Theroux’s Settlers – a vision of where the world is heading
JVL Introduction
Louis Theroux has written an opinion piece for the Guardian in which he responds to both praise and criticism of his exemplary BBC documentary The Settlers, saying that it “could never capture the full impact of what is unfolding in the West Bank.”
Seasoned commentator Jonathan Cook looks deeper in the article we are pleased to re-publish below, arguing that the extremists Theroux portrays offer us a dystopian vision of where the West’s once-liberal democracies are headed.
“The gun-toting, stone-throwing, orchard-burning, house-torching settlers are from Texas, London and Paris. And so are many of the soldiers – some of them volunteers from western countries – who are currently slaughtering and enforcing the starvation of children in Gaza,” Cook observes. “It is “us” watching this genocide unfold in slow-motion and shrugging our shoulders, or both-sidesing the stream of constant Israeli crimes on our screens.”
NWI
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's Substack on Sat 10 May 2025. Read the original here.
Theroux's film on Israel's violent settlers was a mirror. Resist the calls to look away
For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It’s because his film tells us far too much about ourselves.
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Excellent article / critique in NS on the TV program. …you’ll need to google
What Louis Theroux gets wrong about the West Bank
The settlers are engrained in Israeli society, but the BBC cast them as radical outliers.
Bbc are trying to promote the idea that it’s the settlers and right-wing of Zionism that’s the problem, implying that Zionisms otherwise fine. People who believe there’s a socialist Zionism will often talk about the Jewish right to self determination if challenged, never really dealing with how the state of Israel was, and is, built on Palestinian dispossession, which is apparently all their own, and other Arabs fault – pointing out the elephant in the room (Zionist colonization of Palestine) will get you labelled an antisemite as people try to cram it into the wider narrative of Jewish suffering, ignoring or downplaying the change to Jewish people’s material reality, or worse, acknowledge it, but fail to see differences, so were left with a trans-historical story, completely vilifying Palestinians and their national liberation struggle.
The bbc, being an arm of the capitalist state, are complicit in that, so we should hold them to account.
Theroux’s film went about as far as the BBC could platform. As an expose of Israel’s crimes against humanity it only skimmed the surface, but there was enough there to point to the larger evils that were not on display. As a comparison, see B’Tsalem’s truly shocking Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps. https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
Imagine the documentary Theroux could make if he were allowed free access to Megiddo or Sde Teimon. Not that the BBC would platform a film this fiercely critical of Israel.