Louis Theroux The Settlers BBC2 27 April 2025
Documentary film-maker Louis Theroux has an apparently artless interviewing style which goes as follows: smile sociably to your chosen interviewee, ask naive questions, and with any luck, the person concerned will say something just dumb enough to hit the headlines.
So it has proved over Theroux’s long career, and his revisit to the West Bank settler movement, after 14 years since his previous documentary, produced many such “gotcha” moments, including a rabbi who spoke about Palestinians as “savages” and “camel drivers”, and armed settlers who Theroux took pains to tell the viewer had been born in Texas or Brooklyn.
And then there was Daniella Weiss. Ah, Daniella, the gift that keeps on giving. Theroux seemed to be so delighted with the frankly terrifying gibberish that Weiss was uttering that he devoted no less than three encounters with her in his film, repeatedly describing her as “the godmother” of the settler movement.
For her part, she came over as smug and self-satisfied, speaking of her activism as “a light felony” in which Theroux was complicit by spending time with her, and then dropping the grandmotherly mask briefly to denounce Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet. He hated her, she claimed, hissing, “because I disturb his peaceful, secular life”. Right there was the nexus of the split in Israeli society: the religious who despise the irreligious.
Theroux, it must be said, made no secret of his pained loathing of everything for which the settlers stand. For most of his film he took refuge in his trademark eyebrow-raising response to some truly disturbing comments. But in his last face-off with Daniella Weiss — during which she pushed him while claiming that “there is no such thing as settler violence” — even Theroux seemed to be in danger of losing his temper, almost shouting at her that her views were “sociopathic”.
It was notable that not one of the settler interviewees referred to the hostages, so determined were they to promote the idea of going to live in the Gaza Strip. Interestingly, there was no reference to the fact that Israelis had left Gaza in 2005, at the instigation of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose wall, built to prevent suicide attacks, loomed darkly over the roads through which Theroux and his team were driving.
I could have done with more input from Israeli opponents of the settlers, such as the man who protested at a settler “jamboree” aimed at getting families to move to Gaza, telling Theroux that the idea was “absolutely ridiculous”. Or the peace activist who helped a Palestinian farmer harvest his olive crop in the face of determined — and, it seemed to me, pointless — opposition from local settler villages.
Critics of Theroux have already waded in to complain that he had not devoted equal airtime to examine the ideology of Hamas or Hezbollah, which I think is rather missing the point. Theroux and his researcher were not presenting anything that they had not previously promised: in other words, he provided what it said on the tin. Whether that was uncomfortable viewing or not largely depends on what part of the political spectrum you already sit on.
Incidentally, activists on Twitter/X, within hours of transmission, were claiming that the programme had been pulled from BBC iPlayer at the behest of “the Zionists”. As far as I know, this is presently not the case.
