Part of me is amazed the BBC agreed to screen a new film by Louis Theroux about ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers in the West Bank, a subject he first visited in 2011. In its present state – let’s be polite, and call it timid – you might have expected it to run a mile at the merest mention of the idea. Only last week, after all, Evan Davis was told he must give up his podcast series about that most controversial of subjects, heat pumps.
But I suppose even the BBC could see the value in this one: a deathly warning wrapped inside a fairly straightforward bit of reporting. At his best, Theroux’s great skill is to allow people to be themselves: to talk, unbridled, of things that may ordinarily remain unspoken. In this film, his interviewees, emboldened by their conviction that the Old Testament is basically a land deed giving them absolute right over what they call Judaea and Samaria, explain their plans for what the rest of us know as the Palestinian Territories with perfect openness – and it’s chilling.
Gaza, it seems, is now again in their sights. At a viewpoint close to the border, Daniella Weiss, the far-right Zionist who is widely known as the mother of the settler movement, tells Theroux she has already signed up 800 families who want to settle the razed land they can see in the distance – a scheme that’s promptly sanctioned by a rabbi, who offers up prayers and refers to the Palestinians as “camel riders”. You don’t need a telescope – the viewpoint has one, for the observation of destroyed Gazan homes – to see that this way, disaster surely lies.
Theroux wonders how influential Weiss is. Can she, for instance, simply pick up the phone to Benjamin Netanyahu? At this, she pulls one of her faces: a look that purports to be coy, but is actually shot through with pride. “I call his aides,” she says, as if it’s the same thing. Theroux shouldn’t be taken in, she goes on. Whatever Netanyahu says in public about the settlements, illegal under international law, in private he’s very happy at what she’s up to. Since the beginning of the war that began after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, she has already driven into Gaza, and in a few moments, we’ll see her attempting to do so again, pursued first by Theroux in his car, and then by members of the Israeli army, who finally manage to stop her. Weiss seems to find this chase unaccountably thrilling, her face suffused with a manic excitement that far outweighs anything you’ll find among the pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Beside her, Theroux is ever-calm: statue-like in his refusal to express an opinion, let alone an emotion. Nothing can ruffle him, though this isn’t a criticism. Sometimes – for instance, when an Israeli soldier takes your passport as you observe him telling a Palestinian family they cannot harvest their olives – the best thing is just to ask why, a question he deploys repeatedly in this film (it’s never answered to any great effect).
His stillness serves to underline, too, the particular energy of those he meets, a good example being Ari Abramowitz, a Texan-born settler who came to Israel aged 16 to study the Torah, and never left. Abramowitz is the founder of Arugot Farm, a desert retreat – synagogue, eco-pool, nature hikes – south of Bethlehem, and he is loud. “We were in this land planting vineyards before Mohammed was in the third grade,” he shouts, bridling at Theroux’s use of the word Palestine (he doesn’t think “it exists”). Should you visit Arugot, don’t expect Abramowitz to appear bearing a yoga mat or some essential oil. At his hip is a large gun. Un-relaxingly, it clanks when he walks.
As a child, I lived in Israel. It was before the First Intifada – it was before anything, looking back – and in those days, you could drive into the Occupied Territories with relative ease, park your car, and mooch around the markets. We sometimes used to go to bustling Hebron, a city of 200,000 Palestinians and a settler minority of about 700 that lives inside an army-protected cordon, to buy the beautiful blown glass that is (or used to be) its speciality, and thanks to this, I’m always destroyed by its transformation decades on.
In his film, Theroux attempts to walk around the city with a Palestinian peace activist, Issa Amro. How bleak it is. Shuttered shops, gates and wire fences, arbitrary lines that move every day, and unseen eyes, always watching. When the two men part, Amro can’t take the short way home; a needlessly circuitous route is his only option. And again, the physical contrast with Theroux. While Amro seems to slump even as he walks, Theroux, tall and straight-backed, will soon head for coffee in Nablus – a place that, for his companion, might as well be as far away as the moon.
Louis Theroux: The Settlers
BBC One
[See also: Why China is winning]
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment