# Munich (film)

Munich is a 2005 drama film based on Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli government's secret retaliation against the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics.
    Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas.

## Ephraim

* We deposit money from a fund that doesn't exist into a box we don't know about in a bank we've never set foot in. We can't help you because we never heard of you before.

## Steve

* Don't fuck with the Jews.

## Carl

* [to Avner] I've known guys like you in the army. You'll do any terrifying thing you're asked, but you have to do it running. You think you can outrun your fears and your doubts. The only thing that really scares you guys is stillness.

## Others

* Golda Meir: Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.
* Papa: The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong but time and chance happens to them all. Evil falls suddenly, who can say when it falls?
* Mossad Accountant: In the operational funds box we will deposit 250,000 American dollars. You take it out - we put more in. I want receipts! [he emphatically slams his hand on his desk] You are not working for the Baron Rothschild; you're working for Israel, a small country! I'm an old Galicianer from a mud hut in the Ukraine, and I don't trust Yekke putzes let loose in Europe with unlimited operational expenses!

## Dialogue

    Robert: We're Jews, Avner. Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong.
    Avner: We can't afford to be that decent anymore.
    Robert: I don't know if we ever were that decent. Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn't make you decent. But we're supposed to be righteous. That's a beautiful thing. That's Jewish. That's what I knew, that's what I was taught and I'm losing it. I lose that and that's everything. That's my soul.
    Carl: It's strange, isn't it, to think of oneself as an assassin?
    Avner: Think of yourself as something else then.
    Papa: I blew up trains, bridges...and trucks full of Germans during the war. My brothers were killed, my papa and my sister were both hanged. She was a young girl.
    Louis: Papa, the guest doesn't want to hear your war stories.
    Papa: We paid this price, so Vichy scum could be replaced...by Gaullist scum...and the Nazis could be replaced by Stalin and America. We stay away from governments.
    Papa: Let me see your hands.
    [he grabs Avner's hands and compares them to his own]
    Papa: Too big for a good cook. That was my problem too! I had been a master, but I have thick, stupid butcher's hands just like yours. Oh, we are tragic men. Butcher's hands, gentle souls.
    Daphna: We should stay at home.
    Avner: You are the only home I ever had.
    Daphna: [laughs] This is so corny.
    Avner: What? That took a lot for me to say!
    Daphna: I bet. Why did I have to marry a sentimentalist? You're ruining my life.
    Avner: [to their newborn baby] Your mother's teasing me.
    Steve: [to Avner] You know how to shoot, to assassinate people, right? I mean... [to Robert] you make dolls in a toyshop. [to Hans] And you, you shop for sofas? [to Carl] And you, I don't know what you do.
    Carl: Me? I worry.
    Steve: [to Avner] So why did they make you team leader?
    Hans: Because he really knows how to cook a brisket.
    [All laugh]
    Avner: I was born in Israel. I'm not a Yekke.
    Mossad Accountant: Where was your grandpa from?
    Avner: Frankfurt.
    Mossad Accountant: You're a Yekke!
    [At a safehouse in Athens, Avner gets into a conversation with Ali, a member of the PLO unaware of his status as a Mossad agent]
    Ali: Eventually the Arab states will rise against Israel. They don't like Palestinians but they hate the Jews more. It won't be like 1967. The rest of the world will see by then what Israel does to us. They won't help when Egypt and Syria attack. Even Jordan. Israel will cease to exist. [Avner stares at him in disbelief] What?
    Avner: This is a dream. You can't take back a country you never had.
    Ali: You sound like a Jew.
    Avner: Fuck you. I'm the voice inside your head telling you what you already know. You people have nothing to bargain with. You'll never get the land back. You'll die old men in refugee camps waiting for Palestine.
    Ali: We have a lot of children. They'll have children. So we can wait forever, and if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews.
    Avner: You kill Jews and the world feels bad for them, and thinks you animals.
    Ali: Yes. But then the world will see how they've made us into animals. They'll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.
    Avner: You are Arabs. There are lots of places for Arabs.
    Ali: [scoffs] You're a Jew sympathizer. All you Germans, you're too soft on Israel. Well, you give us money, but you feel guilty about Hitler, and the Jews exploit that guilt. My father didn't gas any Jews.
    Avner: Tell me something, Ali.
    Ali: What?
    Avner: Do you really miss your father's olive trees? Do you honestly think you have to get back all that, that nothing? That chalky soil and stone huts? Is that what you really want for your children?
    Ali: It absolutely is. It will take a hundred years, but we'll win. How long did it take the Jews to get their own country? How long did it take the Germans to make Germany?
    Avner: And look how well that worked out.
    Ali: You don't know what it is not to have a home. That's why you European Reds don't get it. You say, "It's nothing," but you have a home to come back to. ETA, ANC, IRA... We all pretend we care about your international revolution, but we don't care. We want to be nations. Home is everything.
    Jeanette: I have to go to bed soon. I work in the morning.
    Avner: What kind of work do you do?
    Jeanette: [taking a long drag on her cigarette] The kind that drives you to drink.
    Avner: We must have the same job then.
    [last lines]
    Avner: Come to my house for dinner tonight. Come on, you're a Jew, you're a stranger. It's written somewhere that I should invite you to break bread with me. So, break bread with me, Ephraim.
    Ephraim: No.
    [both then go on their separate ways]

## Tagline

* The world was watching in 1972 as 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. This is the story of what happened next.

## Cast

* Eric Bana - Avner Kaufman
* Daniel Craig - Steve
* Ciaran Hinds - Carl
* Mathieu Kassovitz - Robert
* Hanns Zischler - Hans
* Geoffrey Rush - Ephraim
* Michael Lonsdale - Papa
* Ayelet Zurer - Daphna
* Marie Josee Croze - Jeanette
* Yvan Attal - Tony
* Mathieu Amalric - Louis
* Gila Almagor - Avner's Mother
* Lynn Cohen - Golda Meir
* Yigal Naor - Mahmoud Hamshari
* Moritz Bleibtreu - Andreas

## External links

* Munich quotes at the Internet Movie Database
* Munich at Rotten Tomatoes