice resorted to terrorist attacks and assassination. In 1970, the PFLP—External Operations attacked Lod airport in Israel in 1970 killing twenty-six people, though the actual gunmen involved were members of the Japanese Red Army with which the movement was allied.

The 1970s and 1980s were decades of growing international terrorism as a variety of governments provided terrorist movements with funding, training and support. The movements made use of growing global air travel to hijack planes, gain rapid global media attention, smuggle explosives and weaponry and use hostages to bargain for the release of prisoners. One spectacular incident was in September 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games when a group of Black September militants took Israeli athletes hostages, though at the time the hijack was viewed as one of a series of cases of international terrorism that had successfully garnered global publicity. The government of Golda Meir in Jerusalem refused, as always, to negotiate but offered the West German government assistance in the form of a counter-terrorist squad, though this was turned down. The West German government then bungled its own attempted rescue operation, leaving eleven athletes and five Black September terrorists dead (the three who survived were later released following another plane hijack).

It is questionable how far the attack was a real turning point in the evolution of Israeli counter-terrorism strategy, with the launching of Operation Wrath of God and the despatch of hit squads being sent across Europe to kill Palestinian terrorist leaders. The Munich raid had certainly revealed an extensive undercover Palestinian network in Europe, though this was already known to Mossad. The operation was secret and Israel did not seek to gain any propaganda from it, and some analysts and commentators have tended to see it as merely another round in an ongoing struggle of Palestinian and Israeli terror squads that had been rumbling on since the late 1960s. The right-wing journalist Christopher Dobson, for instance, suggested in one early study of Black September that the real turning point came with the Israeli commando raid on Beirut on 10 April 1973 which not only killed three top Fatah leaders but produced an extensive set of files on operatives working inside Israel.25

Operation Wrath of God did not appear on screen for over a decade after it occurred, unlike the speedy release of the movies on the raid on Entebbe. This does not mean that the Munich ‘massacre’ was unimportant, but it became the centre of a later screen myth relating more to the situation in the early 1980s than a decade before. Losing a group of male athletes to a group of Palestinian terrorists was a psychological blow to the Israeli government, but the full details of the hostages’ ordeal would not be revealed for over twenty years. Some were tortured, while the weightlifter Yossef Romano was left to bleed to death before being castrated.²⁶

The failure of the West German government to deal resolutely with the situation shocked the Israeli government and Mossad. It confirmed what happens in a situation where a state appears to lack any coherent counter-terrorism strategy. It also revealed just how isolated Israel was when responding to Palestinian terror attacks, though it is hard to believe that the leaders of Mossad were not already aware of this. The head of Mossad at the time, Zvi Zanir, minuted (in a recently declassified document) that the Germans ‘didn’t take even a minimal risk to try to save people, neither theirs not ours’.27 Following the Munich killings, the West German government expelled over a hundred Fatah supporters among the 37,000 Arab community residing in Germany (many went to East Germany) as well as disbanding the General Union of Palestinian Students and General Union of Palestinian Workers. This was a propaganda blow to the PLO and Fatah, which had been founded at the University of Stuttgart in the 1950s.²⁸

But the global imagery of the Munich hostage-taking was as much horror as terror. The photos taken of the siege of the Athletes’ flats showed a faceless Palestinian terrorist peering over a balcony shrouded in a hood. This was a horror narrative rather than one that could immediately be made into an action thriller, given that there was no immediate way of striking back. Even before the Munich massacre and the launching of Operation Wrath of God, Mossad had been sending hit squads across Europe and the Middle East in a violent strategy of counter-terrorism.²⁹ Over the next few years, the squads killed several senior Palestinian political leaders, a fact which had considerable impact on the operating ability of Black September, the PLO and the PFLP.³⁰

Hollywood ignored the Munich massacre and would continue to do so for decades. The disastrous outcome conflicted with its currently popular genre of disaster movies such as Towering Inferno (1974) and the Dirty Harry crime series with Clint Eastwood. It would not be until Steven Spielberg’s Munich in 2005 that it finally released a feature dealing with the Olympics massacre and the Mossad response. Before then, the global reputation of Israeli counter-terrorism rested on the commando raid on Entebbe in 1976 to rescue hostages taken by two members of the German terrorist group known as the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) who had teamed up with two members of a faction that had broken from the PFLP to demand the release of fifty-three Palestinians being held prisoner by the Israelis.

The raid seemed to have been planned with cinema in mind. Here were good guys being held by bad guys who had not only hijacked a plane but taken it to a country run by a murderous African dictator. The hijacking leads to some prolonged debate and dithering by the government before, eventually, a tough task force of well-trained special forces is sent off across a huge distance that would have been unimaginable in the Second World War or even the 1950s. The raid is almost completely successful, though one heroic commander gets tragically killed while 102 of the 106 hostages (most of whom were Israeli Jews along with the French crew) are brought back to an ecstatic welcome by their relatives and loved ones.

