It’s ironic that, though their meanings are very different, both sides see the essential problem as resulting from an intrusion of European values upon Middle Eastern realities. For some left-leaning academics interviewed in the film, the religious-minded settlers are mistakenly embracing a kind of Western nationalism that sees land, rather than faith, as the foundation of identity. For the settlers and their rightist backers, who regard the territories they call Judea and Samaria as part of their Biblical birthright, the real European intrusion is the idea of democracy. Everything would be fine, one defender of the settlers says, if people didn’t think Arabs should have political rights.
This conflict points back to an innate duality in the original concept of Zionism. On one hand, the idea was to provide a homeland for the Jewish people. On the other hand, most of its first proponents saw their envisioned state as being democratic-socialist in its political nature. The pressure being put in Israel currently by the settler movement, as many have observed, results from the way it forces these two ideas onto a violent collision course.
Among the curious features of “The Settlers” that may inspire certain reservations among viewers are the number of issues and personalities it never mentions. These range from the Holocaust to Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, the half-century history of the Zionist project prior to the founding of Israel in 1948 goes unexamined.
For most of its length, the film traces the history of the settler movement, using archival footage, and interviews with various academics, political figures and settlers both prominent and ordinary, old and young. While it notes that the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 called for the British Mandate of Palestine to be divided into Jewish and Arab states, the film’s narrative really begins in 1967 with a highly emotional speech by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who lamented the Jews' loss of contact with holy sites in the West Bank. When the Six-Day War of a month later gave Israel control of both the West Bank and Gaza, many of Kook’s followers came to regard his words as prophetic; the ideology of the settler movement was the result.
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