"They are the only ones who can have an impact," Dror Moreh told me. The director of a new Israeli documentary was speaking about his film’s six protagonists, all former heads of Israel's Shin Bet (internal security agency). Their first ever on-camera disclosure of their past work makes for a groundbreaking glimpse into the history of Israel’s covert security industry. 

"The Gatekeepers," which has already been shortlisted for an Oscar nomination for best documentary and will be widely released in 2013, puts Israel’s counterterrorism efforts from 1980 until the present on display. The six former agents talk for the first time about the operations they oversaw, from recruiting Palestinians to help identify terrorists in their villages, to targeted assassinations, failures to thwart suicide bombings and the murder of former prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli Jew. In this highly critical documentary, Moreh utilizes the willingness of these men to divulge the moral and practical dilemmas they have faced in the “war against terror” in order to expose and challenge the otherwise sacred Israeli concept that "anything goes" when it comes to securing Israeli lives against Palestinian threats.

“The power to take lives in an instant, there's something unnatural about it," says Yuval Diskin, who served as Shin Bet chief during 2005-2011. This is not a statement you expect to hear from the person who up until a year ago was in charge of Israel’s entire domestic security system. Yaakov Peri, who served as Shin Bet head in 1988-1994, describes how during his service, the agency rounded up hundreds of Palestinians (archival footage in the film shows that, like today, many of them are children) on a given day and put them in jail. He admits that once you retire, you “become a bit of a leftist.”

Perhaps the most revealing testimony comes from the most veteran of the six interviewed, Avraham Shalom, who served 1981-1986 and was ultimately forced to resign after the 300 bus affair in 1984, in which Shalom allegedly ordered the killing of two of the apprehended Palestinians who hijacked the bus. The incident put the legal boundaries of the Shin Bet’s authority in question and sparked a scandal between the agency and the government as to who should be held responsible. Shalom says in the movie that the moment Israel assumed control over 1 million Palestinians in 1967, “we stopped dealing with the Palestinian state, and started dealing with terrorism. Suddenly we had a lot of work to do in the West Bank and Gaza, and overseas too. We forgot about the Palestinian issue.”