Thursday 11 April 2013

The Gatekeepers – review

Dror Mareh manages to get remarkable access to the former heads of Israel's internal security agency – but are they giving us more half-truths?

 The secrets of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, are laid as bare as they're going to get in director Dror Moreh's Oscar-nominated documentary. Moreh interviews the six surviving former heads of the group, who speak candidly about their involvement in some of the country's most controversial covert operations. The access is remarkable; the revelations come slow, but steady. The official account of the agency's activities since the Six-Day War – the Bus 300 executions, the monitoring of Jewish militants, the intelligence failures leading to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – is chipped away. What's revealed (although perhaps another layer of half-truth) is a compelling overview of a modern security agency – bred in a moral grey area, organising state-sanctioned violence, but uncertain of the strength of its political safety net.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/11/the-gatekeepers-review

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