The Israeli security agency known as Shin Bet is so secretive that its members are not permitted even to acknowledge that they work there. The only public faces of the organization are its leaders, and six former heads consented to be interviewed by filmmaker Dror Moreh.
For New Yorkers, Moreh’s film comes hard on the heels of the similarly conceived “The Law in These Parts.” This is a slicker affair, with re-enactments meant to show what the agency sees of a targeted killing in progress. There are also harrowing scenes of buses torn apart by suicide bombings, meant to show what’s at stake.
These former spymasters seem wily at times, such as one man’s brusque dismissal of Moreh’s suggestion that you can’t drop a 1-ton bomb in a heavily populated area without “collateral damage.” There is also breathtaking candor, such as Avraham Shalom’s testy comeback, “They were terrorists,” when pressed about the summary execution of two hijackers captured alive. Carmi Gillon, who served from 1994 to 1996, speaks with palpable bitterness about the Israeli extreme right and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
The filmmaker doesn’t speculate about why these men are talking, but he leaves you with an excellent guess. All of them express a desire for negotiation with the very people they fought, and they all fear that chances for peace are slipping away. Anyone watching the news from Gaza this week will find chilling prescience in “The Gatekeepers.”