Video
I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱
· 48 min · Watch on YouTube
I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱
The last video of the Israel–Palestine series, and the one built as a matched pair. The first fifteen minutes are spent inside an Israeli settlement in Area C with a settler who explains why she moved there and why she does not believe peace is possible. The rest is spent in Bethlehem with a Palestinian taxi driver and guide, who explains the same landscape — the same roads, gates and hills — from underneath it.
Harry sets the structure out at the start: not politicians and not headlines, but people who live inside it, both of them at length, with no verdict at the end. See talk to both sides.
The single richest stretch is the second half, which is less about opinion than about mechanics: how the road gates work, what the colour of an ID card decides, which three permits exist and what each one is for. Most of that is on the Palestine page.
Obs: the video carries a read-aloud eSIM sponsorship at [20:43]. The provider is not recorded here; nothing in the read is travel information.
Obs: the description links the Instagram accounts of the Palestinian driver, guide and shopkeeper Harry spends the trip with, and asks viewers to follow and book them. Per the bundle’s rule on content the creator directs viewers to, they are not named here. It also links a fundraiser for the Gaza Relief Fund, which Harry says he has donated to himself — named, because it is a donation appeal rather than a business he is sending traffic to.
Obs: the numbers in the opening are Harry’s, and he attributes the attack and casualty figures to the UN. They are recorded on the country page as his.
Key moments
- [00:34] The map first. The Oslo Accords split the West Bank into Area A (the big Palestinian cities, run by the Palestinian Authority, Israeli citizens not allowed in), Area B (towns and villages — Palestinian daily life, Israeli security), and Area C (over 60% of the land, full Israeli control). It was meant to last five years.
- [01:09] The figures he opens with, which he says are worse than he expected — settler attacks, deaths on both sides, and a record year for settlement approvals.
- [02:16] Driving to the settlement, and saying on camera that he is nervous and has no idea what to expect.
- [02:48] The settler’s account of herself: an orthodox family, a belief that this is a way of serving God, and a move to the West Bank after 7 October. She says she has had no problems and that it is very safe.
- [03:24] The nearest Palestinian village is visible from where they stand, and Tel Aviv is visible behind it. Would she ever go there — no.
- [03:59] What she wants in 200 years: Israeli sovereignty over the whole land, with Palestinians living in their own cities inside it.
- [05:10] An informal farm outpost, placed between two Palestinian communities to stop them joining up. Harry notes on camera that this is illegal under Israeli law as well as international law.
- [05:46] Could she imagine a Palestinian friend — no, not since 7 October. Harry pushes on whether that is a generalisation and she holds the position.
- [07:33] “I don’t believe in peace.” Her fullest statement, and the line the video opens with.
- [11:24] One state, not two — and her version of a future for Palestinians is a future in Europe.
- [12:36] Asked to condemn violent settlers, she calls them a small group and says they are not part of what she believes in.
- [14:15] The separation barrier. Harry’s account: about 8 m of concrete, twice the height of the Berlin wall, roughly 700 km long and not on the 1967 line — it cuts into the West Bank, separating farmers from fields and villages from water. The ICJ ruled the sections inside the West Bank illegal in 2004.
- [15:19] Bethlehem, empty. Graffiti the length of the wall, the place to himself, and the two sentences that sit together oddly — it feels like a prison camp, and he feels extremely safe.
- [16:23] The driver. 37, four children, lost his Instagram following during the war and is starting again; says Bethlehem’s business is finished and that there is perhaps 1% hope. Every year for as long as he can remember has been maybe next year.
- [18:06] Harry’s own summary, and the thing he says he took from the whole trip: almost everyone loses, and the losers you don’t see are the hotel owner who now drives a taxi and the tour guide who now drives a taxi.
- [18:40] Answering the settlers’ claim that everyone in Gaza and the West Bank supports Hamas: his estimate is 70% on each side who would share the country and 30% on each side carrying hatred, and that the 30% are the people who lost someone.
