War has a way of testing a country’s commitment to civil liberties like nothing else. It’s easy to be high-minded when you’re Switzerland. But when terrorists are flying planes into your buildings, as the U.S. discovered after 9/11, the impulse to deny some suspects even the right to be brought before a judge, a core tenet of any fair legal system, can be powerful.

Israel has been at war since its birth. How its legal system measures up is the subject of a gripping new documentary, The Law in These Parts. Shot in a single room over nine days, the film draws its power not from interviews with Palestinians—that would be the predictable approach. Instead, director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz turns the camera on the military judges tasked with imposing order and meting out punishment in the West Bank and Gaza during more than 43 years of Israeli rule. Some are defensive about their role in the occupation, others proud. One judge admits knowing that interrogators were systematically beating the suspects. Overall, an uncomfortable truth emerges: while the judges had in mind a fair and lenient occupation, they ended up rubber-stamping measures that could not possibly square with international law—including land grabs, collective punishment, detention without trial, deportation, and torture.

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