Six smart, tough guys, tightly framed and talking to the camera: Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh’s compelling Oscar-nominated doc “The Gatekeepers” gives the voice of experience a human face.

Moreh’s subjects are all former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s anti-terrorist internal security agency. Given that they successively ran the Shin Bet from 1980 to 2011, these men are steeped in intelligence. They know where the bodies are buried and there’s a practiced pragmatism in the way that they handle Moreh’s often blunt, sometimes Talmudic questions. “With terrorism there are no morals,” one tells him. Indeed, the interviews are punctuated with harrowing footage of suicide-bombed buses, decimated Gaza neighborhoods, and violent demonstrations — both Palestinian and Israeli.

“The Gatekeepers” has been compared to “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’s feature-length interview with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, but — although similarly ascetic — it’s less a study in individual than national psychology. “We’ve become,” one says of his countrymen, pausing to find the best word, “cruel.” All six men are critical, if not contemptuous, of Israeli politicians, although several entered politics after leaving the Shin Bet. All six stake out positions as proud professionals (causing some leftist critics to call the movie a whitewash). Most take pride in their “clean” ops (assassinating a terrorist without collateral damage), if some of the six now question the use-value of targeted killings.

According to the New York Times, “The Gatekeepers” has been highly praised but little seen in Israel — a fact that dovetails with the sextet’s uniform pessimism regarding the future. The six Shin Betniks speak more in sorrow than anger. “We win every victory but we lose the war.” None is a Jeremiah and none sees any alternative to the apparently endless Israeli-Palestinian war other than a two-state solution.

Remarkably, “The Gatekeepers” is one of two Israeli documentaries to have received an Oscar nomination; the other, which depicts the occupied West Bank from a Palestinian point of view, is “Five Broken Cameras.” The similarity in subject matter makes it unlikely that either will win; it would be a small but symbolic step towards reconciliation if they somehow shared the award.

Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal.