Dror Moreh's 'The Gatekeepers'

Speaking truth to power is one of the obligations of the moral life, but can power itself speak truth? That's one of the interesting questions raised by Dror Moreh's The Gatekeepers, an Israeli documentary that features six former heads of Israel's security arm, Shin Bet, who were collectively responsible for it between 1980 and 2008.

Eat your heart out, Bob Woodward. Mr. Moreh has achieved a feat unprecedented in journalistic history in getting an entire generation of chief spooks to speak on camera and quite candidly about the nature of their work, its successes and failures, and its ultimate consequences for the long-term future of the Jewish state and the prospects for democracy within it.

Nothing operational is discussed that hasn't been in the public domain, so no state secrets are compromised. Nonetheless, many of the details are new and fascinating, and the collective portrait that emerges— though undoubtedly a self-serving one— is of men performing a task they find in many ways troubling and repugnant. None seems to regret doing it; all seem to wish it needn't be done.

Forced to resign

I can't imagine the U.S. counterparts of these gentlemen ever engaging in a similar exercise. Richard Helms did speak out bitterly after being relieved of his duties as head of the CIA, and Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's Defense Secretary, was publicly remorseful about his role in the Vietnam War. But I have a hard time imagining James Bond writing his memoirs.

The eldest of the Israeli chiefs interviewed here is Avraham Shalom, who was part of the team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, still the most celebrated feat of espionage since World War II. Shalom was head of Shin Bet between 1980 and 1984 but was forced to resign after ordering the execution of two captive terrorists. Shalom is now a genial old man with a memory sometimes quite lucid but occasionally not, and with an old man's penchant for unconsidered statements.

Perhaps the most remarkable of them is one equating Israeli conduct in the Occupied Territories with that of the Germans in occupied Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. The Germans killed more than 2 million non-Jewish Poles during World War II. Had the Israelis done the same, there would be no Palestinian problem, because there would no longer be any Palestinians.

About that "'occupation'

This brings us to the political problematic of The Gatekeepers itself. The film acknowledges that Israel has a terrorist problem, and that there are forces that wish Israel ill. But there is never an overt acknowledgment of the existential threat posed not only by terrorist groups but state actors that proclaim their desire to destroy the Jewish state itself.

The Gatekeepers makes no mention of Iran, apart from a fleeting reference to its president, Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. (Perhaps this subject was declared off-limits in advance, since it's hardly conceivable that ground rules were not carefully negotiated for the interviews.)

Let us start, however, with a term in widespread use, the one that Shalom himself adverted to in his unfortunate comparison. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are still routinely referred to as the "Occupied Territories," although 99 percent of the former's population (if not land area) is governed by the Palestinian Authority and by Hamas.

Who governs?

To be sure, Israel largely exercises revenue control over the West Bank, imposes a naval blockade on Gaza, regulates border traffic and reserves the right of military incursion. It also strikes, both pre-emptively and in retaliation, against terrorist targets. But this is certainly not an occupation as classically defined.

The term was accurate in describing Israel's control of the Palestinian population between 1967 and the 1990s (although for some reason it's never used to describe Jordan's rule over the native West Bank population between 1948 and 1967). But Palestinians now govern themselves on a day-to-day basis. Refusal to recognize this in effect dismisses the Palestinian Authority as a quisling tool.

It also ignores the reality of Hamas in Gaza, from which all Israeli forces were unilaterally withdrawn in 2005. Whatever one may say of Hamas, it's unlikely to be described by anyone as a tool of Israel.

Unwelcome burden

The film's flashbacks to the Six Day War of 1967 show joyous Israelis celebrating their victory. It makes no mention of the fact that the war was forced upon Israel, one of whose ports had already been blockaded; that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were the unforeseen spoils of victory, not the objects of a planned conquest; and that the Israeli government of the time immediately offered to exchange those territories in return for peace— an offer unanimously spurned by the Arab League.

Israel could only have avoided the burden of an occupation, in short, by doing what it did in Gaza in 2005, and withdrawing from the territories it had taken to the all-but-indefensible borders of the 1949 Armistice Line without precondition. That the occupation was a hugely unwelcome burden was evidenced by Israel's willingness to abandon it in return, not for peace, but for the unfulfilled promise of peace.

