When the BBC Media Centre announced in February 2025 that it had commissioned a documentary titled “The Settlers” from Louis Theroux’s ‘Mindhouse’ production company, concerns were raised due to the publicly expressed anti-Israel stance of his business partner and wife.
“Strang has signed an open letter absurdly accusing the BBC of failing to hold Israel to account, despite the broadcaster’s long history of hostility towards the Jewish state. Her name also appears on a ‘Palestine coalition statement’, which criticises police – who were concerned that Jewish worshippers at a nearby synagogue might be intimidated – for rerouting yet another furious anti-Israel march past the BBC. “
That BBC Media Centre announcement includes the following:
“Louis Theroux: The Settlers is a Mindhouse production for BBC Two and BBC iPlayer, commissioned by Clare Sillery, Head of Documentary Commissioning, with Fran Baker as Commissioning Editor. The Director is Josh Baker, the Senior Producer is Sara Obeidat and the Producer is Matan Cohen, the Production Manager is Emily Wallace and the Executive Producers are Fiona Stourton and Arron Fellows. Global sales will be handled by BBC Studios Distribution.”
Readers may recall that in May 2024 two of the people involved in the Mindhouse production – Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat – were among those originally (but no longer) credited with the writing of a report published on the BBC News website that was based on a BBC Three programme called “The Other War” which they directed and produced respectively.
TWENTY-TWO YEARS ON, THE BBC AGAIN PROMOTES THE NOTION OF ‘WAR CRIMES’ IN JENIN
Theroux’s latest offering – “The Settlers” – was first aired on BBC Two on April 27th and remains available for the next 11 months on iPlayer, with its synopsis telling BBC audiences that:
“Louis Theroux spends time with the growing community of Israeli religious-nationalist settlers. Their settlements are illegal under international law, and they have been protected by the army, the police and the Israeli government.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, there has been an acceleration in the establishment of settlements, with settlers pursuing a campaign of violence against local Palestinian communities.
What was once a fringe movement has now won support at the highest levels of government, with their supporters holding key positions in the cabinet and able to influence not only the role the military plays but also the future of this conflict.
Louis Theroux embeds himself in the West Bank, meeting prominent settlers – including the ‘godmother’ of the movement, Daniella Weiss – and travelling throughout the territory to understand the consequences of their activity. Louis also meets Palestinians whose lives have been impacted by settlers moving into their communities. As the world focuses on Gaza, where at least 50,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli forces since 7 October, Louis discovers that the settlers are already making plans to move into that territory, too.”
Since its airing, numerous commentators have pointed out issues arising in that documentary. The Telegraph’s Arts and Entertainment editor pointed out that:
“After invoking October 7 as his reason for making the film, Theroux barely mentions it again. It’s a shame that journalists aren’t allowed into Gaza, because a film in which he gently accuses a Hamas leader of being a bit of a sociopath would be one to watch.”
Another article at the same paper noted that:
“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”.”
At the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons commented on how Theroux managed to completely ignore terrorist organisations’ ‘martyrs’ posters on the walls in Nablus:
“At one point, he has a coffee in Nablus, “surrounded by the ancient architecture of the Old City and the undeniable fact of the hundreds of thousands of people living there and their aspirations for statehood,” he tells us. The camera ranges over said Old City, panning quickly past the many posters of young men wielding automatic weapons on the walls without any comment provided.”
Historian Simon Schama and others pointed out Theroux’s failure to mention the 1929 massacre of Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community and the erroneous claim that Jews only arrived in that city in 1968.
Others, including Stephen Daisley, have criticised Theroux’s failure to present “the settlers” he interviews in context.
“There is something missing from The Settlers and it’s the settlers. We get pantomime villains but no one halfway normal from a population of hundreds of thousands, the implication being that all of them are crazed supremacists. Theroux managed to find plenty of reasonable Palestinians. Indeed, they are the only kind of Palestinians featured. If your only exposure to the conflict was this documentary, you might wonder how Israel ever provoked such a beatifically peaceful people to raise their voices let alone blow up buses and gun down festival-goers.”
A post at Harry’s Place noted that:
“Sure these settlers are extremists who would like to re-establish the biblical land of Israel, but they don’t have millions of supporters around the world chanting “From the river to the sea….”. The Palestinians do. They can be found every weekend marching through London or disrupting campus events within earshot of BBC headquarters. We see no effort to document them either and “just let them speak” to expose their extremist desire to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Jews.”
Sadly for BBC audiences, there is plenty of other context missing from Theroux’s 61-minute film too. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine doesn’t even get a mention, the 1948 Jordanian invasion and occupation of Judea and Samaria is completely ignored and no context regarding the Six Day War is provided. Theroux’s visit to Evyatar follows in the uninformative footsteps of previous context-free BBC reporting and his commentary during repeat trips to the border with the Gaza Strip fails to tell BBC audiences that Israel evacuated every last civilian and soldier from that territory almost twenty years before his documentary was made.
Similarly, during his visit to Hebron Theroux makes no effort to explain the twenty-eight-year-old agreements between Israel and the PLO which are the context to the repeatedly filmed checkpoints and his puerile questions to the soldiers manning them. And of course it came as no surprise to find Theroux’s film features the inadequately presented Palestinian ‘activist’ Issa Amro who has appeared in past BBC content.
While documentaries were once regarded as non-fictional films intended to instruct and educate viewers while providing historical record, the BBC’s “Documentary commissioning brief” suggests rather different priorities.
“Documentary storytelling sits at the very heart of the BBC’s offer to audiences and continues to be hugely popular with both iPlayer and linear viewers. Our commissions are typically narrative or character driven, where audiences engage with stories by feeling and experiencing them, reaching their own conclusions rather than being told what to think.”
With the omission of so much vital background information, the almost cartoon-like portrayal of Israeli participants and the repeated camera pauses on Theroux’s primary school drama class style facial expressions, his film is indeed narrative driven – as can again be seen in an article he had published at the Guardian on May 10th.
The film promotes a deliberately blinkered viewpoint – already amply available in years of BBC content – which fails to challenge audience perceptions, makes no attempt to provide new information or essential context and thus engineers the type of “conclusions” that viewers will reach. And that is precisely what makes Louis Theroux’s BBC commissioned film such a drearily predictable and excruciatingly boring waste of licence fee funding.
The BBC has become the leaders in International Anti Semitism – remember it broadcasts world wide and dishing up such material is basic anti Israel Goebbels type propaganda