One of the most powerful scenes in The Settlers, Louis Theroux’s brilliant new documentary about the Israeli settler movement, comes in the final minutes of the film, which was broadcast earlier this week on BBC Two.
Theroux and his small crew are at a festival at Evyatar, one of the numerous settlements in the Palestinian West Bank deemed illegal under international law. He is there to speak with one of the festival’s speakers, Daniella Weiss, leader of the extreme right Nachala settler movement.
Theroux has had a number of exchanges with Weiss up to this point and her ethno-nationalist vision for the country’s future has already been made clear: she wants to remove any possibility for a Palestinian state and to establish a “greater Israel” by “settling” Gaza and the West Bank and driving the Palestinians from their land, by divine right and by any means necessary.
Theroux and Weiss are standing on a hill overlooking the town of Beita, the site of recent violent confrontations between, on one side, its Palestinian citizens and, on the other, the settlers encroaching on their land and the Israeli military protecting them. He asks her whether she is aware of the level of suffering caused to Palestinians by “rampaging” settlers and puts it to her that “when a people is invaded, and put under a military occupation, and deprived of their rights, then anger is an appropriate response”.
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She says there is no such thing as settler violence. To this patently absurd claim, Theroux points out that there is no shortage of filmed footage of same. He refers to a piece of footage shown earlier in The Settlers, filmed in the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point blank range in the stomach as an IDF soldier gazes equably on. (He could just as well be referring, though, to the shooting earlier this month of a 60-year old unarmed Palestinian man by a settler in the West Bank village of al-Rakeez, one of a group who was claiming his farmland as their own.)
Weiss’s response is more revealing than anything Theroux might presumably have expected. She steps towards him and shoves him in the chest. It‘s a surprisingly powerful shove, too, for a 79-year old woman, and Theroux is forced backward, clearly thrown off balance in every sense of the term. She is obviously expecting him to push her back, but he – unsurprisingly, sensibly, and yet also a little provocatively – refuses to do so. (Even if BBC guidelines don’t have anything specific to say about getting into literal shoving matches with interview subjects, I suspect the general drift is against it.)
The point Weiss imagines herself to be proving here is that if he had shoved her back, the footage could easily have been edited to portray Theroux as committing an act of unprovoked violence against a defenceless older woman. This, she says, is exactly what is happening when we see, say, the footage from the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point-blank range in the stomach while an IDF soldier looks on.
Theroux has, for decades now, been celebrated for his approach to interviews: he tends, famously, to draw on a particular brand of impassive charm, avoiding expressing strong disapproval of even his more reprehensible subjects, whom he typically allows to do the work of portraying themselves in a bad light. But in the moments after being shoved by Weiss, Theroux listens to her reiterate her tribalist refusal to give any thought to the suffering of Palestinians, because they are not her people. And he does something we have rarely seen him do, in nearly 30 years of making television. He says exactly what he thinks of her: “It would be understandable to think of your own people, your own children, first,” he tells her. “But to think about other people, and other children, not at all? That seems sociopathic.” She laughs, and it is a laugh empty of even the possibility of humour.
“I hoped you would push me back,” she says, with a strange and unsettling smile.
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Theroux has encountered such people with such views in his films over the years – Afrikaner separatists in post-Apartheid South Africa, American blood-and-soil white nationalists and so forth – but they have tended to be basically fringe propositions, holding no real power within the societies they wish to reshape in their image.
The Israeli settler movement, on the other hand, has, for a very long time, shaped the lived reality of Palestinians in their own villages, towns and cities. The illegal military occupation of the West Bank, in place since 1967, functions as both protection of and a front for the likewise illegal settlements that take up more and more land, and make life more and more dangerous and difficult for Palestinians.
The fact that the settlements are illegal is, for the settlers themselves as for the power structure that protects them, neither here nor there. One of the film’s major subjects, for instance, is an affable, armed-to-the-teeth American who left Texas to be a settler in the occupied West Bank. His own connection to the land is infinitely deeper, he says, than that of the “Arabs” – he refuses to use the word Palestinians, because he denies the existence of such a nation, or such a people – who happen to have inhabited it for mere generations. “There’s some things,” he tells Theroux, “that transcend the whims of legislation”. Theroux’s film makes clear, in many ways, how a mythic narrative of divine promise supersedes the law and human rights, and justifies violence and dispossession.
For her part, Weiss clearly doesn’t think in terms of legality or illegality either. Her movement, as she sees it, is about doing what the state itself would like to do but can’t. “We do for governments,” as she puts it, “what they cannot do for themselves.” Netanyahu, she says, can’t openly say he supports their plans to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. “But he is happy about it.”
As she says this, she is sitting across the table from Theroux, a map of the territory spread out before her, on which the West Bank is dotted with a dense constellation of pink stickers, denoting the settlements built there since 1967. The heavy historical symbolism of the scene is left unarticulated, but it‘s easy to imagine a caption to the image, in the form of Edward Said’s line about the imperial use of cartography: “In the history of colonial invasions, maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest.” That scene at Weiss’s kitchen table is a scene right out of the 19th century: a nightmarish glimpse of an era, and a worldview, that has somehow survived into our present.
