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Louis Theroux Points the Camera — and Israel's Settlers Tell on Themselves

Back when I was in high school, we put on a production of “The Laramie Project,” the stage show centered around the aftermath of the murder of Matthew Sheppard, a student at the University of Wyoming who was killed in 1998 for being gay. Reading the play, which was taken from extensive interviews conducted with the people involved in the case, one of the most striking aspects was the role of the Westboro Baptist Church. 


Louis Theroux in blue shirt and glasses listens to masked man gesturing in discussion. Stone wall and arched windows in background. Tense mood.
Louis Theroux in The Settlers

The organisation, a rabidly anti-gay hate group, served as a minor but notable player in the story. Their MO, for those unfamiliar, is to picket funerals of people they deem ‘sinful’ (a wide umbrella, ranging from gay people to soldiers in the US army) with deeply obscene signs and chants. While looking up more about them, I stumbled onto a video titled “America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis” — this was back in the time when you could upload entire documentaries on YouTube without triggering the copyright bots — and that was my introduction to Louis Theroux.


Since then, I’ve been a pretty big fan of the British documentarian, known for his signature style: demure passiveness that still feels incredibly needling. Oddly, he bears a resemblance to the famous TV detective Lieutenant Columbo, in that he has a way of pestering his interview subjects in a haplessly good-natured way that they end up saying more than they probably initially intended to. Theroux got his start making documentaries about weird subcultures, chronicling UFO cultists and extreme survivalists on his TV show Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. Gradually, he transitioned to more “serious” documentary filmmaking, retaining his somewhat deceptive passivity. 


“Deceptive” is sort of the operative word when it comes to Theroux — the question of how much of his bemused, questioning affect is legitimate, and how much of it is him playing up for the camera. Now, certainly to an extent, it has to be a performance. Theroux is a documentarian, he’s there to tell a story, and in general, I believe that every time you know you’re in front of a camera, you start to perform a little bit. Intriguingly, a large part of the genius of Theroux’s approach could be described as his having such a casual and easygoing manner that it makes people temporarily forget they’re being filmed. Though I’m aware this edges towards parasociality, I like to imagine Theroux in sort of the same way I do Lieutenant Columbo — in the sense that he is genuinely like that, but also smart enough to know how he comes off to other people, and sometimes plays it up to get a rise.


The trick, then, is to find a subject that benefits the Theroux approach. The Westboro Baptist Church was perfect in that regard, since the fascination with them was more than just them being unrepentantly hateful and dogmatic — it’s that they’re weird. The trilogy of movies Theroux made chronicling them has a lot of scenes where the presenter just stares in nonplussed horror at the cult-like insanity happening around him, but when your subject in question does things like remix a Lady Gaga song to be about gay hate, complete with an accompanying music video,  there’s not much else you have to do.  


Alternatively, however, you could get an instance like the recent three-part miniseries Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, which had one episode centered on alt-right figures like Nick Fuentes and Tim 'Baked Alaska' Gionet, which was stymied by the fact that there’s nowhere to go with them. He can point a camera in their face and highlight their hypocrisy all he wants, but that only goes so far when the subject has already made a tactical decision to discount everything you say as "fake news.” 


I was a little worried going into The Settlers that the same problem would apply. Israel has spent every day since October 7, 2023, steadfastly denying that there even is a genocide going on. Given that the core of the conflict lies in the ongoing occupation and settler-colonial project that denies Palestinians their right to land, autonomy, and dignity, it’s not surprising that any attempt to document these realities is obstructed by the entrenched ideological narratives and political interests that seek to uphold Israeli dominance.  


Instead, many of the people Theroux talks to are the perfect marks for his style, for one simple reason: they crave external validation, and become deeply uncomfortable and belligerent when they don’t get it. So much of this doc is taken up with Theroux talking to settlers, who go to absolute water the minute he doesn’t immediately go along with everything they’re spouting. Half the time, Theroux doesn’t even say anything — he just gives them an unimpressed stare. It’s another signature move, and you could summarize the entire documentary that way; sixty minutes of Theroux going around, talking to whoever he can who’s involved in the settler project in some way.


Instead of being frustrated by Theroux’s lack of confrontational moments, I was astonished at how little he had to scratch to elicit a torrent of sheer genocidal hatred from these people. Similar to the Westboro Baptist Church, where all you have to do is point a camera at them, and they do all the work for you; like early on, when Theroux tags along with a settler group who set up camp overlooking the war zone, where a Rabbi claims, “we will never have peace with these savages,” who he proceeds to call “camel riders” and says they should be “cleansed” (he then notices the camera crew, and freaks out a little, forcing them to stop filming). 


Easily the best instance of Theroux’s signature pseudo-naïveté comes when he and his crew find themselves hiding from the IDF, who are hunting outside, waving their guns around. There’s a tangible feeling in the air that Theroux might actually die. Israel has, of course, a well-documented history of assassinating journalists. Shireen Abu Akleh, for instance, was murdered by the IDF in May of 2022 — notably a full year before Israel’s genocide of Palestinians began. As of last month, the estimated death toll for journalists sits at 232, according to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project. 


