The year’s most accomplished, and most important, films about war, terrorism, and geopolitics aren’t Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. They’re two modestly budgeted films from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. And, unlike their American counterparts, they’re not drawing on true stories for blockbuster entertainment. No, they are the thing itself: blistering documentaries about life and death, violence and oppression, and the struggle to remain human in unbearable conditions. 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers are morality tales, as much of a warning for gung-ho Americans of the potential costs of their military adventures as they are stark indictments of the Israeli occupation and its effects on Palestinian life.

Now, both 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers are nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, to be awarded this Sunday in Los Angeles. That two of the five films nominated in this category are highly critical of Israeli security policies—and the politicians who oversee them—reflects a stark change in Hollywood’s treatment of Israeli cinema. From 1964 through 2006, only six Israeli films were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and none won (a film must be first submitted; being a nominee in this category is the equivalent of being a finalist). During this time, Israel had a single documentary nominated for an Academy Award—The 81st Blow, a 1974 film about the oppression of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

That began to change in 2007, with the Foreign Language Film nomination of Beaufort, a tale of brotherhood and valor in the last days of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Beaufort was followed by Waltz with Bashir, a dark look at the trauma of IDF veterans who served in Lebanon and their complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. (Due to the Academy’s picayune rules, Waltz with Bashir, while ostensibly an animated documentary, was submitted under the category of Best Foreign Language Film.) In 2009, Ajami, a grim story about forbidden love and clan violence in Jaffa, was also a nominee. Co-directed by a Christian Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, the film represented a further victory for Israel’s progressive film industry.

But labeling these films as Israeli has proved problematic. In 2010, Scandar Copti, one of the directors of Ajami, strongly rejected the notion that he represented Israel: “The film technically represents Israel, but I don’t represent Israel. I cannot represent a country that does not represent me.” And more recently, Emad Burnat, the co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, objected to his film being called Israeli.

Burnat has a point. 5 Broken Cameras is almost entirely his production. He spent years filming the nonviolent protests in his village of Bil’in, where residents struggle with the encroachment of the separation barrier and the calving off of land for Israeli settlements. Burnat had some assistance from Israeli director Guy Davidi, but Burnat did the bulk of the cinematography, contributed the narration, and is the documentary’s star. It’s his story. And while the film received some government financing, Burnat isn’t an Israeli citizen; he’s a Palestinian living under Israeli military occupation. (Ajami also received some support from the Israeli government.)

The Academy doesn’t distinguish between nationalities for the documentary category, which is why two “Israeli” films can be nominated at once. But they are an important pairing—not the whole story of the occupation, but two essential pieces of it. With patience and steely determination, 5 Broken Cameras leads us through the daily humiliations of attacks from the army and settlers, night raids, the arrests of children, and the difficulty of staying nonviolent amidst an excruciating situation. We see the birth of Burnat’s son, Gibreel, and hear some of his first words: the Arabic terms for shells and soldiers.

The Gatekeepers, in turn, offers unprecedented admissions from six retired heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, all of whom issue startling critiques of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. “We are making the lives of millions unbearable,” says Carmi Gillon, who also relates his pain at failing to protect Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from a right-wing Jewish assassin. “Suddenly it becomes a kind of conveyor belt,” says Ami Ayalon, about the practice of targeted assassinations. At the end of the movie, he laments, “We win every battle, but we lose the war”—words that highlight the ultimate futility of what one former Shin Bet chief calls “tactics without strategy.” All of these men, including the iron-fisted Avraham Shalom, advocate negotiating with enemies, from Hamas to Ahmadinejad.

These films, too, represent a kind of negotiation, one that would have us move beyond antique binaries of victimhood and victory. By nominating 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers, the Academy is spurring a dialogue that started only after decades of laureled films about European Jewish survival and Israeli might. These are much different movies than Exodus, Schindler’s List, or Munich. They’re about guilt, justice, dignity, and the limits of violence; they’re about the long hangover of war and the mature demands of statehood. Kathryn Bigelow, who calls herself a “lifelong pacifist” while in the same breath praising the bravery of those prosecuting the war on terror, would do well to watch.

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Beyond Nepotism

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The 2013 Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, and two films about Israel garnered Best Documentary nominations. The Gatekeepers, which features frank testimony from former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence bureau, and 5 Broken Cameras, a film shot by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat documenting protests against a separation fence built in his village, will both be up for the Oscar.

In December, Danielle Wiener-Bronner wrote about her experience watching The Gatekeepers, a somber film featuring candid discussion about the subjects’ involvement in past intelligence operations and thoughts looking forward:

The Gatekeepers, while certainly not optimistic, is also not a hopeless film. The men, who approach their histories with surprising frankness, seem to be thirsting for peace. It’s easy to see them as mouthpieces for the majority of the region’s people—sick of war, sick of needless death, sick of struggling with their conscience at every turn. They seem about ready to reject the complexities of their past for a simple future, one unencumbered by history. They might not believe that it will happen, but they want it to, and we are left feeling that, maybe, it’s the only way to start.