The Entebbe raid lasted a mere 99 minutes but has led, over the years, to at least five feature films, three of them blockbusters: Victory at Entebbe in 1976, starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; the made-for-TV Raid on Entebbe in 1977, starring Charles Bronson and Peter Finch; and Operation Thunderbolt in 1977, the one domestic Israeli film on the raid that starred Klaus Kinski as one of the German terrorist anti-heroes with suitably manic features. None have really explored with any seriousness the political background to the original hijacking or even its wider political significance. The raid’s success led to a major boost in Israel’s standing and Jonathan Freedland is correct when he suggests that ‘it would come to seem the high watermark in global attitudes to the country’.31 For exponents of hard-line counter-terrorism, the raid served as a textbook example of how to negotiate with terrorists.³² The mystique surrounding it has disguised a deeper lesson to be learnt, by both policy makers and strategists alike, when it comes to formulating a successful policy of counter-terrorism. This is that pure counter-terrorism on its own does not work very well since it commands relatively little public support or understanding – something the Bush administration had still not learnt with its later ‘war on terror’ after 2001.

Successful counter-terrorism, in other words, needs to be allied to, or capitalize on, a widely understood public or national narrative. For the Israelis, this was relatively easy to formulate in relation to a narrative of national survival, though even this became questioned in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Globally, the strategy was far harder to formulate and would end up being rather half-heartedly linked to a late Cold War ideology of anti-communism. For the moment, things could ride high in the case of the Entebbe Raid since the appeal of the raid lay not just in an action-style narrative of military daring-do but also the humiliation of the figure of President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, who epitomized, for audiences in the west at least, all that had apparently gone wrong in the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1950s.

Amin came to power in a coup in 1971 that overthrew the corrupt and increasingly anti-western regime of Milton Obote. He was a former soldier in the King’s African Rifles where he had become sergeant major or effendi, the highest rank open to a black African in the British army. The coup has often been portrayed as a British undercover operation in retaliation to Obote’s increasingly left-leaning rhetoric, though another less well-known feature was Israeli assistance to Amin’s main ethnic base of support, the An-ya who straddled the border between Uganda and Sudan. Israel was interested in removing the anti-Israeli Obote from power as well as supporting a rebel movement in the south of Sudan to divert the attention of the anti-Zionist government in Khartoum. Indeed, the head of the Israeli military mission in Uganda, Colonel Bar-Lev, assisted Amin in organizing the 1971 coup that brought him to power.³³

Despite this support, Amin drew away from the Israelis over the next few years, as his narrowly-based military regime wrought havoc on the Ugandan population, massacring hundreds of thousands in a reign of terror. Amin was prone to bouts of anti-British sentiment and, in August 1972, expelled the Asian minority, while also projecting such an exaggerated image of an African dictator in full military uniform complete with rows of medals. He became a gift to cartoonists and a caricature in his own right, rooted in caricatures of the devil, the gargoyle and the buffoon that Johnson, in a classic early study of European racism, suggesting that much of the racist metaphorical imagery of black-skinned peoples since the sixteenth century.³⁴ While not always exploited with malice, the caricatures could be used for a range of purposes. In Amin’s case, this was the devilish buffoon who was also a mass murderer.

Amin’s persona would emerge as a striking nemesis in many of the movies made about the Entebbe raid, marginalizing to some degree the German-Palestinian terrorist group that had pulled off the hijack in the first place. By the time that the Anglo-Kenyan-Nigerian film The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin (dir. Sharad Patel) was made in 1980 the raid is shown in only a few brief scenes, the director very probably assuming this was all too familiar with cinema audiences from the previous action movies. Perhaps the one interesting addition in this movie was the portrait of Amin as coward; when he hears the raid at Entebbe, he is in bed with two white women and hides in a cupboard.

The Amin caricature ensured that the resulting action movies would not need to explore the terrorist hijackers with any seriousness, as attention could focus on Amin and his inept army. The films were rushed out to satisfy audience cravings before memories faded but were generally mediocre. The one interesting film on the raid was only released thirty years after it occurred in the form of The Last King of Scotland (2006). This movie looks at the raid from the standpoint of Idi Amin, played with considerable verve by Forrest Whitaker. Amin cynically addresses the hostages, telling those who are not Israelis that they will be able to fly home. He has cut some sort of deal with the terrorists, while also attempting to milk the issue as political propaganda for his own beleaguered regime.35

The cinematic payoff from the Entebbe raid helped drive forward an ideological reformulation of the Israeli national purpose. The one Israeli commando killed in the raid was Jonatan Netanyahu, who commanded the Sayeret Matkal. His brother Benjamin (‘Bibi’) had also been familiar with the politically risky nature of special operations. He was a team leader of Sayeret in the late 1960s after the 1967 War and took part in Operation Inferno in March 1968 against a Palestinian guerrilla base in Jordan, leading to the so-called Battle of Karameh. The fifteen-hour engagement against the PLO turned into a full-scale military engagement with the Jordanian army and proved costly both politically and militarily. Not only did the UN Security Council vote for Resolution 248 condemning Israel for violating the ceasefire agreed the previous year, but the IDF suffered between twenty-eight and thirty-two killed and over sixty-nine wounded.

