Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’
And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch. The only variety lay in how long they managed to speak in the patient tones of somebody explaining something obvious to a dimwit, before giving way to exasperation at Louis’s failure to realise how obvious it was. After all, the Jews have a literal divine right to this land, whereas the Palestinians have none.
At the centre of the programme was the ‘godmother of the settler movement’, Daniella Weiss, who’s helped to establish dozens of Jewish strongholds in the West Bank – and now has her sights set on Gaza. While still in patient mode, she told Louis that ‘we do for governments what they cannot do for themselves… Netanyahu is very happy at what we do but he cannot say it’. Moving on to exasperation, she dismissed Louis’s allegations of settler violence against Palestinians as ludicrously unfounded, even though there’s solid video evidence of it – and (a fact Louis curiously failed to mention) she’s been convicted of some herself.
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