I was in the BBC documentary ‘The Settlers.’ This is the part of my story they didn’t tell
A screenshot of a scene from ‘The Settlers’ documentary film. Louis Theroux (2nd left) and Mohammad Hureini (left) hide in a building in Masafer Yatta while Israeli settlers and soldiers point weapons and laser sights at the group
Mohammad Hureini writes in Mondoweiss on 6 May 2025:
The BBC documentary ‘The Settlers,” directed by Josh Baker and written by Louis Theroux, has recently aired to much international attention. It aims to give Western viewers an inside look into the minds of Israeli settlers – those who occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, often with open ideological commitment to ethnic cleansing and supremacy.
The film achieves its goal to a certain extent, as it exposed the raw, unfiltered language of settlers who speak brazenly about displacing Palestinians from their ancestral homes. But while the documentary was willing to give settlers the microphone to lay out their dangerous visions for the future, it fell painfully short in giving equal weight to the lived reality of those whose lives are being shattered by those very ideologies.
I know this firsthand, because I was in the documentary.
I met Josh and Louis and shared my personal story as a Palestinian from Masafer Yatta, a community under constant threat of displacement. I also spoke about the deeper history that Western audiences almost never hear: how my grandparents were violently uprooted from their homes in 1948 by Zionist militias during the Nakba. I spoke of our long journey as refugees, of how we ended up in the South Hebron Hills, of how the Nakba never ended; it simply changed. Bulldozers have replaced rifles, and legal orders have replaced expulsion notices, but the goal remains the same: to erase us from our land.
But that part of my story, the part about 1948, about the original sin that provided the foundation for what was being shown in the film, was left on the cutting room floor.
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BBC’s choice was clear: to frame the situation as a present day political disagreement rather than the continuation of a decades-long campaign to displace and erase an entire people. By omitting our full stories, they sanitize the context and dull the impact. The settlers’ continued expansion on Palestinian land does not happen in a vacuum, but instead within the context of a nearly 100 year campaign to steal our land and cleanse us from it.