Goodwill hunting: "The Human Factor"

The Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh is shaping up to be a single-issue filmmaker, though that's not at all meant as a criticism. For one thing, the issue in question - the Arab/Israeli conflict - keeps inviting examination: less than a century old yet seemingly ageless, an ongoing expression of some essential rift in the heart of man. As a never wearier Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) sighed, in one of the West Wing episodes directly inspired by The Human Factor's historical reality, "It's tribal. It can't be solved. It's Hatfields and McCoys, and there is no end." We might follow that line of thought back further still: it's Cain and Abel, the left hand against the right, two brothers who can't occupy the same room without threatening one another's safety and the stability of the house entire. Moreh's interest lies with those grown-ups who've been given the grave responsibility of trying to calm and tidy up this situation. In 2013's Oscar-nominated The Gatekeepers, he took an unusual route into this donnybrook, interviewing bulletheaded former employees of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, who had a clear bead on the failings of their government's domestic policy. In this follow-up, Moreh hones in on that post-Cold War moment when the United States, as the last superpower standing, came as close as anyone to finding some form of accord between the factions, then led by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. The thrill of getting the inside line on top-table negotiations gradually subsides, replaced by a rueful mood that will only be heightened for viewers who've been keeping an eye on the news this past fortnight. Moreh recognises, as President Clinton did before him, that all parties really came nowhere near close enough. There's unfinished business here, and - as per tired old Toby - apparently no end in sight.

The 108 minutes of Moreh's film are composed largely of talking heads - belonging to six of the mediators involved - yet as in The Gatekeepers, the director's flinty questioning prompts his subjects to relitigate the past with candour, safe in the knowledge that time has passed, both Rabin and Arafat have gone to their graves, and that they'll have more eyes on them here than any memoir would likely attract. Their collective testimony leaves us in no doubt as to the difficulty of achieving their aim. Clinton's team had to constantly tiptoe around all of the following: Israel's reluctance to acknowledge the PLO, suspicious third parties (chiefly Syria), terror attacks by aggrieved extremists that threatened to derail the talks, even the changeability of language. As one mediator points out, for Israel, the word "future" implied drawing a line under the past and moving on, while for the Palestinian delegation, "future" meant addressing - and redressing the imbalances of - exactly that same shared past. We get a sense that the Clinton team entered into this process with a (possibly not untypical) mixture of altruism and self-interest. For them, the Middle East was a Good Will Hunting-style maths problem to be solved, with a Nobel Prize waiting beyond the finish line, although there was equally hope that tamping down the violence over there might lead to a comparable reduction on the homefront. As Rabin vowed, when the three parties triangulated on the White House lawn in the wake of the first Oslo agreement: "Enough of blood and tears". Instead, alas, it was the 21st century - merciless and more divisive yet - which lay in wait for those who survived that far.

That's the bigger picture here - big enough for 200 movies, if Moreh had the time and inclination to make them. Yet it's the minutiae - the human factor of the title - which draws us in: the team schooling Clinton in how to avoid being kissed by Arafat, lest he be perceived by the Israelis as a soft touch (you can only wonder why he wasn't coached to keep his interns at arm's length); Arafat sitting transfixed on the sofa before an episode of The Golden Girls; the pair of them appearing visibly hurt at press conferences called in the wake of Rabin's assassination by an ultranationalist nutjob in 1995. Then, too, there is the human factor of the mediators, obliged by this process to wrestle with their own Jewishness, and - in the years since the collapse of the peace talks - with everything they could have said and done. Between their insights, a small VFX team work sensitive wonders to bring photographs of these meetings to two-and-a-half-D life. They succeed in getting us closer to three very distinct personalities (four, when Netanyahu finally enters the frame); we get a feel for the ambience of and camaraderie in any given room, but also telltale shifts in body language (note how tired the once-genial, can-do Clinton gets over eight years) and the bodyblows when they start to land. Moreh is under no illusion: the failure of this generation to bring about peace in the Middle East was a tragedy, and one that has only made things worse in the intervening years. (An abrupt coda sees the future - however one might define it - rushing in; the film doesn't conclude so much as duck and cover, holding agonised head in hands.) Yet his interviewees, at least, seem to look back on it as a teachable moment. Dig away at the rubble, as Moreh does here, and alongside the blood and tears, there survives a lesson in what talk can achieve that rockets can't - and why it's more important than ever for us to try and find common ground.

The Human Factor is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Prime Video and Dogwoof on Demand.