When author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS Morning to promote his book The Message last September he was immediately confronted by journalist Tony Dokoupil.
Taking command of the interview from his co-anchors, Dokoupil locked in on Coates and said the section of the book about life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”.
By extremist, Dokoupil clearly meant a Palestinian. More precisely, a Muslim Palestinian. He made that very evident by asking Coates, “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”
It was a calculated question meant to invoke the belief that Israel is under a perpetual physical and existential threat. Dokoupil quickly launched into a set of follow-ups that made little effort to mask his own suspicion of Muslim-majority states.
“Why do the Palestinians have a right to exist? Why do 20 different Muslim countries have a right to exist?” he asked Coates.
By the end of the interview, Dokoupil took up more than five of the segment’s nearly seven minutes to ask the writer several leading questions about Israel. He never once asked Coates about his trips to Senegal or South Carolina, both of which were also in the book and help to support his argument that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has clear parallels to apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States.
CBS News eventually had to apologise for Dokoupil’s demeanour, but the truth, as Coates himself said during the segment, is that “reporters that believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out” in mainstream US media.
Whistleblowers from France, Germany, and the UK have attested to this pro-Israel bias across a litany of international outlets. It’s likely why Dokoupil kept his high-paying job – despite CBS admitting his tone did not meet the network’s editorial standards – while a sports journalist in Philadelphia lost his over a single pro-Palestine X post.
That’s why when it was announced that the BBC would be broadcasting Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers, his follow-up to 2011’s Ultra Zionists, it was met with some trepidation, especially given the fact that the BBC has also faced accusations of pro-Israel bias.
Theroux’s first film was subject to its own backlash, but it was released into a very different media and political environment: a time before an R&B singer could be publicly disinvited from performing at Cornell University due to her history of pro-Palestine stances; before staffers of a Pennsylvania senator said working in his office meant “you’re just working on Israel all the time”; and before the governor of Texas threatened to cut funding from a small city of 70,000 after local politicians said they want to re-divert $4 million of their local tax dollars that were being sent to Israel each year back to the community itself.
Cognisant of this, users on X were quick to post the full hour-long documentary on their accounts. “Get it while it lasts”, they said while reminding their followers that only a few months prior, the BBC pulled the documentary How to Survive a Warzone because a 14-year-old featured in that film is the son of a Hamas Deputy Minister of Agriculture.
So far, Theroux’s documentary, which premiered last Sunday, is still online, but he has already come under intense scrutiny. The British-American documentarian currently stands accused of “picking on Israeli settlers”, “inflaming Jew hatred”, and creating “just another excuse to make Israelis look evil”.
And just like Dokoupil accused Coates of making Israel look horrible, detractors say Theroux showed “only half the story” by platforming “a tiny bunch of nutters who most people and most Jews think are nutters”.
“Laid-back style”
After watching The Settlers, though, I was immediately taken back to Dokoupil’s grilling of Coates.
For all the accusations of the film being “manipulative” and not “providing any balance”, Theroux comes off as almost too well-mannered in The Settlers. Even when he is standing in front of an armed settler from Texas who says, “I’m so uncomfortable using the word ‘Palestinian’, because I don’t think that it exists,” Theroux continues his questioning in what one TV critic called “his own deceptively laid-back style”.
Whereas Dokoupil was seen as hostile and aggressive towards an acclaimed Black writer for saying life in the occupied West Bank reminded him of “apartheid” and segregation in the Jim Crow South, Theroux maintains his composed, personable demeanour as the settler goes on to say, “I don’t think that they (Palestinians) exist as a real nation with a real claim to this land.”
Even when confronted with settlers who openly say things like, “the Bible says this place was given to the Jews,” “Our right to be in this land is the Torah”, and, “We want to have a Jewish state, based on Jewish rules, on Jewish values”, Theroux refrains from goading them the way Dokoupil did Coates, a former MacArthur Fellow.
“Pseudo-naïveté”
Theroux’s unwillingness to push his subjects, even the settlers, is purposeful. One online fan described it as his “great signature move – pseudo-naïveté knowingly utilised to get people to say exactly what they think, or exactly how things are.”
And in the final minutes of the film, Daniella Weiss, the 79-year-old “godmother” of the settler movement, gives him the most precise answer through her own words and actions. No goading or hostility from the host necessary.
“There’s no such thing as settler violence,” she declares, before forcefully pushing Theroux as part of a strange attempt to demonstrate her belief that online footage of settlers abusing Palestinians is selectively edited to favour the victim.
The whole exchange lasts only a few seconds, but it’s a particularly striking moment in light of recent events.
It has only been a month since an Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker – who lacks the privileges that come with Theroux’s US and UK passports, and his whiteness – was brutally beaten by settlers and immediately detained by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank. At several points throughout the film, Theroux is accosted by Israeli soldiers, but we know that his dual nationality, white skin, and affiliation with the BBC will protect him from the kind of abuse and mocking Hamdan Ballal was subjected to only weeks after winning the Academy Award.
By literally laughing off her aggressive act, Weiss rendered any potential follow-ups by Theroux moot.
Even if Weiss had not spent her final moments on camera saying to Theroux, “I hoped you push me back,” so much of what the other settlers say throughout the film goes against her insistence that “settlers do not wake up in the morning or… wait for sundown to attack.”
