April 22, 2013: The former heads of Shin Bet speak in important Israeli film

By Michael Regenstreif

MP Irwin Cotler made the point during his March 28 speech at the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University Passover lunch that, had the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries accepted the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, all of the problems of refugees – both Arab refugees from Israel and an almost identical number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries – would have been avoided. There would have been two states for two people, avoiding subsequent wars, and all of the disputes over territory and settlements that grew out of the Six Day War of 1967, and persist to this day.

The importance of Cotler’s point hit home earlier this month while I watched The Gatekeepers, one of the two Israeli films nominated for an Oscar this past year in the feature documentary category, during its week-long Ottawa run at the Bytowne Cinema. The film is a series of interviews – interspersed with archival footage – with the six living former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. These are the directors who ran Shin Bet for all but two of the years between 1981 and 2011, charged with keeping Israel safe from Palestinian terrorists and from internal terror threats, such as the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish extremist intent on stopping the peace process.

Each of these Shin Bet directors – Avraham Shalom (1981-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1994), Carmi Gillon (1995- 1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), Avi Dichter (2000-2005) and Yuval Diskin (2005-2011) – answered directly to the Israeli prime minister of the day. Almost by definition, these are hardened, unsentimental men who needed to be unafraid of making extremely difficult life-and-death decisions, which often had far-reaching consequences.

Watching the film, it becomes increasingly obvious the Shin Bet directors share a consensus that the policies of occupation and Jewish settlements followed by Israel since 1967 have been a failure and a threat to Israel’s long-term survival as a Jewish and democratic state. These policies have forced all of Israel’s governments, whether led by left- or right-leaning prime ministers, to govern in a virtually permanent state of crisis management – a situation that has not served the country well.

The Shin Bet directors are surprisingly candid and open, even when talking about some of their most catastrophic failures, such as failing to prevent the assassination of Rabin or the summary execution in 1984 of two captured Palestinian terrorists, an event for which Shalom eventually lost his job and for which he was held in disdain by at least one of his successors, or when discussing the “collateral damage” of innocent people being killed when terrorist leaders have been targeted for assassination.

Near the end of the film, The Gatekeepers director Dror Moreh, who conducted the interviews off-screen, asks about the prediction made by Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, not long after the Six Day War, that attempting to govern the Palestinians would turn Israel into a “Shin Bet state”; a prediction for which Leibowitz, who died at age 91 in 1994, was reviled by many in Israel.

Diskin, the most recent of the Shin Bet directors, agreed sadly but absolutely, with Leibowitz’s prediction. Shalom, the earliest to serve as head of Shin Bet, said, perhaps even more sadly, that the occupation had made Israel “cruel.” The commitment to Israel of these former Shin Bet directors – three of whom later served in the Knesset and cabinet (Peri, elected this year under the Yesh Atid banner is now minister of science and technology) – is beyond question.

Whether they challenge your own views, or reinforce them, or some combination of both, their voices, forged with a level of experience we will never have, are important to listen to and understand. And although they seem disillusioned with the prospect of actually achieving peace, their stories and observations make its pursuit seem all the more vital.

The Gatekeepers is a very important film. Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to see it.