Review | Louis Theroux’s Settlers

The BBC’s Louis Theroux returned to the illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine’s West Bank after 14 years since his last programme in the region, prompting international outrage about the state sanctioned violent terror inflicted onto the Palestinian people depicted in The Settlers. rs21 member and Palestine activist Liz Burdon checks in to see if the critical acclaim and inevitable Zionist backlash is deserved.

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers sets out to examine the beliefs, plans and activities of the illegal under international law settler community in Palestine. They are an extremist group supported by Israel’s Minister of National Security Ben Gvir.

Theroux revisits Palestinian communities 14 years after his 2010 documentary, to find the situation has worsened dramatically. His work exposes how Israeli settlers, often migrants from around the world, come to Palestine to seize Palestinian land, reinforcing a brutal colonial system.

Zionist ideology champions the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel, and could be seen as a response to centuries of discrimination against Jews. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, asserted that antisemitism could only be eradicated if Jews lived in their own national state. The making of a Jewish homeland suited the Western colonial project; Israel could be seen as the US watchdog in the Middle East. 

‘Historically Zionists saw themselves as part of the European colonial project bringing progress to Palestine.’ It was believed that a British-protected Jewish colony would help secure the eastern approaches of the Suez Canal. 

I wrote a piece for the guardian about the reaction to my settlers documentary. https://t.co/KLIHfVkqnG

— Louis Theroux (@louistheroux) May 10, 2025

Zionists wishing to settle in Palestine talked about a land without people. Nevertheless, they understood that Palestine was populated. A Zionist farmer’s leader wrote ‘We must not forget here that we are dealing with a semi savage people, which has extremely primitive concepts’. Dehumanising a population marked for ethnic cleansing is a common tactic used by colonisers across the globe for centuries. We see it repeated in Theroux’s documentary, settlers to continue to deploy this tactic in order to achieve ethnic cleansing. 

In the documentary, the settlers talk about their plans to completely annex Gaza and the West Bank. Settler leader Daniella Weiss chillingly laughs off the welfare of Palestinians when asked about a two-state solution or a single democratic state with equal rights for all. She rejects coexistence, insisting on maintaining a Jewish-supremacist state. She maintains, ‘We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves.’ She claims not to call Netanyahu directly about her settlement plans, instead calling his advisers, telling Theroux, ‘We will make it realistic.’ When asked if she is forcing the government, she answers, ‘It’s not forcing the government, it’s helping the government.’ 

She tells us that she is doing the government’s job for them, insisting that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports settlement expansion into Gaza but ‘cannot say it publicly’. 

Arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former minister of defence. Theroux referred to the war crimes of displacing Palestinians, which she responded to as, ‘a light felony’. Her ideological position is reiterated in the language used by one of the rabbis she engages to provide spiritual support.

He says, ‘Look Gentlemen, to my mind there was never peace with these “savages”. There is no peace, and never will be. It’s not that I don’t want peace. I want peace too. The land belongs to only the people of Israel. All of Gaza, all of Lebanon should be cleansed of these “camel riders”. Whoever runs away, good on them. Whoever doesn’t we’ll encourage him to do so, including providing money so they can buy everything they need.’

This language is reminiscent of how settler colonies in the past regarded those they conquered. If you dehumanise them, you’ll get the people on side. This theme of dehumanisation of Palestinians continues throughout the programme. Israeli settlers often cite biblical texts to claim exclusive rights to Palestinian land. A young woman at a festival close to the Gaza border, when 40,000 people had already been killed, says, ‘The bible says, this place was given to the Jews; this place is ours.’ Another settler originally from Texas says, ‘I’m so uncomfortable using the word Palestinian because I don’t think they exist… I don’t think they exist as a real nation with a real connection to this land… they are Arabs.’

In cities like Hebron, Palestinians live under an apartheid regime, facing systematic violence including shooting, land theft, and movement restrictions enforced by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Palestinians live under Israeli military law, restricted from most Israeli roads, subject to frequent run-ins with the authorities and detention without trial. The legal system is opaque and arbitrary.  

Films are made by teams. And I'm incredibly proud of everyone who came together to make @louistheroux The Settlers. It was tough. And you deserve this praise. Out film is on BBC Iplayer now. #louistheroux #louistherouxthesettlers pic.twitter.com/jHAqICYAA0

— Joshua Baker (@joshbakerstory) April 29, 2025

Theroux is walked through areas of Hebron by Palestinian Issa Amro, who demonstrates the almost impossible logistics of navigating through his own community with checkpoints and forbidden places, appearing sometimes to be decided on by the military when it suits them. Many Palestinians have left Hebron, leaving boarded-up businesses, forcibly shuttered by the army. Against this backdrop, settlers can roam freely.

Theroux remarked in the programme, ‘They see it as their divine right to make a greater Israel, drive out the Palestinians who have been here for generations. They are accelerating the settlement process while being protected by the Israeli military.’  

Whether or not Theroux’s intention was to advocate for Palestinians, I believe he has helped to do so by informing his audience of approximately 800,000 viewers on the night, and this has to be welcomed. The settlers are allowed to speak for themselves, revealing very clearly their intentions. They make no secret of their supremacist ideology, their racism and hatred of the Palestinians. Settlers carry weapons, believing they have the right to defend themselves, understanding no irony. They want to make the lives of Palestinians so painful that they will choose to live elsewhere, otherwise, they are happy to see their extermination. They don’t see Palestinians as human beings. 

There is no obliqueness anywhere in the documentary. It is welcome in that it informs those who know little or nothing about the settler colony and reminds the rest of us of the brutality of the apartheid state. It does not give any historical background to the Zionist movement. 

Importantly, it does not inform us about or give any background to the resistance since 1948, the year of the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ when thousands of Palestinians were murdered, burned out of their homes and villages and driven to refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. To view Palestinians as merely objects of the settler colonial project or as victims, would leave us with little or no hope for the liberation of Palestine. 

A video clip I took during the filming of the BBC documentary Louis Theroux’s “ the settlers “ shows how Theroux was physically attacked by an Israeli soldier In Hebron , the reality is much harder what came out in the film. @BBC @BBCLondonNews , @louistheroux pic.twitter.com/rDgrzcvxyV

— Issa Amro عيسى عمرو 🇵🇸 (@Issaamro) April 29, 2025

In spite of Weiss’s intention to get international governments on board, she is increasingly losing the argument. South Africa brought a powerful legal case to the ICC, imposing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. More importantly, there is a growing global movement, no less across Jewish society, that understands the Zionist project and is fighting on many fronts in order to resist and see an end to it. ‘Not in our name’ is now a slogan used by Jewish people across the globe, ‘never again means never again’ being another. The global resistance employs peaceful strategies, but is met increasingly in many countries with police brutality. Nevertheless, the global fight back is not diminishing. 

Some governments pay lip service to supporting a two-state solution whilst doing nothing to end apartheid or the war and starvation in Gaza. With the growth of the settler movement (there are about 700,000 settlers in the West Bank) there is realistically one state, rubbishing the notion of a two-state solution. Although the circumstances are different, like with South Africa in the 80s, the global movement, together with Palestinian resistance at home and abroad, can and will see an end to Israeli apartheid and expansionism. 

This documentary has been largely well-received and deservedly so.