This is the story of what happened next
There is great uncertainty about how many Israelis are being hostage in the apartment.
It now appears that Black September has tossed a piece of paper out the window.
A list of demands.
They want what they call 'The Israeli war machine' to release 200 Arabs,
which it insists are political prisoners or the hostages will be killed.
The terrorist communique ends with an appeal for revolutionaries of the world to unite.
~TV Announcer
Daphna: I tried not to think about you, but I couldn't.
Avner: I have the world's most boring job. What's going to happen to me?
Daphna: Well, they were just athletes. They went to the Olympics. Look what happened to them.
It's the same as Eichmann.
We say to these butchers:
"You didn't want to share this world with us, then we don't have to share this world with you."
There's legitimacy for this, am I correct?
Ambushed and slaughtered again
while the rest of the world is playing games, Olympic torches
and brass bands and dead Jews in Germany.
And the world couldn't care less.
~Golda Meir
These people, they're sworn to destroy us.
Forget peace for now. We have to show them we're strong.
We have laws, we represent civilization.
Some people say we can't afford to be civilized.
I've always resisted such people.
But I don't know who these maniacs are, and where they are come from.
Palestinians? They're not recognizable.
You tell me what law protects people like these.
Today I'm hearing with new ears.
Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.
~Golda Meir
If you can't decide in one day, you can't decide.
~General Zamir
Avner: You're not going to give me any information?
Ephraim: We deposit money from a fund that doesn't exist,
into a box we don't know about, in a bank we never set foot in.
We can't help you because we never heard of you before.
You'll do what the terrorist do.
You think they report back to home base? They don't.
We want them dead.
I could be anybody. You could be anybody, too.
Identity. That's the boring part now.
Here's what isn't boring.
As long as you don't work for any government...
We can locate almost anyone for anyone anywhere and we are ideology promiscuous.
We love everybody, hate everybody. I get my feelings confused.
If you're not working for any government...
we know, or we find... we don't find, you don't pay.
~Louis
Mahmoud Hamshari: I believe what he meant by this is that now the world will begin hearing us.
We are, for 24 years, the world's largest refugee population. Our homes taken from us.
Living in camps, no future, no food. Nothing decent for our children.
Robert: So was the attack in Munich justified?
Mahmoud Hamshari: The PLO condemns attacks on civilians. Through for 24 years...
Marie Claude: Tell your newspaper that.
Mahmoud Hamshari: ... our civilians have been attacked by the Israelis day after day...
Marie Claude: Tell them about all the years and years of Palestinians blood spilled by Israel.
And who mourns for us?
Mahmoud Hamshari: You know, Israel just bombed 2 refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.
200 people killed, right after Munich they did this.
Marie Claude: It did not begin in Munich.
And where does it end? How will it ever end?
Mother: I'm proud of what you are doing.
Avner: You don't know what I'm doing.
Mother: I look at you and I know everything I need to know.
Avner: I can't do what I'm doing if I can't see you.
Daphna: What are you doing?
Don't do it then, Avner. This is our home.
Avner: You're the only home I ever had.
[Daphna chuckles] What?
Daphna: This is so corny.
Avner: It wasn't easy for me to say that.
Daphna: I bet.
Avner: Don't laugh at me then.
Daphna: Why did I have to marry a sentimentalist? You're ruining my life.
Ephraim: Lots of people in Mossad don't know about you. No one knows.
So everyone's asking, "Who's killing the fedayeen? Is it our guys? Why weren't we told?"
Big ego. Lots of screaming.
I can maybe include one or two of you, but excluding Mossad or the army is impossible.
Accept it.
Avner: We will, but our source won't.
Ephraim: Who is your source?
It's time you told me.
That, by the way, is not a request. It's an order.
Carl: You can't order him. He doesn't work for you.
Ephraim: Shut up! I pay you. You work for me.
Avner: I work for a metal box in a bank in Geneva. The box pays me.
Ephraim: You want to find it empty?
Avner: I want you to let us do our work.
Ephraim: What's the matter with you? With all of you?
Grow up and do it quick.
This is not a game, a fucking game.
Who has the source? Where are you getting your information?
Give me his goddamn number!
Hans: I hope the old lady next door enjoyed that.
She's a little deaf but I doubt she had any trouble hearing you.
Ephraim: Give me the source and we'll let you take part.
Avner: Let us go to Beirut.
After Beirut, we'll use our source to find the remaining targets.
Let us do out job.
Papa: The world has been rough with you, with your tribe.
It's right to respond roughly to such treatment.
You pay well and you pay promptly, so we'll continue together.
But no more infractions.
Avner: Thank you. You have my word.
You could have been my son.
But you're not.
Remember that.
We'll do business but you aren't family.
~Papa
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 the Israelis do to us.
They won't help when Egypt and Syria attack. Even Jordan.
Israel will cease to exist.
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 all 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 are 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: You're a Jew sympathizer.
All you Germans, you're too soft of 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, 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.
Louis: Salameh is in London.
He goes there periodically to meet with his CIA contact.
Avner: His what?
Louis: Salameh works for the CIA.
Avner: Bullshit!
Louis: Salameh guarantees that Black September won't touch American diplomats.
In exchange, the CIA gives him lots of money.
And they don't ask what he uses it for.
Avner: Did he tell them about Munich in advance?
Did the CIA know about Munich?
Louis: The CIA didn't even know Black September existed before Munich.
Since then, he's been busy, hasn't he?
All manner of costly exercises.
Shooting tourists in the Athens airport, blowing up pharmacies in Amsterdam,
and that Mossad agent in Barcelona before that.
Europe hasn't been this interesting since Napoleon marched to Moscow.
Salameh is in London.
For the usual price.
Steve: I think we have a double agent in our midst.
Carl: Don't you dare accuse me of that!
My son died in '67, you foul-mouthed son of a bitch!
Everything you can ask, I've done for Israel.
Hans: Ask for a reassignment if this is so distasteful.
Carl: Why, it's not distasteful to you?
Steve: No. Cause the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood.
Nice job, eh, nice job leading.
Avner: Stop chasing the mice inside your skull.
Carl: I never thought you'd last.
Avner: I thought the same about you.
From the beginning you seemed so reluctant.
Carl: I was born reluctant, ask my mother.
If I can't kvetch, I can't do my job.
You ever feel reluctant?
Avner: I'm not comfortable with confusion.
Carl: I knew guys like you in the army.
You'll do any terrifying thing you're asked to do, but you have to do it running.
You think you can outrun your fears, your doubts.
The only thing that really scares you guys is stillness.
But everyone's overtaken, eventually.
Papa: We inhabit a world of intersecting secrecies.
We live and die at the places where those secrecies meet.
That's what we accept.
We buy information for you from your enemies. This alerts them.
You're not the only people looking for names.
Avner: You're telling me I'm being hunted now?
Louis: He's telling you it's time for you to quit.
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?
Robert: So you're really gonna kill her?
All this blood comes back to us.
Avner: Eventually it will work. Even if it takes years, we'll beat them.
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 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's what I knew, that's what I was taught.
And now I'm losing it, and I lose that, that's everything. That's my soul.
Avner: You need to go rest somewhere. You don't have to do this one.
When I need you again, I'll find you.
And to dispatch our 6 dispatched targets
we must have spent something close to $2 million, right?
Mrs. Meir says to the Knesset,
the world must see that killing Jews will be from now on an expensive proposition.
But killing Palestinians isn't exactly cheap.
~Hans
It's dangerous going after Salameh.
But he planned the Munich massacre.
Eliminate him, and they'll let you go home, don't you think?
~Louis
Mother: Everyone in Europe died. Most of my family. A huge family.
I never talked to you about it.
Avner: I knew.
Mother: You knew? So what was there to say?
I didn't die because I came here.
When I arrived, I walked up to the top of a hill in Jerusalem and prayed for a child.
I never prayed before, but I was praying then.
And I could feel every one of them praying with me.
You are what we prayed for.
What you did, you did for us.
You did for your daughter, but also for us.
Every one of the ones who died, died wanting this.
We had to take it, because no one will ever give it to us.
