{"id":56170,"date":"2025-04-28T01:10:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T01:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/56170\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T01:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T01:10:11","slug":"the-settlers-is-louis-theroux-at-his-shocking-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/56170\/","title":{"rendered":"The Settlers is Louis Theroux at his shocking best"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe documentarian’s first film since 2022 sees him narrowly avoid arrest by the IDF and ask the ‘Godmother’ of the settler movement is she is a ‘sociopath’\n <\/p>\n

Louis Theroux<\/a> has come a long way since making a name for himself by lulling celebrities into revealing too much about themselves \u2013 albeit not quite enough in the case of Jimmy Savile<\/a>. He still interviews celebrities, of course, but he\u2019s also a serious documentarian of considerable weight, and his latest film, Louis Theroux: the Settlers, is among his best.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sort of sequel to his 2011 documentary The Ultra Zionists about Israeli religious nationalists stealthily building illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and 14 years later Theroux finds this colonisation process far more advanced \u2013 and more violent. In part this renewed aggression is a response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, but also because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s unholy alliance with the country\u2019s religious far-right lends tacit government support to the process.<\/p>\n

Not that Theroux seems interested in the broader political picture. Instead, his documentary is an intimate and often shocking picture of what is happening on the ground. It makes a perfect companion piece to last year\u2019s Oscar-winning Isreali-Palestinian documentary No Other Land<\/a> (available to stream free on Channel 4) \u2013 together the films make for a fully rounded picture of an intense, low-level conflict that rarely makes the news.<\/p>\n

\"TITLE:Louis (Photo: BBC\/Mindhouse Productions Ltd\/Josh Baker)<\/p>\n

For his part, Theroux meets the \u201cGodmother\u201d of the settler movement, Daniella Weiss, whom he first encounters at an event organised to enhance the practical idea of now establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. \u201cWe very much encourage and enable the population in Gaza to go to other countries,\u201d Weisz says blandly of her dream of a West Bank rid of Palestinians.<\/p>\n

In his own deceptively laid-back style, Theroux later suggests to Weisz that she is a sociopath \u2013 but it\u2019s water off a duck\u2019s back. \u201cWe do for the government what the government can\u2019t do for themselves,\u201d she says of an increasingly emboldened settlement movement.<\/p>\n

While Weisz remains wary and a little dismissive of Theroux, he finds a more open subject in Texan settler Ari Abramowitz, who lives with his wife and eight children on a ramshackle settlement in \u201cwhat you call Palestinian Territory but I call the heart of Judea.\u201d Indeed, the settlers feel they have a Biblical right to the land that Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. \u201cWhere we don\u2019t settle, terrorism grows,\u201d says Abramowitz.<\/p>\n

Much of the terrorism Theroux witnesses is Israeli in origin, however, and the filmmaker finds himself holed up in a Palestinian home as settlers train their rifles on windows that already bear bullet holes. \u201cCan we call the police?\u201d he asks his hosts. \u201cWhich police?\u201d they reply, wearily inured to this aggression. And touring the Palestinian town of Nablus, Theroux is nearly arrested, while endless checkpoints illustrate the daily lot of the oppressed locals.<\/p>\n

Thankfully for those who don\u2019t want to lump all Israelis together, there are signs here of liberal Jewish resistance to the settler movement. Protesters wave placards at Weisz\u2019s event calling for the settlement of Gaza, while peace movement activists help a Palestinian farmer gather olives from his own land as Israeli police attempt to stop the harvest. On the whole, however, Theroux sounds unsurprisingly pessimistic about what he calls \u201can unquenchable blood lust\u201d.<\/p>\n

He concludes the film by following Weisz to a viewpoint overlooking the ruins of Gaza \u2013 she apparently already has 80 \u201ccaravans\u201d of settlers primed and ready to move into the embattled home to two million Palestinians. Weisz addresses a gathering that includes elderly rabbis, these holy men of God decrying Palestinians as \u201csavages\u201d and \u201ccamel-riders\u201d. It\u2019s at this point that Theroux is told to stop filming \u2013 there\u2019s a learned distrust of the media at work here, but also (dare we hope?) an inherent sense of shame.<\/p>\n

\u2018Louis Theroux: The Settlers\u2019 is streaming on BBC iPlayer<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The documentarian’s first film since 2022 sees him narrowly avoid arrest by the IDF and ask the ‘Godmother’…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,837,29706,1814,29707,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-56170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-louis-theroux","11":"tag-palestine","12":"tag-tv-reviews","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114412927329275498","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}