Six former heads of the Shin Bet — Israel's security agency — speak to director Dror Moreh in his Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers. They are men who have signed off on brutal interrogations and targeted killings. They have given their lives to the cause of Israeli security.
What is striking is that all articulate their shared conviction that the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories will not lead to peace or a political solution for the future of the state of Israel.
"It was a long journey," Moreh tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies of his efforts to get the Shin Bet chiefs to talk. "I think it is timing, and the timing for them to speak was right. ... [Y]ou don't force people like that to speak. They came because they wanted — they understood — what I wanted to say, what I wanted to tell, and I think that the main reason for them to come is the fact that they felt that the state of Israel is walking in a path or in a route where it will only lead to a dire and bitter consequences for the existences for the state of Israel."
Moreh, once an Israeli soldier himself, says one of the reasons he made the film is because his own son is now about to join the Israeli military.
"My son is going to the army in two weeks from now," he says, "and for me to create that movie was the fear that he will have to be that young soldier running in those alleys, arresting people, going into their homes in the middle of the night. And what effect it will have on his soul? What effect it will have on his personality, a young boy that now just finished high school?"