Louis Theroux's settler documentary shows only half the story

Yahoo

29-04-2025

In his latest documentary, The Settlers, Louis Theroux meets Ari Abramowitz, an Israeli settler living in the West Bank.
Wide-eyed Theroux asks Abramowitz if he's holding a gun 'for effect'. 'No', Ari responds. 'I wear it for protection.'
Israeli settlements, to clarify, are Jewish villages (mainly in the West Bank) that were set up beyond Israel's internationally recognised borders following the Arab-Israeli war in 1967.
I was born and raised in one such village not far from where Abramowitz lives, called Kfar Adumim.
I lived with constant fear throughout my childhood, frightened that a terrorist might emerge from the valley below our home and slaughter my family in our sleep.
That fear was not a product of my imagination. When I was a teenager, Hagit, a 23-year-old woman from my village, was swimming in a natural pool in the nearby valley with her friend when the pair were stabbed to death by a Palestinian attacker.
Thousands of Israeli civilians like Hagit have lost their lives to similar attacks over the years: some blown up in buses, others shot and rammed by cars.
My mother — the daughter of a Jewish refugee family from Baghdad — always slept with a pistol under her pillow. It was not an act of bravado but a matter of keeping us safe. I wonder whether Theroux would think my mother did it just 'for effect' too.
Journalists have a duty to gather evidence and share knowledge responsibly when the public relies on their reporting. But The Settlers fails on all counts. Let me explain why.
Firstly, Theroux says that violence committed by settlers is often framed by them as a reaction to Palestinian violence, which he claims is 'much less frequent' than the former.
But this is false. Palestinian attacks against Israelis are far more common than the inverse.
According to data from the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, in 2024 alone, Palestinians carried out 6,828 attacks against Israelis – twice that of the previous year (excluding the October 7 massacre). In contrast, there were 673 attacks against Palestinians committed by Israelis in 2024, according to Israeli Defence Force (IDF) statistics.
If you adjust these numbers relative to the population size, it means that last year Palestinians committed between around two and three times more attacks than Israelis (depending on which population estimate is used). Hardly 'much less frequent'.
Then there's the problem of who Theroux chooses to interview. The only Israeli settlers we meet are the most ideological, many of which are militant, foreign-born outsiders. The Palestinians Theroux interviews however are the opposite: like Issa Amro, a moderate non-violent Palestinian activist from Hebron.
This characterisation of Jewish settlers didn't resonate with my experience. Like many of my friends, my mother made it clear I had to be respectful of our Palestinians neighbours. 'Respectful and prudent' she would repeat. Nowhere in my education nor in our community we were taught to disrespect, let alone harass, Palestinians. Even today, a vast majority of those living in the West Bank say they would not move to Jewish settlements if built in Gaza.
Theroux's film also leaves out the key historical context which explains why the West Bank is governed in the way it is. Checkpoints, for instance, were built because of a wave of violent attacks by Palestinians travelling into Israeli cities between 2000 and 2002 known as the second intifada. In 2023, many Palestinian stabbing plots were thwarted only because knives were found on the people intending to carry them out as they passed through checkpoints into Israel.
Let's be very clear. Every single attack directed at civilians whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis is criminal, immoral and unjustified. Our community must do better to address the root causes of this shameful violence as these are not our values. Settler extremists do not act in our name.
But this simplistic worldview — in which the Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians the weak oppressed – is plain wrong. The reality is far more complex.
Dr Eitan Oren is a war studies lecturer at King's College London
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