Opinion
To demonstrate ‘impartiality’, the BBC shows the worst Jews they can find
Theroux’s settler documentary doesn’t illuminate – it rehearses the same old narrative
April 29, 2025 11:43
4 min read
Theroux’s settler documentary doesn’t illuminate – it rehearses the same old narrative
April 29, 2025 11:43What could have possessed the BBC to make a documentary about the very worst Jews they could find? I suppose they would argue that Louis Theroux’s The Settlers was necessary for impartiality to be upheld, given how unbearably pro-Israel they have been of late. (“Vital film,” gushed the Guardian. “Masterpiece,” declared the Independent.)
But seriously, folks. Before I sat down to watch the programme – in which our hero revisits the hated West Bank to see just how much more savage it has become since the last time he was there in 2011 – I made two wagers with myself.
First, I bet that the fraudulent Hamas casualty figures would be mentioned within the first half-hour, shorn of all meaningful context (such as, I don’t know, the Israeli numbers of how many of the dead were combatants, which are quoted in just five per cent of news reports).
Second, I predicted that the documentary would open with a scene shot in Hebron, which is without doubt the very worst city in the territory, featuring an entire road – Shuhada Street – that is closed to Arabs and nets overhead to protect people in the market from objects lobbed out of the windows of the Avraham Avinu settlement embedded in the town. That’s what I’d do, I thought, if I were the BBC.
Reader, I was both righter and wronger. On the latter prognostication, my judgment was off; our intrepid presenter managed to hold out for a full half-hour before skipping along to watch the freak show of Hebron with his characteristic ironical stare. On the former, however, I had outdone myself. The phony casualty figures were quoted not in the first half-hour but within the first three minutes.
What to say about this fine piece of work? For one thing, Theroux seems to have a far less developed radar for extremism when he strays into the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
At one point, he has a coffee in Nablus, “surrounded by the ancient architecture of the Old City and the undeniable fact of the hundreds of thousands of people living there and their aspirations for statehood,” he tells us. The camera ranges over said Old City, panning quickly past the many posters of young men wielding automatic weapons on the walls without any comment provided.
Similarly, one night Theroux is interviewing some Arab men in a breeze-blocked building when some Israeli soldiers come past, the green light of their gunsights shining on the walls.“We are raised in this situation,” his Arab interviewee laments. “It becomes a normal situation for us. When you are a kid, you just see this army invading your home in the day, in the night, you grow up in this injustice and reality.” Awful, of course. But when it came to the reason why the soldiers had entered the village after dark, Theroux has a strange failure of curiosity.
When it comes to the Jews, however, the BBC producers sniff out “ethno-nationalism” like a bloodhound. Israelis are more like us Brits, I suppose, so their evil is easier to spot. To be fair to Theroux, the relationship he builds with 79-year-old Daniella Weiss, dubbed the “godmother” of the settler movement, is pretty entertaining. She is abrasive, animated and comes across as crude in comparison with the urbane Englishman asking passive aggressive questions.
After returning to her house several times, he ends up joining a convoy in which he is led to Sderot, then to the Gaza border, where the Army provides an escort. Suddenly, Weiss veers off the main road towards the Strip, only to be stopped by two military jeeps. Why? To show her followers that Gaza is not some distant and unachievable land. It can be settled.
As the programme wears on, Theroux becomes increasingly confrontational with the endless checkpoints at which soldiers ask him to present his passport. I get that. In 2014 – a few years after he made his first West Bank documentary, Ultra Zionists, I too made a feature there (called Meet The Settlers). I remember well the unpleasantness of Hebron, the swaggering yahoos and the resentful Palestinians. I remember the queues at the checkpoints. I remember how the whole thing gets under your skin.
The problem, really, is the framing. Not to defend the Ben-Gvirs of this world, but entirely predictably, Theroux provides the kind of patrician, sneering perspective that in the eyes of the BBC passes for impartiality. He gets quite cross towards the end and makes an impassioned plea for a one-state solution in which everybody has “equal rights”. Now there’s a man who has never had to fear for the lives of his children. There’s a man who has not thought very much about October 7. In the next breath, he accuses Weiss of being “sociopathic”. This is backed up by many suggestive scenes in which, for instance, the cameraman manages to frame settler joviality with a backdrop of smoking Gaza.
The whole thing made me reflect upon how far apart societies with similar foundational values can drift when one is regularly called upon to fight for its life against genocidal enemies, while the other has no higher expression of nationhood than Paddington Bear. Yet the Bearites can’t stop with the lectures. It’s almost comical.
Overall, it was impossible to form a proper opinion on the people we met due to the baked-in bias. Here was the world according to the BBC, in which Theroux’s every encounter happened to support the conclusions with which he had left Heathrow.
Right at the end, he dispenses with his trademark light touch and treats us to a bit of raw dogma. “The settler dream shows no sign of abating, along with the dislocation, devastation and death that follows inevitably in its train,” he says. So here is the takeaway: the Jews are to blame for the bloodshed, not the Arabs, who tried to murder them from the start. Which is what we were supposed to think all along.