To an Israeli, watching both Louis Theroux’s The Settlers and the response to it has been a strange experience. The film revisits the project of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Theroux previously explored in 2011. It reiterates the danger that the settler movement poses to the prospect of Palestinian statehood, and showcases two archetypes of the movement: the frontiersmen, personified here by an outpost-dwelling horse-wrangler; and the provocateur, personified by veteran settler leader Daniella Weiss.
Rachel Cooke wrote in these pages earlier that the film is a “deathly warning”; in the more avowedly pro-Israel press it has been castigated for focusing on a handful of extremists who, apparently, don’t represent Israel as a whole. There’s some truth to the film’s argument and to both of these responses. But all three – Theroux, his fans and his critics – manage to miss the point.
First – to borrow a Bushism – the film misunderestimates even the issue it does try to tackle: settlement expansion. Theroux points out that the population of settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace process in the 1990s (which in itself means that the settlers successfully derailed that process when they were three times weaker and far more isolated than they are now). But his film doesn’t show just how sprawling these settlements have become. They aren’t just cosy suburbs, eco-resorts and hilltop encampments; they spread over over 30 industrial zones, shopping malls, colleges (including a sizeable university) and dormitory towns.
Moreover, while we catch a glimpse of a dense settlement map, Theroux’s film doesn’t pause to explain that the locations of these settlements don’t merely threaten a future Palestinian state – they have already made anything recognisably state-like physically impossible on the ground. They have isolated the West Bank permanently from the rest of the Arab world by largely depopulating and de facto annexing the Jordan Valley, which runs between much of the would-be Palestinian state and Jordan. And the accelerated expulsion of entire Palestinian communities from the West Bank over the past year and a half exposes any pretence Israel would cede control over it to a Palestinian entity.
Palestinian statehood isn’t threatened by settlement expansion; its demise is a fait accompli, and refusing to acknowledge that actually offers the leeway Weiss and her accomplices need to move onto the next goal – annexation and expulsion.
But the change between Theroux’s first film and his second runs much further and deeper than the hilltops. Like most other Western coverage of the issue, the film appears to exist in 1990s time warp, where the settlers are a militant, insidious minority dragging Israel, an otherwise modern and pragmatic state, into their agenda. In real life, the movement has always been closely linked to the state. After all, military bases and their accompanying infrastructure don’t just magically turn up at random militant outposts that are supposedly illegal, wink wink, under international or even Israeli law (though some settlements are deemed legal under Israeli law while still being illegal under international law). But now, in 2025, the settlements are the state, and the settlers are the military.
Especially since Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – a pivotal moment for the settlement movement, which viewed the evacuation of settlements in Gaza as an enormous setback and a betrayal – a massive effort has been under way to colonise not only hilltops in the West Bank, but the very infrastructure of the Israeli state. Settlers set up communes and communities in mixed Arab-Jewish cities like Lod and Jaffa, while there was a push to increase the number of settlers and their allies in both the judiciary and civil service. This effort has been a runaway success. There is an ever-growing number of settlers in the public sector and two of the 12 justices currently serving on Israel’s Supreme Court live in settlements. When Weiss tells Theroux she calls Netanyahu’s aides, not Netanyahu himself, she’s probably not being entirely truthful. But more to the point, neither she nor Theroux dwell on the fact that many of the aides and allies Netanyahu has surrounded himself with are settlers themselves.
Then there’s the army. The number of graduates of religious, overwhelmingly right-wing schools among infantry cadets in the IDF had already increased tenfold between 1993 and 2008. By 2010, settlers were “heavily overrepresented” among IDF commanders. Today – alongside a general rightward drift of Israeli students and educators – the most pronounced change is happening via pre-military colleges, which offer students the opportunity to defer the draft for a year in order to acquire additional knowledge and skills. While these colleges come in most political flavours, the majority of graduates are part of the religious state education stream, tightly intertwined with the settlement enterprise (15 government-recognised colleges are actually located beyond the Green Line). Each year, these colleges inject hundreds of ideologically committed conscript into the military. Attending a premilitary college makes one much more likely to volunteer to a combat unit (81 per cent vs the 40 per cent overall average). The shift is notable in the current war in Gaza: settlers are overrepresented among military casualties. One particularly ideological school, the Bnei David college in the settlement of Ali, lost at least 29 alumni in the current war alone.
Then there is the private sector. Settlements bloomed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the liberalisation of the welfare state began pushing many lower-income families from social housing in the mainland to cheap private housing in settlements. Today, settlements attract more and more of the perennially squeezed Israeli middle class, who are then rewarded with more than just better housing: the state invests 30 per cent more per child in settlement schools than in mainland Israel.
There have been attempts in the UK to boycott produce from settlements but even a completely successful boycott of identifiably settler produce would not make much of a difference to the movement. Services form the bulk of Israel’s economy and most settlements primarily act as commuter belts to Israel’s larger economic hubs. Meanwhile, the state’s entire economy is deeply implicated in the settlements. There isn’t a single major Israeli bank that would refuse to grant someone a mortgage to buy a house in a settlement (even if illegal under international law), or lend someone money to start a business there, which means all of the money circulating in Israel’s financial system is contaminated to one degree or another.
An Oslo-style two-state partition had begun to seem untenable long before the current war. The prospect has only since deteriorated. According to Peace Now, which tracks settlement expansion, nearly 60 outposts were established in 2024 alone, compared to a historical yearly average of seven or fewer. Over the course of the year, 47 Palestinian communities were expelled altogether. And in June 2024, a monumental legal shift saw administrative responsibility for settlements passed from the IDF to the civilian government, ending the pretence that settlements are anomalies within a military occupation. The pace of expansion and annexation is only picking up, and has been met with virtually zero interest from Western states that still propagate a two-state solution that is in the final stages of being crushed.
Above all, it’s nearly impossible to gauge from films like Theroux’s how deeply normalised settlements have become within Israel. Having over 500,000 settlers in a country of just seven million means that most of the rest of us Israelis know someone from a settlement as a relative, a colleague, a friend or a comrade-at-arms. The opposition candidate with the greatest likelihood of toppling Netanyahu in next year’s general election is Naftali Bennet, who is strongly identified with the settler movement but still expected to mop up the majority of the vote from Israel’s mass protest movement, rooted though it is in secular, socially liberal Tel Aviv. There is currently no political leader of any consequence calling for settlements to be evacuated; even the new leader of the Labor Party, Yair Golan, has endorsed annexation of most of the West Bank.
Can anything be done? Technically, there are steps that could still be taken to restrain the settlements. Western sanctions on a handful of especially violent settlers last year sent jitters through Israeli banks, which found themselves forced to freeze the relevant accounts even as the government struggled to devise countermeasures that wouldn’t implicate the entire system. If the UK or Europe began conditioning trade with Israeli banks on these institutions halting activity with settlers, it would be like dousing the entire Israeli economy in nitrogen. But in terms of political will in European capitals, this is like saying we could, technically, stop climate change by imposing a moratorium on fossil fuels.
The West’s refusal to take any concrete steps to enforce partition in the West Bank has been matched only by reluctance to begin considering alternatives to two states. This is the crux of the formula that allows Israeli expansion in the West Bank – and in Gaza, where Israel is very much headed for permanent conquest and resettlement, by way of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation. If the world missed the window to impose two states, it should start developing its own standards of what a non-apartheid single state could look like; to upend the agenda of the settlers and decree that they can’t have both complete hegemony over the land between the river and the sea while excluding half the population from government. Otherwise, the new reality will continue being shaped by the most belligerent of settlers, while the left continues to debate what might have been.
[See also: The war to end all peace]
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