What moves Daniella Weiss?

Ideological shatnez actually works OK

Britain is a depressing country. I don’t just mean that when you reflect on what it was, and what it could have been, and what it is, it is naturally depressing. I mean that Britain goes out of its way to depress you, just rubbing its grimness in your face no matter how hard you try to look away.

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There are a lot of examples of this, but the one that haunts my mind is how last summer whenever the clouds cleared for more than an hour, every wait at a train station was punctuated each 30 seconds by an announcement over the tannoy imploring all present to carry a bottle of water, and prescribing proper conduct in case someone faints from the heat AT TWENTY TWO DEGREES C°. Anyway, Britain does provide good material for wry internet wits, and one of the recent bits was the hit TV mini-series Adolescence.

When it came out, the sourer type of rightoid was quick to point out that, while purportedly inspired by youth knife crime in the UK, the central character had been changed with drastic implausibility into a good-looking middle class white kid who looked at incel stuff online. At the time, I thought this a churlish and shortsighted complaint: the show is about the anguish of a loving father as he slowly comes to realise the enormity of what his son has done. Changing the subject from ‘urban’ (Britain doesn’t have ghettos) blacks to generic Englishers was an act of implicit white supremacy. Unfortunately, my sophisticated and edgier-than-thou take was rendered void by the ensuing mini-hysteria in which the British press dubbed the show a moment of national reckoning for a non-existent social ill, the Prime Minister repeatedly described it as a documentary while demanding schools screen it to all children, and the Conservatives’ charmingly hapless Yoruba leader was attacked for the sin of not watching it.

All this is to say that Brits really do like their telly, and, despite the proliferation of channels, still have enough shared culture that a good enough programme can capture and shape the national mood. So, when Louis Theroux’s new documentary Settlers¹ came out, I figured British policy on Israel was due a change and, sure enough, a fortnight later David Lammy had this to say.

What about the show itself? For the most part, Settlers is not very informative. The Palestinians do what they need to to do, which is put someone who isn’t a demented genocidal nutter in front of the camera to wearily say sympathy-inducing things to the camera. It’s not much, but when your opponent is playing Russian Roulette, you don’t even need to play checkers. On the settler side, there is a long section with Avi Abramowitz who is an interesting case study in a particular American-Israeli subculture with a lot of Christian overlap, but not one that is really very relevant to understanding the Israel Palestine conflict.

Sweet guy.

However, where Theroux really scored is his extended interviews with Daniella Weiss who, with her cheerful and pithily expressed extremism, has for the last year and a half been a one-woman content creation machine for Al Jazeera. So we’re going to talk about that.

Start by saying something nice

I like Daniella Weiss. She reminds me of the type of feisty chassidic woman who runs the local housing association and four different charities, and still finds time to prepare dinner for 10 while her husband sits in the Beis Medrash, vibing. Our people run off such women, and while I would definitely not like to be married to Daniella Weiss, I would quite like my sons to be. My favourite part of the documentary was the weary, winking frustration she briefly expressed with the doddery Religious Zionist rabbis that she has to push on stage at their expulsion workshops to mumble about kedusha or what not. More than her ability to get things done, though, what I really like about Weiss is that, in contradistinction to every other hardcore settler spokesperson, self appointed or otherwise, that I am familiar with, she isn’t a whiny little bitch. She doesn’t whine that the evil erev rav state is oppressing her because it isn’t legal to just shoot random Arabs and take their house, and she doesn’t mewl endlessly about muh ethnic cleansing that happened in 2005. She doesn’t pose as a rebel, or as a persecuted faggot with a yellow star.

To the contrary, Daniella Weiss is fully cognizant of what she has achieved and confident that she will achieve more; she is proud of her connections to people in high places throughout muh deep state and she wants to share this with the world. Nor does she mince words about her strategy. Unlike the terminally fake and gay Kahanists who do their ‘don’t hold me back bro’ act and spin crack dreams about how they would take out the whole Arab nation without the SECULAR LEFT-controlled IDF restraining them, Weiss is open about how her entire strategy hinges on manipulating the forces of the state. You get some ideological types willing to live in a shack with no electricity and build something that doesn’t legally count as a building, so no eviction order can be enforced. The IDF has to protect them because it can’t just have families with little kids getting shot up every week, which means installing some basic infrastructure. Then you take every opportunity as it comes up with a sympathetic local junior officer to put in running water, gas, electricity, a paved road etc. and, in due course, when Bibi’s doing the annual budget, Smotrich puts your outpost on the list and now it’s a legal settlement. Find the next hill, rinse, repeat.

If you want a detailed explanation of how you go from tent to tower block, there are people who know a lot more about this than me. You come here for spicy takes, so I’m going to ask a different question. Daniella Weiss is an incredibly motivated woman. What motivates her?

Redemptive how?