Last week on Veteran’s Day, as I was meditating on the deep sacrifices our country asks of its military families, I came across a documentary called The Gatekeepers.

I’d read about the film when it came out and was reminded of it again at this year’s Academy Awards as one of the nominees in the “Documentary (Feature)” category, but it wasn’t until last Monday that time and opportunity coincided, and I sat down to watch it.

The Israeli director of the film, Dror Moreh, inspired by Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War, conducted interviews with six former directors of Israel’s Shin Bet, the ultra-secret internal security service. The questions were hard-hitting and direct: was the country safer for their efforts? Were their tactics, which included brutal interrogations, high-tech surveillance, and targeted assassinations, morally justified? Now that they were retired, how did they feel about themselves and the enemies they’d spent their careers fighting? What were the country’s long-term prospects for peace?

That one former director of Shin Bet would speak publicly about the agency was virtually unprecedented; having six of them talk with complete candor was an invitation for the entire country to wrestle with its demons.

Imagine gathering all the living former CIA, FBI, and NSA directors, and asking them pointed questions, on camera, about the internal struggles during their tenure: the public and private failures; the political infighting; and above all, the moral dimension of their operations!

While The Gatekeepers focuses on the flashpoints of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict of the past thirty years, it also casts on unblinking eye on the foundations of the Shin Bet, which came into existence with Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948.

The agency’s history is a mirror of the country’s history. Israel has been locked in a struggle for its existence from the start. In the early years, the existential threat was primarily the combined might of its Arab neighbors. But once Israel demonstrated its military superiority — with the massive support and technical assistance of the United States — the Shin Bet turned its attention more and more to the enemies within: focusing first, and foremost, on a rebellious, oppressed, and deliberately dead-ended Palestinian population; and then, as Israel’s demographics changed and the religious Right gained political power, on Jewish factions that saw violence as the only means to rid the Holy Land of the “Infidel.”

If some of this sounds familiar — a seemingly endless “war on terror;” an increasingly divided, and dangerous, domestic population; morally dubious, but effective tactics like drone strikes and “surgical bombing” — it should. The questions that have proven so intractable in Israel have stark similarities to those facing the United States. How do you fight wars against insurgencies and stateless jihadists? Is torture justifiable? To what degree should citizens be willing to sacrifice privacy in the name of security? Is it even possible to negotiate with “terrorists?”

The answers of these former Shin Bet directors may surprise you. These are not weak men. Every one of them started as a foot soldier or field operative and rose through the ranks by proving their willingness to kill. These are fierce patriots who decided early in their careers that the spilling of enemy blood was not only justified, but essential to defend their beloved country.

And yet.

To a man, they despair of Israel’s political leadership, which, in their eyes, hasn’t been serious about negotiating peace with the Palestinians since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Like the CIA or the FBI, the Shin Bet serves at the pleasure of the country’s chief executive. Theirs isn’t a political role; the opinion of the directors as to the virtue of a particular operation isn’t of great interest to the Prime Minister. It’s their job to provide security assessments and tactical options, and then to follow through on their orders. In the absence of a Prime Minister who believes in peace, the military will simply keep fighting.

And what of Israel’s long-term prospects, failing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state? The former directors are united in their pessimism on this point. There will be no lasting peace until a political solution emerges.

From time to time, the film invites viewers to set aside the big picture for a moment, and dwell on the terrible things that defending a country can require of its citizens. These are philosophical men, men of conscience. The Gatekeepers reminds us of the heavy burden of violence imposed by both terrorism and counter-terrorism, no matter the side, no matter the moral calculus.

Haunted by what they did in the name of freedom, exhausted by the deadly cycle of violence in their beloved country, these men are unanimous in at least one judgment: you can’t bomb your way to peace.