It’s a sort of sequel to his 2011 documentary The Ultra Zionists about Israeli religious nationalists stealthily building illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and 14 years later Theroux finds this colonisation process far more advanced – and more violent. In part this renewed aggression is a response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, but also because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unholy alliance with the country’s religious far-right lends tacit government support to the process.
(Photo: BBC/Mindhouse Productions Ltd/Josh Baker)
For his part, Theroux meets the “Godmother” of the settler movement, Daniella Weiss, whom he first encounters at an event organised to enhance the practical idea of now establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. “We very much encourage and enable the population in Gaza to go to other countries,” Weisz says blandly of her dream of a West Bank rid of Palestinians.
While Weisz remains wary and a little dismissive of Theroux, he finds a more open subject in Texan settler Ari Abramowitz, who lives with his wife and eight children on a ramshackle settlement in “what you call Palestinian Territory but I call the heart of Judea.” Indeed, the settlers feel they have a Biblical right to the land that Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. “Where we don’t settle, terrorism grows,” says Abramowitz.
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Much of the terrorism Theroux witnesses is Israeli in origin, however, and the filmmaker finds himself holed up in a Palestinian home as settlers train their rifles on windows that already bear bullet holes. “Can we call the police?” he asks his hosts. “Which police?” they reply, wearily inured to this aggression. And touring the Palestinian town of Nablus, Theroux is nearly arrested, while endless checkpoints illustrate the daily lot of the oppressed locals.
He concludes the film by following Weisz to a viewpoint overlooking the ruins of Gaza – she apparently already has 80 “caravans” of settlers primed and ready to move into the embattled home to two million Palestinians. Weisz addresses a gathering that includes elderly rabbis, these holy men of God decrying Palestinians as “savages” and “camel-riders”. It’s at this point that Theroux is told to stop filming – there’s a learned distrust of the media at work here, but also (dare we hope?) an inherent sense of shame.
‘Louis Theroux: The Settlers’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer
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