"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.
