Latest news with #Nachala
The Journal
21-05-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
UK sanctions 'godmother' of Israeli settler movement featured in Louis Theroux documentary
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT has announced sanctions against the 'godmother of the settler movement', along with other key individuals and organisations supporting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Foreign Secretary David Lammy made the announcement yesterday as he revealed the UK will be suspending free trade negotiations with Israel. It comes amid swirling international condemnation of Israel's renewed military offensive in Gaza, coupled with its sustained 11-week aid embargo into the strip. The EU, along with Canada, also threatened to take action over the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu's government in Gaza, with the bloc's top diplomat Kaja Kallas promising to act after 'a strong majority' of its 27 member states also backed a review of its trade agreement with Israel. The United Nations warned yesterday that if aid supplies into the region continue to be impeded, 14,000 Palestinian babies could die of starvation. Posted to the UK Government's official website on Tuesday, sanction plans revealed by Westminster will target three individuals, including 'high-profile extremist settler leader' Daniella Weiss. Weiss, leader of Israel settler organisation Nachala, and labelled the 'godmother of the settler movement' by journalist Louis Theroux, appeared in his recent documentary 'The Settlers' which explored the actions of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, also known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Advertisement A group of armed Jewish settlers raids the Old City area of Hebron, West Bank. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo In the documentary, Weiss denies that settler violence against Palestinians takes place, and even shoves Theroux, prompting him to call her a 'sociopath'. Weiss has responded to the sanctions placed on her, promising that hundreds of Jewish Israeli families 'are prepared and ready to implement settlement in Gaza – immediately'. The UK's measures will introduce travel bans and financial restrictions against her and two other individuals – Harel Libi and Zohar Sabah. Libi is the owner of a construction company and has been involved in 'perpetuating acts of aggression and violence' against Palestinians in the West Bank, according to Westminster. His company Libi Construction and Infrastructure has supported the establishment of outposts (settlements built without Israeli authorisation) and will face an asset freeze as a result. Sabah is the owner of an illegal farming outpost built by Libi – Coco's Farm – and has been implicated in 'threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence' against Palestinians. He will be subject to an asset freeze and travel ban. The Nachala movement will also face an asset freeze for its funding of illegal outposts and forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Metro
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Metro
'Godmother' of Israeli settler movement from Louis Theroux documentary sanctione
'What is on my mind all the time is how to bring more people to settle the Palestinian land.' This is what Daniella Weiss, often referred to as the 'godmother' of Israel's settler movement, proudly told Louis Theroux during his BBC documentary 'The Settlers'. The 79-year-old is among several people sanctioned by the UK today over inciting or carrying out violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Foreign secretary David Lammy said about the measures: 'The sanctioning of Daniella Weiss and others demonstrates our determination to hold extremist settlers to account as Palestinian communities suffer violence and intimidation at the hands of extremist settlers. 'The Israeli government has a responsibility to intervene and halt these aggressive actions. 'Their consistent failure to act is putting Palestinian communities and the two-state solution in peril.' Weiss is the founder and leader of Nachala, a radical settler organisation, and a former mayor of Kedumim, an Israeli settlement located in the West Bank. For more than 50 years, she has been prominent in the creation of illegal settlements on territory captured by Israel in the Middle East war in 1967. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Nachala's ambition is for Israel to annex both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Weiss also believes that Lebanon, Jordan and parts of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are all part of Greater Israel. The UK government described Weiss as a 'high-profile extremist settler' and said she is now subject to an asset freeze, travel ban, and director disqualification. It added: 'Weiss has been involved in threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals.' Nachala, which has been involved in 'facilitating, inciting, promoting and providing logistical and financial support for the establishment of illegal outposts and forced displacement of Palestinians' is now subject to an asset freeze. In Theroux's 'Settlers', Weiss is shown promoting the expansion of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. She described settlements as a fulfilment of a divine mission and made no apology for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The activist told the British filmmaker that peace would only come through 'Jewish control' of the land. When Weiss said that she 'does not think' about Palestinian villages in the West Bank such as Beita, Theroux called her stance 'sociopathic'. Weiss' inclusion on the sanctions list marks a rare move against a leading ideological figure in Israel's settlement project. More Trending Eliav Libi and Zohar Sabah, as well as two illegal settler outposts and two organisations 'supporting violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank' have also been targeted. 'These individuals and entities are now subject to measures including financial restrictions, travel bans, and director disqualifications, and will follow 18 other individuals, entities, and companies already sanctioned relating to serious violence against communities in the West Bank,' the press release read. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Aisling Bea struggles with family's 'shameful' past in tonight's Who Do You Think You Are MORE: 'My BBC drama did something rarely seen before on TV' MORE: Huge update as EastEnders character charged with murder in early iPlayer release
