Louis Theroux on capturing the 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 duty to populate the West Bank for the BBC documentary “Ultra Zionists.” Last year, more than a decade and a half later, the broadcaster returned to the region to investigate how the Israeli settler movement escalated after October 7 with ‘The Settlers’.

Speaking on CPH:DOX after a sold-out screening of the documentary, the British author said he mainly remembers the “intensity” of his time in the occupied region during wartime. Asked what drew him to this subject, Theroux said the common thread in his work is “human weirdness” and the ways in which “people sabotage themselves or behave in ways that may seem illogical, immoral or controversial.”

He added: “Here you have a religious nationalist ideology being imposed in an area that has turned into a kind of prison in cahoots with a huge military apparatus. I have never seen anything like this done publicly and without shame.”

The Israeli interviewees in Theroux’s documentary are depicted as vocal and open about their plans to fully occupy the West Bank and promote the relocation of Palestinians. The documentary’s most notable subject is Daniella Weiss, an Israeli politician who founded Nachala, a settler and far-right organization. Over the past thirty years, Weiss has directly helped establish dozens of Israeli outposts—settlements in the West Bank built without legal permission.

Throughout the documentary, Weiss is seen fiercely defending the rights of Israelis to occupy the West Bank, saying things like, “We do for the government what they cannot do for themselves,” before bragging that she has a direct line to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At one point, the older woman claims that “there is no such thing as settler violence,” implying that videos widely shared online are edited and manipulated clips depicting settler responses to provocations.

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

Asked about Weiss’s motivation for participating in the documentary, the Briton said: “Anyone who participates in a documentary [has] a reason to do it,” he added. “It might be narcissism, it might be the need for publicity, it might be because they’re trying to bring converts… With her it’s hard to make the call. I guess she thinks there’s something to having a profile. She relies on the international communities to support her work and perhaps she thinks this helps her profile.”

Theroux noted that since the documentary first went live on the BBC last year, Weiss has become “something of a scratching post for the Western media.” “I think Piers Morgan interviewed her afterwards. She seems to enjoy putting it out there.” You could say that this feeds into the general criticism that some of Theroux’s working platforms produce voices that should not be highlighted in the wider media. When pressed, the journalist said he doesn’t like the term ‘platforming’.

“It feels so broad, like having someone on a live podcast is like spending weeks trying to interview someone appropriately 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 from the one I take when I make a documentary.”

With “The Settlers,” Theroux was primarily concerned with “getting it right” in portraying the complexity of the subject he was approaching on screen, thanks to how important the subject was to his creative team. Unlike recent work like his Netflix hit “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” the author said he was “more on my front foot on this one.”

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

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

“I understand that would be frustrating,” he admitted. “At the same time, this is not the only film about the situation in the West Bank. It is the film I made and it is part of a body of work in which I have tried to reach a large audience with a way of telling stories that do justice to situations that have moral urgency. And ultimately, the people with agency are the ones with the guns, right? They are the ones who have maintained a region in which over three million Palestinians live under military conditions for more than sixty years.” occupation.”

Finally, when asked about the impact of working so close to the tragedies and devastation of war, the British presenter emphasized that “documentary storytelling is part of the regrettable privilege you have of moving on,” adding that “you can’t get too attached to the idea of ​​changing the world.”

“I have a great family, a great wife, three great boys. I feel very blessed,” he continued. “I have the luxury of leaving. I’m not suffering. I’m not a war correspondent who comes home and gets traumatized or thinks, ‘I have to get back out.’ I enjoy doing the work and there is a real sense of pride and purpose that comes with documenting something that you think deserves to be documented.”