15.05.2025
When Louis met Moloch
Paul Demarty reviews Josh Baker (director), Louis Theroux (presenter and writer) Louis Theroux: the settlers BBC 2 2025
It was not too long ago that Louis Theroux lamented his looming alopecia: he had, after all, built a career on raising his eyebrows, and what was he to do without the eyebrows?
Fortunately, it has not come to that quite yet and, if ever there was a case for painting eyebrows back on in thick, smudgy pencil, it would be this. His latest documentary, The settlers, which somehow snuck through the censors at the BBC, is, apart from anything else, an exemplary demonstration of the man’s artistry, which flows unusually directly from his personality. He is friendly, but awkward. He always stands up bolt-straight, as if he is worried that he has forgotten something important. Even if you have heard of him, even if you know his way of doing business, he is disarming. And so people talk to him, and talk too much.
Long ago, he used his apparent guilelessness for comedy. People older, or slightly younger, than 40 may remember his Weird weekends series, in which he visited various marginal communities of American eccentrics and presented them for the consideration of sceptical British viewers. As time has drawn on, his tone and subject matter have grown more serious, but his technique has undergone no more than slight refinements. “How do you do? I’m Louis,” he says to cranky survivalists, polyamorists, true believers of the Westboro Baptists (‘God hates fags’ and all that), and now - for the second time - Israeli settlers. He offers them the same stiff, jerky handshake. He offers them no threat. His subjects may be condemned or, after a fashion, redeemed; but always out of their own mouths.
Protagonists
This time around, his subjects are, as the title suggests, Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Perhaps 10 have speaking roles in the hour-long film, with two Palestinian men additionally interviewed effectively to illustrate what life is like in a world carved up by Israel Defence Forces checkpoints. Among the Israelis, two enjoy the most screentime - a Texan, Ari Abramowitz, who runs a corporate retreat centre on occupied land and is, in true Texan fashion, never to be found without an assault rifle slung over his back; and Daniella Weiss, who was at least born in Palestine to Zionist settler parents, and who has been at the vanguard of the settler movement more or less since the 1967 occupation began.
Both are, to put it politely, real characters, and indeed it is the virtue of the Therouxian method to show them as such. Abramovitz boils over with rage every time Theroux talks about the Palestinians per se: he has a strange, twitchy reaction to the word itself. They are not a real nation, they have no rights, they are a genocidal death cult. Theroux pushes back a little: “It seems to me there’s a danger with that characterisation of Palestinians. You define them as eliminationist and hateful and genocidal.”
Abramovitz rushes to ‘correct’ him: “Yeah, I used the words ‘death cult’ also - as a death cult.” He did not want that missed out. Theroux is not a man to disoblige him on that point. During the interview, the camera alights on a holiday present, presumably for one of Abramovitz’s children. It is a cuddly toy. It has the same assault rifle as daddy’s draped over it. Were he not involved in heinous crimes, it would be difficult not to pity this man, clearly a thuggish idiot who found, in his immigration (Aliyah), an all too suitable outlet for his stupidity.
Winning smile
Weiss is a whole different kettle of fish - a veteran political operator, introduced as the godmother of the settler movement. Were this a fiction film, Weiss would be a captivating anti-hero. She has a winning smile (whether it is that of an amiable grandmother or a hungry shark depends on the moment and the target). She is extremely articulate. It is notable that the first public speech of hers in the film - near the border with Gaza, urging the settlement of the territory - is in English (Itamar Ben-Gvir, also present, makes much the same speech in Hebrew).
She consents to not less than three separate interviews, in which she is remarkably and compellingly candid about her plans. “Gaza is not something beyond reach,” she says:
The October 7 [attacks] naturally made people more receptive to the idea of the great Israel. But the next step - Jewish settlements in Gaza - is a very difficult step that demands a lot of work. You have to influence the leftists, the government, the nations of the world, using the magic system, Zionism. You redeem the land, you establish communities, you bring Jewish families. You live … live Jewish life. And this will bring light instead of darkness. And this is how the state of Israel was established. And this is what we want to do in Gaza.
When Theroux challenges her about settler violence, she objects that there is no settler violence. To prove the point, she shoves him, hard. Theroux, understanding the point, states that he will not shove her back. But, even if he does not, she says, this is all that is going on. The Palestinians provoke violence, and get what they deserve in return, but a rigged media only shows the reaction.
Weiss is compelling as a screen character, because she makes her point by assaulting Theroux - not dangerously or maliciously, but that is her whole argument. She seems almost disappointed that he doesn’t fight back (perhaps she has not seen any of his previous documentaries). Abramovitz, for all his firepower, seems pathetic in comparison: a shouty American male of the usual type with a gun instead of a pair of balls. Weiss, by contrast, is a pure product of the whole history of Zionist colonisation - something cold and hard like a piece of metamorphic rock.
