The Gatekeepers

Film (2012)
Directed by Dror Moreh

With Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter, Yuval Diskin, Carmi Gillon, Yaakov Peri, Avraham Shalom

This extremely interesting, but somewhat oddly put together, documentary provides distinctive and surprisingly candid revelations by a series of top leaders from Israel’s domestic security agency.

One would ordinarily expect that the leaders of a top national security agency would be closely allied with political leadership. In Israel, this appears largely not to have been so.

Astonishingly, the expressed general consensus among these security agency leaders is that most Israeli prime ministers over the past several decades – with the single exception, perhaps, of Yitzhak Rabin – have had no serious and consistent long-term vision with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. In short, according to most of them, Israeli politicians developed tactics for dealing with the Palestinian opposition while having virtually no overall strategy.

Also, perhaps surprisingly, these six leaders of diverse political affiliations demonstrate considerable concern with the radicalization of the Israeli religious right. Interleaved images of effigy burnings of Yitzhak Rabin by these groups shortly before his assassination drive the point home.

Though this film provides a fascinating integration of interviews with these security leaders, its way of organizing its contents is not particularly eloquent. Though thematically arranged, the arguments seem patched together rather than carefully organized.

There is considerable, but informative, supplementary footage of all matters related to Israeli security. The filmmakers, however, felt compelled to add an abundance of eerie sound effects to these, giving an overall, but not particularly welcome, tone of suspenseful creepiness. The film would have been better more appealingly straightforward without these.

This film has a lot of very good, revealing accounts by these six security heads. Had the filmmakers focused more on the logical organization of the arguments presented rather than on cinematic effects, this would have been a more coherent and compelling film. It is still very much worth seeing, but one needs to bring along one’s own organizational and interpretive energies to make the most sense of it.

– BADMan