{"id":546376,"date":"2026-03-19T08:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546376\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T08:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:36:08","slug":"louis-theroux-on-capturing-reality-of-israeli-settlements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546376\/","title":{"rendered":"Louis Theroux on Capturing Reality of Israeli Settlements"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn 2010, British journalist Louis Theroux<\/a> 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 \u201cUltra Zionists.\u201d 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 \u201cThe Settlers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking at CPH:DOX<\/a> following a sold-out screening of the documentary, the British author said he mostly remembers the \u201cintensity\u201d of being in the occupied region during wartime. Asked about what drew him to the subject, Theroux said the throughline in his work is \u201chuman weirdness\u201d and the ways in which \u201chuman beings self-sabotage or behave in ways that maybe seem illogical, immoral or controversial.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tHe added, \u201cHere you have a religious nationalist ideology being imposed in an area that\u2019s been turned into a kind of prison in cahoots with a vast military apparatus. I\u2019d never seen that sort of thing unfold out in the open and with no shame.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Israeli interviewees in Theroux\u2019s documentary are portrayed as boisterous and open about their plans to fully occupy the West Bank and promote Palestinian relocation. The documentary\u2019s 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 \u2013 settlements in the West Bank built without legal authorization.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the documentary, Weiss can be seen fiercely defending Israelis\u2019 rights to occupy the West Bank, and saying things such as: \u201cWe do for the government what they cannot do for themselves,\u201d before boasting she has a direct line to Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. At one point, the elderly woman claims \u201cthere is no such thing as settler violence,\u201d implying videos widely shared online are edited and manipulated snippets portraying the settlers\u2019 reactions to provocations.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLouis Theroux at CPH:DOX<\/p>\n

\n\tTheroux said of the hardline approach of Weiss, who he called \u201cthe godmother of the settler movement,\u201d toward Palestinians, \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAsked about the motivation of Weiss for taking part in the documentary, the Brit said, \u201cAnyone who enters into a documentary [has] a reason for doing it,\u201d he added. \u201cIt might be narcissism, might be the need for publicity, might be because they\u2019re trying to bring converts\u2026 With her, it\u2019s a hard one to call. I suspect she must think that there\u2019s something in having a profile. She relies on the communities internationally to support her work and maybe she\u2019s thinking that this helps with her profile.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTheroux noted that, since the documentary first went live on the BBC last year, Weiss has become \u201csort of a scratching post for Western media.\u201d \u201cI think Piers Morgan interviewed her afterwards. She seems to enjoy putting it out there.\u201d This, one might say, feeds into a general criticism that some of Theroux\u2019s work platforms voices that should not be spotlighted in the wider media. Prodded about that, the journalist said he does not like the term \u201cplatforming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt 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,\u201d he noted. \u201cThose 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\u2019m making a documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith \u201cThe Settlers,\u201d Theroux was especially concerned with \u201cdoing a good job\u201d 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 \u201cLouis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,\u201d the author said he was \u201cmore on my front foot in this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne of my frustrations in making the film was being aware that we weren\u2019t able to document the very worst of what was going on,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2026 [My team] imposed on me how important it was that we did a good job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for the criticism that might arise from the fact \u201cThe Settlers\u201d largely focuses on the Israelis on the West Bank, with only brief interludes following Palestinians in the region, Theroux said he \u201cunderstands\u201d how that could be viewed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI can see that would be frustrating,\u201d he admitted. \u201cAt the same time, this isn\u2019t the only film about the situation in the West Bank. It\u2019s the film I made and it sits in a body of work in which I\u2019ve 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\u2019re the ones who, for more than 60 years, have kept a region in which more than 3 million Palestinians live under military occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLastly, asked about the impact of working so close to the tragedies and devastation of war, the British presenter emphasized that \u201cpart of telling documentaries is the regrettable privilege you have of moving on,\u201d adding that \u201cyou can\u2019t become too attached to the idea of changing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI have a great family, a wonderful wife, three amazing boys. I feel very blessed,\u201d he went on. \u201cI have the luxury of leaving. I don\u2019t suffer. I\u2019m not a war correspondent who comes home and either goes traumatized or thinks, \u2018I have to get back out there.\u2019 I enjoy doing the work and there\u2019s a real sense of pride and purpose that goes with documenting something you feel deserves to be documented.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2010, British journalist Louis Theroux went to Israel to interview ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers who believed it was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,200933,49495,75,209715],"class_list":{"0":"post-546376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cphdox","11":"tag-documentaries-to-watch","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-louis-theroux"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}