Netanyahu learnt several major lessons from both Operation Inferno and Operation Thunderbolt in Entebbe. It was evident that Israel needed to create a more positive international environment if it was to create a successful strategic doctrine of national defence. Special operations on their own would be unlikely to do this, though spectacular and successful ones, like that at Entebbe, might briefly win global admiration. It was necessary to use special forces as part of a more complex doctrine of counter-terrorism capable of generating support from the political right in the west, concerned as always with the continued spread of communism. Over the next few years Netanyahu was adept at forging contacts with neo-conservatives in the United States such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who were critical of the apparent lack of moral resolve displayed by many western governments in tackling terrorist movements.

Netanyahu also learnt the skills of political consultancy after working for the Boston Consultancy Group. He returned to Israel in 1978 and founded the Yonatan Netanyahu Anti-Terrorist Institute, otherwise known as the Jonathan Institute, named after his brother Jonatan killed at Entebbe. The Institute held two major international conferences in 1979 and 1984 to refine the doctrine of counter-terrorism as well as gain the intellectual support of a wide body of terrorism experts in Britain and the United States such as Robert Moss, Brian Crozier, Richard Pipes, Ray Cline, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Bernard Lewis.36 The conferences were important for modernizing the language of the Likud government in Israel away from the fiery combative and quasi-biblical tone of Menachem Begin towards a business-like discourse better suited to American political debate. The long-term aims were not just to ‘understand’ modern terrorism but to follow through on the vision of Likud’s political founder, Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, and remove any last ‘glimmer of hope’ among the Arab opposition that the Israeli presence in the Palestine could be removed.³⁷

The idea that terrorism was an absolute moral evil did not gain universal acceptance even among conservative terrorism analysts. Some of the strongest support claiming to be scholarly came from the American author Claire Sterling, who attempted in two books, The Terror Network (1981) and The Time of the Assassins (1984), to link international terrorism to Soviet grand designs in the Cold War. Widely dismissed as another conspiracy theory, Sterling’s work certainly buttressed the Israeli doctrine of counter-terrorism by linking it to a wider Cold War ideology of the ‘free world’ struggling against global communist terrorism. Few serious intelligence analysts – or even many terrorism analysts – saw international terrorism as a Soviet-promoted challenge to the west, even in the early years of the Reagan administration.³⁸ International terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s functioned within a complicated myriad of networks exploited, on occasions, by extrovert freelancers such as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos, who broke from the PFLP and hired himself out to the East German Stasi or the Romanian Secret Service; while the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal created a renegade terrorist group known as the Abu Nidal Organization that changed sides from the Iraqis to the Syrians, once they found him a useful agent to attack Jordan in reprisal for the Jordanian king’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood against the Syrian Baathists.³⁹ There was little evidence for the Soviet Union using terrorism as part of a coherent strategy to undermine the west when it was bogged down in a war during the 1980s against Mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan. For all its Cold War rhetoric, the Reagan administration did not see pressuring the Soviet Union leading to unconditional support for allies such as Israel. With mounting bloodshed from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Reagan telephoned Prime Minister Begin to condemn what he called a ‘holocaust’.⁴⁰

The Israeli invasion, called Operation Peace for Galilee, was one of the most ambitious ‘counter-terrorism’ operations operated by any western state before 9/11. It lasted for the following three years and was commanded by Ariel Sharon, who later became Israeli prime minister. It led to the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon, though at mounting cost to Israeli forces. The long-term goal was to fortify Israeli security through the establishment of a military alliance with a Maronite Christian government in Lebanon, freeing the Likud government in Israel to fulfil its dream of incorporating the West Bank into Greater of ‘Eretz’ Israel as Samara and Judaea. The campaign initially worked as the Palestinians were forced to move to Tripoli in June 1982 and a pro-Israeli government was installed in Beirut under Bachir Gemayal. However, hopes of a peace treaty like the one with Egypt in 1979 were shattered by Gemayal’s assassination in September 1982; while Israel’s image became considerably tarnished by evidence of its complicity in the massacres of Palestinians by Phalangist militias in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. In Israel, popular disillusion with the war grew and by 1985 the IDF had withdrawn from most of the country, leaving a Maronite-controlled Free Lebanon State in the south.

The 1980s were thus a watershed for Israeli politics. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon certainly marginalized the PLO, for the moment at least, though in 1987 a popular Palestinian uprising – or Intifada – broke out lasting until 1993. This was followed by a second Intifada between 2000 and 2005 following the failure of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accords, signed between Israel and the PLO. Israel found itself under growing international criticism and threats of various forms of boycott, reminiscent of the earlier campaign against South African apartheid. Counter-terrorism as both a strategy and doctrine has not, in the end, been a particularly successful means to increase the Israeli state’s international legitimacy, though at the tactical level it has improved policing and intelligence gathering in several western states.

