About the documentary film settlers [The Settlers].
By: Louis Theroux / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com
It wasn't something I expected. For a film about the situation in the West Bank to go viral - a story that seems to be always present. Appreciation, shock, gratitude, anger at what the film showed ... Throughout the week they didn't stop. More reposts, more reactions, a little opposition. Shock was the theme of many messages - the idea that "this is happening". And, a feeling: "Finally". "Finally, mainstream British television is saying something about what's happening".
The film was a kind of sequel. In 2010, I had made a documentary called Ultra-Zionists [Ultra Zionists]. It was a look at the Israeli religious nationalist community that exists in the West Bank - the area along Israel's eastern edge that has been under military occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War. Now, a decade and a half later, with the world's attention focused on Gaza, settlers were reportedly stepping up their activities. The Israeli government had given them thousands of assault rifles. Shootings of Palestinians, damage to their property, and harassment were all on the rise.
We conceived the film as a kind of road movie through a region under military occupation. During two trips, each lasting a little over a week, with my director Josh Baker and producers Sara Obeidat and Matan Cohen, I traveled up and down the West Bank. I was able to enter the settler community, interviewing representatives of their mindset. Among them was Ari Abramowitz, from Arugot Farm, a tourist site deep in the occupied West Bank. Abramowitz was born and raised in Texas, but came to Israel as a young man, obtaining Israeli citizenship because of his Jewish heritage. For our interview, he met me armed with an automatic rifle and a pistol. He took me on a walk and expressed his belief that the Palestinian people “do not exist.”
I also spent time with Daniella Weiss, the woman often referred to as the “spiritual mother” of the settler project. A vibrant 79-year-old, Weiss has worked for more than 50 years to expand the Israeli presence in the West Bank — or Judea and Samaria, as she calls it — by lobbying governments, raising funds at home and abroad, and promoting a vision of a region ruled entirely by Israelis, where Palestinians would either accept this reality or leave.
We saw her in action at an event promoting the idea of Jewish-only settlements in Gaza — the last frontier of settler activity. In a fiery speech, she declared that the region’s Palestinians should leave and go elsewhere — to Turkey, to Canada — wherever. On another visit to the Gaza border, she accompanied a prominent rabbi, Dov Lior. With ruins billowing smoke behind him, he spoke of the need to “cleanse” the land of “camel riders.” In the meeting that marked the film’s closing scene, Daniella Weiss and I had a heated argument on a hill in Eviatar, the last settlement recognized by the Israeli state.
During the days of filming, traveling through checkpoints, past defensive walls, watchtowers, olive groves, and Palestinian towns, I was reminded of my previous visit 14 years ago. Much was still the same. The same sense of a two-tiered society: Jewish settlers protected by Israeli civil law; Palestinians living under an ambiguous military regime, with closed roads and major and minor difficulties in daily life. The daily humiliation of waiting in lines and passport checks. Fear of vandalism and intimidation from settlers.
The reaction to the film, when it was broadcast, was immediate. Positive writing and massive online comments. Some critics noted that there was a new “seriousness” to my approach. There was a point where I told Daniella Weiss that her thoughts seemed “sociopathic” - as she suggested that she was only interested in the well-being of her people and had no regard for others. It was said that I seemed more determined than usual. I am not sure if this is true. But I think the weight of what is happening gave the meeting more importance.
Could the West Bank become the next Gaza?
Several reviews were critical of the film. The main charge was that I focused on a handful of crazy individuals who were not representative of the wider community. “Weiss is a crazy woman,” wrote one reviewer in Daily Mail. IN X, conservative environmentalist Ben Goldsmith claimed that the extremists in the film “represent a deranged fringe of Israeli society ... as representative of the whole as Tommy Robinson is of British society.”
But this comparison reveals what makes the situation in the West Bank so special. In the UK, Robinson is widely seen as a peripheral figure. He is excluded from politics and shunned by those close to the government. But here we have a situation where a similar figure enjoys great influence within the Israeli cabinet and has the military's protection in its settlement expansion project. As the journalist of Haaretz-it, Etan Nechin, in response to Goldsmith: "Their representatives, literally, are sitting in the government and controlling everything, from the police to the treasury."
Others asked why I didn’t mention the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank are already refugees – or their descendants – having been expelled from the lands they lived in in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. Now they face a potential second displacement, as settlers – and elements of the Israeli state – seek further expulsions and continue to make life unbearable for Palestinians.
The part of the analysis that was not explicitly stated, but was present in the background, was the question: “Why Israel?” - the idea that atrocities of similar seriousness are occurring in other parts of the world and that, by reporting on Israeli nationalist religious extremism, we may have contributed to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment. I take this accusation seriously, for the reason that I hope it is understandable.
But the urgency in this case lies in the fact that the West Bank settlers are a warning sign of the direction that society in various Western countries may be taking. In the past, the settler agenda has been supported by governments, both right-wing and left-wing, but is currently being embraced by populist leaders and elements of the far right who relish its ethno-nationalist and anti-democratic character. At the same time that the documentary was broadcast, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at Mar-a-Lago. So a film about extremist West Bank settlers is not just about a region of the Middle East. It is also about “us.”
Although the global reaction to column has been largely encouraging, there is also a disappointing aspect. As Peter Oborne rightly noted, in a sympathetic review, “this film tells us nothing new about the situation in the occupied West Bank.” The facts were familiar to those who had followed them – from the Oscar-winning documentary, No other land [In the Other Land], Our Land: Israel's Next War [Our Land: Israel's Other War] by ITV, a documentary that includes extraordinary scenes of settlers taking control of farmland and references to intimidation and eviction.
One of the saddest and most unjust outcomes of our film concerns Palestinian activist Issa Amro. Amro lives in Hebron, a West Bank city where, since 1968, around 700 settlers have lived in the city center, surrounded by a heavy Israeli military presence. We filmed Amro walking through the so-called “sterile zone” – a term used by the military. Just a few days after the film aired, Issa reported on social media that he had been harassed by settlers and soldiers near his home, in what appeared to be retaliation for his participation in the documentary. Our team reached out to him and did what they could to provide him with the necessary support.
Scholar and writer Hamza Yusuf wrote in X that indignation towards everything that appeared in settlers “it speaks volumes about how the media has shielded the public from the brutal reality of Israel’s occupation.” As proud as I am of the film, I know that our documentary can never fully capture the impact of what is happening in the West Bank. The reality of eviction and harassment often occurs in interactions even more extreme than the ones I witnessed.
So, I'm grateful for the response. I encourage people to read and learn more about this topic. I'm glad we were able to tell as much as we did. But I also wish we could have told a lot more. /Telegrafi/
