Fourteen years after his first visit, Louis Theroux returned to the occupied West Bank to meet some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled there.
Theroux also meets Issa, a Palestinian man who gives him a guided tour of the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, where everything is closed with dozens of checkpoints in place.
During filming, Theroux and his crew faced repeated confrontations, including incidents where guns were pointed at them while visiting Palestinian homes. In key scenes, Theroux challenges settlers over their treatment of Palestinians, notably confronting Daniella Weiss and calling her a “sociopath” during a discussion about settler violence.
Daily Mail review
Part of the review said: “A deep streak of cynicism lies under his charade. His interviewees are carefully chosen, to reinforce the BBC narrative that Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians their victims.”
They also said: “Louis Theroux is turning into Mae West without the wigs. Aged 54, he’s still doing the schtick that launched his career in the 1990s, the faux-naive bumbler with an air of boyish puzzlement. And it’s wearing uncomfortably thin.”
It ends with: “Every aspect of this documentary, and Amro’s involvement most of all, will have been scrutinised in minute detail by BBC lawyers and spin doctors. They can’t afford a repeat of the disaster earlier this year, when the teenage narrator of a film about children in the Gaza Strip turned out to be the son of a senior Hamas official.
“Louis isn’t naive enough to make a mistake like that.”
However, in The Independent’s four-star review of the documentary, Phil Harrison pointed out that Theroux’s moments of accidental honesty when talking to his subjects are his “biggest strength as an interviewer” as “people don’t feel threatened by him”.
Reactions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Related: Watch: Piers Morgan stunned silence as Gaza genocide summed up in 2 mins