- [20:11] Asked whether he feels safe saying all this, his answer is that he does and doesn’t — and he gives a figure of more than 5,000 Palestinians held over social-media posts.
- [21:52] The road gates. Not one gate: a gate for each village and town, and since 7 October this one is shut except when the army opens it. A one-minute drive becomes four or five kilometres.
- [22:54] His verdict on the settlement next door is that it is peaceful — and that others, further north, are not. His formulation: his own fingers aren’t the same as each other either.
- [24:30] Settlement construction has accelerated sharply since 7 October.
- [25:05] On the competing claims to the land: he says neither he nor Harry can know who is right, only that the other side believes it completely.
- [26:41] The hardest thing about life here, in his answer: watching someone take your home, your sheep or your car and being able to do nothing.
- [27:45] Lunch at a family home above Bethlehem, and Harry’s observation about the room — sofas around the walls rather than facing a television, because the room is built for gatherings.
- [29:25] The work economy. Around 400,000 Palestinians crossed daily to work in Israel before 7 October; he says roughly 300,000 of them now have nothing, and that the labour has been replaced from China, India and Sri Lanka.
- [30:27] Driving a road inside Area B that is under Israeli control, past Israeli flags, and saying plainly that it makes him angry.
- [31:31] His Holocaust argument, given at length and recorded as his: the six million died in Europe, not here, and he cannot see why the answer to it arrives on his land.
- [33:12] What he asks Harry to carry back: that Palestinians are human, want an ordinary life, and are not all terrorists — and that the way to test it is to come and walk around alone.
- [33:49] The Banksy piece on the wall, and the line painted beside it about who prevails.
- [34:21] The wall, his version: begun in 2002 under Ariel Sharon, about 780 km, and 8 m plus another 2 on top. Harry’s own figures earlier in the video are 700 km and 8 m — see the country page.
- [34:54] A man of 47, out of work since the crossings closed, shot in the face trying to get over the wall to a job. Before 7 October, he says, you were beaten or jailed for a few days.
- [35:28] Green card and blue card, the section that explains most of the rest: which side you may live on, which colour number plate you may drive, what you may buy or build.
- [36:30] Marriage across the divide — a green ID and a blue ID marrying means one of them loses their side, so in practice green marries green.
- [37:05] Flying anywhere means Jericho, then Amman, then the world. A brother with German citizenship still cannot come in through Tel Aviv.
- [37:38] Informers, and how much of the jail population he attributes to them.
- [38:46] The three permits — prayer, hospital, work — and who gets each.
- [39:18] What the hospital permit costs in practice: treatment priced at 100 shekels locally can be 10,000 across the line, which he puts at three or four months’ salary here.
- [39:48] The work permit is construction, 99% of it, and he is blunt about what it means to build houses for the other side.
- [40:55] Why he once crossed the wall, told on camera for the first time: not for work, but to pray at Al-Aqsa on the night of Ramadan he says is worth a thousand months.
- [42:02] Coming back was the easy half — nobody checks the bus in that direction.
- [42:35] “99% you die and 1% you jump.” What crossing costs now, with a watchtower every several hundred metres.
- [43:37] Harry pays him a lot, and doesn’t film it — the driver tried to refuse and asked only for petrol money. See don’t film private moments.
- [44:12] $1,000 of food and supplies bought for families in a local refugee camp, with a Palestinian friend who closed his shop for the day to help. Harry says the hardest part was choosing who to give it to.
- [45:20] The closing thought. He came expecting anger and even a wish for revenge, and says that is not what he found — people talked about their homes, their children, their olive trees and whether they would be allowed to build.
- [45:56] Ten days in, the thing he can’t ignore: how physically close the two populations are and how far apart their realities are.
- [46:28] He expects that these videos mean he will not be allowed back into Israel, and therefore not back to Palestine either.