Nominated for an Oscar and winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Documentary Feature award, Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers may sound dry on paper: It’s a Hebrew-language documentary on Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service. But the film resonates with viewers largely due to its access to and the candidness of its interview subjects: the six surviving directors of the Israeli secret service. Through their retrospection—and some arresting special-effects wizardry—The Gatekeepers explores the role Shin Bet has played in Israel’s short, tumultuous history.
These Shin Bet dudes? They’re badass. Big, bald Yuval Diskin, who headed the agency from 2005 to 2011, looks like he could snap you in two, and he’s only viewed from chest up. But to a man, discussing their work for Shin Bet for the first time, they are surprisingly forthcoming and reflective about the tactics, successes and failures, and morality or lack thereof of the job as they revisit the 300 bus hijacking, the Intifada, the Oslo Accords, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, the successful operation to kill Palestinian terrorist Yahya Ayyash and the failed operation to take out as many as a dozen Hamas leaders.
Throughout, they are frankly critical not only of themselves but of each other and especially of politicians who encourage the Shin Bet’s “barely legal” activities behind closed doors but wash their hands of the agency when its actions go awry. Avraham Shalom, the earliest of the participating directors who led the agency from 1980 to 1986, takes the brunt of the criticism for his role in the killing of two terrorist suspects arrested for the bus hijacking in 1984, forcing his resignation two years later. An unassuming grandpa-like figure now, it’s Shalom who shrugs at questions of morality when pressed by his off-screen interviewer.