Dror Moreh's first-rate film has rightly been compared with The Fog of War, Errol Morris's revealing documentary on US secretary of defence Robert S McNamara. His austere The Gatekeepers briefly intersperses newsreel material among the expressive talking heads of six former chiefs of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, the equivalent of our MI5. It's less well known than the Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of MI6, but since the six-day war of 1967 Shin Bet has been altogether more influential, as it has had the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to control.
The sextet talk with admirable frankness about their successes and failures over the past 45 years in a war against terrorism, where there has been "no strategy, only tactics". "Forget about morality," one of them says. But that's only a short-term policy in a seemingly hopeless conflict where the intransigence of both sides and the increasing pig-headedness of politicians have ensured that Israel may end up winning every battle but losing the war.
It's a depressing movie, yet there is encouragement to be found in the manifest decency and reasonableness of these six honest, articulate men, one of whom compares the conduct of Israel in the West Bank to that of the Nazis towards the non-Jewish civilian population of occupied western Europe in the second world war.