Louis Theroux’s “The Settlers” Is Very Good—But Let’s Not Call it a Turning Point

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: BBC

 
 

A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.

If you’ve seen any of the commentary around journalist Louis Theroux’s new BBC documentary, “The Settlers,” you’re likely familiar with some of the most viral clips: An IDF soldier informing one of Theroux’s Palestinian sources that he’s suddenly not permitted in a particular neighbourhood of the West Bank. Instead, he has to retreat to an arbitrary-seeming spot behind a painted line on the asphalt. Or Daniella Weiss, the so-called ‘godmother’ of Israel’s settler movement, pushing Theroux, which she soon admits was an attempt to provoke him into pushing her back. Or a rabbi calling Palestinians “savages” and “camel riders,” and saying that all of Gaza and Lebanon should be “cleansed.” But the moment I found most jarring was a conversation between Theroux and Ari Abramowitz, a born and raised Texan who moved to Israel after high school. 

“We are the tip of the spear fighting the battles of America, and defending the entire Western world. And not just the Western world, anyone who wants any semblance of liberty and freedom in their lives,” the heavily armed Abramowitz says at around the 50-minute mark.

Theroux pushes back, saying, “Nevertheless, there are millions of people up and down the area—Arabs, Muslims—who aren’t living free, right? They’re enclosed, without the same rights, without national self-determination and, in many respects, feeling besieged. And I just wonder, do you see that?”

Abramowitz: “I don’t have tremendous compassion for a society that has an unquenchable, genocidal, theological blood lust. It’s like a death cult.” 

Theroux: “It seems to me there’s a danger with that characterization of Palestinians. You define them as eliminationist and hateful and genocidal.”

Abramowitz: “Yeah—I used the words ‘death cult,’ also.” 

Theroux: “’It’s a death cult.’ That then permits you to almost create a mirror image of to that. You say, ‘Well if they want to do that to us, then we need to do that to them.’”

Abramowitz: “I think that when you’re living amongst who have perpetually proven, not only by word but by deed, that they want your blood spilled in the streets, that they want to murder your children, that they want to slay all of you, kill all of you, in the most horrific, genocidal way. All of the polls show, after Oct. 7, that these people who you continuously call the Palestinian people, that I reject the very premise that they actually are a real nation… for a lot of reasons. I mean—”

Theroux: “The millions of people who have nothing to do with Oct. 7, right? Who would actually just like to live free, full lives.”

Abramowitz: “If that’s really what they wanted, they would have had it a long time ago. They want to wipe Israel off the map. They want every last Jew dead.” 

Theroux: “So what’s the answer?” 

Abramowitz: “The answer is for us to declare sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria. And all of the land of Israel. And Gaza. And to settle Gaza and the land of Judea and Samaria with Jews in the land of Israel.” 

I admit, I was not familiar with Theroux until his viral Chicken Shop Date moment (“my money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds,” etc. etc.) and subsequent celebrity interview series, but it didn’t take long to recognize his favourite interview strategy for documentary work: wielding faux-naivety as a way to give his subjects the room to reveal themselves. (See also: this old clip of an interview with a South African Boer who was very candid about his white supremacy.) And listen, it’s very effective! I challenge any viewer to observe Abramowitz talking about “living amongst who have perpetually proven, not only by word but by deed, that they want your blood spilled in the streets, that they want to murder your children, that they want to slay all of you, kill all of you, in the most horrific, genocidal way” and not think about the experience of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 18 months. But I also feel a bit frustrated with the liberal impulse to praise this doc as a turning point, or as a revelatory watch. Because really? It doesn’t reveal anything Palestinians haven’t been saying for decades—or that we haven’t seen on TikTok over the past year and a half. 

Literally, none of this is new information

To be fair, “The Settlers” is a follow-up to Theroux’s 2011 doc, “Ultra Zionists,” and as he says himself, this was a literally about going back to a story he’s done before to “update, or experience a culture that I’ve seen before and see how it’s changed, or see the ways in which it’s moved on got worse, got more strange…. [I]t was a chance to experience the extremes of an ideology that combines religious zealotry, nationalism and a militarized support infrastructure, and to kind of get to grips with that, journalistically and emotionally.” All of which is to say, he wasn’t really promising brand new information.  

