The Gatekeepers

The final nominee for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards that I've seen is The Gatekeepers, an occasionally interesting but very dry film featuring interviews with the heads of Israel's Shin Bet, the intelligence arm of their national defense. None of them had ever given interviews before, so it was something of a coup for director Dror Moreh to get them to be so candid.

Shot mostly in a static, "talking head" style, with interstitial archive footage, the six men interviewed discuss Israel's history from the Six-Day War in 1967 onward. The Shin Bet replaced the Mossad as the intelligence organization in 1980, and the first leader was Avraham Shalom, who now looks like a cuddly grandfather in suspenders, but we hear how he was a ruthless bully. When he talks about an incident in which Palestinian hijackers of a bus were killed while in custody, the fierceness of the man shows in his eyes. He is asked whether it was moral to kill them, and he says that with terrorists, no morality is needed.

Also making an impression is Carmi Gillon, who presided over the Shin Bet when it had to go after internal terrorists--the Jewish Underground. A plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock was thwarted, though the captured later were released early. Gillon points out that had they succeeded, a worldwide war would have erupted. Gillon was also at Shin Bet when Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was assassinated, by a zealous Zionist.

Over the course of the history of Shin Bet, the enemies of Israel changed, from the PLO to groups like Hamas and other Islamic Jihadists. It's interesting to see how all of them, even Shalom, see violence as counterproductive, and none of them are particularly optimistic about the future. There is also a division about "collateral damage," with some of them haunted by the killing of innocents when terror leaders are taken out by bombs. But Avi Dichter bemoans a missed opportunity when all the major terrorist leaders were gathered for a meeting, but a small bomb was used to try to limit collateral damage, and the leaders walked away.

The film is very informative, but kind of drab. Though the men are identified by their years of service, that didn't register with me and I forgot who was who and what order they came in. For those who follow Israeli or Palestinian issues, this film will have much more impact.

Now that I've seen all five of the nominees, I can agree wholeheartedly with the winner, which was Searching for Sugar Man. It is the only one that doesn't deal with a hot-button issue (the others were about AIDS, sexual assault in the military, and Palestinian civil rights), so perhaps it was just refreshing to see a documentary that didn't challenge anyone's beliefs.