It has been 14 years since Louis Theroux made a documentary about Jewish settlers, and now he is back with another. His 2011 film The Ultra Zionists was praised by some and criticised by others. “No piece of coverage will please everyone,” he wrote about his new film, Louis Theroux: The Settlers (BBC2). “I trust my instincts. I accept mine is just one contribution in the vast offering of coverage.”
If the settlers we met here were wary of Theroux returning with his signature faux naivety, it didn’t show. He was welcomed into their homes in the West Bank, some still only half-built, and given access to people who didn’t hesitate to say exactly what they believed. “I believe that Gaza is ours and we need to be living there,” said one young woman at a fête to promote the establishment of new Jewish outposts.
It opened with a scene inside a man’s home where Theroux referred to Palestinian territories. His host replied that while Theroux and others might call them the Palestinian territories, “I call it the heart of Judaea.” What was crystal clear was that his main interviewees thought they had an absolute right to live there. “We were in this land planting vineyards before Mohammed was in the third grade,” one said.
At one point Theroux’s crew were told to stop filming at a meeting to discuss plans for new Gazan settlements, which they did. But not before they had filmed a rabbi, according to the subtitled translation, saying that Lebanon should be “cleansed of these camel riders”.
As the film progressed Theroux’s familiar furrowed-brow hangdog expression became ever more pronounced. His laid-back style, however, remained intact, except when an IDF soldier who had hitherto been quite friendly seized his arm near a military checkpoint and said, “Come with me,” as if he might arrest him. “No, no, no, don’t touch me,” Theroux said. But even then his hands never left the front pockets of his jeans.
In an article he wrote for the website Deadline recently Theroux said he had been struck making his 2011 film by settlers pursuing “an openly expansionist ethnonationalist vision while enjoying the benefits of a separate and privileged legal regime”. He returned this time because he had read that, after October 7 and with the world’s attention now on Gaza, settler activities had accelerated.
During the olive harvest the crew filmed Palestinian people being stopped by Israeli soldiers from picking from trees they said they had harvested for years, but defended by peace activists, some of them Israeli. Earlier in the film a member of an Israeli group demonstrating for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages told Theroux that he thought the idea of settling in Gaza was “absolutely ridiculous”. Theroux could have given a bit more airtime to this kind of viewpoint but, as he has said, his style of documentary is “perpetrator focused”. “I try to hear from those at the heart of a story who, broadly speaking, are viewed as being ‘in the wrong’,” he wrote.
The person who he seemed to spend most time with was Daniella Weiss, the so-called godmother of the settler movement. At the end Theroux’s questions became more charged, talking of settlers “rampaging” and suggesting to Weiss that to prioritise one’s own people to the exclusion of others was “sociopathic”. Weiss shoved Theroux hard to make her point that videos of “settler violence”, which she denied, were only telling half the story and that there was provocation.
Then came Theroux’s trademark concluding voiceover. He said hers was “extreme ideology delivered with a smile” and that the “settler dream shows no sign of abating”.
★★★★☆
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