Documentary About ‘The Settlers’ Shows Them as Israeli Left Wants To See Them
By Yitz Landes
June 27, 2016
Shimon Dotan’s recent documentary, “The Settlers,” currently attracting a lot of attention in Israel, is painfully beautiful. Dotan’s shots capture both the beauty of the West Bank and the complexity of the geopolitics that are tragically tearing it apart. Along with the fantastic production, Dotan’s skills as an interviewer present the settlers, an often-misunderstood segment of Israeli society, to a wide audience. Yet the film has much more to teach us about the dogma of left-wing Israelis than it does about settlers.
According to this dogma, the settlers bear the blame for pulling Israel into the occupation. Aside from Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin, Israeli politicians from both the right and the left are presented in the film as lacking agency as they take on expansionist colonial practices not as a matter of policy, but because they are forced to do so by radical Religious Zionists.
But at one point in the film, Levi Eshkol is heard explaining that settlement expansion does not violate the fourth Geneva Accord because Israel has always used its civilian population as part of its military defense system — exposing the possibility that Israeli politicians built settlements as a matter of policy. Similarly, Shimon Peres is depicted as caving in to the Religious Zionists’ demands for settlement expansion. But he didn’t have to be dragged to the foundation of the settlement of Ofra, where he glowingly planted the community’s first tree in 1975. As with other Labor politicians, the building of settlements for Peres was a matter of policy.
As far as more recent history goes, there is no mention in the film of Ehud Barak’s insistence on speeding up settlement expansion while participating in the Camp David talks, bringing settlement expansion to a pace faster than it had been during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government.
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