Unnerving whisper: Louis Theroux captures the mundanity of Israel’s extreme settlers

Louis Theroux filming ‘The Settlers’ in Israel in October 2024.

Rachel Fink writes in Haaretz on 5 May 2025:

For years, reporters, activists and academics have searched for the most effective way to capture the brutal reality of life for Palestinians, both Gaza and the West Bank. Some do it relentlessly – tracking every demolition, every burned olive tree, every denied permit – until one injustice bleeds numbly into the next. Others, primarily on social media, turn to shock value, posting the most graphic images and the gravest injustices, hoping the sheer horror will jolt the world awake.

But in the long months since Israel began its military campaign in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, Palestinian suffering in Gaza has eclipsed the ever-worsening situation in the West Bank. Efforts to shine a light on settler violence and the occupation there have become more urgent – but mostly invisible.

In his new BBC documentary “The Settlers,” veteran documentarist and storyteller Louis Theroux takes another approach: quiet observation. The film, which debuted last week, is chilling in its restraint and devastating in its effect. In interviews with the men and women who believe they are divinely entitled to drive out the Palestinians from their home, Theroux does not repudiate. He does not editorialize. Instead, he lets his subjects speak for themselves – and in doing so, he reveals the terrifying normalcy of their beliefs and their actions.

“My aim was to observe them up close,” Theroux wrote in a piece for “Deadline” ahead of the premiere, “to try to understand their mindset and their actions, and to get a sense of the impact of their presence on the lives of the millions of Palestinians who live in the region.” His tone throughout the film is curious, not caustic. Which is precisely what makes it so powerful.

Disarmingly ordinary
This is not a documentary about the Ben-Gvirs or Smotrichs of the world – brash politicians well-known for their incendiary statements and open calls for ethnic cleansing. Instead, Theroux sits down with settlers who seem, at first glance, disarmingly ordinary. Like Ari Abramowitz, a friendly Texan transplant with a warm drawl and a home in an illegal West Bank outpost. He is affable, articulate – and armed to the teeth. Abramowitz is “uncomfortable” with Theroux’s use of the word Palestinian, but only because he does not believe they, or their claim to the land, exist.

When asked whether the nearby settlement is legal according to international law, Abramowitz tells Theroux he doesn’t know. “But I also do not care. At all,” he adds.

We meet Rabbi Dov Lior, a soft-spoken elder statesman of the movement and the former chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, as he confers with a group of men who are preparing to resettle Gaza. “I, too, want peace,” he tells them gently. And for a moment, it sounds like a rare note of moderation – until he continues: “But the land belongs only to the people of Israel. All of Gaza and all of Lebanon must be cleansed of these camel riders.”

Lior’s followers form a tight circle of dancing, the braided fringes of the prayer shawls worn by religious Jewish men under their clothing fluttering in the wind, as they rejoice in celebration.

And then there’s Daniella Weiss, often referred to as the grandmother of the settler movement – both because of all she has done to advance its cause and because she looks the part: cheerful, maternal, camera-ready. Weiss is featured throughout the documentary, posing for photos with admirers, attempting to drive her car into Gaza, and waxing lyrical about a future Greater Israel with no Palestinians from the River to the Sea. “Extremist ideology, delivered with a smile,” as Theroux describes it.

In one scene, he reflects on this juxtaposition. Leaning against his rented truck in a dimly lit gas station, Theroux says in voiceover: “There was something unsettling about hearing Daniella lay out her vision of ethnonationalism so plainly.” That feeling of unease is the film’s emotional center of gravity.

Louis Theroux filming “The Settlers” in Israel in October 2024.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
At one point, Theroux and his crew are visiting Mohammad Hureini at his neighbor’s home in the village of At-Tuwani, south of Hebron, when a laser beam appears on the wall, warning that IDF are patrolling the area. They soon hear soldiers shouting at them from the road. “What can we do? Can we call the police?” a visibly nervous Theroux asks his host.

“What police?” Hureini replies, laughing bitterly. “It’s all the same regime.”

The taunting green light of the laser is a symbol of the constant threat under which Palestinians in the West Bank are forced to live their lives. It’s not the bullets that are so terrifying, but the omnipresent possibility that one could come flying through the house at any given moment.

Theroux meets olive farmer Ishak Jabarin, who harvests trees in the South Hebron Hills with his sons, accompanied by volunteers for protection. Jabarin wears his keffiyeh as it was originally intended in ancient Mesopotamia – long before it became a symbol of solidarity on college campuses – to shield his weathered skin from the sun and dust as he works. With cameras rolling, the army arrives, acting on a settler’s tip. Though no warrant is presented, Jabarin is forced to leave. He scoops what olives he can into his shirt before the situation escalates.

In Hebron, Theroux walks with activist Issa Amro through an army checkpoint. It’s a place Theroux visited previously for his 2011 documentary “The Ultra Zionists,” and now, for Palestinian residents, the sense of being trapped has only deepened. When a smug soldier tells them they can’t film, Amro calmly complies, and Theroux follows suit.

Amro knows the rules. Every inch of his life is regulated. Asked how he’ll get home, Amro outlines the winding detour followed by a long wait at yet another checkpoint. As he disappears from frame, two children kick a tattered soccer ball, surrounded by barbed wire and the watchtower looming in the background.

Only once does the documentary show graphic violence: a short video clip of a settler shooting a Palestinian man point-blank in At-Tuwani, as a woman’s anguished scream pierces the air. The man survives, though he is seriously wounded. The settler, on the other hand, faces no consequences beyond having his gun license revoked.

The footage is used sparingly but precisely to make a point, perhaps even to preempt the claim that Theroux is “platforming” extremists: Do not be fooled by their jovial smiles, the sweet wedding photographs that decorate the walls of their illegally built homes. Underneath the seemingly wholesome fun and the festive celebrations they hold on the border of what they believe will be their next conquest, is an ideology built on hatred and vengeance, bolstered by fundamentalist religious beliefs.

The documentary’s final scene is a return to Weiss, filmed at one such gathering – a Sukkot conference promoting the resettlement of Gaza held last fall. The event featured several senior Likud officials, a worrying sign of just how thoroughly these once radical ideas have crept into mainstream right-wing politics. When Theroux asks what she thinks of settler violence, she doesn’t flinch. “There is no such thing,” she declares.

Which begs a question “The Settlers” forces us to examine. What is more dangerous – the extremist who justifies an attack on his Palestinian neighbor, or the ideologue who denies that such violence exists?

Many journalists and human rights workers on the ground have risked their lives to expose the occupation’s most brutal atrocities, like the IDF killing in January of two-and-a-half-year-old Laila Al-Khatib from the Palestinian village of Muthallat Ash Shuhada near Jenin, who died in her pregnant mother’s arms. Their work is essential and brave. But so is Theroux’s. His film doesn’t scream – it whispers, unnervingly, and in doing so, illuminates how injustice is normalized not just through violence, but through indifference.

In the film’s closing moments, Theroux finally breaks from neutrality to offer one brief but piercing rebuke, though even this is delivered in the same dulcet, composed voice he has maintained throughout the film. Sitting across from Weiss, he reflects on her refusal to consider the lives of Palestinians.

“It would be understandable to think about your own people, your own children first,” he tells her. “But to think about other people, other children, not at all?”

Theroux pauses.

“That seems … sociopathic.”

The camera lingers on Weiss. As always, she is smiling.

This article is reproduced in its entirety