A place to be a Jew among Jews, subject to no one.
I thank God for hearing my prayer.
Avner: Do you want to know, Mama?
Do you want me to tell you what I did?
Mother: No.
Whatever it took, whatever it takes, a place on earth. We have a place on earth. At last.
If you're Mossad, you know who I am.
If you don't, tell Ephraim, Avner came to see him.
I won't hesitate to kill other people's children if you hurt my child, understand?
Or wives if you hurt my wife, or fathers if you hurt my father, I don't care.
I'll go to the newspapers,
I'll give every name of everybody who was in the meetings.
I'll tell them everything if you don't leave my family alone, okay?!
~Avner
Avner: Did we accomplish anything at all?
Every man we killed has been replaced by worse.
Ephraim: Why cut my fingernails? They'll grow back.
Avner: Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership?
You tell me what we've done.
Ephraim: You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon.
The country your mother and father built, that you were born into.
You killed them for Munich, for the future, for peace.
Avner: There's no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe.
*****
~Louis
Mahmoud Hamshari: I believe what he meant by this is that now the world will begin hearing us.
We are, for 24 years, the world's largest refugee population. Our homes taken from us.
Living in camps, no future, no food. Nothing decent for our children.
Robert: So was the attack in Munich justified?
Mahmoud Hamshari: The PLO condemns attacks on civilians. Through for 24 years...
Marie Claude: Tell your newspaper that.
Mahmoud Hamshari: ... our civilians have been attacked by the Israelis day after day...
Marie Claude: Tell them about all the years and years of Palestinians blood spilled by Israel.
And who mourns for us?
Mahmoud Hamshari: You know, Israel just bombed 2 refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.
200 people killed, right after Munich they did this.
Marie Claude: It did not begin in Munich.
And where does it end? How will it ever end?
Mother: I'm proud of what you are doing.
Avner: You don't know what I'm doing.
Mother: I look at you and I know everything I need to know.
Avner: I can't do what I'm doing if I can't see you.
Daphna: What are you doing?
Don't do it then, Avner. This is our home.
Avner: You're the only home I ever had.
[Daphna chuckles] What?
Daphna: This is so corny.
Avner: It wasn't easy for me to say that.
Daphna: I bet.
Avner: Don't laugh at me then.
Daphna: Why did I have to marry a sentimentalist? You're ruining my life.
Ephraim: Lots of people in Mossad don't know about you. No one knows.
So everyone's asking, "Who's killing the fedayeen? Is it our guys? Why weren't we told?"
Big ego. Lots of screaming.
I can maybe include one or two of you, but excluding Mossad or the army is impossible.
Accept it.
Avner: We will, but our source won't.
Ephraim: Who is your source?
It's time you told me.
That, by the way, is not a request. It's an order.
Carl: You can't order him. He doesn't work for you.
Ephraim: Shut up! I pay you. You work for me.
Avner: I work for a metal box in a bank in Geneva. The box pays me.
Ephraim: You want to find it empty?
Avner: I want you to let us do our work.
Ephraim: What's the matter with you? With all of you?
Grow up and do it quick.
This is not a game, a fucking game.
Who has the source? Where are you getting your information?
Give me his goddamn number!
Hans: I hope the old lady next door enjoyed that.
She's a little deaf but I doubt she had any trouble hearing you.
Ephraim: Give me the source and we'll let you take part.
Avner: Let us go to Beirut.
After Beirut, we'll use our source to find the remaining targets.
Let us do out job.
Papa: The world has been rough with you, with your tribe.
It's right to respond roughly to such treatment.
You pay well and you pay promptly, so we'll continue together.
But no more infractions.
Avner: Thank you. You have my word.
You could have been my son.
But you're not.
Remember that.
We'll do business but you aren't family.
~Papa
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 the Israelis do to us.
They won't help when Egypt and Syria attack. Even Jordan.
Israel will cease to exist.
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 all 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 are 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: You're a Jew sympathizer.
All you Germans, you're too soft of 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, 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.
Louis: Salameh is in London.
He goes there periodically to meet with his CIA contact.
Avner: His what?
Louis: Salameh works for the CIA.
