Louis Theroux’s The Settlers could be credited with helping to finally shift government policy on Israel’s campaigns of expansion in Gaza and the West Bank. But as well-made as it is, it doesn’t feel like it’s really told us anything we didn’t already know. What does that tell us about the state of politics and journalism in the UK?
My feelings on Louis Theroux’s latest documentary are hard to pin down. On the one hand I think he should be commended for using his platform to speak out against the actions of both the Israeli state, and the euphemistically termed ‘settlers’ who want to purge Palestinians from the land.
After a post-pandemic lull, Theroux has finally stepped out from his more comfortable journalistic niche of celebrity interviews – and not without significant physical or reputational risk. Physically, Theroux repeatedly faces harassment from the Israeli military – who repeatedly demand his passport, bark Arabic at him as a ‘test’, and order him to move on whenever his crew might be about to photograph something even vaguely inconvenient to them.
Two instances stand out in particular. One, sees a pair of soliders hiding behind balaclavas circle back to confront Theroux’s team after they don’t move along rapidly enough; one pointedly whines “I don’t know what to do with you” underlining the fact that violent repercussions really are on the cards here. The soldiers then make this explicit by attempting to grasp Theroux – before he insists “Don’t touch me.”
Another sees Theroux and the crew taking refuge inside a West Bank Palestinian home after dark. Soldiers, stationed there to ‘protect’ a nearby Israeli settlement (repeatedly noted by Theroux as being illegal under international law) take an interest in the foreign press, and make a point to blunder around noisily outside, while shining the laser-sights affixed to their rifles across the house’s walls. It is an unmistakable message: This isn’t another weird weekend with the Hamiltons. All we need is an excuse, and you’ll just be another journalist whose death is being obscured as some great mystery.
It would be easy to write this off as just a fraction of the lived experience of Palestinians – or that even as Theroux is mistreated, his position of celebrity means he gets off lighter than the average reporter in this scenario – but the fact is, it’s not a level of risk any other big name journalist seems willing to undertake, and this level of brutality is still inexcusable, and utterly terrifying. At the same time, that should underline how just how horrific the situation is for the Palestinians Theroux speaks to, who endure much worse treatment as a “normal” daily occurence.
Then there is the reputational risk. Theroux has since been accused being selective in his coverage of a ‘complex situation’, and in some quarters, that has gone as far as to brand his film antisemitic. As is often the case with such allegations relating to criticism of Israel’s military or political leadership, these are tellingly vague – and hinge largely on the assumption that everyone has long agreed to the IHRA’s conflation of the state of Israel with the beliefs of all Jewish people.
Even then, though, it’s not a criticism that has stuck – because Theroux’s whole brand is devoted to presenting interviewees with the space to disgrace themselves in their own words. In three relatively short interactions, Theroux most effectively deploys this technique with Daniella Weiss. Described by some as the “godmother of the settler movement”, Weiss has spent a lifetime championing the colonisation of Palestinian territory. While officially this is not supported by the government – because, again, it breaks international law – Weiss has enjoyed decades of impunity, during which time she has clearly developed a great fondness for the sound of her own voice.
Weiss brags about connections to Israel’s government – and a direct line to Benjamin Nettanyahu’s handlers – while saying she believes those occupying the West Bank do “for governments what they cannot do for themselves.” She also flaunts ideas of colonising the Gaza strip – at one point making a break for the border to prove a point about its apparent feasibility. Possibly most damagingly, when Theroux says he has seen examples of violence inflicted on Palestinians, she insists no such thing has happened – echoing the now endless 24-hour cycle of denial and obfuscation that Israel’s government and military have tirelessly maintained in the face of a mountain of evidence that they have committed war crimes in Gaza.
Whether out of misplaced confidence in her rhetorical powers, or simply an assumption after all these years that she is a Teflon coated, untouchable immortal, Weiss oversteps her bounds when she decides to physically push Theroux to make a point. Hoping for him to retaliate – either in a gotcha moment where she could point out how easy it is to goad an innocent person to violence, or in a moment that could have seen him arrested and (in the best-case scenario) deported in disgrace – she gets nothing. At least directly.
The scene clearly moved the dial for someone, because after the film aired, Weiss has been officially sanctioned by the UK government. This is, admittedly, a bare minimum – making an example of someone who was argued to still be an extreme fringe figure even in Israel. But even a few months ago, any kind of reprimand for someone “threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals” from Keir Starmer and David Lammy seemed inconceivable. The government even went a little further, when it announced it would pause free trade negotiations with Israel (though not sending arms) with immediate effect, saying “it is not possible to advance discussions” with “a Netanyahu government that is pursuing egregious policies in the West Bank and Gaza”.
Filling a void
On the other hand, as much as this might seem like (the very faintest hint) of progress – when it comes to even the slightest government resistance to a situation so dire that the International Court of Justice has already ordered Israel to take actions to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people – the film also comes with a depressing sense of frustration. Partially this is because the film is limited in contextualising what is going on.
In an article re-published on Jewish Voice for Labour, Fathi Nemer notes, “The film’s outright refusal to scratch anywhere beneath the surface points to deeper problems with how the world still discusses Palestine. There are clear limits to Palestinian aspirations or rights that cannot exceed the threshold of Israeli table scraps. Under this ceiling, we are permitted to abstractly discuss violations and appeal to international law. The world is even happy to point out some problems; occasionally, it musters the courage to condemn them. Still, it rejects naming their origins or taking tangible action towards them.”
This also means that there is room for people positioning themselves as ‘sensible moderates’ to characterise it as under-serving the dreaded ‘complex situation’ – ultimately cited as a reason not to do anything beyond feeling bad. In The Guardian, a five-star review from Stuart Heritage was therefore able to simper, “As with everything, you wish certain aspects of the situation could be explored more. Most notably, the peripheral glimpses of Israeli activists who protest against the settlements probably need more airtime, if only to demonstrate that this is a problem of individuals rather than an entire nation.”
Theroux’s point is not that Israel is a whole, singular monolith of hatred – and I suspect Heritage knows as much. But this is also not merely a problem of individuals – it is an ideology which has been baked into the design of every institution and public entity in Israel. As Nemer – paraphrasing Weiss’ own admissions – notes, the settlement project is “essentially the face of Zionism and the mechanism through which the Zionist state was established”. Ideologically predestined expansion – the kind used to justify ‘settling’ the American West, and which subsequently attracts a good number of US conservatives – is baked into the Israeli state. However many individuals might be rebelling against that in its society, they remain at a colossal disadvantage in the face of the institutionally entrenched beliefs of the settler project.
On top of this, though, perhaps an even bigger frustration is how even this timid, liberal intervention is pointedly late to proceedings.
Nemer notes that Theroux’s intervention could have come “anytime in the last 50 years, and nothing would have fundamentally changed; even Daniella Weiss would have been able to reprise her infamous role. Nothing the settlers bragged about, not even the most wicked or dehumanizing of statements, deviates from what Palestinians have been documenting for a century.”
The response to it is both encouraging and galling. It is encouraging that anything at all changed. But it is galling that we only got here after after thousands of innocent people were killed – having been ignored whenever they spoke for themselves. After months of public outcry and mass demonstrations characterised as hate-fuelled mobs, and after states across Europe and North America arrested and detained peace activists (many of whom were Jewish) for speaking out against the Israeli military’s actions, this is what it took to finally shift the dial. Until Weiss and co directed their nakedly genocidal comments at a mild-mannered celebrity interviewer, the media and political mainstream were unwilling to take those comments at face value.
And while it’s not the fault of the film, the apparent shock with which many positive reviews approach it is nauseating. This film is being painted as finally giving us insight into the minds of Israel’s far-right – and filling a void by providing that insight. How could we have known? There was nobody to tell us.
But rather like the disingenuous write-up that Barney Ronay recently gave Gary Lineker’s departure from the BBC, this is a rhetorical sleight of hand. In that Guardian article, Ronay lamented that mainstream criticism of Israeli military policy was only coming from pop celebrities.
He asked, “Where are the public intellectuals, the archbishops, the supremely informed correspondents, the MPs who are educated and fearless enough to at least voice views on international affairs?”
A reasonable question, you might think, until you consider that Ronay – and Lineker for that matter – participated in the sustained campaign of ‘sensible liberals’ to discredit the foremost politician who was daring to campaign for peace in Gaza. The tarring and feathering of Jeremy Corbyn – who Ronay described as carrying a “sack of old horse shit from the 1970s”, and who Lineker called on the public to “bin” as early as 2017 – eventually led to the expulsion of a number of MPs from the Labour Party who were also speaking out in support of Palestinian people. This momentum also helped to purge academics and other “figures of relevance” from public discourse.
Feigning ignorance as to how we got here is a cynical fudge. The world where only a caste of tame celebrities can even allude to mild criticisms of what has happened in Gaza has been long in the making. And although Louis Theroux might not be directly at fault for this, while his film takes commendable risks, and has apparently managed to get through to people who for whatever reason were oblivious to Israel’s settler ideology, it’s also a depressing reminder of that status quo.
Then again, maybe I am underselling a sea-change in what those in power deem acceptable from Israel. Hopefully this presents an opportunity to properly address the issues Theroux’s film skimmed over – and opens a window for policies better reflecting the wider public’s disgust at the Gaza war. But The Settlers only appears remarkable in that artificially constructed void, where public dissent has long been silenced or ignored. Capitalising on that momentum will rely on overcoming that.