• Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! host, interview with Shimon Dotan at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
• Also writing from Sundance, the review in Variety begins “Shimon Dotan’s documentary on Israeli settlements in the West Bank has the power to provoke strong reactions wherever it plays.”
• Philip Weiss begins his review by calling The Settlers “an important documentary about the destruction of the two-state solution.”
• J. Hoberman review in the Tablet Magazine in March 2017.
• IndieWire commentary: “the film is the first of its kind as it looks at the historical, religious and personal ramifications of Israeli citizens expanding communities into the already-occupied territories of the West Bank, where they frequently come into direct conflict with the region’s Palestinian inhabitants.”
• The Times of Israel headlines it “an effective work of left-wing propaganda.
• Uri Klein, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Jun 22, 2016, lambasts The Settlers for being over-cautiousness and leaving out realistic portrayals of Palestinian life, turning “a Blind Eye to the Horror of West Bank Life.”
• Both Times of Israel reviewer Jordan Hoffman and New York Times reviewer Helen T. Verongos writing in early March 2017 pair their reviews of The Settlers with reviews of Ben Gurion, Epilogue, which played at the same time in New York City.
• Godfrey Cheshire gives the film 3 stars in his March 3, 2017 review on the RogerEberts.com film reviewing site.
• The New York Film Festival blurb for The Settlers says it “takes a good, hard look at the world of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank: the way they live, the worldview that many of them share, and, most crucially, the relaxed attitude of the Israeli government toward their presence since the first settlements in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Dotan lays out the facts with extraordinary care and lucidity, and allows us to see the progression of actions and reactions that led to the current volatile situation, one small step at a time. Perhaps the greatest astonishment of this generally astonishing film is the casual zealotry and racism, and the apparently untroubled certainty, of many of the settlers themselves.