Documentary Review: ‘The Settlers’ (2002)
‘The Settlers’ is a 2002 documentary by Ruth Walk on life and times of Israeli settlers in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank and specifically on Tel Rumeida, which is where the ancient city of Hebron stood.
The interesting thing about ‘The Settlers’ is that captures the before and after picture of the jewish settlers in Hebron during the initial period of the second intifada. The interest is not so much about daily life – which while interesting is not really of huge importance – but the ideological and religious attitudes of the jewish settlers.
Naomi Horowitz - the principal subject of the documentary - is recorded before the second intifada talking about how beautiful the landscape around Hebron on is only to then comment ‘it is a shame about all the Arabs’. With the necessary implication being that they somehow mar the landscape.
Indeed, jewish settlers are shown repeatedly stating that all of Israel is ‘jewish land’ even though a study of the Bible – the basis for this claim – utterly demolishes this idea. (1)
Further when Naomi is questioned about Baruch Goldstein - a jewish military doctor who committed the mass murder in the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994 and a member of the Jewish Defence League - (2) she claims that he was murdered and that he was quite a loss to the jewish community of Hebron.
That Goldstein’s attitude that the non-jews (specifically in this case the Arabs) are the eternal enemies of the jewish people was and is still normal among the jewish settlers is alarming indeed.
This is demonstrated by the settlers continually referencing non-jews writ large as ‘the enemy’, the statements of the settler leaders at rallies that any accommodation with the non-jew is ‘an abomination’ (the strongest term of abuse of Judaism and also coincidentally what jews also call the Christian cross/crucifix) (3) and - as Rabbi Levinger (founder of the jewish settler community in Hebron) said - ‘it is time for jews to rise up and conquer’.
The jewish attitude is simple: they want to – and I quote Naomi Horowitz directly – ‘shoot Arabs’.
Is it any wonder that the Palestinians continue to violently resist the insidious jewish effort to ethnically cleanse them from their lands?
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/do-the-jews-have-a-biblical-claim
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/baruch-goldstein-and-the-massacre
(3) Elliot Horowitz, 2007, ‘Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 149-185