The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here violates the very essence of justice. Justice, that transcendent principle ordering human affairs, demands respect for property and the security of persons. Yet, this act of settler violence - smashing cars, setting fires - is not merely a criminal act; it is a profound severing of the present from the accumulated moral order that the West Bank, however tragically contested, has long embodied. The permanent thing of justice, which demands that individuals and communities be secure in their possessions and persons, is being violated with calculated cruelty.

This violence does not merely attack physical property; it attacks the institutional form through which justice and security were historically mediated: the local community. The West Bank, for all its political complexities, possesses a fabric of towns, villages, and families where the ordinary rhythms of life - agriculture, trade, prayer, kinship - once provided a framework for order and mutual recognition. The settler’s torch and hammer are not instruments of progress, but of fragmentation. They deliberately target the material expressions of Palestinian community life, aiming not just to punish, but to shatter the very sense of place and belonging that makes justice, however imperfectly realized, conceivable. This is not the application of law; it is the application of force to sever the connection between the present inhabitants and the land they have cultivated and lived upon for generations. It is an act of ideological violence, reducing a complex human reality to a mere obstacle to be cleared, confident in the superiority of its own temporal moment.

Kirk would see this not as a localized conflict, but as a symptom of a deeper civilisational erosion. The ideology driving such actions - whether rooted in a distorted sense of religious or nationalist entitlement - applies a single, destructive principle mechanically, ignoring the intricate web of relationships, traditions, and inherited practices that constitute a society. It ignores the locality, the specific towns and villages where human life is lived and where, however tenuously, some form of order might still exist. This act of destruction does not produce security or justice; it breeds resentment, fear, and the fertile ground for further chaos. The permanent things - justice, security, the dignity of the person - are not served by such violence; they are violated. The question before us is not merely one of condemning the perpetrators, but of understanding how such acts arise from a failure to attend to the permanent things and the institutions that embody them. True order, Kirk understood, requires tending the garden of tradition, not setting it ablaze.