Steven Spielberg Courted Controversy with ‘Munich’ in 2005. Two Decades Later, It Feels More Timely Than Ever

We were also in Hebron, in the streets with netting overhead because of the settlers. You looked at the netting, and it was filled with fragments of brick and stuff that the settlers were routinely throwing down on Palestinians in the streets. It was my first experience going through a checkpoint to go from East Jerusalem to Ramallah, and it took eight hours in the blazing hot sun. The person right in front of me in line, who looked like she was in her 60s, was holding a five-year-old kid and waiting for some teenage boy in an IDF uniform to look at her papers. It was that and the entry into Gaza, which, I’m sorry, there’s no way around it: It looks like Auschwitz architecture. I mean, it just does. Those were really life-changing experiences. I continued to have a connection of sorts, but now that has changed.

Right.

Do you go back to Israel? You still have some family there?

I haven’t been back since my grandfather died in 2018. My mom basically grew up on a kibbutz right nearby Gaza. Her family still lives there. Their kibbutz was attacked on October 7, although some members managed to fend off the attack.

When I was last there, we were driving back from the hospital with my grandmother, who’s since passed away. We were driving by the fence right along the Gaza border. My grandmother just started reminiscing about her own father, who was a real leftist, and she was saying, “I’m glad he’s not alive to see the way that we’re treating the Palestinians.” So things like that have stuck with me. Although, I have also heard family say just the most appalling things imaginable lately. I’m sure you’ve had conversations with at least some people like that.

Well, we’ve just gone through the, um— [Kushner points to his Zohran Mamdani campaign button].

Yes. Right.

The responses that I got wearing that pin. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and friends of mine…. I’ve lost a few friends over Gaza, and now I think a couple of friends over Mamdani.

Over Mamdani? No way.

Oh, yeah. Well, these are people who are otherwise completely rational, who genuinely believe that he’s going to move in and install sharia law and kill all the Jews. I mean, it’s psychotic. What they’re doing is looking at this South Asian guy and thinking, Ooh, I don’t like that. Jews should never.

Do you learn from history? Do you learn from being the victim of oppression, or are you a conduit for oppression?

I can quote back your movie to you, where you’ve got Robert and Avner saying farewell at the train station, and Avner is going, “Eventually it’ll work. Even if it takes years, we’ll beat them.” And Robert goes, “We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” Avner says, “We can’t afford to be that decent anymore,” and Robert responds, “I don’t know that 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 actually reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who during his last press tour was saying similar things about his own experience as a Black man in America. Your oppression won’t save you. Your oppression doesn’t automatically make you righteous.

As Auden says, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

Right.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, because you do see people taking shit and saying, “No, I’m not going to get into the worst part of myself. I’m going to get into the better angels of my nature.”

In the final scene of the film, one of the most striking things to me is not Avner doing the reverse aliyah, but actually the last lines of the film, where he says to his handler, “Come to my house for dinner tonight. Come on, you’re a Jew, you’re a stranger. It’s written someplace or other that I meant to ask you to come and break bread with me. So break bread with me, Ephraim.” And Ephraim just looks at him, says “no” and walks away. Especially watching it now, it feels like Avner is me. I’m in this position, believing there is a moral righteousness that at least you should try to approach. And then you have Israel, or people more committed to Zionism or to Israel, just saying “no,” and walking away and doing their own thing. That fissure within the Jewish community is really devastating.

It is. It is. It’s very hard.

Is that how you feel about it?

You know, part of the reason that we’ve survived for 2,000 years of diaspora is because of this incredibly intense sense of the mishpocha, of the people of Israel, of being part of a living tree. The first time I was in Israel, this wonderful journalist, a gay journalist, took me—I had to convince him, because he didn’t want to go—to Jerusalem. He said it’s crazy there, and I’m going to get killed. He lived in Tel Aviv. And I said, “Please, really, I can’t be in Israel and not see Jerusalem.” So we went to Jerusalem, and I went to the Wailing Wall, and I was looking at all these guys praying in front of the wall, and I said that it makes me so sad that these Jews would look at me and think, because I’m gay, that I’m not a Jew. And he said, “Oh, no, they think you’re a Jew. They think you’re a Jew who should be killed.” [Laughter].

Well, oh boy.

I still believe that there is a very profound thing that Jews hold, that comes from both our having endured thousands of years of torment and also having endured the terrible pain of Jewish history, but also its astonishing perseverance. I think that my non-Jewish friends, who I agree with about many, many things, often don’t get that. It’s one of the reasons that I have a huge issue with saying that “the Zionist army” is bombing Gaza or “the Zionist government” is doing this or that.

It’s the Israeli army. It’s like, the American army bombs Iraq.

Right, exactly. And I remember, not that long ago, that the “Zionist Occupation Government” was what white Christian antisemites called the American government. So I have a problem with that. It feels to me that the use of that word has, intentionally or unintentionally, the value for people who are using it of pulling all Jews into this, as opposed to ascribing this to the policies of a specific country with a specific military and a specific civilian population. I’m not an Israeli. I’m an American, which means my hands are bloody for all of those reasons. But I’m not an Israeli. And I think that’s an important distinction.

Before I let you go. What’s the mood like in Hollywood around all this? I know you’re mostly in New York, but what’s the feeling?

I don’t know. I am working on a project that has a lot to do with Jews, but it’s not about Israel. It’s about something that happened in the United States. But very clearly, we know just from that Haaretz interview that you mentioned. [They asked] about Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars, which I said I thought was a morally unimpeachable speech. And I got a certain amount of shit for saying that.

Interesting.

I mean, you can go into any bookstore in the United States now in any reasonably sized city, and there is a section right up front of books about Palestinians, and Palestinian culture, and the Nakba, and books that are critical of Israel up front. It used to be you could go into these bookstores and you couldn’t find a book about Palestinians anywhere. These people have lost the fight about that.

Right.

October 7th, and the massacre of people in Gaza, has changed the world’s view, I think.

You wrote that in Munich too. The Palestinian man Avner talks to says that the world will start asking about the conditions in their cages.

Right, and it always takes too long for that to happen, but there it is. And I do feel that. When I first started getting into trouble for talking about the Palestinian conflict, there weren’t a lot of people who were talking publicly about the Palestinian conflict. It was a scary thing to do. There were people, but you felt very much isolated. Much less now.

History never goes in straight lines, so there are turns back. I can certainly say that in New York theater, for instance, it’s very difficult for anyone to get a play on about Palestinians from a Palestinian perspective. It’s very difficult for Palestinian writers to get produced in the American theater, and I would imagine even more so in film. It’s considered a very dangerous subject, and people are still trying to hide from it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.