Nigeria, July 6 -- He has made it his bread and butter for years: finding society's kooky representatives, the marginal, the crazed and the touched. But what makes Louis Theroux's The Settlers troubling is its examination of a seemingly inexorable process in the West Bank, one that has, at its core, a religious, nationalist goal of cleansing and violent purification. The documentary captures Israel's modern colonial project in real time, and it is one most ugly.

The target of the cleansing and eradication - the Palestinians in the West Bank - is awesomely horrific, rationalised by suffocating checkpoints, brooding military posts and endless harassing points of invigilation. Having already made The Ultra Zionists, a documentary on the sam...