The failure to fulfill the promise— a Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel— is largely attributed in the film to the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who negotiated the Oslo Accords which were to lay its framework, by a young fanatic of the Israeli religious right.

Clinton at Camp David

Although the film does remark in passing that the terrorist mantle of Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization fell at once on two new rejectionist groups— Hamas and Islamic Jihad— and although the notorious destruction of Bus #5 by terrorists is shown (the most gruesome image of many similar ones in the film), the essential blame for the failure of the peace process is laid on the Israeli right and its settlers. Carmi Gillen, head of Shin Bet at the time of Rabin's assassination, is made to seem in agreement with this assessment, but all he actually says is that most Israelis were dispirited in the aftermath of Rabin's murder, a reasonable enough response.

We then fast-forward to Bill Clinton's last-ditch attempt to revive Oslo at Camp David, with a priceless image of Yasir Arafat and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak each refusing to be the first to enter the pow-wow lodge, and Clinton having to sweep them over the threshold like a mother with a pair of recalcitrant ducklings. We get the message: neither side wanted to negotiate.

But was this so? Of Barak, a decorated soldier, we are told only that he was proud of nothing more in his career than of having expanded the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank from 100,000 to 220,000. Moreh doesn't mention that Barak had brought with him a detailed peace plan that called for the withdrawal of the great majority of settlers, a sharing of Jerusalem as a joint capital with a new Palestinian state, and compensation for refugees displaced in the 1948 war.

Whose bad faith?

Arafat, on the other hand, brought— nothing. He did not respond to Barak's proposals; he did not acknowledge them; and he left Camp David with a silence that could portend only the Intifada that in fact shortly after erupted. Yet the film, by word and image, leaves the impression that the 2000 Intifada was primarily the result of Israeli bad faith.

This misrepresentation serves no one. It does suggest, however, why peace groups in Israel have steadily lost credibility over the past decade.

All of this history has meant a lot of work for Shin Bet, little of it pleasant. The Gatekeepers describes Israel's present system of "enhanced interrogations," a set of tortures designed to stop short of acute physical harm or death but not always (like the American version) operationally successful in that regard.

Avi Dichter, who pioneered the targeted assassination, talks about the hazard of innocent deaths, a.k.a. collateral damage; a precise hit is "clean" and "elegant." As for the moral issues involved, Shalom puts it most succinctly: "Forget about morality. It's not a moral decision, it's a tactical one."

A "'moral' bombing

The chief case in point was a unique opportunity to take out ten or 12 senior Hamas operatives at a single conclave on September 6, 2003. The device needed to assure success was a one-ton bomb, but Ariel Sharon's cabinet balked at a weapon likely to injure or kill civilians in surrounding buildings. A smaller explosive was finally approved; it scored a direct hit but killed no one at all.

Was this more "moral" than the practice of Hamas, like Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization before it, of specifically targeting civilians, the more innocent the better?

Shalom appears to have it right. In this world, the calculus is simply tactical. For Israel, collateral damage is politically disadvantageous. For Hamas, the category doesn't exist; all Israelis down to the last child are, simply, "occupiers."

Winning battles, losing wars

The most charismatic of the spy chiefs, the hatchet-faced Ami Ayalon, describes meeting a Palestinian colleague who defines victory, for his side, as "making you [Israelis] suffer." To achieve this, the Palestinians are willing to sacrifice themselves, which balances the equation of killing their enemies indiscriminately.

Ayalon's epiphany is to realize that there is no winning against such an adversary: "You can win every battle, and still lose the war."

Perhaps. But, for Israel at present, the prevailing wisdom is that as long as you have battles you can fight, you haven't lost the war. And, although Moreh manages to make his superannuated talking heads sound like doves, this viewer was left entirely convinced that if they had the responsibility of power again rather than the luxury of philosophy, they would be doing exactly what they did before.

To tell the truth, you first have to face it. That's what The Gatekeepers, for all its documentary value, fails to do.