Cinematically, things became increasingly militarized by the time of Chuck Norris’s action movie Delta Force in 1986, the first of a spate of Golan-Globus productions made in Israel, which would also include action movies such as Invasion USA and Bloodsport. The movie was important for linking themes from the Entebbe action movies to the wider terrorism subgenre emerging in Hollywood.41 It was the first film to portray the failed Operation Eagle Claw in Iran in 1979. The disastrous operation supplies the basic theme of US unpreparedness and incapacity to defend itself against international terrorism, though – unlike Bloody Sunday – SOF in the form of the Delta Force can now be deployed at short notice to rescue a plane that has mostly American passengers on board.

The first half of the film tracks the fate of an airliner hijacked by two fanatical members of an Arab terrorist organization called the World Revolutionary Front. The film makes occasional use of some well-known actors such as Shirley Winters, George Kennedy and Martin Balsam as some of the passengers suffering at the hands of the terrorists, in a manner now familiar from the Entebbe films a few years previously. But the passengers are dispensed with in the second half of the film, which descends into a scene of fantasy violence as the Deltas, led by their star fighter Major Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris), eliminate all their enemies with minimal casualties. McCoy even despatches some of the Arabs by firing rockets from a motorbike: a device that has never been operational (though in 2014 the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Agency was reportedly planning a ‘stealth’ motorbike for use by special forces over difficult terrains, though still without rockets).⁴²

The fantasy violence raises questions about the motivations behind the film. It clearly provided laddish entertainment, while also helping to solidify the image of terrorists and hijackers (especially Arab ones) as militarily incompetent and easily outwitted by superior American technology. It was a trope that helped to bind the morality of the struggle against international terrorism in Israel with the United States, though this would not be true of all the films of the era, even those released by the Cannon Group. For instance, the 1984 suspense thriller The Ambassador (dir. J. Lee Thompson) has the American ambassador to Israel (Robert Mitchum) attempting to establish a dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian students. But the meeting he organizes is attacked by Arab terrorists who machine-gun most of the students; despite this, the film still managed to end on an optimistic note as thousands of students gather outside his house holding torches and calling for peace.

By the 1990s, the terrorism genre in Hollywood had largely moved on from the Israeli focus that had surfaced in some 1980s films such as Delta Force. The demise of Cannon Films in the early 1990s (following a series of failure including the $10 million Captain America in 1992) weakened the links between Israeli film producers and the Hollywood mainstream.43 Israeli tropes in cinematic counter-terrorism largely disappeared by the 1990s as a new spate of action movies were released by Hollywood, some of which began to question some of the basic assumptions of the genre. It was in this context that two major feature films were released that attempted to engage with the morality of terrorism and counter-terrorism, The Little Drummer Girl (1984) and, ten years later, Munich (2005).

Exploring the morality of Israeli counter-terrorism: The Little Drummer Girl and Vengeance as cinematic texts

Israeli counter-terrorism remained poorly understood in western societies well into the 1980s. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon formed the immediate background for a major espionage novel, The Little Drummer Girl (1983), by the British espionage novelist John Le Carre (David Cornwell). Le Carre had been publishing spy novels for years, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and Smiley’s People (1979). By the early 1980s he was anxious to move away from the exploits of his most popular hero George Smiley, whose character had been largely stolen from him by Alec Guinness and was, for some readers on the Left, hopelessly nostalgic and old school.⁴⁴ Le Carre began looking further afield for espionage narratives that were no longer bogged down in Cold War intelligence rivalries between East and West. He turned to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, seeing this as an opportunity to include a female character modelled on his sister Charlotte, who had been involved in radical theatre and left-wing politics.

The Little Drummer Girl is one of the most important of Le Carre’s works. Despite its complicated plot, the book became an instant best-seller in the United States, selling 59,000 copies in a single day and 400,000 over its total print run.⁴⁵ In a story about the breaking down and reinvention of an identity in pursuit of a military objective, the novel prophetically looks beyond the Cold War. The novel can be compared in some ways to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its portrayal of ruthless state operatives manipulating their victims, but less in terms of the ideological ‘brain-washing’ of the Cold War (exemplified by The Manchurian Candidate) but identity reconstruction in a manner relatively new to the espionage novel, and one that the conservative American writer William F. Buckley considered ‘raise(d) him (le Carre) out of the espionage league’.⁴⁶

