When we’re afraid to talk about settlements, we let the extremists dominate the conversation

Louis Theroux is a dark comedian with a movie camera. A more foppish, less ideological Nick Broomfield, he brings to the participatory documentary a well-practised routine of Oxbridge irony and phoney diffidence, luring his subjects into the most outrageous self-incriminations on the misapprehension that they are dealing with some bashful Brit-twit. Neo-Nazis and sex traffickers, paedophiles and the Westboro Baptist Church have all lunged into his trap and found themselves on the receiving end of his lingering, silent stare, as damning as a death sentence.

Theroux is a connoisseur of the absurd, and he understands that underlying almost all wickedness and extremism is absurdity. He knows, too, that the British cannot help but titter at evil. It took until 1967 and The Producers to convince Americans that the Nazis were suitable targets for comedy, whereas in England Hitler had become a figure of ridicule before the war even began. Theroux is such a hit with BBC audiences because he gives the educated middle classes an opportunity to laugh at the most grotesque aspects of humanity.

There is plenty of grotesquery on offer in The Settlers, Theroux’s latest documentary and the second on Israeli settlers after 2011’s The Ultra Zionists. There are gun-totin’ Texan transplants to the land of Abraham, Joseph and David; a rabbi who kashers a plan to resettle Gaza with the pronouncement: “All of Gaza, all of Lebanon, should be cleansed of these camel riders”; and of course Daniella Weiss, the 79-year-old hyper-nationalist who spends the documentary dashing from one patch of disputed territory to another, sizing each up for settlement, in what Theroux describes as her “ethno-nationalist vision”.

Weiss, the Ma Barker of the settler gang, has helped establish countless outposts which were later legalised by the Israeli state. “We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves,” she says, faintly like a Bond villain. Weiss is a very Therouxean antagonist, a blend of gimlet-eyed fanatic (he implies that she might be a sociopath) and ever-smiling bubbe. It’s like one of the Golden Girls got radicalised on a vacation to the Shomron.

Yet for all that Theroux’s film is an engaging watch, it doesn’t engage with life on the ground in the settlements or who the people who live there are. The most extreme characters are selected to represent the whole endeavour and the 750,000 Israelis who live over the Green Line. There is no reflection of the thousands of Palestinians who work on the settlements — a figure sadly much reduced since October 7 — including 6,500 women. No mention is made of the commercial (Barkan Industrial Zone), cultural (Samaria Theatre), medical (the planned Nanasi Medical Centre), educational (Ariel University) or infrastructural (the Gush Etzion-Hebron bypass) innovations brought by the settlers.

Theroux does not share the composition of the settler population: one third secular, one third national-religious, and one third ultra-Orthodox. Doing so would have undercut his portrait of the settlements as a hive of messianic fundamentalism, but it could have allowed for an exchange at least as dramatic as those with Weiss.
Aside from a throwaway remark about ‘cheap housing’, which is indeed a motivation for some Israelis moving to Judea and Samaria, Theroux forgoes the opportunity to grill a secular Jew on their involvement in a project headed by the datim leumi, to the benefit of the haredim, and drenched in the language of redemption and revival. If Theroux can’t see the dark comedic potential in such a conversation, he isn’t half the satirist I thought he was.

There is something missing from The Settlers and it’s the settlers. We get pantomime villains but no one halfway normal from a population of hundreds of thousands, the implication being that all of them are crazed supremacists. Theroux managed to find plenty of reasonable Palestinians. Indeed, they are the only kind of Palestinians featured. If your only exposure to the conflict was this documentary, you might wonder how Israel ever provoked such a beatifically peaceful people to raise their voices let alone blow up buses and gun down festival-goers.

Perhaps our intrepid documentarian honestly never encountered a single settler who expressed complex or nuanced views, or perhaps he never went looking for them. Perhaps they might have asked Theroux some awkward questions. What about Israel’s legal claims to what he called ‘the occupied West Bank’? Why would the presence of a Jewish minority be such a problem in what he says is supposed to become a Palestinian state? When was his documentary about the three-quarters of Palestinians who expressed support for October 7 coming out?

There is no test of a liberal’s liberalism like Israel. Apartheid is a crime, except on the Temple Mount. No human being is illegal, unless they’re a Jew living in Judea. At one point in The Settlers, Theroux is at a pro-settlement rally near the boundary with Gaza and asks an Israeli man, “Where are you from?” Told Hebron, he presses, “And before that?”, which elicits a response perhaps more to his liking: New York. It is difficult to imagine Theroux posing the but-where-are-you-really-from question to a British person in Britain and impossible to imagine the BBC broadcasting it.

Some British Jews and liberal supporters of Israel feel uneasy about The Settlers because they are used to shying away from the subject. But it is this don’t-mention-the-settlements attitude that allows caricatures like Theroux’s film to have such an impact. Settlements are a part of Israel’s story and so is that country’s legal claims to all or part of the disputed territories.

It is possible to reject the extremist, racist and Kahanist rhetoric heard from some settler leaders while acknowledging that many settlers simply want to live peacefully in the Land of Israel. It is possible to support a two-state solution while recognising, as Bill Clinton did at Camp David, that the major settlement blocs will eventually become part of Israel. It is possible to advocate for the rights of Palestinians without declaring an entire swathe of Jews beyond the pale simply because they live beyond the Green Line.

Not only are all these things possible, they are essential if coexistence is ever to be achieved. Reasonable-minded settlers must be cultivated as assiduously as pro-peace Palestinians. If liberal Zionists will not tell the settlers’ side of the story, then people like Daniella Weiss will and people like Louis Theroux will be only too happy to help.