Oscar bid for ‘The Gatekeepers’ keeping the government quiet

An Oscar-nominated Israeli documentary has brought little joy to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The focus of the film’s criticism is Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.

Featuring searingly confessional interviews with six former chiefs of the shadowy Shin Bet (Israel Security Service), The Gatekeepers portrays the 46-year-old control of the West Bank and Jewish ultranationalism as threats to Israel’s survival.

Its run for Sunday’s Academy Awards comes at an awkward time for the conservative Netanyahu.

Usually quick to congratulate Israelis who succeed abroad, Netanyahu has kept mum on The Gatekeepers, which an aide said he had not seen.

Reaction from other officials has been frosty.

Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon said the Shin Bet veterans’ interviews, in which they discuss episodes such as the agency-ordered killing of two captured Gazan bus hijackers in 1984 and a plot by Jewish extremists to blow up the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, had been edited “to serve the Palestinian narrative.”

“What was presented there was presented in a really onesided manner, and therefore the film is slanted,” Ya’alon, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a former IDF chief, told Army Radio.

Asked about the film during last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Defense Minister Ehud Barak offered tepid praise for its “testament to the fact that in Israel you can talk more freely, perhaps, than in any other place.”

Also among the five contenders for the best documentary Oscar is Five Broken Cameras, a sympathetic account of the Palestinian struggle against land seizures involved in the erection of the West Bank security barrier.

Five Broken Cameras was partly funded by an Israeli government-run cultural trust and involved an Israeli filmmaker, but its Palestinian director, Emad Burnat, has shunned suggestions that it augurs reconciliation between the sides.

While mostly well-received by Israeli audiences and film critics, The Gatekeepers broke little new ground politically. Four of the ex-Shin Bet chiefs had jointly aired similar public criticism against then-prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2003.

But interest has been piqued by the film’s slick archive footage and digital reenactments, its international accolades and the fact its interviewees span ideological divides.

One of them, Avi Dichter, is home front defense minister and a member of the Likud and Netanyahu’s inner security cabinet.

Another, Yaakov Peri, is a lawmaker in Yesh Atid.

“When you leave the service [Shin Bet], you become a bit of a leftist,” Peri says in the film.

A third interviewee, Ami Ayalon, who once ran for the leadership of the Labor Party, tells director Dror Moreh that Israelis suffer a strategic shortsightedness that could imperil their survival as a democracy.

“We win every battle, but lose the war,” Ayalon says.

Moreh told Reuters this month that US President Barack Obama should intervene in the conflict in his second term, comparing Palestinians and Israelis to kindergarten children.

“They need a grown-up to tell them, ‘Enough! Israel, Palestine, this is what you need to do, do it.’”

Dichter, who said this week he had not yet seen the film, said it was “skewed, improper and tendentious” to criticize a serving prime minister, telling Channel 2 television: “The prime minister sets policy that is good for the State of Israel, not policy that is good for the Oscars.”