Israel Matzav

Revenge is defined by the Cambridge University dictionary as "harm done to someone as a punishment for harm that they have done to you." Now, in general, especially in personal life, this is not a good policy. If someone steps on your toe, it is not wise or good to do the same to him.

However, the desire to see identical harm inflicted on the evildoer is not only not wrong, it is at the essence of an empathetic, moral and just heart and conscience. What sort of person reads what a torturer did to an innocent victim and doesn't want to see that torturer suffer? Those who have no desire to see such people suffer commensurate with the evil they have inflicted have blunted the natural human desire for justice.

And talking about justice, what sort of justice would it have been for Israel not to seek the death of the murderers of their athletes? Would the world be a finer, kinder, let alone more just, place if all those murderers had been allowed to live?

That argument is never advanced in the screenplay of "Munich." Instead, all the arguments put into the mouths of the Israeli hit team are about "Jewish blood is not cheap" and other nationalistic -- as opposed to moral -- defenses. This is because the chief writer, Tony Kushner, is a man of the Left; and the Left has lost its hatred of evil, its ability to recognize evil and, most of all, any desire to wage war against it.