Do extremists deserve a platform? Responding to the lively protests at Berkeley and Middlebury recently, a certain cross-section of Beltway punditry has maintained that yes, they do: it’s everyone’s responsibility to the health of the Republic to respect everyone else’s First Amendment rights unequivocally. Only through public exposure, the theory goes, can toxic ideas be exposed to the rational scrutiny that ultimately proves their undoing. Needless to say, both history and the word of law offer numerous reasons to question this logic. Yet the question is worth asking: Can we ever just let reactionary ideologies defeat themselves?
In a way, Shimon Dotan’s excellent new documentary The Settlers experiments with this very premise. To be sure, its patches of voiceover exposition and professorial talking heads align too closely for Dotan to make any of the usual mealy-mouthed claims to neutrality, to say nothing of its solemn musical overtones. But the bulk of the film, which maps out a history of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, is given over to a bevy of settlers to describe their beliefs unabated. The opening moments even let them question the film’s title, with Dotan asking the simple question, “Are you a settler?” The subjects run the gamut from young to old, tolerant to militant, rank-and-file to leaders of the movement. Sometimes their rhetoric is urbane and compelling; other times, it’s crude and openly hostile. The one constant is an ironclad belief in the exclusive divine right of Jews to the land of Palestine and the necessity of demoting Palestinians to second class citizens for its realization.
No doubt many moderate Jews would balk at the description of these particular members of the tribe as right-wing extremists. To American eyes they appear pretty familiar; although a few appear in front of RVs and otherwise spartan digs, many more are interviewed in perfectly suburban prefab homes, surrounded by the luxuries of contemporary middle-class life. These aren’t the rejects of the global economic hegemony we imagine zealots to be. Many made aliyah – the Hebrew term for returning to the Promised Land – from Europe and North America, and many more maintain close ties with communities and relatives abroad. To born-and-raised Jews like myself, their smiling visages resonate: these are our Sunday school classmates, our cousins, our kin.
This sense of familiarity is the settlers’ strongest weapon: it mobilizes Western governments and Jews across the world to their cause as a matter of course for this eternally diasporic community. In The Settlers, it also allows them to unburden themselves of the euphemistic doublespeak the US’s own fanatical powerbrokers have so thoroughly mastered. At one point, one particularly charismatic early settler dismisses the Israeli official line of self-defense in the struggle over the West Bank, happily declaring the Jews the aggressors in pursuit of their “destiny” in Judea and Samaria. Later, a starry-eyed young woman, found throwing herself on tillers as they prepare an olive grove for planting, coyly concedes that the grove belongs to a Palestinian “at the moment.”
Out of context, the sight of an earthy woman wrapped in flowy fabrics blocking machinery with her body suggests environmental protest of the most stereotyped order. Indeed, an unspoken theme of The Settlers, both absurd and chilling, is how the spirit and tactics of counter-cultural movements were appropriated wholesale by the first settlers in the 1960s. Abundant archival footage from the days after the Six-Day War ceasefire shows throngs of college-aged activists following the lead of legendary settler pioneer (and Gush Emunim terrorist) Moshe Levinger through the streets of Hebron, where, pairing kippahs with bell-bottoms, they stage sit-ins, sing, dance, and generally make flower child merriment in anticipation of setting up camp in territories newly won at the cost of hundreds of Israelis and thousands of Arabs. One woman waxes nostalgic to Dotan of charging a barricade with her newborn in her arms. As she describes it, she planted the settler flag in Palestinian territory simply by waltzing past IDF grunts too deferential to lay hands on a young mother and her child. As The Settlers shows, this would become a pattern: the settlers openly transgress the rule of law, and the Israeli state, rather than enforce it, simply shrugs and relents, allowing them to grow in political power and escalate.
There are multiple reasons for the state’s complacency, of course. First and foremost is the holy war some of the settlers here describe against the Arabs, which in many ways represents the vanguard of the defense of Israel’s apartheid state. Another is the ongoing intertwinement of capitalist growth with settler expansion. One interviewee, a secular resident of a settlement, cheerfully boasts of the suburban splendor he enjoys for a fraction of the cost of a much smaller space in Jerusalem.
If The Settlers has any real flaw, it’s that it only pursues such lines of further inquiry momentarily. Another provocative scene shows young settlers donning mock keffiyehs at a wedding and observes that many young men in these communities become militant in part out of envy for the passionate sense of purpose of their Muslim counterparts in Hezbollah and Isil. The point begs for elaboration but is instead abandoned quickly.
Still, complaining that a documentary encourages further interest is hardly a complaint. Clearly aware of the reactionary specialty in casting opponents as illiberal hypocrites, Dotan preempts the settlers and lets them speak for themselves, with no militant Muslim voices to counterbalance. Accordingly, your mileage may vary. Perhaps you will view the footage of settlers watching in tearful protest as Ariel Sharon orders their homes demolished and their families evacuated from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and feel outrage. Perhaps you will simply empathize. Or perhaps you will also recognize those families as part of the “half a million people standing in the way of peace,” as one commentator puts it, and wonder why this didn’t happen sooner.
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