British intelligence and the Cold War spy games with the KGB are absent in The Little Drummer Girl which focuses instead on an operation by a Mossad team, led by the mercurial Kurtz, a name that links the narrative (like Apocalypse Now) to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The team reconstructs the identity of a left-leaning English actress Charlie so that she can become a convincing plant into an underground Palestinian terror network led by a top terrorist called Khalil. Mossad has already captured Khalil’s brother Salim, who they torture and eventually murder, leaving his body to be blown up in a car, along with his Dutch lover, on the Munich Autobahn. One of Kurtz’s operatives is known as Joseph (real name Gadi Becker) and shows another link with Conrad. Joseph forms a relationship with Charlie so she can be drawn into a Mossad-inspired plan for the reconstruction of her identity. The purpose behind this is to make Charlie think of herself as the lover of Salim, whom she knows by the invented name of Michel. She is eventually sent back under cover to contact Salim (not knowing he has been murdered) while being watched closely by Joseph and Mossad. Khalil establishes contact with her and she becomes his mistress. Mossad is finally able to track Khalil down to a hotel bedroom, where Joseph bursts in to shoot him while in bed with Charlie. Charlie has a nervous breakdown and Mossad pays for her recuperation in a sanatorium in Israel; her acting career, though, is at an end after acting in a far more demanding and violent real-life drama.

This far-fetched narrative raised serious ethical questions about counter-terrorism operations as well as going a long way towards transforming the image of Mossad. The novel pinpointed a new pattern of post–Cold War espionage in which ideology was of decreasing importance in comparison to the wilful state manipulation of identities. Mossad has no interest in Charlie’s political views, indeed, her left-wing attachment to the Palestinian cause is an advantage since it enhances her credibility as a Mossad mole. Kurtz is a latter-day Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness as he plunges nihilist depths in search for what he describes as a ‘durable basis of morality’ – strong enough at least to support Mossad’s immediate plan. It is the weakness of Charlie’s political attachments that Kurtz sees as a major asset, since ‘the nearer she was to drowning … the greater would be her pleasure at coming aboard’.47

The cynicism of the narrative reflected Le Carre’s growing disenchantment with intelligence organizations by the 1980s. Their close links to state power, he considered, was leading to an internal moral rot and, by 2003, he became a prominent critic of the Blair government’s support for the invasion of Iraq based on fraudulent intelligence information in a ‘dodgy dossier’ purporting to show Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Twenty years before this, The Little Drummer Girl suggested that the Israeli state already had in place an elaborate apparatus for campaigns of disinformation, exemplified in a scene, excluded from the film version of the novel, between Kurtz and a leading figure in British MI6, the ex-Palestine policeman Pickard.

Pickard is the near-perfect embodiment of the ‘self-made anti-terrorist’ given that he was ‘part soldier, part copper, part villain’ and ‘belonged to the fabled generation of his trade’.⁴⁸ He has none of the gentility of the older generation of spy hunters such as George Smiley for he ‘had the senior policeman’s fastidious bad grammar and the borrowed good manners of a gentleman, and both were returnable without notice any time he damn well felt like it’.⁴⁹ Counter-terrorism involves some rough straight-talking, very different to the polite niceties of clubland. Pickard sees through Kurtz’s ruse, including forged photographs, to put MI6 off the scent of the murder of Salim and his Dutch terrorist girlfriend on the Munich Autobahn. Kurtz suggests that the man in the car was called ‘Mesterbein’ who had explosives supplied by ‘contacts’ in Istanbul. Pickard is not taken in. ‘The trick is normally done with dead meat’, he pointedly tells Kurtz:

You find a nice corpse, you dress him up and leave him somewhere where the enemy will stumble on him. ‘Hello’ says the enemy, ‘what’s this? A dead body carrying a briefcase? Let’s look inside.’ They look, and they find a little message. ‘Hello’ they say, ‘he must have been a courier! Let’s read the message and fall into the trap’. So they do. And we all get medals. ‘Disinformation’ we used to call it, designed to misguide the enemy’s eye, and very nice too’. Picton’s sarcasm was as awesome as his wrath. ‘But that’s too simple for you and Misha. Being a bunch of over-educated fanatics, you’ve gone one further. ‘No dead meat for us, oh no! We’ll use live meat. Arab meat. Dutch meat.’ So you did. And you blew it up in a nice Mercedes motorcar. Theirs. What I don’t know, of course – and I never will, because you and Misha will deny the whole thing on your deathbeds, won’t you? – is where you have planted the disinformation. But planted it you have, and now they’ve bitten.50

The Little Drummer Girl disturbed many critics in Europe and the United States. It promoted accusations of anti-Semitism, though these were eclipsed by growing evidence to suggest that sympathy for the Palestinians was no longer confined to far-left figures such as Vanessa Redgrave (who served in some ways as a model for Charlie) or even firmly pro-Arab voices as Edward Said but to the sections of mainstream opinion.⁵¹ The novel also cut a raw nerve inside Israel as well as Zionist apologists internationally, for the way it portrayed Israeli campaigns against international terrorism as part of a sophisticated strategy of disinformation in a world growing increasingly hostile to the Zionist cause. The behaviour of Mossad has now veered so far in the direction of state terrorism that its actions were little different to those of its Palestinian terrorist enemy.

