Louis Theroux has responded to the discussion around his new documentary, The Settlers.
The BBC Two film is a follow-up to 2011’s Ultra Zionists, in which he visited and interviewed Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank.
In the new film, which has been praised by viewers and critics, Theroux arrives back in the West Bank 14 years after his last visit where settler ideology has found itself gaining political traction.
Among the settlers that he meets is Ari Abramowitz who says they don’t believe Palestine exists as a nation, or with “a real claim to this land”.
Theroux also meets Issa Amro, a Palestinian man who gives him a guided tour of the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, where everything is closed with dozens of checkpoints in place.
Clips of the movie have gone viral on social media, racking up millions of views, with bootlegged versions of the full documentary being shared across the internet.
Theroux said the success of Settlers took him by surprise. “It wasn’t something I saw coming,” he wrote in The Guardian. “The reaction to the film, when it aired, was immediate. Positive write-ups and massive online commentary.”
He also addressed some backlash to the film, after being criticised for spotlighting a “handful of crazies”, comparing settlers to “fringe” figures such as right-wing campaigner Tommy Robinson.
“A few pieces were critical of the film,” he continued. “The main charge was that I’d focused on a handful of crazies who weren’t representative of the wider community. 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.”
Responding to criticism about his choice to “pick on Israel” and suggestions that “reporting on religious nationalist Israeli extremism may have contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment”, he said that he felt there were warnings for the west within some parts of Israeli society.
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“I take this charge seriously, for reasons I hope are obvious,” he wrote.
“But the urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the West. In the past, the settler agenda has been supported by governments on both the left and the right but it’s currently being embraced by populist leaders and elements of the far right who find much to like about its ethno-nationalist and anti-democratic character.
“Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at Mar-a-Lago. And so a film about extreme West Bank settlers isn’t simply about a region of the Middle East. It’s also about ‘us’.”
He also commented on “one of the sadder and more outrageous results of our film”, namely reports by Amro that he had been harassed by settlers and soldiers at his home “in what appeared to be a reprisal for his participation in our documentary.”
Theroux added: “Our team got in touch with him and did its best to provide appropriate support.”
Amro told The Independent in the days following the documentary’s release: “It’s very hard and life is not easy here. I have a 13-year-old son, and he’s at the age now to be arrested and targeted. Two hundred children have been killed in the West Bank in the last 18 months.”
“I don’t stay in public areas,” he continued, as he said he had received death threats throughout the years. “I don’t have a routine in my life. I’m very careful. I don’t work alone. I work with others, you know. So, I’m very careful and I see that the situation is really, really risky.”
However, he criticised an excessive focus on Israeli settlers by the media at the expense of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
“We want more Palestinian voices to talk about our lives under the occupation,” he explained. Referring to one viral footage of Theroux, whose “courage” he praised, being pushed by an Israeli soldier, Amro added: “As a Palestinian, what happened to Louis is happening to me and to my people every day and multiple times a day. So we want as Palestinians to highlight that they are aggressive with us.”
