If you were shocked by my film on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, you haven’t been paying attention | Louis Theroux
The response to The Settlers has been humbling. But the ongoing displacement and intimidation of Palestinians is more severe than we could capture, says documentary presenter Louis Theroux
Hasnain says:
“A few pieces were critical of the film. The main charge was that I’d focused on a handful of crazies who weren’t representative of the wider community. “Weiss is a crackpot,” wrote a reviewer in the Daily Mail. On X, the Conservative environmentalist Ben Goldsmith claimed that the extremists in the film “represent a nutty fringe in Israeli society … about as … accurate a representation of the whole as Tommy Robinson is of UK society”.
But this comparison reveals what makes the situation in the West Bank so peculiar. In the UK, Robinson is widely seen as a fringe actor. He is excluded from politics and shunned by those close to government. And yet here was a situation where a similar figure enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and who has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism. As the Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin said, responding to Goldsmith, “their representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.”
Posted on 2025-05-11T06:34:26+0000