BBC News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
UK sanctions 'godmother' of Israel's settler movement Daniella Weiss
The UK government has announced sanctions on Daniella Weiss, a far-right Israeli settler known as the "godmother" of the settler Secretary David Lammy said the move "demonstrates our determination to hold extremist settlers to account as Palestinian communities suffer violence and intimidation".Weiss, 79, is the leader of a radical settler organisation called Nachala - or homeland - which has also been sanctioned. For decades, Weiss has been prominent in the founding of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. In the sanctions sheet, she was described as having been involved in "threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals".An Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson described the sanctions - which also target two other settlers, two illegal settler outposts, and two organisations - as "unjustified, and regrettable." Weiss was recently featured in Louis Theroux's documentary "The Settlers" - and has been active in the movement to rebuild settlements in Gaza. Speaking to BBC News last year, she said: "Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip. Who will stay? Jews.""The world is wide," she added. "Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza. How we do it? We encourage it. Palestinians in Gaza, the good ones, will be enabled. I'm not saying forced, I say enabled because they want to go."The UK also announced sanctions on two other settlers - Zohar Sabah and Harel David Libi, as well as the outposts Coco's Farm, and Neria's Farm, and the organisation Libi Construction and Infrastructure are settlements built without official Israeli authorisation."The Israeli government has a responsibility to intervene and halt these aggressive actions. Their consistent failure to act is putting Palestinian communities and the two-state solution in peril," Mr Lammy the UK government announced it would pause free trade negotiations with Israel with immediate effect, saying "it is not possible to advance discussions" with "a Netanyahu government that is pursuing egregious policies in the West Bank and Gaza". An Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson responded: "If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy — that is its own prerogative." The move follows a strongly-worded joint-statement from the leaders of the UK, France and Canada on Monday which called on the Israeli government to "stop its military operations" and "immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza".Israel has said it will allow a "basic amount of food" into Gaza, ending an 11-week blockade of the territory, which it said was aimed at pressuring Hamas to release remaining United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said the amount of aid was a "drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed".
Middle East Eye
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
UK sanctions settler leader from Louis Theroux BBC documentary
The UK has announced it will sanction several prominent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including veteran settler activist and head of the Nachala movement Daniella Weiss. Weiss appeared in a highly publicised recent BBC documentary on the occupied West Bank, presented by British documentarian Louis Theroux. In the film, Weiss boasted that she can phone Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aides anytime. She was filmed driving close to the boundary of Gaza in an attempt to reach it before being stopped by Israeli soldiers. Weiss also claimed there was "no such thing" as settler violence against Palestinians. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Theroux, the film's presenter, said her lack of any concern for Palestinian lives "seems sociopathic". The new UK sanctions also target Eliav Libi and Zohar Sabah, as well as two illegal settler outposts and two organisations "supporting violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank". Speaking in parliament on Tuesday afternoon, Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned "this Israeli government's egregious actions and rhetoric". UK summons Israeli ambassador and suspends free trade agreement with Israel Read More » He also announced Britain is summoning the Israeli ambassador in London and suspending its free trade agreement with Israel. He said: "I am announcing we have suspended negotiations with this Israeli government on a new free trade agreement. "We will be reviewing cooperation with them under the 2030 bilateral roadmap. The Netanyahu government's actions have made this necessary. "Today my honourable friend the foreign minister for the Middle East is summoning the Israeli ambassador to the Foreign Office to convey this message." Lammy added that Palestinians must have their own state and live "free of occupation". In response to the announcement by the British government, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the suspension of trade negotiations would harm the UK's economy and were motivated by anti-Israel sentiment. "If due to anti-Israeli obsession and internal political considerations the British government is willing to harm the British economy, that's their decision." The ministry said. "The British Mandate ended exactly 77 years ago. External pressures will not divert Israel from its path," it added.
Irish Times
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
In The Settlers, Louis Theroux does something we have rarely seen him do in 30 years of TV
One of the most powerful scenes in The Settlers, Louis Theroux's brilliant new documentary about the Israeli settler movement, comes in the final minutes of the film, which was broadcast earlier this week on BBC Two. Theroux and his small crew are at a festival at Evyatar, one of the numerous settlements in the Palestinian West Bank deemed illegal under international law. He is there to speak with one of the festival's speakers, Daniella Weiss, leader of the extreme right Nachala settler movement. Theroux has had a number of exchanges with Weiss up to this point and her ethno-nationalist vision for the country's future has already been made clear: she wants to remove any possibility for a Palestinian state and to establish a 'greater Israel' by 'settling' Gaza and the West Bank and driving the Palestinians from their land, by divine right and by any means necessary. Theroux and Weiss are standing on a hill overlooking the town of Beita, the site of recent violent confrontations between, on one side, its Palestinian citizens and, on the other, the settlers encroaching on their land and the Israeli military protecting them. He asks her whether she is aware of the level of suffering caused to Palestinians by 'rampaging' settlers and puts it to her that 'when a people is invaded, and put under a military occupation, and deprived of their rights, then anger is an appropriate response'. READ MORE She says there is no such thing as settler violence. To this patently absurd claim, Theroux points out that there is no shortage of filmed footage of same. He refers to a piece of footage shown earlier in The Settlers, filmed in the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point blank range in the stomach as an IDF soldier gazes equably on. (He could just as well be referring, though, to the shooting earlier this month of a 60-year old unarmed Palestinian man by a settler in the West Bank village of al-Rakeez, one of a group who was claiming his farmland as their own.) Weiss's response is more revealing than anything Theroux might presumably have expected. She steps towards him and shoves him in the chest. It's a surprisingly powerful shove, too, for a 79-year old woman, and Theroux is forced backward, clearly thrown off balance in every sense of the term. She is obviously expecting him to push her back, but he – unsurprisingly, sensibly, and yet also a little provocatively – refuses to do so. (Even if BBC guidelines don't have anything specific to say about getting into literal shoving matches with interview subjects, I suspect the general drift is against it.) The point Weiss imagines herself to be proving here is that if he had shoved her back, the footage could easily have been edited to portray Theroux as committing an act of unprovoked violence against a defenceless older woman. This, she says, is exactly what is happening when we see, say, the footage from the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point-blank range in the stomach while an IDF soldier looks on. Theroux has, for decades now, been celebrated for his approach to interviews: he tends, famously, to draw on a particular brand of impassive charm, avoiding expressing strong disapproval of even his more reprehensible subjects, whom he typically allows to do the work of portraying themselves in a bad light. But in the moments after being shoved by Weiss, Theroux listens to her reiterate her tribalist refusal to give any thought to the suffering of Palestinians, because they are not her people. And he does something we have rarely seen him do, in nearly thirty years of making television. He says exactly what he thinks of her: 'It would be understandable to think of your own people, your own children, first,' he tells her. 'But to think about other people, and other children, not at all? That seems sociopathic.' She laughs, and it is a laugh empty of even the possibility of humour. 'I hoped you would push me back,' she says, with a strange and unsettling smile. [ Renewed onslaught on Gaza is all about Netanyahu's political survival Opens in new window ] Theroux has encountered such people with such views in his films over the years – Afrikaner separatists in post-Apartheid South Africa, American blood-and-soil white nationalists and so forth – but they have tended to be basically fringe propositions, holding no real power within the societies they wish to reshape in their image. The Israeli settler movement, on the other hand, has, for a very long time, shaped the lived reality of Palestinians in their own villages, towns and cities. The illegal military occupation of the West Bank, in place since 1967, functions as both protection of and a front for the likewise illegal settlements that take up more and more land, and make life more and more dangerous and difficult for Palestinians. The fact that the settlements are illegal is, for the settlers themselves as for the power structure that protects them, neither here nor there. One of the film's major subjects, for instance, is an affable, armed-to-the-teeth American who left Texas to be a settler in the occupied West Bank. His own connection to the land is infinitely deeper, he says, than that of the 'Arabs' – he refuses to use the word Palestinians, because he denies the existence of such a nation, or such a people – who happen to have inhabited it for mere generations. 'There's some things,' he tells Theroux, 'that transcend the whims of legislation.' Theroux's film makes clear, in many ways, how a mythic narrative of divine promise supersedes the law and human rights, and justifies violence and dispossession. For her part, Weiss clearly doesn't think in terms of legality or illegality either. Her movement, as she sees it, is about doing what the state itself would like to do but can't. 'We do for governments,' as she puts it, 'what they cannot do for themselves.' Netanyahu, she says, can't openly say he supports their plans to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. 'But he is happy about it.' As she says this, she is sitting across the table from Theroux, a map of the territory spread out before her, on which the West Bank is dotted with a dense constellation of pink stickers, denoting the settlements built there since 1967. The heavy historical symbolism of the scene is left unarticulated, but it's easy to imagine a caption to the image, in the form of Edward Said's line about the imperial use of cartography: 'In the history of colonial invasions, maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest.' That scene at Weiss's kitchen table is a scene right out of the 19th century: a nightmarish glimpse of an era, and a worldview, that has somehow survived into our present.
