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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In the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, text flashes onto the screen: “1858. Two years before the Civil War.” Tarantino has not only given us the year, but also added its relation to an monumentally important event in American history. He assumed, perhaps correctly, that this chronological hand-holding was necessary to adequately situate the film for viewers. Of course, it’s appropriate that it’s Tarantino, whose fidelity to history is nonexistent, who offers this curiously didactic moment.

This week—after celebrating a holiday that often displays only a dim relationship to its historical inspiration—many American families will go to the movies. And many of them will, in turn, see a movie that dramatizes a particular moment in American history—Lincoln, Django Unchained, or Zero Dark Thirty. Ever since Lincoln’s debut in early October, much ink has been spilled about the film’s purported accuracy and whether it appropriately dramatizes the effort to end slavery. Similar debates have followed the release of Django and Zero Dark Thirty, each of which, to varying degrees, relies on the audience’s built-in historical knowledge to tell a particular kind of story.

A great deal seems to be at stake in these arguments, not least because, for many Americans, big-budget cinema is one of the primary ways to absorb history. How many holiday movie-goers will have read Mark Owen’s No Easy Day—an account of the bin Laden raid from one of the members of the SEAL team involved—or Mark Bowden’s The Finish? Or Doris Kearns Godwin’s Team of Rivals, which Steven Spielberg drew on for his Lincoln biopic? All of these books are bestsellers and claim some expertise in their field (though you can find worthy critics of each), but none will ever have the reach, the low barrier to entry, or the hold on the public imagination that these two-hour, forty-foot high entertainments do. Despite whatever challenges mainstream Hollywood filmmaking may face, it still remains the greatest force for distributing this kind of content, and indeed these versions of our national history, to the public.

The critics of these films are more often right than they are wrong (Eric Foner’s letter to the New York Times is a particular treat), but they also proceed from a flawed premise. It seems misguided, if not naïve, that we should continue, year after year, to expect fine-grained accuracy on the big screen, that Hollywood will subordinate dramatic possibility (or the opinions of focus groups) to picayune details of the historical record. These are spectacles, mass culture on the largest scale, and we are long past the point where even the manipulative possibilities of documentaries—and reality television, for that matter—are widely understood. We should know better and adjust our outrage-meters accordingly.

Instead, what is most revealing about these films is our practically carnal appetite to see history writ large and to arbitrate the film’s treatment of this history. (Every movie-going group has at least one person whose first post-film response is to point out some inaccuracy.) Filmmakers play off of this desire as well. They buy into the discourse of authenticity and accuracy. They make heavy use of academics and expert sources, they pay homage to their source materials. In interviews, they speak of the historical personages in the present tense, as if they know them deeply. They talk about the hardships and sacrifices of their subjects.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, they trumpet access to members of the intelligence community and the Obama administration (access which has proven controversial). With an event like the bin Laden raid, initially so highly secretive, with the dissemination of information cleverly stage-managed, the filmmakers can claim an authority that perhaps surpasses that of former SEAL Mark Owen, with his ground-level view. And given that this is a recent affair, the first books on the subject having appeared in the last few months, there’s a fresh-off-the-presses air to this film. Commentators and Kathryn Bigelow herself have compared the film to a piece of journalism. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Zero Dark Thirty is positioning itself as the work of a reporter embedded at the most covert levels; this film is the exclusive.

It’s in the interest of these movies to never quite settle the question over their accuracy. They’re better off when adhering closely to the historical record but also leaving some wiggle room. Otherwise, we would have little to debate; controversy surrounding a new movie generates easy copy. But whether Zero Dark Thirty promotes the incorrect view that torture yielded intelligence that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout is ultimately less important than what this argument reveals about how an “accepted” historical narrative is created. (And as a friend of mine commented, it’s odd that Bigelow is seemingly receiving more flack for her dramatization of torture than the Bush administration did for actually ordering and countenancing torture.)

No, what these films reveal most are our fears about our society’s historical literacy, that these mass entertainments must be counted on to give us a true vision of who we are. Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir may have said it best when he remarked, “for Tarantino, history is just another movie to strip for parts.” With Django, it’s easy to conclude that the antebellum South just provides a useful thematic backdrop and moral structure for a particular kind of revenge-driven gore-fest. The movie is a fantasy from first to last, with anachronisms and disturbing liberties taken throughout (mandingo fighting). In this sense, Tarantino isn’t the greatest violator of the historical record. Among this season’s directors, he’s simply the most honest.

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