The Fanatic’s Gaze: Louis Theroux and the West Bank Settlers

He has made it his bread and butter for years: finding society’s kooky representatives, the marginal, the crazed and the touched.  But what makes Louis Theroux’s The Settlers troubling is its examination of a seemingly inexorable process in the West Bank, one that has, at its core, a religious, nationalist goal of cleansing and violent purification.  The documentary captures Israel’s modern colonial project in real time, and it is one most ugly.

The target of the cleansing and eradication – the Palestinians in the West Bank – is awesomely horrific, rationalised by suffocating checkpoints, brooding military posts and endless harassing points of invigilation.  Having already made The Ultra Zionists, a documentary on the same subject in 2011, Theroux finds, notably after the attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, a missionary project of hardened purpose.  The edge on the “ultra” has been taken off.  The fringe has moved to the centre.

Sanitised areas (the language of ethnic scrubbing) pullulate with armed settlers holding forth with pious defiance in outposts of a land seen as promised to them.  One figure interviewed, the gun-toting Texas-born settler Ari Abramowitz, sees the Bible as supplying Jews “a land deed to the West Bank.”  Palestinian shopfronts remain closed for security reasons, and Palestinians barred from visiting designated areas without appropriate approval.  Theroux’s guide and local peace activist Issa Amro is unable to accompany him to areas in Hebron where settlers are offered continuous military protection.

When Theroux and his guides visit a ruined Palestinian home in Tuwuni in the night, an IDF patrol with laser sights is not far behind.  At one checkpoint, Theroux is accosted by a balaclava-wearing Israeli soldier, provoking him to bark “Don’t touch me”.  They are solid reminders to Palestinians living in the West Bank that they are living on borrowed time, a measure that diminishes with each day.

Daniella Weiss emerges as a central character, a figure who has led the Israeli settler movement for half a century.  She reveals being clandestinely escorted by the sympathetic soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza to scout for possible future settlements.  (800 families, goes the proud claim, await moving into them.)  She grins, mocks and scorns, but does, at some point, demonstrate to Theroux her view about settler violence.  For her, it does not exist.  In that familiar pattern, even if it did exist, it would be justifiable because of Palestinian violence.  When Theroux says he had seen a video of a Palestinian being shot, Weiss retorts that the Israel shooter was merely retaliating.  She proceeds to shove him, hoping he returns the serve.  He considers the display sociopathic. Yet sociopathy and the limitless well of self-defence are firm friends for Weiss and any number of IDF personnel and lawyers who see their cause as worthy.  All are incapable of violence, incapable of genocide.

Critics have taken issue with the lens of the documentary, suggesting that the camera can deceive because of its sharp focus.  The sampling of settlers shows them as almost comically villainous, their fanaticism icy and cruelty assured.  The British-Palestinian writer and activist John Aziz was frustrated by the “selection of nasty extremists who lurched between denying the existence of Palestinians and expressing the desire to conquer more land and drive out the Arab inhabitants.”  He even takes issue with the keen interest in Weiss, curious given that any program about Israeli settlements would look bare without her starring role.

Aziz misses the point in his demand for an elusive nuance.  People once seen as marginalised pioneers seeking land in the West Bank have become the spear of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  After October 7, 2023, it has become modish to entertain notions of expulsion, dispossession and seizure, to finally bury Palestinian notions of self-determination.  National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party and follower of the teachings of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn rabbi who, after moving to Israel, declared “the idea of a democratic Jewish state [a] nonsense”, is symptomatic of this shift.  Convicted on eight charges, among them supporting a terrorist organisation and incitement to racism, Ben-Gvir regularly advocates ethnic cleansing of both the West Bank and Gaza.

In May this year, the Israeli Security Cabinet initiated the land registration process in Area C in the West Bank, a process which determines final ownership of land and extinguishes other claims.  The Ministry of Defense was unequivocal about the goal of this move in a statement: “to strengthen, consolidate, and expand Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.”

While the Israeli settlers seem to fail to see the Palestinians as human beings with valid territorial claims, international law has little time for the legality of the settlements.  They are structures of a colonising project, and one regarded as unlawful.  In its advisory opinion from July 2024, the International Court of Justice found that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was “a wrongful act of a continuing character which has been brought about by Israel’s violations, through its policies and practices, of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.”

The settler project can also count on abundant support from the private sector.  In her report to the UN Human Rights Council From economy of occupation to economy of genocide Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, lashes “corporate entities” international and local who have been enriched by “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.”  This includes heavy investments in the West Bank colonising enterprise, be it through supplying logistics, construction equipment and building materials.  With the Israeli settlers being the shock troops of the Israeli State, Weiss’s boast captured by Theroux is being realised: “We do for governments what they can’t do for themselves.”