...At the center of this corrupt film are two central encounters with Avner. One concerns a contrived meeting with a young Palestinian terrorist. When Avner tells him that the Palestinians have acted “like animals,” the Palestinian counters, “You have made us animals.” The fact that Jews were crowded into ghettos for centuries, and in a genocidal era packed into gas chambers, without behaving barbarically, goes unmentioned...

...There are all sorts of reasons to malign Munich for its mendacity, its misuse of history, its refusal to recognize that when Israel has acted strongly it has saved its people—as in the building of the wall that has protected countless Jews (and for that matter Palestinians). Or to recognize that whenever Israel has acted weakly, as in the days of the meaningless Oslo accords, Israelis paid for it with their lives...

...Still, all these pale before the criticism of a UCLA professor named Judea Pearl. He is the father of the late Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan for the crime of being a Jew.

Prof. Pearl writes that Munich “does not explicitly justify terrorism, but it leans in that direction by assigning a palatable yet unchallenged rationale to the Palestinian terrorists, and by having the Israeli hero suffer a crisis of conscience. . . . Missing from the script is the most important theme of all: justice.”

Justice, of course, is beyond the scope of Munich. So is reality...

...Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?

It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine" from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.

But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. If the Jews were just seeking a nice refuge, why did they choose the malarial swamps and barren sand dunes of 19th-century Palestine? Because Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terrorism...