WEARING a salmon-pink shirt, dark glasses and his hallmark baseball cap, Steven Spielberg last week ordered the cameras to roll on one of the greatest gambles of his Hollywood career.

In the old Maltese town of Rabat, the 58-year-old director was re-enacting the death of Wael Zwaiter, a cousin of Yasser Arafat, gunned down in the lobby of his Rome apartment by Israeli secret agents.

The scene is a pivotal moment in Vengeance, the working title for the £60m film which opens at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists and killed.

Most of the film recounts the revenge assassinations carried out over the following two years by squads sent out by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. In the film, agents are played by the Australian Eric Bana and British star Daniel Craig.

Spielberg is determined to keep the exact contents of the film secret until it opens in December, but some Israelis already feel “betrayed” by him.

They feel the most famous Jewish film-maker is casting a spotlight on events they would rather keep lower key, including the shooting of an innocent Norwegian waiter mistaken for a Munich terrorist.

For Spielberg the film is personal. Friends in Los Angeles say that, for him, it is all about exploring what it means to be Jewish, an issue that has driven the director from the Protestant suburbs where he was raised and set early films such as E T. The same motive came to fruition in Schindler’s List, his Oscar-winning 1993 film about the Holocaust.

“Steven has been more worried about getting this film right than he was about Schindler’s List, because he feels if it fails it could make the Israeli-Palestinian situation worse,” said a source in a circle of religious advisers he consulted.

“He feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. His family and friends are telling him he can do something positive with this film, but he cannot even talk about it. If he could, maybe he would not need to make the film.”

Spielberg was raised as a “modern Jew” by his mother, Leah, who avoided living in Jewish areas in Arizona and California so that he could learn to blend in. It did not work.

“Everyone knew I was Jewish, and I was embarrassed that I could not fit in” he said later.

Although Hollywood is strongly Jewish, Spielberg said he did not start coming to terms with his family history until the 1970s when he started regular meetings with Holocaust survivors. This led to Schindler’s List, although to assure success at the box office the film still needed to show a gentile — in this case a German industrialist — saving Jews from the gas chamber. “I wanted something that could confirm my Judaism to my family and to myself,” he said at the time.

Since then, while achieving further success with Saving Private Ryan, War of the Worlds and a forthcoming Indiana Jones film, he has been giving hundreds of millions of pounds to Jewish charities and preparing his riskiest gamble.

Even during the ballyhoo that surrounded the release last month of his science-fiction hit War of the Worlds, Spielberg restricted himself to a 138- word press statement about the forthcoming film. He talked about how Israeli agents’ “implacable resolve slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing”.

The film is also understood to portray the misgivings of Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, over the campaign that came to be known as “Operation Wrath of God”.

Spielberg bought the rights to the 1984 book Vengeance, by the Canadian George Jonas, which tells how the Palestinians were hunted down and killed. Israeli critics have long raised doubts about Vengeance’s main character, Avner, who claimed to play the role portrayed on screen by Bana. Some suggest Avner was only ever an El Al Airlines security consultant.

Last week Jonas stood by his book, but others fear Spielberg’s “moralising” will make the agents look weak. “Why is it that it’s only the Jews who are shown to have doubts about taking action in Hollywood movies?” said Jonathan Tobin, executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent magazine. “It’s a moral and political minefield for Spielberg.”

J J Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper Forward, said: “Spielberg has upset some by appointing a playwright (Tony Kushner) who is to the left of the Israeli left. Many Jews feel betrayed by Spielberg, but the rest of us will wait to see the film before judging.”

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