From the moment I watched Igal Hecht conversing with one of the settlers in The Hilltops, I knew he was the kind of director who really takes a journey with his subjects. It isn’t about telling them where to stand or what to say. He decided to be in the frame with them, to speak with them on camera, to listen and to provoke discussion so that his reasons for making this documentary would be completely transparent. It was refreshing to watch his various interactions with the featured settlers, from insistent questions mumbled from behind the camera to debates filmed between himself and the men and women of the hilltops, in the West Bank. In Israel. Or Palestine.
At the outset, my concern was that in the interest of creating an attractive and suggestive film, Hecht would fail to detail the proper context of the historical trauma caused by Israeli settlement in the West Bank. I soon realised, however, that our filmmaker was in fact focusing on a more sophisticated analysis of the problem of the West Bank settlements. He deftly handles both the inflammatory and peace-loving characters of his story, ultimately supposing that in Judea and Samaria – where foreign affairs spokesperson Marc Regev says Israel is scrambling for the rule of law – the conflict perhaps begins with the lack of unified policy amongst Israelis themselves.
The female settlers interviewed appear to exist in a kind of bubble, where marrying and having children on a hilltop outpost is the number one priority. In forty-five minutes, we aren’t privy to their softer side; those moments where they might mourn the loss of murdered neighbours, or observe the Sabbath with their parents who survived the Holocaust. These scenes would, in fact, sway an audience towards the idea that they have nowhere else to live. In fact, they believe that they don’t. They choose not to live in secular Israel, in land that is not specifically mentioned in the bible. There are religious zealots all over the world, so what makes settling in the West Bank distinct?
Essentially, the act of establishing one’s home in this region is no longer condoned by the Israeli government, as strikingly and as recently as 2005 when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had to create a new party in order to formulate a plan to withdraw settlers from the Gaza Strip. Bureaucracy is ingrained in the region, a result, one settler claims, that comes from Israel aping the United States. This sentiment is compounded by another young man who passionately expounds the virtues of the wider non-democratic Middle East. Canadian audiences may appreciate this pronouncement, as it sheds light on the push-pull relationship that Israel and the US have enacted over the decades of the peace process. Footage of Obama’s statements regarding Israel clearly illustrate that blocking settlement creation is a top priority of US foreign policy in Israel/Palestine. We watch a snippet of a meeting between Netanyahu and Obama in 2010, but it is projected by Hecht as a talk-fest compared to the real activity happening on the ground in the West Bank.