Over at the Scroll, Rikki Novetsky wrote about 5 Broken Cameras, which was co-produced by Burnat and Israeli documentary filmmaker Guy Davidi:

Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras is a 2011 film that chronicles peaceful Palestinian resistance in the Arab West Bank village, Bil’in. Viewers are taken behind the camera of Palestinian villager Emad. Throughout the film, five of Emad’s cameras are smashed by the IDF, yet he continues to record the countless arrests and raids that affect his friends and family.

See the full list of 2013 nominations here.

Related: From Unyielding Cameraman, an Acclaimed Film [NYT] Israeli Documentaries Make Oscar Shortlist [The Scroll] Previous: How I Felt Watching the Israeli Documentary ‘The Gatekeepers’

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The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was assigned two books that I ended up reading during our annual family trip to Israel. One was Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. The other was Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. The contrast between them, and the fact that this stint in Israel was, for reasons I can’t exactly remember, particularly unpleasant, was painful. Franklin’s existence seemed so quaint, his America so effortlessly unencumbered by history. I don’t remember much about the book, but I do remember Franklin outlining his preferred daily routine (early rising was recommended) and detailing the establishment of the lending library. The Case for Israel, on the other hand, I recall as a sad, shrill, unapologetically aggressive defense of the country’s right to exist. It struck me that summer that most Americans got to read the Franklin book and not know about the other, and that they had the luxury of patriotism to a single, simple place, which counted among its founding fathers a rather chummy gentleman who invented bifocals.

Watching The Gatekeepers, Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh’s spare but devastating documentary about six former heads of Israel’s intelligence bureau, the Shin Bet, I felt again that same sinking, reflexive loyalty to the Jewish state. Moreh’s film features a series of fairly candid conversations (they appear as monologues, but Moreh’s often heated interjections remind us that he is guiding their reflections,) with roughly 20 years’ worth of intelligence leaders. Each faces the camera openly and, nearly immediately, begins to tell of the moral ambiguity that characterized his time in the service. They all talk about their doubts, their regrets, and, perhaps most potently, their fears for the future. Their Israel lines up well with Dershowitz’s—a country in which triumphs are never unequivocally good, and tragedies foreshadow a darker tomorrow.

There’s one scene in particular that brought me back to the Dershowitz/Franklin summer. One of the leaders, in recounting the Shin Bet’s early investigations into Jewish right-wing extremist factions, mentioned that the bureau was shocked to find that they didn’t have any files started on the fanatic groups. That is, they didn’t have any files on Jews, at all. Which is, at worst, arrogant and short-sighted and possibly xenophobic, and, at best, naïve and short-sighted and tragically idealistic.

It is this idealism that makes it so hard for me give up on the State of Israel. Yuval Diskin talks about growing up on a kibbutz, describing a charming period when the state was young enough to be hopeful, and when the idyllic society that Israel was designed to be was seemingly fulfilling Herzl’s dictum. It becomes increasingly clear throughout the course of the film that their fight was not just for land and not just for safety, but for the protection of this wild, incredibly reckless dream that had somehow become a reality. And what all these powerful men seemed afraid to say was that this faulty experiment in a truly utopian state has been horribly, violently failing.

But perhaps I judge too quickly. Unlike the United States and most other countries, Israel does not have the luxury of time. Those of us who call America our home need to reach back to 1776 in order to find the passion that fueled our genesis, Israelis need look only as far as 1948. And the losses we recall by nation-wide sales and barbecues they honor with a nation-wide moment of silence, because war—ubiquitous, home-based war—is not a distant memory. The Israel/Palestine region is in rapid development, housing one people so alienated from their historical ties to the land that they seem to be rushing in leaps and bounds to make up for lost time, and one people who, because of the intersections of politics and tragedy and fate history doles out so carelessly, is limping along beside them. Generally, discussion surrounding the ramifications of Israeli historical roots refer to three points in time—when God promised the Jews a land in Canaan, when the British swept aside the Palestinian people and established a Jewish state, and when, nearly 20 years later, the lines between the Jews and Palestinians got redrawn. But history existed before and beyond these moments: The histories of colonization and oppression and injustice that are too far removed, and too common, to mean anything today. But maybe they should.

The Gatekeepers, while certainly not optimistic, is also not a hopeless film. The men, who approach their histories with surprising frankness, seem to be thirsting for peace. It’s easy to see them as mouthpieces for the majority of the region’s people—sick of war, sick of needless death, sick of struggling with their conscience at every turn. They seem about ready to reject the complexities of their past for a simple future, one unencumbered by history. They might not believe that it will happen, but they want it to, and we are left feeling that, maybe, it’s the only way to start.

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