The Settlers is Louis Theroux at his shocking best ...Middle East

Louis Theroux has come a long way since making a name for himself by lulling celebrities into revealing too much about themselves – albeit not quite enough in the case of Jimmy Savile. He still interviews celebrities, of course, but he’s also a serious documentarian of considerable weight, and his latest film, Louis Theroux: the Settlers, is among his best.

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.

Not that Theroux seems interested in the broader political picture. Instead, his documentary is an intimate and often shocking picture of what is happening on the ground. It makes a perfect companion piece to last year’s Oscar-winning Isreali-Palestinian documentary No Other Land (available to stream free on Channel 4) – together the films make for a fully rounded picture of an intense, low-level conflict that rarely makes the news.

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.

In his own deceptively laid-back style, Theroux later suggests to Weisz that she is a sociopath – but it’s water off a duck’s back. “We do for the government what the government can’t do for themselves,” she says of an increasingly emboldened settlement movement.

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.

square KATE MALTBY

Israel has become impossible for me to defend

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.

Thankfully for those who don’t want to lump all Israelis together, there are signs here of liberal Jewish resistance to the settler movement. Protesters wave placards at Weisz’s event calling for the settlement of Gaza, while peace movement activists help a Palestinian farmer gather olives from his own land as Israeli police attempt to stop the harvest. On the whole, however, Theroux sounds unsurprisingly pessimistic about what he calls “an unquenchable blood lust”.

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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