Theroux asks the question, “What can we do - can we call the police?” and gets the answer, “Which police?” Theroux presses on, asking if they’re worried or not, and he’s told they’re not, because “we’re raised in this situation, so it became a normal reality for us.” Once again, Louis’ clear-eyed, no-frills directness resulted in a more direct answer than you might otherwise get, cutting through the mire to arrive at the central truth of the matter. 


This is what makes Theroux the perfect documentarian for a topic like this — his straightforwardness in approaching a subject cuts through the mire and arrives at a crystal clear center. Coverage like this is important because this is a topic that’s very easy to tune out and dismiss on account that it may be “too complicated.” Filmmakers who point out that it’s not are vital. The Settlers is actually Theroux’s second film set around the Zionist movement, serving as a sort-of sequel to 2011’s The Ultra Zionists. It wasn’t in the first batch of films of his I watched, but it was one I came around to when I was first attempting to educate myself about the conflict.


For a good chunk of my life, “Israel/Palestine” was a broad sociopolitical phrase that I didn’t understand, and comfortably ignored, a fact I’m pretty well ashamed of now. One of the tactics Israelis use to attempt to legitimize their claim is to obscure it with geopolitical complexity, when the fact is: it’s not complex. Israel is an apartheid, supremacist state that is actively oppressing an entire people. 


That’s the beginning and the end of it, and it was unacceptable even before they launched into even-more open genocide back in 2023 (I say “even more” because their tactics towards Palestinian people have been genocidal for a really long time. The only difference now is they’re comfortable posting their war crimes on TikTok). A frequent type of post you’ll see crop up on social media is a headline that looks like the latest Israel atrocity — for instance, The Guardian headline “Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza” — and then the post directs you to look at the date, and you see it was from 2014.


As a Jew by heritage, it is maddening to see people of your background openly using it as a shield and justification for genocidal violence, usually with a broad smile that doesn’t quite meet the eyes. It’s frightening the degree to which they truly believe it is their divine right to expunge a whole group of people, whom they do not consider human, because their religious texts told them so. 


An aspect of the movie that is making the biggest splash on social media is Daniella Weiss, the ‘Godmother of the settler movement,’ whose presence in the movie is akin to Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men; there is a sense looking at her that we are witnessing a historic evil at work. Which is a deeply charged thing to say about another human being, but how else do you respond to scenes of her methodically laying out her plan for systematically dislocating Palestinian people? 


Another movie comparison, deeply charged but I think totally apt, is 2001's Conspiracy, the biopic about the meeting between the Nazi top brass where the mechanics and implementation of the Final Solution was decided upon. Her final interview with Theroux is stomach-churning to watch, as she casually denies settler violence against Palestinians exists, and when Theroux points out just one example of the mountains and mountains of proof contradicting this, she claims the settlers were acting in retaliation. She then charges forward and fully shoves him, taunting him to do something. He doesn’t, and at the end of the interview, she looks back and says with possibly the most chilling smile I’ve ever seen committed to film, “I’d hoped you’d push back.”


It’s no surprise the pitchforks are out in full force for this movie. I ended up watching it on YouTube (a nostalgic feeling, given that’s how I was introduced to the documentarian originally) as enterprising users have already grabbed the film and are posting it to as many sites as they can, predicting — not unjustifiably — that the BBC will get cold feet and try to have the doc taken down. So far we seem to be in the clear, although there have been attempts from the usual suspects to muddy the film; prominent tabloid rag The Daily Mail said in their review, "[Theroux’s] interviewees are carefully chosen, to reinforce the BBC narrative that Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians their victims.” 


It’s a framing being seized upon by pro-Israel defenders, at least the ones cogent enough to recognize that Israel’s open genocide is a bad look — that Theroux picks and chooses his marks carefully. This handily ignores how the film demonstrates Weiss’ influence over the Israeli government, and her direct hand over charting the settler project, or the fact that she was nominated by Israel for a Nobel Prize this year. The Spectator similarly published an open hit job on the film — “Why does Louis Theroux keep picking on Israeli settlers?” by Jonathan Sacerdoti — dated before the film even came out, making its status as a preemptive strike all the more obvious (worth noting, the rag is edited by Michael Gove, a former minister in Boris Johnson’s cabinet with direct ties to charities funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defence).


The problem with these attempts to muddy the water is that they’re dealing with a filmmaker whose whole MO is shocking clarity. Nothing in this film is a hit job on Israelites — it’s just Theroux handing them a rope, and watching with a look of wide-eyed faux-naïveté as they hang themselves. The only real problem with this movie is that the title “Louis & The Nazis” was already taken.




Edited by Anish Paranjape


Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.



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Keywords: Louis Theroux The Settlers, Israeli Settler Documentary 2025, Louis Theroux Israel Palestine Conflict, BBC Louis Theroux New Documentary, Zionist Settlement Documentary, Daniella Weiss Louis Theroux, Journalist Deaths Gaza 2025, Israel Palestine Theroux Film Review, Exposing Israeli Settlers Theroux, Louis Theroux Forbidden America Vs The Settlers.

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