AFTER years of supporting Democratic causes as one of Hollywood’s best-known liberals, Steven Spielberg is calling in old political favours as he prepares for a storm over his first film-making foray into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One month before the scheduled release of Munich, his account of Israel’s response to the massacre of its athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, Spielberg has been consulting the former president Bill Clinton over likely international reaction to a film that is already tipped for next year’s Oscars.

Both Palestinian and Israeli officials have expressed concern at advance reports on the film’s subject matter: the Israeli plan to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinians responsible for murdering 11 athletes.

Clinton has read the screenplay and encouraged several of his former aides to help Spielberg prepare for the political fall-out from a film whose stars include Daniel Craig, the British actor recently chosen to be the next James Bond.

Dennis Ross, Clinton’s former Middle East envoy, provided Spielberg with introductions to Palestinian and Israeli officials. The director is also being advised by Mike McCurry, a former Clinton White House spokesman who is now a prominent Democratic strategist.

Munich will be released in America on December 23, just in time to meet the deadline for next year’s Academy Awards, and in Britain the following month. A short trailer recently posted on the internet has fuelled speculation that it could do as well as Schindler’s List, the 1993 Holocaust film that won seven Oscars, including best director for Spielberg.

Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg’s long-time producer, was quoted last week as telling friends that Munich “could be his best”. Yet not even Spielberg’s towering reputation and record of sensitivity to difficult subjects has deterred an early exchange of barbs from warring factions in the Middle East.

The Munich attack was carried out by the Black September wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group. Spielberg has already provoked a rare public statement from Abu Daoud, the former Black September leader, who has been living in hiding since he boasted in 1999 that he masterminded the attack on Israel’s Olympic athletes to publicise the Palestinian cause.

Daoud complained that Spielberg had not consulted him and that “if someone really wanted to tell the truth about what happened he should talk to the people involved, people who know the truth”.

Daoud narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Poland in 1981, but more than a dozen other Palestinians were killed by Israeli hitmen.

Spielberg, who is Jewish, is seen by much of the Middle East as sympathetic to Israel. Yet the loudest protests about Munich have come from Israelis concerned by reports that the Israeli assassins are depicted as questioning the morality of their mission.

Among the sources that Spielberg has said he consulted for the film is the book Vengeance, which purports to tell the story of a member of the hit squad. The book’s account of a multi- national team of assassins — including a Briton, played by Craig — has been widely rubbished in Israel, where Gad Shimron, a former Mossad officer, recently told the Hollywood newspaper Variety: “It’s nonsense, totally baseless.”

Shimron added: “This sexy plot of an epic squad composed of a German, a Frenchman, an American and a Brit sounds like a bunch of clowns playing partisans behind enemy lines. It never happened that way.”

Zvi Zamir, a former head of Mossad, has also said he was “surprised” that Spielberg had relied on Vengeance. Other agents have dismissed as fiction the book’s claim that Golda Meir, who was then the Israeli prime minister, gave her personal blessing to a mission of assassinations that was dubbed the “Wrath of God”.

Spokesmen for Spielberg have since insisted that Vengeance was only one of many sources for the film, and Ross, the former US envoy, popped up to reassure Israelis that Spielberg’s script was “a responsible telling of the story that takes dramatic licence because it isn’t trying to be a documentary”.

For Spielberg, the controversy may prove a double-edged sword. While few directors shy away from publicity for their films, a serious row over Munich’s credibility might damage the film in the eyes of Oscar voters. Among other contenders they will be considering will be Syriana — a complex tale of Middle East oil skulduggery starring George Clooney — which has already won rave reviews.

The academy’s strong Jewish contingent may also turn against Spielberg if Israel’s reaction is hostile.

By enlisting the help of Clinton and his aides, Spielberg appears to be taking every precaution to prevent a damaging row. So far his strategy seems to be working.

“If Munich is in the quality range of Schindler’s List it will be the frontrunner,” declared the New York Daily News.

“No one has seen it,” admitted Emmanuel Levy, author of All About Oscar, a history of the Academy Awards. “But given the subject matter and director, that’s the one people are talking about.”

Additional reporting:

Flora Bagenal

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