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.
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.