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Writer/director Dror Moreh’s film, The Human Factor, is a simultaneously riveting and illuminating examination of American foreign policy in the Middle East since the mid-1980s and through to the promise of the attempt summit at Camp David near the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure as president. This is simply an incredibly poignant and timely film that illustrates how this region has shaped American foreign policy for the better part of a quarter century.

The Human Factor is a look behind the curtain with those individuals within the United States government whose job it was to attempt to secure peace between Israel and its neighboring countries to establish a Palestinian homeland. But, what makes The Human Factor a more universal treatise on human nature is the approach it takes to the stance of learning from the mistakes of the past so that they are not perpetuated well into the future.

There’s a certain group of documentary-loving policy wonks who’ll be clamoring for “The Human Factor,” with its nostalgic spotlight on a time when the U.S. understood the value of international diplomacy (how quaint that now sounds!). For director Dror Moreh, making a film about the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations was a natural follow-up to his well-received “The Gatekeepers,” in which Israeli security agents spoke of their work and Moreh exposed conflicting rationales and troubling moral relativity. His latest documentary, while potentially more sellable, is far more problematic, on multiple fronts.

First, there’s his decision to see the conflict only through the eyes of six negotiators for the Americans, several of whom admit to a latent Israeli bias. Then there’s the problematic way Yasser Arafat is presented, depicted as usual as petulant and childish, with no recognition that his insistence on being treated with respect was at...