The Settler’s Guide to Accountability (West Bank Edition)

You know how it is with property. One moment it’s yours - the car parked outside, the olive grove your grandfather planted, the front door that actually opens - and the next moment it’s… well, let’s call it repurposed in the service of a Higher Historical Narrative.

The Israeli settlers, of course, are merely exercising their divinely mandated right to perform what urban planners call spontaneous zoning adjustments and what everyone else calls arson.*

• *The official term is “price tag” attacks, because nothing says “accountability” like pricing human dignity in burnt rubber and shattered glass.

Now, in any sensible bureaucracy, there would be forms for this sort of thing. Form S-42/B: Request for Permission to Set Fire to a Stranger’s Livelihood (With Attached Proof of Theological Superiority). But the West Bank operates on what we might call expropriation-by-inertia - a system where the rules are whatever the people with the most guns and the least paperwork say they are.

The real genius of settler violence isn’t the violence itself - though it’s impressively thorougharterial*** - but the way it slots neatly into the broader machinery of occupation. The state can shrug and say, “Oh dear, rogue actors,” while quietly ensuring that the “rogues” never face consequences***.

*** *Rogue actors, , meaning “people doing exactly what the system encourages but prefers not to stamp with an official letterhead.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinians - those unfortunate souls who didn’t get the memo that history had reassigned their land - are left to file insurance claims with the UN.**

** *Insurance claims being the international community’s preferred method of expressing moral outrage while doing absolutely nothing.

The stakes? Oh, just the usual: a slow-motion erasure of any possibility of peace, dressed up as “defensive territorial consolidation.”***

*** *A phrase only ever used by people who have never had to explain to their children why the family car is now a melted sculpture.

And so the wheel turns, grinding ordinary lives into the dust of someone else’s grand narrative. The settlers get their outposts, the politicians get their soundbites, and the Palestinians get to practice the ancient art of existing while inconvenient.

The real joke, of course, is that everyone pretends this is complicated.