Sparks: UK accuses Israeli ‘terrorists’ of ethnic cleansing in West Bank with government backing

Forget the speeches. Here is who has leverage: the settler armed and protected, the minister with sanctions he may lift tomorrow, the foreign secretary with words. Here is who is constrained: everyone else, permanently.

All I know is what I read in the papers, and the papers say we just discovered a foreign government was backing the fellas doing the deed - which is how we describe our own foreign policy when somebody else prints it.

A man walks through a door that soldiers have opened in a wall of a house that was not theirs, and in London a minister says the word 'sanctions' - the peasant eats what remains, and the word changes nothing on his plate.

Condemnation without a tariff schedule, a banking restriction, and an enforcement mechanism is merely a press release wearing the costume of policy, and no amount of virtue in the minister's language will supply the architecture he has neglected to build.

The settlement trades, the settlement banks, the settlement insures; the merchant who profits from the arrangement will defend it in the language of national interest, which is the language merchants have always used when petitioning to keep their privileges.

When the word 'terrorist' is applied only to some armed men and withheld from others, the name has been corrupted, and once names are corrupted, duties fail; a government that aids the deed cannot be trusted to name the deed.

The reform trap: they announce trade restrictions on the settlements while leaving intact the alliance, the arms contracts, and the machinery that makes the settlements possible - a brake applied to one wheel of a train whose engine is untouched.

Two texts are being read: one calls the act a crime, the other calls it security, and the judges of each declare the other's book illegible; a ruling that cannot name the same deed twice by one name is no ruling at all.

Things that are hateful: a sanction announced with flourish, a word chosen for its echo, an orchard that outlived three governments and could not outlive a Tuesday; things that are elegant: none, this week.