Louis Theroux on Capturing Reality of Israeli Settlements

In 2010, British journalist Louis Theroux went to Israel to interview ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers who believed it was their religious and political obligation to populate the West Bank for the BBC doc “Ultra Zionists.” Last year, over a decade and a half later, the broadcaster returned to the region to investigate how the Israeli settler movement has escalated following October 7th with “The Settlers.” 

Speaking at CPH:DOX following a sold-out screening of the documentary, the British author said he mostly remembers the “intensity” of being in the occupied region during wartime. Asked about what drew him to the subject, Theroux said the throughline in his work is “human weirdness” and the ways in which “human beings self-sabotage or behave in ways that maybe seem illogical, immoral or controversial.”

He added, “Here you have a religious nationalist ideology being imposed in an area that’s been turned into a kind of prison in cahoots with a vast military apparatus. I’d never seen that sort of thing unfold out in the open and with no shame.”

The Israeli interviewees in Theroux’s documentary are portrayed as boisterous and open about their plans to fully occupy the West Bank and promote Palestinian relocation. The documentary’s most striking subject is Daniella Weiss, an Israeli politician who founded Nachala, a settler and far-right organization. Over the last three decades, Weiss has directly helped establish dozens of Israeli outposts – settlements in the West Bank built without legal authorization. 

Throughout the documentary, Weiss can be seen fiercely defending Israelis’ rights to occupy the West Bank, and saying things such as: “We do for the government what they cannot do for themselves,” before boasting she has a direct line to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. At one point, the elderly woman claims “there is no such thing as settler violence,” implying videos widely shared online are edited and manipulated snippets portraying the settlers’ reactions to provocations.

Theroux said of the hardline approach of Weiss, who he called “the godmother of the settler movement,” toward Palestinians, “There’s just a kind of joy that pours out of her, a joy in her sense of mission that she has for this select group of people she prefers to represent.”

Asked about the motivation of Weiss for taking part in the documentary, the Brit said, “Anyone who enters into a documentary [has] a reason for doing it,” he added. “It might be narcissism, might be the need for publicity, might be because they’re trying to bring converts… With her, it’s a hard one to call. I suspect she must think that there’s something in having a profile. She relies on the communities internationally to support her work and maybe she’s thinking that this helps with her profile.”

Theroux noted that, since the documentary first went live on the BBC last year, Weiss has become “sort of a scratching post for Western media.” “I think Piers Morgan interviewed her afterwards. She seems to enjoy putting it out there.” This, one might say, feeds into a general criticism that some of Theroux’s work platforms voices that should not be spotlighted in the wider media. Prodded about that, the journalist said he does not like the term “platforming.”

“It feels so broad, as though having someone on a live podcast is the same as spending weeks attempting to interview someone in an appropriate way and then shaping the story in a way that feels truthful and responsible,” he noted. “Those are two very different things. I have a podcast and my approach on the podcast is very different to the one I take when I’m making a documentary.”

With “The Settlers,” Theroux was especially concerned with “doing a good job” of portraying the complexities of the subject he was approaching onscreen, thanks to how important the subject matter was to his creative team. Different from recent work like his Netflix hit “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” the author said he was “more on my front foot in this one.”

“One of my frustrations in making the film was being aware that we weren’t able to document the very worst of what was going on,” he said. “I’m doing stories about crazy people in America and porn movies and some subjects that are more obviously mainstream. Here, I am on something that people might perceive as less clearly for the mass market. The idea of me [pointing] my kind of documentary lens on the story… [My team] imposed on me how important it was that we did a good job.”

As for the criticism that might arise from the fact “The Settlers” largely focuses on the Israelis on the West Bank, with only brief interludes following Palestinians in the region, Theroux said he “understands” how that could be viewed.

“I can see that would be frustrating,” he admitted. “At the same time, this isn’t the only film about the situation in the West Bank. It’s the film I made and it sits in a body of work in which I’ve tried to reach large audiences with a way of telling stories that do justice to situations that have moral urgency. And, in the end, the people with agency are the ones with the guns, right? They’re the ones who, for more than 60 years, have kept a region in which more than 3 million Palestinians live under military occupation.”

Lastly, asked about the impact of working so close to the tragedies and devastation of war, the British presenter emphasized that “part of telling documentaries is the regrettable privilege you have of moving on,” adding that “you can’t become too attached to the idea of changing the world.”

“I have a great family, a wonderful wife, three amazing boys. I feel very blessed,” he went on. “I have the luxury of leaving. I don’t suffer. I’m not a war correspondent who comes home and either goes traumatized or thinks, ‘I have to get back out there.’ I enjoy doing the work and there’s a real sense of pride and purpose that goes with documenting something you feel deserves to be documented.”