The Gatekeepers directed by Dror Moreh (review)

“What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment?” is the question at the heart of the documentary, The Gatekeepers, by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh. Nominated for the 2013 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature, the film was inspired, Moreh says, by the iconic movie Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, by Errol Morris, released in 2003, which poses the same question. Both are masterful documentaries, but unlike Fog of War, which contextualizes its subject’s words with striking visual and aural production techniques common to feature film, The Gatekeepers takes a leaner approach to documentary, letting the testimonies of its narrators resonate a collective story of individuals humanized by their inhuman experiences.

The Gatekeepers contains interviews with the six surviving former leaders of the Israeli secret security force, the Shin Bet, who share their responses to terrorism in Israel as they lived it then and see it now, a collective uncovering of top secret tactics and techniques (and not, as more than one narrator reminds us, a cohesive strategy) and reflections on their own individual actions. While this film offers a perspective on the so-called war against terror, it is also an apology, if a complex and sometimes contradictory one, circling around its subjects and returning again. The film borrows Morris’s literary conceit of titling sections; for example, the last line of dialogue of each section provides a title, such as “Forget about Morality.” But Moreh’s work is notably restrained compared to Morris’s film, delivered in classic documentary style, save such contemporary innovations as the computer-generated animations used to gripping effect in the reenactment of the Bus 300 affair in 1984, when Palestinians who hijacked a bus were captured and executed by the Shin Bet. The Gatekeepers is spare and purposeful. It opens without any music track, setting out to tell its stories with utter seriousness. A map and tracking device come into view as one of the narrators in voiceover introduces the line of questioning fundamental to the film: “What do you do, hunting a terrorist? You can get him, but there are other people in the car.”

Rhetorical questions become more pointed as the film goes on. For example, one of the narrators confesses to a now-questionable act, saying, “We killed a terrorist whose hands were tied—by what right?” Interspersed with archival news and security monitor footage are interviews with the six former Shin Bet leaders, dressed in neat button-down shirts, positioned against a neutral backdrop. They are for the most part emotionally contained but clearly eager to share their reflections. These are interview extracts, but the viewer gets the sense they derive from full-bodied, narrator-led life histories; for example, among references to childhood, one of the narrators talks about his life as a child and the impact on his consciousness of the Six-Day War. Each individual shares increasingly conflicted feelings over the Palestinian question, even the notoriously brutal, bullying Avraham Shalom. Mistakes are admitted and light bulbs keep going off, as the recollection of youthful compliance with whatever aggressive methods were necessary to keep the Palestinians in line gives way to the admission of, as McNamara would say, empathizing with the enemy.

Midway through the film, a bomb of another sort drops when the documentary reveals that Palestinians aren’t the only terrorists at work. In fact, the Shin Bet considers them small potatoes compared to the Israeli extreme religious right, who are discovered plotting to blow up the Muslim shrine the Dome of the Rock, an act of such far-reaching proportions it could set off a world war. And when it is revealed that the Israeli government has effectively conspired with the convicted plotters by commuting their sentences, the security operatives become further disillusioned. Following Prime Minister Rabin’s...