As everyone knows by
now, The
Gatekeepers is a 2012 Academy award-nominated
documentary film made by the Israeli director Dror Moreh. Moreh succeeded in interviewing
the last six heads of Israel’s General Security Services, better known by its
Hebrew acronym Shin
Bet.
These gentlemen display considerable frankness about the nature of their past
activities, their belated advocacy of a two-state solution to the Palestine
issue and their negative views of successive Israeli governments.
It’s not my purpose
here to write another review of this much talked-about but surprisingly
uncontroversial film. Interesting articles, both of which discuss it in
conjunction with the Israeli/Palestinian film 5
Broken Cameras,
may be read here
and
here.
Instead, I wish to reflect on some worrisome aspects of the film’s framing and
reception in public discourse, and to suggest that its propagandistic effect is dependent on such framing.
First of all, the six subjects
of this film tortured, murdered and criminally conspired on behalf of a rogue
state. It is as if six capi di tutti capi,
who had somehow escaped conviction, were to describe in gory detail their
protection rackets, vendettas and other enormities, and then cheerfully opine
(these Shin Bet men chuckle a lot) that the Mafia could probably have achieved
its ends by other means.
It’s also likely that
Shin Bet’s current Director, Yoram Cohen, is at present engaged in the torture
and murder of Palestinians. When he retires, no doubt he too will “become a bit
of a leftie” (Yaakov Peri, Director from 1988-1994) and criticise the
government that employed him for its failure to pull out of the West Bank, a
policy that he will have actively conspired to implement. He will then be
succeeded by another tough guy, and thus the cycle will continue – until it
ends.
Moreh’s only previous
film was a 2008 TV documentary about the mass murderer Ariel Sharon
that was reputedly something of a whitewash. This could have aroused suspicions
that, in its own way, Gatekeepers
might also have a propagandistic agenda.
Such niceties eluded
the astounding Melanie
Phillips who wrote in the Jewish Chronicle:
We don't know to what extent these six were unaware how
they would be used in this film. But it is astounding to see former
intelligence chiefs shooting their mouths off with opinions that can only
hearten Israel's enemies. For any former director of MI5, such behaviour would
be utterly unthinkable.
Alan
Johnson of BICOM (Britain Israel Communications Research
Centre), who is as right-wing as Phillips but rather more shrewd, hastily took
her to task in his Daily Telegraph blog.
She was “unwise” not to realise that “friends of Israel must not dismiss” the
film:
… by humanising the former Shin Bet heads,
Moreh humanises Israel itself, opening up its security dilemmas to a more
nuanced understanding, in which the ground tone of tragedy is present while the
nonsense about “imperialism” is absent.
Phillips, Johnson accurately diagnosed, was in danger of
messing up this clever propaganda ploy by taking the film’s supposedly critical
stance at face value. And of course “tragedy” is a word commonly used by
Israel’s defenders to imply that Palestine’s woes result from some kind of
fatality, and not from purposeful political decisions on the part, precisely,
of imperialist politicians, generals, and Shin Bet Directors.
However, while this little contretemps on the right is amusing, the film’s reception among putative liberals with no overtly
Zionist axe to grind is far more instructive.
Philip French in The
Observer (in effect, the Sunday Guardian) is encouraged by “the
manifest decency and reasonableness of these six honest, articulate men…”, a
comment that some might find chilling given the atrocities these decent,
reasonable fellows have perpetrated. He refers to “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”, thus buying in to the standard liberal discourse
that the Israel/Palestine issue is a “conflict” between two “intransigent”
sides rather than a war of dispossession waged by a colonial regime, with full
backing from the imperial West, against the practically defenceless Palestinian
people. But then French also sees the “conflict” as “a war against terrorism”, so perhaps he’s not as liberal as all that.
Ian Dunt, editor of politics.co.uk and
an undoubted supporter of Palestinian rights, refers to “the murder of two terrorists” by Shin Bet after
the hi-jacking of an Israeli
bus in 1984. Were they “terrorists”? They didn’t
kill any of the passengers, and they released a pregnant woman who raised the
alarm about the hi-jack. Or were they “freedom fighters”? However one defines
these terms there’s no doubt that Dunt is adopting Israeli terminology. Of
course throughout
The Gatekeepers the
term “terrorists” and “terror”, referring exclusively to Palestinians, are used
repeatedly – with only Yuval Diskin (torturer-in-chief from 2005-2011)
expressing some qualifications (“one man’s terrorist…”).
Dunt opines that the sextet “have clear scars on their
conscience and clearly resent the insane, self-defeating hawkishness of
Israel's political class”. But if the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is correct
and Israel is
“a
mukhabarat state” (the
mukhabarat
are the secret police in Arab countries), “run by an all-pervasive bureaucracy
and ruled by military and security apparatuses”, then our six interviewees
themselves belong to “Israel’s political class” and have done their
considerable bit to perpetuate the hawkishness in question.
**********************
Here in Ireland, the programme booklet of the Irish Film Institute
(IFI) refers to the six ex-Directors as “wily old warriors” who are “humanised
by a recognition of the psychological and emotional toll of knowing you’ve
killed innocent people along with terrorist targets.”
It was Alan Johnson who claimed that “by humanising the former Shin Bet heads,
Moreh humanises Israel itself”. Thus the impeccably liberal, even lefty IFI
nods in agreement with the British ultra-Zionist rightist. This “humanisation”
entails commiserating with the pain of the murderer who knows he has “killed
innocent people”, while in reality the “guilt” or “innocence” of Israel’s
Palestinian victims is largely defined at the discretion of these same “wily
old warriors”.
Would similar interviews with my
hypothetical six Mafiosi not also
have humanised them, and by extension the Mafia itself? Or is it only Israeli
torturers whose humanisation somehow absolves both themselves and the rogue
state they serve? The Western political unconscious, rightly uneasy because of
Europe’s past persecution of its Jews, is always seeking alibis for Israel. That
this leads merely to another form of exceptionalism brings it under the
category of philo-Semitism (a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who
loves Jews).
Paul Whittington
in
the Irish Independent writes a remarkably subdued revue by the rabid standards
of that paper’s commentariat. Nonetheless, his language is also far from
neutral or objective. He refers slavishly to “Shin Bet and the Israeli army…
taking out terrorists from the air.” Note that “taking out resistance fighters
from the air” has a rather more unsavoury ring to it.
For Whittington the Shin Bet operatives’ willingness to
kill and torture Palestinians in the pursuit of expansionist Zionism is
translated into “
their absolutely unflinching
commitment to defend their country by all means necessary”, a phrase that could
have been dictated by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Shin Bet’s – and the
Israeli army’s – true responsibility is to inflict a reign of terror on the Palestinians
to ensure that, in the immortal words of General Moshe Dayan, they “will live like dogs and those who will leave, will leave.”
Donald
Clarke in the Irish Times cites a quotation once attributed to Orwell – “People
sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do
violence on their behalf” – and concludes that “the misquote gets at horrible
truths about the modern state and its enemies.” In this reading Israel, instead
of being a rogue state that serially violates international law, stands in for
“the modern state”, while the Palestinians represent “its enemies”. Ireland is
also a “modern state” (after all, our army is also designated
IDF), so presumably the Palestinians must be our enemies too.
“The six men”, he continues, “deserve more enthusiastic
congratulations for telling their grim stories.” Presumably, then, if Pinochet
had given us a bloodcurdling personal account of the crimes committed under his
dictatorship he would have “deserv[ed]… enthusiastic congratulations”? Surely
the stories in question are not merely “grim” but “criminal”? Once again it
appears that the Irish Times regards
Israeli criminality as something not deserving our opprobrium.
For the IFI and the reviewers, therefore, Israel is simply
a normal state that has had to resort to harsh measures in order to subdue its
enemies, not a rogue military state founded in the dispossession of the
Palestinians and committed by fair means or foul to completing that process. The Gatekeepers, far from being an
indictment of that dispossession and the persecution it entails, is a homage to
the humanity of “the wily warriors” of the Shin Bet who defend the “modern
state” – of Israel, but somehow also of the whole civilised world – and by
extension a homage to the humanity of Israel itself and consequently the
inhumanity of its victims.
A viewer who knew nothing about “the conflict” would
probably be persuaded by The Gatekeepers
that Israel is a criminal state that, in its present form, needs to be
disbanded. The film can only succeed as propaganda because its perspective has
already become the common currency of our liberal media and cultural
institutions.
