I was in the BBC documentary ‘The Settlers.’ This is the part of my story they didn’t tell.

Mohammed Hureini speaking to British journalist Louis Theroux in the BBC documentary film, ‘The Settlers’. (Screenshot, ‘The Settlers’)

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 an 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.

"Can we call the police?" "Which police?" In the BBC documentary The Settlers, Louis Theroux meets 20-year-old Palestinian activist Mohammad Hureini@MohammadHureini , who brings him to the village of At-Tuwani in Hebron. There, Louis witnesses the brutal reality of settler… pic.twitter.com/XtKVNi7rTn

— Translating Falasteen (Palestine) (@translatingpal) May 3, 2025

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.

Instead, the documentary chose to use a small clip of me talking about recent events in my village. It’s as if they wanted to show the surface of the crisis, without digging into its roots; as if they feared that exposing the full truth about settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the enduring legacy of the Nakba would make viewers uncomfortable.

Well, it should make them uncomfortable.

It’s not enough to present the settler ideology without giving Palestinian voices equal time to show how those ideologies devastate lives and communities. It’s not enough to hear settlers talk about wanting to kick Palestinians out if you don’t also hear from those who’ve been kicked out generation after generation.

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.

A screenshot of a scene from 'The Settlers' documentary film. Louis Theroux (second from left) and Mohammad Hureini (left) hide in a building in Masafer Yatta, in the southern occupied West Bank, while Israeli settlers and soldiers point weapons and laser sights towards the group. (Screenshot, 'The Settlers' film).

A screenshot of a scene from ‘The Settlers’ documentary film. Louis Theroux (second from left) and Mohammad Hureini (left) hide in a building in Masafer Yatta, in the southern occupied West Bank, while Israeli settlers and soldiers point weapons and laser sights towards the group. (Screenshot, ‘The Settlers’ film).

I do not reject the idea of documenting the settlers and their words. The world needs to see how normalized hate and supremacy have become in Israeli society. But any documentary that gives platform to that kind of rhetoric must, with equal seriousness and depth, amplify the stories of those resisting it; not just in the present, but in memory, in history, and in legacy.

The real story isn’t just happening in front of the cameras that visit our villages from time to time. It happened in 1948, in the destroyed villages, in the refugee camps, in the rubble and the roots of trees our grandparents planted, and it is still happening now.

The Nakba isn’t over. But neither is our fight to tell the truth – the full truth.