Interestingly, even the former supporter of Haganah, Kurtz, is left angry and betrayed at the end, as it emerges that one of his objectives behind the campaign to assassinate Khalil was to prevent the invasion of Lebanon. This takes place anyway, leading to the massacres in the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila and the impact on Kurtz is immense: ‘His body seemed to shrink to half its size; his Slav eyes lost all their sparkle, he looked his age, whatever that was.’⁵² Joseph is angered at the apparent betrayal and is left asking ‘a most offensive question, something he claimed to have culled from the writings of Arthur Koestler, and evidently adapted to his own preoccupation. “What are we to become, I wonder?” he said. “A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?”’⁵³ Mossad counter-terrorism is too serious to be a matter of mere moral anguish. It raises fundamental questions about the future direction of the Israeli state, given the new military adventurism that led Israeli forces all the way to Beirut.

The Little Drummer Girl portrayed an Israeli state cut adrift from the moral anchorage it had claimed to have in the years after its founding. It reframed the morality of Israeli counter-terrorist strategy in terms of reason of state rather than a code of morality convincing to the wider world. Mossad operates outside any clear ethical framework and pursues a nihilist counter-terrorism strategy dependent on the body count of enemy terrorists taken out. This was a dimension that tended to be underplayed by the makers of the film version, released in 1984. The film The Little Drummer Girl was directed by George Roy Hill and cast the American actress Diane Keaton as Charlie while Klaus Kinski played Kurtz. Changing Charlie into an American actress was rather confusing and Keaton was out of her depth in a complicated role clearly better suited to a British actress, though perhaps Meryl Streep might have managed the part.54 Keaton fails to engage with the genuine passion that Charlie has for the Palestine cause, appearing as a weak and disorganized woman with no serious beliefs and eventually collapsing into a nervous breakdown. We see little in the movie of the Charlie’s identity reconstruction at the hands of Kurtz’s operatives, who appear as an efficient group whose mission is never seriously examined. However, this contained far more realism than Spielberg’s more ethically tortured Munich, which I shall examine shortly, since there is no evidence to suggest that Mossad agents have ever really questioned the job of assassinating Israel’s political enemies.

The Little Drummer Girl never attempts any real even-handedness. Certainly, the Israelis and Palestinians play the same kind of game with murder and counter-murder; both test Charlie’s resolve by making her see an enemy agent tortured or even shot in the case of the Palestinian treatment of an Israeli. Khalil displays evil qualities compared to either Kurtz or Joseph; his face is, on occasions, lit menacingly from below and he appears to have little or no moral compass. The film falls back on well-tried stereotypes of villainous Arabs to sustain a narrative in which the Israelis are battling a fanatical terrorist enemy, considerably different from the narrative in Le Carre’s novel. There is no reference to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon or of Joseph’s view of the country as a ‘Spartan state’. The only reconciliation that occurs at the end is not one between Israel and its Palestinian enemies but of Joseph and Charlie as he followed her down a street after she has apparently left her acting career for good. There might be some sort of mending, it seems, at the personal if not the political level.

The Little Drummer Girl is more pessimistic than Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins on the question of whether the cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism can be eventually ended. A similar outlook pervaded Stephen Spielberg’s Munich in 2005, based on Operation Wrath of God. This film drew on the best-selling book Vengeance published in 1984 by the Canadian writer George Jonas, a book that Spielberg, in his introduction to the DVD version of the film, curiously describes as an ‘historical novel’. Jonas was not an Israeli but a Hungarian Jew who had fled to Canada in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He was a well-known literary figure in Canada and was a strong exponent of the idea that terrorism was a form of malignant disease.⁵⁵ Vengeance led to the rather pedestrian Canadian feature Sword of Gideon in 1986 before Spielberg’s Munich in 2005. The book has never been out of print and remains, for many, the dominant authoritative account. Much of its appeal derives from its style, which, while purporting to be a non-fictional account of a real Mossad operation, is written as a thriller.

Vengeance has real events embellished by the voice of an all-knowing narrator. The book functions at three levels: firstly, it recounts the story of a Mossad squad sent to kill Palestinian leaders known from various intelligence sources to be involved in terrorist attacks, especially the one at Munich. The story flags up the successes of the squad as well as their failures leading to deaths of several members of the Mossad team. Secondly, the book examines the strategic logic of Israeli counter-terrorism and its functioning in what it perceives (drawing on the work of Claire Sterling) to be the continuing Cold War super power rivalry and the control from afar of international terrorist organizations by the Soviet KGB. Thirdly, the book engages in an ethical debate over the morality of the Israeli state and its continuing right to exist, given that memories of the holocaust are now fading and Israel is increasingly being perceived by various sectors of opinion in the west as an oppressive and quasi-colonial state. The book can also be read as a form of response to The Little Drummer Girl, though there is no evidence to suggest that this was the author’s main intention, especially as the research on it appears to go back to before Le Carre’s novel was published in 1983.

