Dror Moresh, “The Gatekeepers” (2012)
An astonishing and powerful documentary about the Israeli internal intelligence security agency Shin Bet as seen through the eyes and viewpoints of six former heads of that service, “The Gatekeepers” turns out to be an indictment of Israel’s obsession with its security and resort to continual violence and terror in resolving its conflicts with Palestinians and neighbouring countries, and the instability and corruption such violence causes to Israel and the Palestinians alike. Moresh initially was moved to make this film after seeing the Errol Morris documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara” which dealt with the life and experiences of the former US Secretary of Defense.
The documentary takes the form of interwoven interviews between Moresh and his six interviewees and is set out in seven segments that follow a loose chronological structure starting with Shin Bet’s emergence as a result of the Six Day War in 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the present day. Each segment focuses on a significant incident or series of incidents in which the Shin Bet was involved and which had a significant effect on Israeli government policy, public opinion and society generally. The interviews are embellished with archival footage and computer-generated reconstructions that approximate what happened.
Although the film appears dry, its impact and importance come through the men’s descriptions of their own feelings and views about their actions and the orders they were given by successive Israeli Prime Ministers like Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres among others. The former heads’ disgust for those politicians who bullied them and Shin Bet into performing hateful actions that killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinians and traumatised thousands more, yet hung out the Shin Bet heads to twist and wither in the condemnation of the Israeli media and public opinion, is very clear in the segment on the Bus 300 affair in which Shin Bet agents executed two Palestinian bus hijackers while the two men were tied up and helpless. Soon after this shocking incident, Avraham Shalom, one of Moresh’s interviewees, resigned as Shin Bet head and was pardoned, yet the memory of the incident in which he ordered the killings at the behest of the government affected him deeply at the time of interview nearly 30 years later.
Later segments in the film dealing with the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s, the rise of extremism among born-again Jews and the Jewish settler movement, and the targeted assassination of prominent Hamas leaders and members like Yahya Ayyash show how the Israeli government’s reliance on terror and violence to thwart Palestinian aspirations to self-determination and right to land stolen from them has steadily corrupted both Israeli politics and society, and traumatised Israelis as well as Palestinians. Each side ends up being driven to commit more desperate and deadly acts of violence and killing which escalate in scale, inhumanity and impact, and leave the other side even more psychologically wounded and intent on revenge.
The focus on interviewing the former Shin Bet heads has the unfortunate effect of ignoring the wider effect on Israeli society and economy. The constant obsession with repressing the Palestinian people privileges certain segments of Israeli society and entrenches their power and influence over Israel institutions. At the same time, other issues in Israeli culture and society are ignored and government spending on dealing and resolving these issues is either scant or even declining. As I write, I can Google for information on the levels of poverty in Israel and find articles reporting that Israel has the highest poverty rate and the highest child poverty rate, with 1 in 3 children living in poverty, of the OECD countries. This is before we even consider the levels of destitution facing Arabs in pre-1967 Israel and Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. I can also Google for information on the levels of social and economic equality in Israel and discover to my amazement that a very small number of families there control over half the nation’s wealth and wield incredible influence over society.
The former Shin Bet heads admit that they have behaved immorally and criminally, and see the irony of their having treated Palestinians almost as dismally as the Nazis treated Jews during World War II. The climax of the film comes when all of them express contempt for past Israeli Prime Ministers and governments, and advocate dialogue with all Palestinians, including groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad that were or are dedicated to wiping out the Israeli state, as the only way to resolve conflict and bring about peace. As one of the interviewees jokingly admits, retirement from Shin Bet has made him a little bit “leftist”.
Even if Israel as a whole were to turn to peaceful diplomacy and conflict resolution, the path ahead is still strewn with problems, of which the major one is certainly the United States and other Western countries and the lobby groups in those countries’ governments that have an interest in prolonging conflict and using Israel as an enforcer to steal the natural resources of Middle Eastern countries and deny all Middle Eastern peoples, Jews, Muslims and other religious groups there alike, the right to control and determine their own destinies and use their territories’ wealth to secure their own well-being.