Theroux's film on Israel's violent settlers was a mirror. Resist the calls to look away
For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society's dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It's because his film tells us far too much about ourselves
Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian today why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.
His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal “crazies” in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out the native Palestinian population, as significant and influential.
That’s exactly what they are, Theroux responds.
Settler leader Daniella Weiss, who Theroux spent much time following and interviewing, “enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and … has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism”.
He quotes Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin in noting that the setters’ “representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.
Theroux makes a further point about why it is important to focus on the settlers and understand what they really represent.
"A film about extreme West Bank settlers isn’t simply about a region of the Middle East. It’s also about 'us'," he writes in the Guardian.
He adds: “The urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the west… Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at [Donald Trump’s] Mar-a-Lago.”
There has been a backlash to Theroux’s documentary – just as there is continuing support for Israel, even as it commits what the International Court of Justice deems a “plausible genocide” – precisely because those extremists are "us".
The gun-toting, stone-throwing, orchard-burning, house-torching settlers are from Texas, London and Paris. And so are many of the soldiers – some of them volunteers from western countries – who are currently slaughtering and enforcing the starvation of children in Gaza.
It is “us” watching this genocide unfold in slow-motion and shrugging our shoulders, or both-sidesing the stream of constant Israeli crimes on our screens. It is “us” still sending weapons to make the genocide possible. It is “us” decrying the protesters marching against the genocide, against the starvation of babies, as “antisemites”, “haters” and “supporters of terrorism”.
Israel's crimes didn't begin 19 months ago. They date back a century or more. They began with Britain's sponsorship of an exclusive Jewish enclave imposed on the Middle East – a colonising state-to-be that was always going to require the containment and ultimately the expulsion, or extermination, of the native, Palestinian population.
That process had nothing more to do with “Jewish control” then than it does now. After all, it was an arch anti-semite, Arthur Balfour – Lord Balfour – who wrote the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising a Jewish state on the Palestinians' homeland. He was supported by the entire British cabinet – apart from Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish government minister, who rightly lamented Britain’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine as evidence of his countrymen’s enduring antisemitism.
Why were Balfour and the other government ministers so keen to have “the Jews” in the Middle East?
Religious reasons played a part, to be sure. But more important were all-too practical, foreign policy objectives.
First because, like other governments driven by ethno-nationalist sentiment that was then running riot in European capitals, the British government preferred that “a Jewish state”, dependent on Britain, would project its interests as a British colony in the oil-rich Middle East.
If Britain didn’t seek to promote and harness a European Jewish presence in the region first – to weaponise those Jews against “the natives” – France or Germany might do so instead.
It was a race between European powers for regional control. Though ultimately, of course, they were beaten to the finishing line by the United States, which has been Israel’s main patron since the founding of a so-called “Jewish state” through the mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948.
The crimes Israel carries out today were engineered – made inevitable – by the decisions western powers took from the early twentieth century onwards.
Which is why Theroux is right that we in the West are responsible for Israel's actions in a way that is entirely untrue of Burma or China or Russia.
Israel's supporters want us looking away from Israel's crimes to Burma’s, China’s or Russia’s precisely because Israel is “us”. Its state terrorism is ours.
If the Israel fortress colony falls, so the fear goes, the West's system of colonial power projection – those 800-plus military bases the US has stationed around the world in its bid for "global full-spectrum dominance" – will begin to unravel with it.
Israel is still secretly viewed by the West – by “us” – as it was by the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, 130 years ago: as "a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism".
Those cheerleading Israel’s genocide, or staying complicity silent, are the ideological inheritors of Lord Balfour and his ugly racism.
Either they wish for “the Jews” to complete the takeover of historic Palestine – exterminating or ethnically cleansing what is left of “the natives” – as a public flexing of “our” muscle, as a demonstration of who controls the world, of what awaits anyone who defies “our” might.
Or they have been so brainwashed by a fearmongering western narrative that the world is divided into two – and only the western half is actually civilised – that the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children and the starvation of a million more seems a reasonable, even moral, response to the state of the world.
Yes, the West’s Jewish populations have been more easily sold on this preposterous notion because, given their history of western persecution, they are more easily persuaded to live in a state of permanent fear, they are more readily convinced by establishment narratives that there are exceptional reasons to support this genocide.
But “our” leaders are no less in thrall to this kind of perverse logic. They gain their positions only after they have been fully initiated into an institutionalised system of power that requires fealty to western – chiefly US – projection of dominance across the globe.
Whatever Starmer’s personal feelings (assuming he has any), the fact is he is not wrong in proclaiming that his government is in no position to impose a sales ban on the components for F-35 fighter jets, the ones dropping bombs on Gaza’s population to level their homes and shred their children.
As his government implicitly acknowledges, the West’s system of arms production is necessarily so tightly integrated that no one, apart from the central hub of empire headquartered in the US, is in a position to change course. The West’s arms industries, just like its financial industries, are simply too big to fail.
Britain is locked in to producing F-35 components not specifically because Israel needs them, but because the West – because the US – needs them for its projection of power, for its continuing control of resources, for its global dominance – or, in the British government’s bogus rhetoric, to safeguard “Nato security” and “international peace”.
Were Starmer to dare to refuse, it would be no different from some local, small-time mafia boss telling the Don in Washington to take a hike. The British prime minister knows his fate would be straight out of a Sopranos script.
This too is the reason why he has been secretly shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza – more than 8,500 items – in violation of the promise he made to the British public last year that the shipments had stopped.
While Starmer has to placate those in his party who cannot stomach being complicit in genocide, he also has to keep the Don happy. And the Don is far more dangerous than either Starmer’s party or the British parliament.
Theroux’s film, The Settlers, is a vanishingly rare example of popular documentary-making showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because his thesis is wrong. It is because it tells us far too much about ourselves.
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