“I made two films, War of the Worlds and Munich, in the same calendar year,” says Steven Spielberg wearily, “and I’m not 30 years old any more, so I’m looking to rest for a little while.”

Spielberg, 59, is also tired of sitting back and taking the furious barrage of attacks from critics of Munich, the most controversial film he has made in his long career.

Munich tells the astonishing — and largely true, according to Spielberg — story of the Israeli assassination squad who hunted down the Palestinians responsible for the deaths of 11 Israelis during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

The film, which opens in Britain next weekend, is also Spielberg’s sometimes anguished attempt to point out what he sees as the futility of the cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Before it opened in America at the end of December he said he had made it as a “prayer for peace” in the Middle East.

The reaction to the film has become increasingly vehement and personal. Spielberg’s critics have accused him of the “sin of equivalence” and “moral relativism”. They charge that he equates Palestinian terrorism with the Israeli response to that terror.

Spielberg clearly felt that as Hollywood’s most prominent and powerful Jew he would be immune from some of the more venomous attacks on him. He has always been a strong supporter of the state of Israel and Jewish causes. He used the profits from Schindler’s List, his Oscar-winning Holocaust drama, to fund the Shoah Foundation, which is compiling an unprecedented and vast audio-visual library of the personal stories of Holocaust survivors.

Deciding not to take the attacks silently any more, Spielberg spoke to The Sunday Times last week, accusing the critics of “political censorship disguised as criticism”.

He was particularly upset by David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, who wrote that “Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis”.

Spielberg retorted that his film “forces the audience to look directly into the face of unmitigated evil again and again, to remind the audience of why Israel had to respond to Munich in the first place”.

He vividly recalls watching the television news coverage of the kidnappings and massacre in Munich as a 25-year-old: “It was the first time that the word ‘terrorism’ and the term ‘terrorist’ were brought into public consciousness.”

On the night of September 4, 1972, during the second week of the Olympics, members of the so-called Black September group invaded the lightly guarded Olympic village. Two members of the Israeli team were killed; nine others were taken hostage.

Over the next 21 hours, 900m people around the world watched the tragic events unfold on television. An inept rescue attempt by the German military on the tarmac of Fürstenfeldbruck airport on the outskirts of Munich ended with the deaths of all the hostages, five of the kidnappers and a German police officer. The three surviving kidnappers were freed after Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa jet.