In the West Bank, Everyone Fights Like a Prince and No One Governs Like a Republic

Settlers do not set fire to mosques by mistake. When, as reported, Israeli settlers burn mosques, cars, and farmland in West Bank villages, they are sending the oldest political message in the world: this land is ours, your God will not protect you, and your harvest depends on our mercy. The fact that such attacks follow deadly clashes, in which Palestinians and Israelis both die, does not diminish their meaning; it clarifies it. Violence of this sort is not a spasm. It is a low, constant drum that says to the rival population, “You may live here only at our pleasure.” In frontier zones, arson is the signature with which men sign their sovereignty.

The state answers in its own dialect. The Israeli army, according to its public statement, searches more than 300 locations and arrests over 70 people it describes as Hamas affiliates, arms traffickers, and militants; troops remain in a town, storm a hospital with dozens of armed soldiers, terrify patients, detain staff, and seize an injured man in front of women and children. This is not policing in the sense of equal law. It is counter-insurgency. The message is again ancient: for any attack, the reply will be larger, more organized, and backed by all the instruments of the state. When I wrote in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, that men first injure lightly and then, fearing revenge, are forced to injure mortally, I had exactly these escalations in mind.

You and I may talk of rights and borders; the actors move on incentives and fears. Israel has built hundreds of settlements housing hundreds of thousands of its citizens on land Palestinians want for a future state. That is not an argument; it is a fact carved in stone and concrete. A state that has planted so many of its people on contested ground must either protect and expand that fact or accept their expulsion. There is no gentle middle. The settlers who torch, and the military that raids, both move from the same root: to maintain and extend control over the territory on which their future rests. Justice may be invoked on all lips, but security decides all hands.

In the Discourses, following Livy, I argued that whoever lays foundations for a state must assume men are bad, and will act badly whenever they have free field. Here, the laws and accords are full of lofty phrases, but opportunity keeps tearing them open. Settler groups see villages without effective protection and strike them. Palestinian militants see soldiers exposed or settlers on the road and strike back. Each side tests where the other is weak and the law absent. You see it in the demolitions in East Jerusalem that Palestinians say destroy their future, and in attacks that kill both Israelis and Palestinians; you see it in the claim, reported by Al Jazeera, that settler war crimes face no accountability. Where appetites find no hard barrier, they flow.

This conflict does not stand still. The reports speak of a “fragile ceasefire,” yet airstrikes in Gaza continue, raids deepen in the West Bank, settlers defy rules at holy sites, and anger grows over demolitions. In my time I said that fortune is like a flooding river, as translated by Marriott: she overwhelms only where there are no dykes. Here, each side uses the same old dykes while the river has changed its course. One relies on raids, demolitions, and settlements as if these could forever secure a mixed, hostile population. The other relies on sporadic armed resistance and the hope of international outrage, as if these alone could produce a state. What once gained ground now as often loses it; that is how decline begins.

Everyone brings arms to the field; no one brings institutions strong enough to contain them. Settlers have their armed groups; Palestinians have militants; the state has its army and police. Peace plans appear like unarmed prophets, respectable and doomed. In The Art of War I preferred a citizen militia bound to the state over hired soldiers; here the problem is almost the reverse. Too many semi-autonomous fighters answer first to faction, whether nationalist, religious, or local, and only second to any common order. The result is a chain of private wars hanging from an official war, with each link able to pull the whole chain toward fresh blood.

Rome resolved its tumults between senate and people by creating tribunes and other offices that gave the plebs lawful outlets, and from those regulated conflicts came liberty. The West Bank shows the contrary experiment. There, the great and the people—settlers backed by state power, and Palestinians seeking a state of their own—have few shared institutions they both trust. So the quarrel goes from courtroom to bulldozer, from parliament to arson. Severity is applied without finality; mercy is offered without security. This is the middle course in its purest form, combining the cost of repression with the chaos of indulgence. States can live long with conflict, but not with unresolved claims to the same streets, the same shrines, and the same futures.

I do not know which particular accusations in today’s reports will be confirmed or disproved, but I am certain that unless someone finds the courage and virtù to found new modes and orders for this land—institutions that can master arms rather than merely deploy them—the West Bank will remain a place where fortune sends always the same disaster in new disguises.