But still. It’s a little concerning how many posts I saw on social raving about how informative the doc was, because it showed how few people are familiar with the long history of settler violence against Palestinians. Briefly, starting in 1979, the Israeli government began seizing land in the West Bank and declaring it “state land,” for the explicit purpose of displacing Palestinians and establishing communities of Israeli settlers. According to a 2023 Human Rights Watch report, there were 700,000 settlers living in 279 settlements in the West Bank, a number that has certainly grown over the past two years. (Per the United Nations, Israel “ramp[ed] up settlement and annexation” in 2024.) For now, those settlements might be small and consist mostly of trailers and makeshift homes, but as Weiss explains at one point in “The Settlers,” the goal is to establish huge metropolises where Arabs are banned. In whatever form they take, these settlements are illegal under international law—and, according to a 2024 New York Times article about Israel’s long history of overlooking settler violence, some of them (termed outposts) are also technically illegal under Israeli law. And yet, ultranationalist extremists continue to build them throughout the West Bank, carrying out violent attacks on Palestinians both when appropriating the land, and later, while working to maintain their new territory. Meanwhile, the Israeli government looks away, as do its Western allies. (Just look at the reaction, or rather non-reaction, to real estate shows advertising land for sale in the West Bank—even though it does literally contravene international law, since the land in question is occupied and all.)

What’s more, what we refer to as “settler violence” has been increasing in intensity and cruelty over the past decade or so, and especially since Oct. 7, because Israeli’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza provides a sort of smokescreen for settlers’ behaviour in the West Bank. In fact, an April 2024 Human Rights Watch report found settlers have regularly “assaulted, tortured, and committed sexual violence against Palestinians, stolen their belongings and livestock, threatened to kill them if they did not leave permanently, and destroyed their homes and schools,” all the while receiving protection, if not actual assistance, from IDF soldiers. Just this month, a settler shot and killed a Palestinian-American teenager, 14-year-old Omar Mohammad Rabea, which the IDF said was justified because Rabea had “hurled rocks toward the highway,” which “endangered civilians.” Of course, any act of violence, real or perceived, can serve as justification for settler violence. Last year, a 14-year-old Israeli teenager named Benjamin Achimeir was murdered close to the settler outpost where he lived. Almost immediately, settlers began circulating messages in WhatsApp groups, promising to “eliminate the enemy,” “exterminate the beasts” and “let all of Duma [a nearby Palestinian village] burn.” According to the BBC, “what followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded.” (Some of the Palestinian villages that were attacked were located up to seven kilometres from where Achimeir’s body was eventually found, and there was no apparent link to his murder.) 

And of course, Palestinians have also been sharing these experiences for decades—with journalists, with human-rights groups and increasingly, on social media. And Israelis have explicitly said it, too. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, not only do most Israeli Jews consider a two-state future impossible, about half “do not see a place for Arabs in Israel. Fully 48% of Jews in Israel say they agree (27%) or strongly agree (21%) that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” This report wasn’t specifically about settlements, it’s true, but it does help explain why settlers can behave this way with impunity.

That’s not to say there’s no value to “The Settlers” 

In general, I try not to do the ‘how did you not know this information that I’ve known forever?!’ thing because a) it’s annoying and b) it’s not a very effective way to encourage people to become more informed about an issue that you care about, tbh. But in this case, we just have so much information that yes, fawning social media posts about Theroux’s bravery did kind of rub me the wrong way. 

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the reception to the doc illuminates a couple of things. First, it’s yet another example of how Western media has largely failed its audiences when it comes to fair and consistent coverage of Israel and Palestine. There is ample reporting on the anti-Palestinian bias in Canadian newsrooms, not to mention lots of off-the-record conversations about unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rules that lead to suppression. And it’s not just happening in this country. So yeah, it is actually kind of shocking not only that Theroux was allowed to produce this piece, but also that it remains up on BBC’s site, despite what I’m sure is a wave of protest from Zionist organizations. Ironically, we saw how rare it is for Palestinians to receive fair coverage this week; in stark contrast to the sensitivity and firmness of Theroux’s doc, there was almost no coverage of Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of the world’s human rights, which was released on Tuesday. While it covers human rights abuses everywhere from Bangladesh to South Korea to Mozambique, what it describes as “Israel’s livestreamed but unheeded genocide of Palestinians in Gaza” is front and centre in its analysis. And yet, while I could find coverage of the report from a few outlets—namely, France24, Al Jazeera and one brief mention on CTV.com—it has been largely ignored by mainstream publications. 

And second, “The Settlers” is a reminder that supporting Palestine remains a tenuous, vulnerable position to take, which makes it even more important for white men to use their privilege to push back on oppression. As poet Omar Sakr points out, for a long time, it was Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and other racialized and oppressed people who bore the brunt of the consequences for criticizing Israel, but that can change. (He references Australian sports journalist Peter Lalor, who was fired in February for retweeting tweets that highlighted Palestinian suffering and described what is Israel is doing to them as genocide.) 

So yeah, we should all definitely watch “The Settlers.” But while we’re doing that, we should also acknowledge that Palestinians have been saying exactly the same thing for decades, so if this is what it takes to make us listen, that’s on us.

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MediaStacy Lee KongLouis Theroux, Israel, Palestine, Gaza Strip, West Bank