Violent Israel “settlers” on the West Bank aren’t the exception, they’re the rule. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:
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
Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.
His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal “crazies” in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out the native Palestinian population, as significant and influential.
That’s exactly what they are, Theroux responds.
Settler leader Daniella Weiss, who Theroux spent much time following and interviewing, “enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and… has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism”.
He quotes Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin in noting that the setters’ “representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.
Theroux makes a further point about why it is important to focus on the settlers and understand what they really represent.
“A film about extreme West Bank settlers isn’t simply about a region of the Middle East. It’s also about ‘us’,” he writes in the Guardian.
He adds: “The urgency here is that West Bank settlers are a bellwether for where society may be going in countries across the west… Around the same time that the documentary aired, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler, was being hosted at [Donald Trump’s] Mar-a-Lago.”
