Early in August 2024, Israel’s security agency Shin Bet sent a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu warning him about the activities of settler terrorist groups, who, having taken time out of terrorizing Palestinians living near their illegal settlements, are now terrorizing the Israeli forces themselves. So it was with awe that I watched TRT’s documentary "Holy Redemption," the audacity of the filmmakers entering this group of maniacal settlers who have gone well beyond their official remit to erect "outposts" in the Palestinian heartland in the West Bank so that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) then come and declare these "settlements" fait accompli.
"Holy Redemption" focuses on the Hilltop Youth, a group of teenagers and young men in their twenties, who are taught that they are the descendants of the sons of Jacob and that what they can see when they go on a hilltop (but which?) is all their land. This story is recounted to us by Daniella Weis, one of the leaders of the Hilltop movement and who, one could argue, is the protagonist of the film. The camera lingers on her face while the almost surgical light reveals every fleck and crease when she gets animated by her belief that Palestine belongs to the Jews and that Palestinians must be exterminated at all costs for God’s word to be realized.
You could still say the filmmakers have been generous by trying to work out what has made Weiss the way she is. Her insistence on the centrality of the "Bible" in her vision is explained when she tells the story of how, in 1967, she heard the air sirens and thought this was the voice of God telling her that the Jews had not done enough to Judify the Holy Land. The film could easily have moved on from this moment, but it takes its time there, as you would for a villain origin story, showing black and white footage of somewhere in Palestine with a plane circling in the air. Weiss is, of course, not the only misguided zealot on God’s green earth. Many cult leaders hold similar views. What is horrifying here is that this zealot’s views are backed by the state of Israel and its allies, who keep sending money and weapons for her Biblical dreams to be realized.
One of the things that Weiss has done for her beloved Jewish nation seems to have been in May 1987, causing the death of a Jewish woman in a firebomb attack, when a vigilante group led by her went on a shooting and rock-throwing rampage through the town of Qalqiliya. Yes, this is the woman whose thugs in 2024 are giving Shin Bet cause for concern. Weiss’s whole interview could easily feature in a second letter from the security agency to Netanyahu’s government to curb the activities of the Hilltop Youth. Weiss even has a humanitarian spiel. After we see footage of her lads invading Palestinian villages and get to know a boy whose family they’ve murdered, we move on to her saying that Palestinians could move wherever they want. "Egypt, Indonesia ... they just don’t belong here," she says and pauses to look for a word to describe the "here"... and then this person named Weiss, this Golda Meir manque, pronounces the words: "the Middle East." If it wasn’t so horrifying, I’d say the moment was worthy of a Monty Python skit.
I wonder about the kind of preparation the filmmakers did to get Weiss and other settlers to say all these things in pure confidence, thinking they were speaking to a largely sympathetic audience. What could they possibly have thought the filming was for? A propaganda piece for Zionist Christians and Jewish Americans so they would send them more arms and money? At one point, one of the Hilltop Youth takes the filmmakers to a very secret location, and on the way, they encounter their own patrol ("Is that the police?" the crew asks, "No, that’s our own patrol, David," the Hilltop Youth answers) and when David, the older guy raises a questioning eyebrow the "guide" says: "Yeah they’re filming for some documentary or something."
When we get to one of the hilltops, we encounter four settler young men in IDF uniforms, holding rifles (it feels redundant to add that any male – or female- Israeli is holding a weapon, but bear with me), one of whom is British. Again, I do not know how she manages, but the interviewer asks, with convincing naivety, how it is that he is serving in the Israeli army. "It’s like the French foreign legion," he explains. Like recognizes like. It’s not for nothing that on social media, the word you see for genocider is genocidaire. This, of course, is a cold reminder that when walking the streets of London, one is rubbing shoulders with IDF soldiers, who believe all who support Palestine are terrorists. I am just happy that the U.K. has not yet become so Americanized that these fanatics can walk around with guns. The film interviews another British, this time ex-IDF soldier who tells us about the ‘outposts’ that enable Israel to steal more Palestinian land. Listening to this young man is even more eerie because he does look like any other computer engineering undergrad you’d encounter at a British university.
The producer of the documentary, Aslıhan Eker Çakmak, has said that the making of the documentary started before Oct. 7 and that it then naturally became essential that the film reflect how the destruction of Gaza was an extension of the vision of people like Weiss. After giving a sobering account of how hilltop youth create these outposts for the IDF to come and claim the land for Israel, the film ends with footage from a meeting where settlers, like in good colonial, American "pioneer" fashion (as one of the hilltop leaders puts it), are parceling out Gaza while IDF is razing whole neighborhoods to the ground. We then follow the settler/pioneer families, bonnets, babies and all, onto the boat, where they sail out to the sea to see the destruction carried out for them. The last picture is three small settler boys, with their kippas and curls, pointing out to the flames and saying, ‘Gaza!’ It’s a chilling reminder of the past and prospect for the future, where cities and countries can be made targets like that and be destroyed by U.S. money and weapons.
