Beyond good and evil

Twenty years ago George Jonas wrote a book called Vengeance, about the targeted assassinations of various murky Arab figures that took place in Europe in the wake of the Munich massacre. According to film critic Terry Lawson in the Detroit Free Press the other day, George Jonas ‘claimed to be the leader of the assassination squad’. Er, no. George Jonas claims to be the former husband of Barbara Amiel, which no doubt is a life of highwire thrills in its own way but not to be compared with whacking terrorist masterminds across the Continent. He’s also Canada’s greatest living public intellectual — and, before you indulge in metropolitan scoffing about damning with faint praise, you should stop buying all that turgid prose by Naomi Klein and less turgid but awfully agonised prose by Michael Ignatieff that clogs up the tables at Waterstone’s.

Instead of killing the alleged plotters of the ’72 Olympic atrocity, Jonas got to know the fellow who did: an off-the-books Mossad freelance called ‘Avner’. Jonas’s book has now been turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg, who hired Tony Kushner (Tony-winning playwright of the gay fantasia Angels in America) to write the screenplay and changed the name from Vengeance to Munich — a word that, to Britons at least, evokes not terrorism but appeasement. As things turn out, that’s not inappropriate.

Munich opens at the Games themselves, and Spielberg, in an impressionistic montage of old TV clips mixed in with shots of anxious relatives, rapt viewers and camera crews on stake-out, captures very well the fuzziness of a high-profile siege — the kind you watch round the clock without ever knowing what’s really going on: glimpses of Black September terrorists, figures piling out of and into airport buses, etc. And then it’s all over, and 11 Israeli athletes are dead and three Black September terrorists are in custody.