Avner: Bullshit!
Louis: Salameh guarantees that Black September won't touch American diplomats.
In exchange, the CIA gives him lots of money.
And they don't ask what he uses it for.
Avner: Did he tell them about Munich in advance?
Did the CIA know about Munich?
Louis: The CIA didn't even know Black September existed before Munich.
Since then, he's been busy, hasn't he?
All manner of costly exercises.
Shooting tourists in the Athens airport, blowing up pharmacies in Amsterdam,
and that Mossad agent in Barcelona before that.
Europe hasn't been this interesting since Napoleon marched to Moscow.
Salameh is in London.
For the usual price.
Steve: I think we have a double agent in our midst.
Carl: Don't you dare accuse me of that!
My son died in '67, you foul-mouthed son of a bitch!
Everything you can ask, I've done for Israel.
Hans: Ask for a reassignment if this is so distasteful.
Carl: Why, it's not distasteful to you?
Steve: No. Cause the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood.
Nice job, eh, nice job leading.
Avner: Stop chasing the mice inside your skull.
Carl: I never thought you'd last.
Avner: I thought the same about you.
From the beginning you seemed so reluctant.
Carl: I was born reluctant, ask my mother.
If I can't kvetch, I can't do my job.
You ever feel reluctant?
Avner: I'm not comfortable with confusion.
Carl: I knew guys like you in the army.
You'll do any terrifying thing you're asked to do, but you have to do it running.
You think you can outrun your fears, your doubts.
The only thing that really scares you guys is stillness.
But everyone's overtaken, eventually.
Papa: We inhabit a world of intersecting secrecies.
We live and die at the places where those secrecies meet.
That's what we accept.
We buy information for you from your enemies. This alerts them.
You're not the only people looking for names.
Avner: You're telling me I'm being hunted now?
Louis: He's telling you it's time for you to quit.
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?
Robert: So you're really gonna kill her?
All this blood comes back to us.
Avner: Eventually it will work. Even if it takes years, we'll beat them.
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 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's what I knew, that's what I was taught.
And now I'm losing it, and I lose that, that's everything. That's my soul.
Avner: You need to go rest somewhere. You don't have to do this one.
When I need you again, I'll find you.
And to dispatch our 6 dispatched targets
we must have spent something close to $2 million, right?
Mrs. Meir says to the Knesset,
the world must see that killing Jews will be from now on an expensive proposition.
But killing Palestinians isn't exactly cheap.
~Hans
It's dangerous going after Salameh.
But he planned the Munich massacre.
Eliminate him, and they'll let you go home, don't you think?
~Louis
Mother: Everyone in Europe died. Most of my family. A huge family.
I never talked to you about it.
Avner: I knew.
Mother: You knew? So what was there to say?
I didn't die because I came here.
When I arrived, I walked up to the top of a hill in Jerusalem and prayed for a child.
I never prayed before, but I was praying then.
And I could feel every one of them praying with me.
You are what we prayed for.
What you did, you did for us.
You did for your daughter, but also for us.
Every one of the ones who died, died wanting this.
We had to take it, because no one will ever give it to us.
A place to be a Jew among Jews, subject to no one.
I thank God for hearing my prayer.
Avner: Do you want to know, Mama?
Do you want me to tell you what I did?
Mother: No.
Whatever it took, whatever it takes, a place on earth. We have a place on earth. At last.
If you're Mossad, you know who I am.
If you don't, tell Ephraim, Avner came to see him.
I won't hesitate to kill other people's children if you hurt my child, understand?
Or wives if you hurt my wife, or fathers if you hurt my father, I don't care.
I'll go to the newspapers,
I'll give every name of everybody who was in the meetings.
I'll tell them everything if you don't leave my family alone, okay?!
~Avner
Avner: Did we accomplish anything at all?
Every man we killed has been replaced by worse.
Ephraim: Why cut my fingernails? They'll grow back.
Avner: Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership?
You tell me what we've done.
Ephraim: You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon.
The country your mother and father built, that you were born into.
You killed them for Munich, for the future, for peace.
Avner: There's no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe.
*****