“Protect the nation”
Weiss’ denial of hostility and aggression is further belied by the words of one of her presumed admirers, Ari Abramowitz, a Texan settler who moved to Israel at 16. Theroux asks why Abramowitz feels it necessary to bring his M4 into the synagogue he built on his farm in the occupied West Bank.
Abramowitz replies plainly, “My gun is here to protect the nation of Israel from those that seek to harm us.”
It’s a response that perfectly encapsulates Abramowitz’s dual personalities: the stereotypical Texan, and the staunch Zionist. Referring to those scenes, one X user said simply, “The best way to show the world that Zionists are lunatics is to put a camera in front of them and let them talk.”
Watching these, usually armed, Israeli settlers using the Jewish faith to justify their claim to the West Bank and Gaza, I can’t help but wonder how Theroux – or any other Western journalist for that matter – would have reacted if an armed Afghan man in Badakhshan or Helmand had told them he wanted the Soviet or Western occupation to come to an end so Afghanistan could return to being a Muslim state based on Muslim rules and Muslim values.
How likely would a BBC journalist be to label such a Muslim man as a militant?
Abramowitz is never referred to as such on camera. In fact, Theroux only ever calls the settlers things like “religious nationalists” and “ethnonationalists” possessing “ultranationalist vision” and “ultra-ideological” views – and only in voiceovers.
At one point, Abramowitz himself even jokes about how he may be perceived for carrying his weapon with him at all times: “Do I want to look more militant?” he asks.
By the dictionary definition of the term – a person or group “favouring confrontational or violent methods in support of a political or social cause” – he should be classified as a militant, just as Kashmiri or Baloch separatists in India and Pakistan often are in Western (and local) media.
But he isn’t.
Nor is he called “a jihadist”, or a “terrorist”, both terms that Abramowitz and other Israelis lob at Palestinians, whom the settlers routinely refer to merely as “Arabs” and “camel riders”.
Throughout the film, Abramowitz and other Israelis describe Arabs as having “an unquenchable, genocidal blood lust”, and wanting to “slay” Israelis in a “horrific genocidal way”.
These constant references to Islam and use of the term “jihad” also ignore the existence of Palestinian Christians. But the reason they do so is clear. For decades now, right-wing media pundits and politicians in the West have appropriated the term as part of their argument that there is an active “clash of civilisations” that proves Islam is incompatible with life in places like the US, UK, and Europe; and that Islam is somehow inherently more violent than any other religion.
Essentially, if a Christian in London, Austin, or Rome doesn’t want to live next to Muslims, why should a Jew in Israel, or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories?
They also keep referring to genocide when talking about their views of the Palestinian mindset, though it is Israel and the majority Buddhist leaders of Myanmar that have most recently faced charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. It’s also an interesting choice of words to air on an outlet that was called out for choosing to broadcast all of Israel’s defence at the ICJ while only airing fragments of South Africa’s case against them to UK viewers.
In the end, The Settlers leaves you with a question, not about whether the clearly stated goals of the settlers are wrong or right. They’re clearly wrong.
It's more a question of Theroux’s own tactics.
“Speak for themselves”
As one Irish journalist said, all Theroux did over the documentary’s 61-minute runtime was let the settlers “speak for themselves. That’s it.”
Hamza Yusuf, the Muslim-American scholar, said the furore around The Settlers “says a lot about how well the media has shielded the public from the brutal reality of Israel’s occupation” over the decades.
That shielding includes everything from constantly referring to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Health as “Hamas-run” to using terms like “tented area for displaced in Gaza” and “Area Where Displaced Gazans Were Camped” as euphemisms for refugee camps.
Again, the wording is deliberate, a way to dehumanise Palestinians and to tie the entire population, even health workers, to the group responsible for the 7 October attack. That decades-long denial or obfuscation of “the brutal reality” of the Israeli occupation is what makes tourists seem perfectly comfortable gathering on a cliffside in southern Israel to watch plumes of smoke billowing from Gaza at the beginning of the film.
Given the immensity of the topic and growing ethnonationalism in countries like India – especially following last month’s attack on tourists in Kashmir – did Theroux need to go beyond being “the greatest wind-up merchant of all time” and really press the settlers harder – the way pro-Palestinian voices so often are in the mainstream Western media, including by the BBC?
In a media landscape where there is a well-documented pro-Israel bias, and at a time when an Oscar-winning documentary about the West Bank still lacks a US distributor, is it enough for Theroux to simply do what he does best and “allow people to show how unhinged they are without interrupting them”, as one Letterboxd reviewer put it?
At a time when Washington and Berlin are threatening legal action against anyone they deem to be anti-semitic, does Theroux not need to do more than just continue his decades-long practice of “using his mild and polite English white guy privilege to lull bigots into the security of revealing their true natures”?
Should he not have truly taken the settlers to task, especially when they said things like: “We were in this land planting vineyards before Mohammad was in the third grade.”
Dokoupil felt it necessary to hound Coates during what should have been a routine promo stop because he was afraid that his 250-page book left out or excused too much, and that it would have become some kind of a guide for “an extremist” Palestinian.
So maybe Theroux should have done the same to the settlers, because there is already an effort to rehabilitate the image of the people featured in the film. Most notably Weiss, who is now being referred to as “a Jewish grandma”, and who less than two months ago was put forward for a Nobel Peace Prize by two Israeli professors.
Without clearer pushback, given the extreme views of these militant settlers, one could easily imagine the documentary in the backpack of a Zionist who cannot pick up on the inferences, ironies, and subtleties of Theroux’s style – right next to their M4 carbine.
