Last month I wrote about Munich and the fusillade of criticism it has received from extremists on either side of the Middle East’s Maginot Line. Tony Kushner, the Angels in America playwright who co-wrote the screenplay for Munich, has penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that takes the film’s critics head-on:

In the last month, the co-creators of “Munich” have been accused of being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel, defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking about receipts and handling money. We’re morally confused, overly complicated, simplistic. We’re cowards who refused to take sides. We took a side but, oops! the wrong side.

Ironic, isn’t it? When you refuse to take sides in any other conflict you’re called an honest arbiter, but when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, everyone needs to have blood on their hands (or lips). In Munich Kushner and the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, have created a film that shows an empathy and understanding that their motley crew of critics lack, and for that they will likely never be forgiven.

For his part, Kushner reaffirms his love for Israel and his staunch belief in its right to exist, and yet he also acknowledges that, like so many Palestinians (and Europeans and Americans and Asians, etc.), he is critical of the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In his op-ed Kushner passionately makes the case that neither side has a monopoly on justice in their battle for a homeland, and that ending terrorism will require not just bullets, but also intelligence:

Contradiction in human affairs, such as the possibility that injustice can drive people to do horrible things, is routinely deplored and dismissed in these troubled times as just another example of the naïveté of the morally weak (a.k.a. liberals and progressives). But there will always be pesky people who, when horrific crimes are committed, insist on asking, “Why did that happen?”

This is a great annoyance to the up-and-at-’em crowd, whose unshakable conviction is that the only sane and effective response to terrorism is savage violence commensurate with the original act. To justify this conviction they offer, as so many of the political critics of “Munich” have done, tautologies on the order of “evil deeds are done by evil people who do evil deeds because that’s what evil people do.” If that’s helpful to you as a tool for understanding terrorism, you won’t like “Munich.”

In the film, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented not as a matter of religion versus religion, or sanity versus insanity, or good versus evil or civilization versus barbarism or Judeo-Christian culture versus Muslim culture, but rather as a struggle over territory, over geography, over home.

We’ve followed the lead of many Israeli historians, novelists, filmmakers, poets and politicians who have recognized and described the Israeli-Palestinian struggle this way — as something tragic and human, recognizable. We’ve incurred the wrath of people who reject, with what sounds like panic, an inescapable fact of human life: People do terrible things in the name of a cause they believe is just, even in the name of a cause that actually is just.

”Munich” insists that this characteristic of human behavior is not meaningless in the struggle against terrorism. In other words, we believe that one aspect of the struggle against terrorism is the struggle to comprehend terrorism. If you think understanding the enemy is unimportant, well, maybe there’s a job in Washington for you.

Ouch. Okay, Kushner is certainly a partisan, but he’s one who’s willing to listen before he shouts. And in the bloody pageant of Middle East politics, listening is a revolutionary act.

(Make sure to read Rich’s excellent review of Munich.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen