The Limits of Self-Criticism: Israel’s Oscar-Nominated The Gatekeepers
I wasn’t going to see The Gatekeepers — the Israeli film nominated for this year’s best feature length documentary Oscar. Its subject — a series of supposedly self-critical interviews with former chiefs of the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI) concerning their experiences dealing with Palestinian terrorism — did not appeal to me.
I am not keen on self-flagellation and I suspected the film would be filled with liberal cant. Furthermore, and I know some people will find this insulting, I am not a fan of the documentary form in general. I think it is quite often dishonest, pretending to deliver facts, when, edited by biased humans, it is almost always a reflection of the views of the filmmakers and nothing more. The vaunted French cinéma verité or “direct cinema” is only the most salient example of the pretentiousness of the ideal of documentaries as being impartial and “documentary.”
Of course, I am over-stating a bit. I have admired many documentaries — of recent years Crumb and Hoop Dreams — but perhaps because they reflect my biases. To be more precise, I don’t look to documentaries to reveal the truth. I find more truth in fictional films, because they are more honestly fictional.
Nevertheless, when, as an Academy voter, I received a DVD of The Gatekeepers in the mail (this year, for the first time, the Academy sent all nominated documentaries to its members), I could not resist slipping it into my player and watched with considerable interest.
Two things became immediately clear: The film, as I had heard, was well made. Its director, Dror Moreh — with the exception of some needless computer razzle-dazzle — had done a fine job. Secondly, it was filled with the predicted liberal cant, an example being how the film was divided into chapters with titles like “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
The problem was those titles were excerpted from the narratives of the individual Shin Bet directors, but stripped of their context, in some cases egregiously, and also of their irony. Like many documentaries, The Gatekeepers is selective in its editing and its juxtapositions.
Not having seen the film, I expect that your review is quite accurate. A good book, written by Amos Oz, is “Land of the Hart” in which the lefty author interviews a bunch of crusty old Israelis. These include some intelligence types whose answers were very salty and straightforward. Israel has lost a lot of that over the years as it has entered the modern consumerist phase and become much more superficial.
This is why I think perhaps loyal Israeli citizens (like I try to be) should support the boycott of Israeli artists, books, films, and to some extent academics. These people are no friends of ours.
Support Israel! Buy our oranges and cosmetics! Ignore our movies!
P.S. It is a sad note that some of the main proponents of an academic boycott are themselves Israeli professors. Commit treason, and you have legal protection. Question that a homosexual couple might be good parents, and you’re out on your ear.
Actually, oranges and cosmetics are a tiny fraction of Israel’s exports, half of which are categorized as “high-tech”. Israel’s exports for software alone are roughly *ten times* those of agricultural products. What we as consumers can buy is rather limited – wines, hand creams, a few specialty items at Trader Joe’s, etc.
That’s what makes “boycotts” so easy, yet so futile, for the BDS crowd. They can make a big deal about a chocolate shop in Australia, an Ahava store in London, or a store in Montreal selling Israeli-made shoes, but can’t do a damn thing about the scanners and diagnostic tools in their local hospital, the chips in their PCs and smart-phones, the irrigation equipment used by farmers growing their food, the monitoring technology used by their power company, or the defense equipment used by their military. Nor have they had any impact on the multi-billion dollar trade being conducted by Israel with India, China and others in Asia. Even boycott-prone Norway can’t help buying more from Israel than it sells to Israel.
I am well aware as I am now sitting here in Israel supporting software for some small American phone companies. It did, unfortunately, hurt business in the territories, where the business is often agricultural (and, of course, gives work to Palestinian Arabs). When I first heard this my thought was, “You mean they won’t buy from Puerto Rico, Guam or CNMI (the latter two are ironically where some of our clients are located) – not to mention Washington, DC”?
Most of the boycotters couldn’t tell you where or what the CNMI is.
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Why cannot the in the now terrorist minded become your freedom fighters ye with little faith ? as holy opens up the change direction in their 5 times a day prayers. these praying people to the True God who would be more faithful,loyal and help drive out the disgusting thing that causes desolation as spoken of by Daniel the prophet in Babylon?
Israel needs to keep the free expression channels wide open. The proof is in what Israel manages to accomplish given it’s difficult situation. When Israel does something, it works. A small country with a politically diverse population could not come together otherwise.
Stifiling opinion does not lead to prosperity or political stability, quite the opposite.
A great example in the recent news from the ever entertaining Iran. They just made a big hoopla about a new stealth jet which it turns out is a total fake. You could not get away with this stuff in a country with free media and expression. The population would boot you from office for sheer stupidity.
Just looking at this thing you can see that it is not real. Even the Space Monkey story is more credible.
http://www.businessinsider.com/irans-new-qaher-313-new-stealth-jet-cant-fly-2013-2?op=1
Depends which opinions. Left-wing opinions and treason are tolerated a lot more than right-wing ones.
What is “left-wing”, and what is “right-wing”, is itself an opinion; and about this opinion there is very little tolerance, even from those who would benefit from more tolerance.
That makes no sense.
If you compomise security it’s OK, but criticize the left-wing Supreme Court or oppose throwing Jews out of their homes, and (if you are prominent enough, not just some blog commenter) you may find yourself reminded of certain interesting laws or even tried.
Here’s left to right in terms of US economic policy.
The attitudes toward Jews and Israel among the US population correlate closely with the perspective on economic policy.
I was, of course, using American terminology; in Israel “right” and “left” are never used for religion, since the religious right is somewhat more pacifist than the religious left. (Only somewhat – we aren’t stupid and we don’t have Stockholm Syndrome.) It is interesting, in spite of the fact that supply-side economics brought us from a third-world status to a first-world, that in the Knesset they are still debating capitalism versus socialism.
Who wants to see Demon possessed Babylon fall? Do that next year(joke)Just a little holy place , that increase the faith of the believers no unclean thing can enter for heaven gives proof come down to the earth
Israel IS a ” light unto the nations. ”
It’s not our fault they refuse to open their
eyes.
Why was the Holy Temple of God taken away from the Jews?
Saint Paul Romans 11
25 I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, 26 and in this way[e] all Israel will be saved. As it is written:
“The deliverer will come from Zion;
he will turn godlessness away from Jacob.
27 And this is[f] my covenant with them
when I take away their sins.”[g]
How do you take godlessness away ? You hear the voice of God like Abraham and Moses
How do you take sin away? How do you keep your innocence before God? I could NEVER slice the throat of an animal and if God commanded me to I would abandon my innocence because i see the animal a child. So this time in the holy temple of God proof in the eyes of the priest the animal did not die but heaven on the earth at the temple where the animal lives proving God is Eternal and Heaven is eternal.
And proving sin causes our death not sacrifice of a child animal to God . The child lives!
Hope you get better real soon.
Well, it is true one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter… in their own minds.
But then there is a higher and impartial overview that suggests a partisan fighting off invaders is not the same as a partisan whose culture invaded, was thrown back, and then came under the occupation of the invaded. Were their Nazi “freedom fighters” in Berlin under the Soviets? The analogy is imperfect, but in such a scenario a certain amount of responsibility and self-criticism must accompany the bitterness of occupation.
Did West Bank Arabs beg Jordan to not allow Egyptian tanks into their country in the name of peace? Did they try and reason with Nasser to leave the Straits of Tiran alone? Those are not fake questions, but real ones, and directly to the point.
And that’s the crux of the cultural differences here and the imperatives each culture draws upon. You would indeed never find six Muslim security men who expressed moral self-doubt publicly. They would be ostracized or even assassinated.
Within Islam, on a media and institutional level, it seems Islam is never wrong. These cultures lack a tradition which encourages self-criticism and so there are no cultural tools to question, to challenge one’s own perceptions, to escape perceptual traps, or make simple moral comparisons. There is only a side, and it is always the right one, no matter how much history and events have to be altered to turn failure into a victory one names overpasses, public squares and museums after.
There is often a not so subtle difference between delusion, self-righteousness, moral posturing and actual facts. But within Islamic Middle Eastern cultures, those differences are often reduced to a subtlety so fine as to be non-existent.
Americans will make documentaries about the Trail of Tears for example. The politically correct oppressed will also make documentaries about the Trail of Tears, that happened to them, but not about what tears they themselves wrenched from another culture. This is an essential and crucial difference between pragmatic and truth concerned cultures and cultures that hold blame, excuses and one-sided narratives close to their breasts. It’s why the black political Left never shuts up about white men who bought slaves, while remaining almost completely silent, and even insulted, over the subject of who captured and sold those slaves in the first place. There’s no right and wrong invoked there, no principle, just decontextualized particulars that amount to a lie.
It’s one reason why the political Left is empty, and why the Palestinian Arabs are true children of the political Left. The other reason is the default morality of failure, and immorality of success the Left loves to advance in their childish narratives. “I surrender,” “I give up,” “I was wrong,” are not phrases high on the list of a situation even the haughty Empire of Japan endured to set their steps into a brighter future.
Well said.
I wonder if these film makers ever thought what it would be like without men like these? Could they make films like these under Sharia law?
For Raymond in DC and others here’s a video of Israeli innovation that cannot be boycotted.
http://youtu.be/IfJemqkby_0
which can best be described as, “Operation rooms as we know them might not be needed any longer … sometime in the not too distant future”.
Very nice. I hope this technology gets developed sonn; I know plenty of people who could use it. (The Technion is at the other end of my neighborhood, and most of my colleagues here studied there.)
Focused therapeutic ultrasound has been around for a while, it generated a lot of interest in the US around ten years ago but is not much in general use at this time. This company is trying to refine the technology.
Basically you are talking about certain techiques to destroy tissue without surgery. Ultrasound (high frequency sound waves) as a diagnostic tool we are familiar with. For imaging purposes it produces negligible heat or tissue disruption. So safe we use it in pregancy without any concern, we do limit higher power pulsed Doppler. Sound is a mechanical force so you can create heat if you give more of it. In focused ultrasound you can disrupt cellular function without the heat of RF ablation or freezing Cyroablation both of which require more invasive procedures. Another technique is to disrupt blood supply selectively by running a catheter and putting coils to cut off circulation to the tissue. All of these have trade off in risk/benefit, outcome, and patient discomfort.
Focused ultrasound means you need an apparatus capable of highly focusing the beam on the target, uterine fibroids are the most common target we are talking about. Then you need to couple that with imaging to exactly focus the beam working together with the images generated, not as easy as it sounds. MRI and ultrasound are not at all the same.
Radiation Oncolgy is basically the science and art of identifying the target and focusing the radiation beam on it without hurting the surrounding tissue. They are the snipers of medicine. They are the most exacting people I work with. This is something like that.
After that you need to show better outcomes for patients vs existing technology. What these folks are trying to do is produce an integrated system which can work with your existing MRI and zap those fibroids or bone metastasis. A bold and awesome project.
Kol Ha’kavod. This looks promising.
Maybe someone can enlighten me here.
It seems to me that Jews tend to have an unusually strong sense of collective guilt — and in addition, a tendency to hold themselves (or more precisely, their people) to higher standards than they hold other peoples.
(Note that what I am inclined to think, is exactly the opposite of what antisemites think.)
Having read the Torah, though only once, I think I see a basis for this.
Am I wrong? probably, but how much?
That sounds more like Stockholm syndrome than anything in Judaism, which is why you will find this more common among the assimilated. (There are exceptions, though, rather surprising ones, where the religion does come into play.)
However, we generally consider attempts by others to hold us to a higher standard than they hold themselves to as anti-semitic. One recalls Gahndi’s call for the Jews to kill themselves.
Is it really moral to endanger your own children to protect enemy civilians, just because your children are wearing uniforms? Or is it a sort of anti-morality?
“we generally consider attempts by others to hold us to a higher standard than they hold themselves to as anti-semitic.”
This is eminently reasonable.
However I do not quite understand how your reply relates to what I wrote … but if you are writing from Israel, I make allowances for the late hour; and actually it’s late for me as well: I’m in the same time zone.
Collective guilt comes from idenitfying with one’s persecutor. Also, Judaism, going back to when the world was pagan, was always based on the assumption that it was possible to be right when everyone else disagreed. A lot of people can’t hold up under the pressure.
In the days of the Romans they throught we were weird because we thought there was somethign wrong with infanticide; now they think it because we think men shouldn’t be fooling around with each other.
Jews talk in questions. it’s what we do. even those who for their own strange reasons don’t want to sound as if they might possibly mayhaps be a Jew. indeed, if it doesn’t come out in their speech it does in their thought balloons.
Exactly. “It comes out in their thought balloons.” And the anti-Semites they worry about identifying them do anyhow.
I was once on a flight from San Jose to Ontario, CA. On the way to a tennis fix in the desert. There was a well-heeled Jew-hater in a seat near the back of the plane, which was nearly full when I got on. I naturally looked at the seat – it was one of two or three left. He shot me a glare of pure hatred. I wondered if I might be paranoid. I took another seat. A Danish-American, or maybe a Swede, took the seat next to this guy. Apparently the sight of me triggered something uncontrollable in him. He began a series of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish commentaries that continued for the duration of the one-hour flight. He was certainly a pseudo-leftist, going on and on about how the US would be loved in the world if not for its support of ‘one country’, and he delved into religious matters as well. Finally, I started to look at him, and the glares continued. When it was time to de-board, I just kept my eyes on him, nothing more. It was clear he yearned to attack me.
Might as well just talk in questions. Those obsessed with Jews will ID us quickly enough.
Grow a set will ya.
You never fail to disappoint. This is obviously your response to my criticism of your criticism of Simon on Schumer etc.
I’ll keep that in mind, living right on the Lebanon border beneath the fortresses of the Hizbollah, while you, a New Yorker living part-time in Jerusalem, gives me manly instruction.,.
It’s also the way the Talmud is written.
So what is so strange about talking in questions? We can have whole conversations in questions.
A man who has finally made it in business treats himself to a new Lamborghini. After buying it, he feels guilty so he goes to the Orthodox Rabbi and asks for a mezuzah for the Lamborghini.
“You want a mezuzah for what?” the Rabbi asks.
“It’s a Lamborghini,”
“What’s a Lamborghini?” asks the Rabbi.
“A sports car.”
“What? That’s blasphemy!” the Rabbi shouts. “You want a mezuzah for a sports car? Go to the Conservatives!”
Well, the man is disappointed, but goes to the Conservative Rabbi and asks for a mezuzah.
“You want a mezuzah for what?” the Rabbi asks.
“For my Lamborghini”, the man replies.
“What’s a Lamborghini?” asks the Rabbi.
“A car, a sports car.”
“What kind of sports car?” asks the Rabbi.
“Italian.”
“What? That is blasphemy!” the Rabbi shouts. “You want a mezuzah for a Goyishe car? Go to the Reform!”
Again, the man feels guilty and disappointed, but goes to the Reform Rabbi.
“Rabbi,” he asks, “I’d like a mezuzah for my Lamborghini.”
“You have a Lamborghini?” asks the Rabbi.
“You know what it is?” says the man.
“Of course! It’s a fantastic Italian sports car. What’s a mezuzah?”
You are a credit to the writing profession, Mr. Simon. I love Israel not because she’s perfect but because she’s true. I get that sense from your article. Thank you for that.