All three levels of Vengeance are organized through the central character of Avner Kauffmann, a former body guard of Golda Meir, who takes on some of the features of a fantasy character in the narrative. There is no independent evidence to verify that Avner ever existed in the way he is presented in the book, though his character has been linked to a Mossad operative Mike Harari. The narrative is written from Avner’s point of view, but one reported by an invisible third person narrator with insight into Avner’s own thoughts, rather like a novel with an all-knowing narrator. Avner leads a small team of small hand-picked specialist operators, familiar from spec ops and action movies. There are no direct quotations from any of the interviews that Jonas supposedly had with Avner, and the reader might question the authenticity of some of the recollections. Avner’s team, if it ever really existed, was never as isolated as Vengeance suggests and was part of a series of teams working for several years, off and on, after the Munich attacks. The book is a clever work of political propaganda disguised as truth with the guiding framework being that all terrorism is morally wrong while acknowledging ‘counter-terrorism also involves bloodshed’.56

Spielberg’s Munich is a political thriller centred on a squad of Mossad assassins moving around Europe in search of Palestinian targets. It was scripted by American playwrights and scriptwriters Tony Kushner and Eric R. Roth and was shaped as much by the events of 9/11 as those of three decades before. The film was released the same year as Spielberg’s metaphorical treatment of 9/11 in War of the Worlds (2005) and twelve years after Schindler’s List (1993), documenting the destruction of the Jewish ghetto at Auschwitz and the rescue of Jews by a German industrialist horrified by the immorality of the Nazi genocide. The three films collectively reveal a major Hollywood director attuned, at least in part, to the complex and multifaceted nature of modern terrorism operating at both state and sub-state levels.

If it is the operation of the state institutions of espionage that are in a process of moral rot in the novels of Le Carre, it is the more abstract process of ‘terrorism’ that has the same nihilistic quality in Spielberg’s filmography, undermining as it does the ethical values of terrorists and victims alike. Only stalwart and morally resolute individuals (rather like Gary Cooper in High Noon) can stand up to affirm conventional moral values in the face of a confused or indifferent community: Oscar Schindler, for instance, in Schindler’s List or Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) in War of the Worlds, battling not only Martians but a wayward and rebellious son so that he can maintain family cohesion in a world shattered by divorce and alien invasion. Avner in Munich also struggles to reconcile his work as an underground Mossad agent with his role as husband and father to a baby daughter. The only time he breaks down while working in the Mossad undercover squad is when he hears the voice of his little daughter over the phone. At the end of the movie, he rejects overtures to return to Israel to embark on another Mossad operation and opts to stay in New York and work out some sort of life there, disappearing across a New York skyline with the twin towers in the background.

Family and domestic obligations largely come first in Spielberg’s movies, shaped, to some degree, by his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. Avner has some of the mediating features of Ari in Exodus. He maintains the cohesion of the Mossad squad and stands between the hard-line South African Steve (Daniel Craig), whose only interest is to fight to protect Jews, and the more conciliatory figure of Carl (Ciaran Hinds), whose trust in human nature leads to him losing his life as he falls for a beautiful Dutch female contract killer in the pay of the Palestinians. Avner lacks Ari’s visionary quality and is so closely attached to the Israeli state that his wife Daphna (played by Ayelet Zurer) taunts him that ‘Israel is your mother’.

The approach at least partially acknowledged that state organizations were as capable of descending to similar morally depraved levels as sub-state terrorist movements. Munich was another personal venture by Spielberg, though one that still ends up viewing the Palestinians from an external perspective, just as the Nazis and their atrocities in Schindler’s List are mostly viewed from a distance as mass murderers with no personalities or characters, and the Martians in War of the Worlds remain faceless aliens.57 Munich fails to explore why the Palestinian terrorists felt it necessary in the first place to attack Israel by killing its athletics team, though this is at least a movie that rises above a conventional action feature with its effort to portray the apparent humanity of several of the Palestinian victims of Mossad. One is a man of considerable learning and has translated The Arabian Nights into Italian; another, Dr Mahmoud Hamshari, is well off, married and bringing up a little girl learning to play the piano; but even here the moral dilemma is very questionable for are we to assume that the killing of men with education and culture is in some way particularly reprehensible? Does this imply that the targeted killing of men without these attributes is somehow more ethical?

Munich was a bold venture that perhaps only a director with the stature of Spielberg could have got away with in Hollywood. Stephen Prince has seen the film as ‘the most sophisticated moral examination of terrorism and the response of a democratic society to it that Hollywood has produced’⁵⁸ and the fact that it did appear to be even-handed has ensured that the film has gained positive reviews by film critics on both sides of the Atlantic, Frank Kermode even suggesting that the film is ‘balanced to the point of tedium’.⁵⁹

Munich, however, is far from being balanced in the sense of, say, Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, a film that Spielberg has admired.⁶⁰ It is not evident that Spielberg even intended any serious balance, given that he saw the film as a ‘prayer for peace’ in the context of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror.’ This did little to dissuade Zionist critics from attacking an apparent moral equivalence between ‘terrorists’ and the counter-terrorism of the Mossad squad sent to kill them.61 The Israeli consul general in Los Angeles described the movie as ‘superficial’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘problematic’ and, for some on both the Right and the Left, it appeared that Spielberg had lost his way in an issue that raised radically diverse moral and political views.⁶²

