But Israel as Mr Webber points out has always made a virtue of its own toughness and predicated its

But Israel , as Mr Webber points out, has always made a virtue of its own toughness and predicated its own existence on a refusal ever to be victimised again in the wake of the Holocaust. That, in their minds, is the link between Israel post-1972 and America post-2001. Israeli “righteousness”, along with the American exceptionalism espoused by liberal thinkers and politicians since Woodrow Wilson, are values that the film sets out both to celebrate and, to some degree, to mourn. Mr Spielberg and his screenwriters, Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, are all liberal American Jews wanting desperately to believe there is something virtuous and morally superior about both Israel and the United States. Holding mass murderers accountable is not a compromise; it is Israel’s reason for being.” Here we come close to the heart of the matter. “Meir understood that Israel ’s chief obligation is to ensure that Jews will never again be slaughtered with impunity, simply for being Jewish. Several of Mr Spielberg’s critics have taken issue with the idea that she would have expressed any such reluctance.

“The truth is just the opposite,” Mitch Webber wrote recently in the New York Sun. “Every civilisation finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values,” she says in the film. Even Golda Meir herself is depicted expressing regret, if not doubt, about the assassination policy she lays down. Avner is seen crying when he listens to the daughter he has never met cooing down the telephone and even finds room for civility when, in the film’s single most contrived sequence, he is thrown into conversation with a Palestinian guerrilla fighter he runs into in Athens. In the film, by contrast, Avner and his colleagues are racked by hesitation and guilt from the get-go and come off as almost implausibly soft-hearted. It seems reasonable to assume that Mossad assassins would be tough, uncompromising sorts.

Indeed, Mr Jonas’s source, identified only as Avner, writes in a new introduction to the book that he has absolutely no regrets about anything he did in his country’s name, despite his doubts about the effectiveness of his actions in stemming the tide of anti-Israeli violence down the years. Mr Danoch told Israeli radio there was “no truth” to the Jonas book – a line the Israelis have been pushing more or less consistently since its publication. The book, though, may not be as big a stumbling block as the interpretation Mr Spielberg and his screenwriters have imposed on it. In both the book and the film, for example, we are asked to believe that the squad was pointed towards its targets by an enigmatic Frenchman called Louis, whose identity and motivation are never fully revealed. Vengeance never entirely overcomes the doubts raised about the story it is telling. The Israelis have identified Jonas’s source as one Yuval Aviv, a man they say never worked for Mossad either on the books or – as depicted in the book and film – off.

An investigative journalist for the newspaper Haaretz has made a cottage industry of nailing Aviv as something of a confidence man, a low-level operative at best who, among other things, became embroiled in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 and wrote an entirely discredited report blaming the whole thing on a plot cooked up by militant Palestinians with the complicity of the CIA. The book is undoubtedly problematic, since it deals with the shadowy world of international espionage and relies for the most part on a single source. Mr Danoch, the consul-general in Los Angeles, and others have also taken considerable exception to his source material – the 1984 book Vengeance, by a Canadian journalist called George Jonas, which relies almost exclusively on the recollections of a purported former Mossad agent who claims to have been the team leader of an assassination squad. Although plenty of information has dripped out over the years, Israel has never officially acknowledged having a policy of targeted assassinations in the wake of Munich , and appears to be furious with Mr Spielberg for revealing it so openly to a mass worldwide audience. From the Israeli government’s point of view, Munich is guilty, at the very least, of a colossal failure of tact.

It is one thing for the film to be pro-Israeli, however, and quite another for it to avoid offending Israeli sensibilities. As Michelle Goldberg cannily observed in the online newspaper Salon, the film’s central concern is “the effect of retaliatory Jewish violence on the Jewish soul, not on the Palestinian flesh”. The essential virtue of the Israelis is never questioned – only the erosion of that virtue through distasteful acts of revenge. It barely mentions the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which began in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967 and was a major spur to the growth of Palestinian militancy, including the emergence of Black September, the group behind the Munich killings as well as a string of airline hijackings and other attacks on civilians. There is never any doubt, during Munich ’s 160-minute running time, that the sympathy of the film-makers is on the Israeli side of the conflict.