For both, and other interviewers, the stakes are plainly religious. Yet we meet not the god of the whole universe, whose sunnier aspect is glimpsed in the prophetic writings of the bible (the lion will lie down with the lamb, and all that), but of ‘Eretz Israel’ - a local potentate at best: something like the cults of Baal and Moloch that were, according to the Tanakh, struck down with such force once upon a time. Such cults have a way of reviving when there is a restive population to be displaced to make room for self-dramatising Texans.
Reaction
The reaction to the documentary has been in some ways predictable. It is, to be honest, hard to raise oneself even to the level of anger towards its various Zionist critics, so perfunctory has their performance been. Many accused Theroux of what is, sometimes, called ‘nut-picking’ - selecting a few lunatics and taking them for the whole. Perhaps these critics might highlight some bleeding-heart liberal settlers for future journalists to interview, but let’s be honest: we are dealing with the tip of the spear here, and spear-tips tend to be sharp. Weiss gloats about forcing the government to back her movement by creating facts on the ground. She may have some megalomania about her, but on this point, nothing about the past 68 years gainsays her. The purpose of the machine, as Stafford Beer said, is what it does.
There were even some who denounced Theroux for picking on a poor, defenceless ‘Jewish grandmother’ - a response that needs to be rejected above all for its condescension towards a woman who is quite clearly in command of her own destiny and betrays no weakness in the face of Theroux’s pious invocations of international law. With five such ‘poor Jewish grandmothers’ at our disposal, we feel that the revolution would be taken care of in a matter of months.
The fact that it was the BBC who commissioned and broadcast the film has led to a new wave of accusations of “anti-Israel bias” against the corporation; again, it is scarcely worth bothering contending with such arrant nonsense, when the Beeb has been so utterly loyal to the most important partner of the US in the region, to the point that the one man with the veto over all its Middle East news coverage, a certain Raffi Berg, is a dedicated fan of Benjamin Netanyahu and admiring historian of the Mossad’s various exploits.
More interesting are the criticisms from the Palestinian side. We mentioned that, among his time with the Israeli settlers, Theroux met with some West Bank Palestinians. One was Mohammad Hureini, a young man from the area of Masafer Yatta, whose villages are assailed by settlers; the crew hide in Hureini’s home from aggressive IDF incursions. Hureini later wrote an article for Mondoweiss complaining that his account of his family’s history since 1948 - “how my grandparents were violently uprooted from their homes in 1948 by Zionist militias during the Nakba” - was “left on the cutting room floor”. “Instead,” he wrote, “the documentary chose to use a small clip of me talking about recent events in my village. It’s as if they wanted to show the surface of the crisis, without digging into its roots.”1
Gloomier still is the account of leftwing Israeli Dimi Reider in the New Statesman:
Theroux’s film doesn’t pause to explain that the locations of these settlements don’t merely threaten a future Palestinian state - they have already made anything recognisably state-like physically impossible on the ground. They have isolated the West Bank permanently from the rest of the Arab world by largely depopulating and de facto annexing the Jordan Valley, which runs between much of the would-be Palestinian state and Jordan. And the accelerated expulsion of entire Palestinian communities from the West Bank over the past year and a half exposes any pretence Israel would cede control over it to a Palestinian entity.
Palestinian statehood isn’t threatened by settlement expansion: its demise is a fait accompli, and refusing to acknowledge that actually offers the leeway Weiss and her accomplices need to move onto the next goal - annexation and expulsion.2
These criticisms are, I think, fair. The documentary remains imprisoned in the increasingly ridiculous framework of a ‘two-state solution’ - increasingly ridiculous for precisely the reasons laid out by Reider’s useful article. Daniella Weiss has only recently, in the grand historical sweep of things, been aligned with the outward and official policy of the Israeli government. But hers has always been the policy of the Israeli state; and it has been pursued with considerable success.
That said, if one wanted to make a documentary that brought all this out, one would not send Louis Theroux. Yes, the film stays on “the surface of the crisis”, as Hureini alleges. Yet this is not all bad. Theroux is a genius precisely at examining the surface of things, and the surface is also interesting in its own way. A more serious historian would not have captured so well the religious nationalism of the settlers, who are, right there and then, waving guns around and shooting people (and we do get to see someone actually getting shot).
It is more a criticism of all the films the BBC is not making. The settlers would find its ideal place as part of a treble bill with a film about the Nakba, and another about the disasters of 1967 and after. Within such a framework, of course, its pious legalism would have to be dropped. No law that permitted the things here depicted could be binding. No doubt other things would seem similarly ridiculous. I submit that friends of the Palestinian cause should be grateful for what is there: a straightforward account of the menace of Zionist colonisation, in the words of its remarkable and not-so-remarkable frontline protagonists.