The movie is a cross between a gangster narrative centred on revenge and a special operations feature. But, unlike Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, this is in colour not black and white and there is a sense that the methods employed by the Mossad team are questionable in terms of their effectiveness and morality, even if the goal of preserving an Israeli state is never in question. The mother figure Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel at the time of the Olympics disaster, defines the moral basis of the Mossad operation. In one crucial early scene, she is presented in a side angle shot that positions the audience as detached observers while she works through, in the company of senior advisors including the head of Mossad and two generals, the logic of retaliatory action against an enemy ‘sworn to destroy us’. There can be no suggestion of a diplomatic response against an ‘uncivilised’ enemy, though the prime minister confesses, ‘I don’t know who these maniacs are and where they come from’ – an absurd remark suggesting that Mossad has no proper intelligence on the Palestinians. ‘They’re not recognisable’, she continues, and then after a reflective pause goes on: ‘You tell me what law protects people like that? (silence) Today I’m hearing with new ears. Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.’

Spielberg’s Golda Meir displays an outlook not so different to Kurtz’s ‘durable basis of morality’ in The Little Drummer Girl. However, the central imperative here is revenge rather than a strategy combining counter-terrorism operations with diplomatic dialogue. The revenge motif comes as much from gangster cinema as the cinema of war. It had been defined by the masterly figure of the enforcer in twentieth-century pulp fiction who displays a cool and ruthless professionalism in the enforcement of his boss’s will, exemplified by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Luca Brassi in The Godfather. The enforcer rarely has any moral doubts about the morality of what he does and is committed to the upholding of gangland codes of honour in a corrupt society where no one outside the immediate family can be really trusted.⁶³ Golda Meir is, to this extent, a somewhat elderly godmother figure in the film, leaving her attendants to sort out the basics of the operation as she goes upstairs ….

It is the constant emphasis on the moral parameters of Mossad’s enforcement operation that makes Spielberg’s movie unconvincing. Released four years after 9/11, the film is as much about the supposed morality of American counter-terrorism operations as those of Israel. Spielberg defended the film in his introduction as one aimed at stimulating debate – though exactly on what lines remains vague. A 2006 Channel Four documentary ‘Munich: Mossad’s Revenge’ suggested, from interviews with two unidentified Mossad agents, that there was no real moral agonising over the operation and targeted assassinations have continued into the years of the second intifada after September 2000. The operation Avner was supposedly involved in did not end because of doubts over its effectiveness, but because of the disastrous Lillehammer operation in Norway in November 1973, aimed at killing Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of operations of Black September and the supposed mastermind of the Munich Olympics operation. The Mossad squad in Lillehammer failed to kill Salameh and instead killed a Moroccan waiter. Six of the team of fifteen were captured and convicted of complicity to commit murder, an event that was a major blow to the intelligence agency’s prestige.64

In Spielberg’s Munich, Salameh is shown escaping from two attacks; the first is stopped by the intervention of CIA agents in London while a second attack on a compound in Spain goes wrong when the two attackers are discovered by a boy guard. Only at the end of the film are we informed that Salameh was eventually killed in January 1979, after five previous attempts, in a cab bomb in Beirut supposedly aided by a British woman working for Mossad called Erika Chambers (otherwise known as Agent Penelope). Chambers’s career, interestingly, had vague parallels with Le Carre’s fictional Charlie and indicates that Mossad continued its operations well after Wrath of God ended.

With hindsight, Operation Wrath of God remained largely invisible until the publication of George Jonas’s book because it involved activities that did not command unconditional support from western governments. This attitude changed with the advent of the Reagan administration in Washington and a new climate of US approval for Israeli policy, though the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 necessitated a more coherent propaganda response to the western criticism of Israeli excesses. Erecting a myth of counter-terrorism operation defined by clear moral concerns a decade before provided a form of ethical cover for Mossad and ensured that it would not end up on screen as another variant of the nefarious CIA and its activities around the globe.

How far can the issues thrown up by the film versions of The Little Drummer Girl and Munich be viewed as moral templates for later films dealing with counter-terrorism? Film producers in the years after 2005 began to focus on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Attacks by terrorist movements, purporting to be acting in accordance with strict interpretations of Islam such as Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Al Nusra and later Islamic State, led to a growing interest in the idea of a ‘global jihad.’ This has led to several films being released focusing on the complexities of modern counter-terrorism, involving the acquisition of good intelligence, targeted assassinations by special forces teams as well as drone and air strikes. In many the role of the CIA has been central, with some films looking at the characters of Agency personnel as well as rivalries with other agencies of the central state such as the State Department, the FBI and the NSA. This was a cinematic landscape, though, where film producers and directors found themselves dealing with a more complex security apparatus than the relatively cohesive and monolithic Israeli state, with its benign image of Golda Meir serving coffee in her home to military and intelligence advisors.