UK government expected to announce restrictions on trade with West Bank settlements

Lucilius, the news from Britannia reaches me as the tide reaches Corsica , slow, then all at once. The island's governor has declared that merchants shall no longer traffic with the settlements Rome's client-king has planted beyond the Jordan. A restriction on commerce. A line drawn in sand that has swallowed many lines before. I think of Philip, who shipwrecked a man on his shore, then changed his decree when circumstance demanded. No disgrace in altering one's plans according to circumstances.

The governor calls this justice. The client-king calls it betrayal. Both call it necessity. I have seen this play in Nero's antechamber: the province pushes, the center pushes back, the soldiers in between bleed for slogans they did not write. The measure of possession, as the slave Epickteetus taught, is the body , the foot, not the shoe. When a power gilds the shoe beyond the foot, when it stitches purple and embroidery onto what was meant to cover bare necessity, there is no limit to the wanting.

The settlements grow. The restrictions multiply. The merchants count their losses. The mothers count their sons. I write this from Nomentum, where the garden still bears the figs Paulina planted. The world turns.

The pattern holds.

I have seen this play before, though the stage was Boston and the actors wore different coats. In '65 the merchants of this city signed a paper pledging not to import British goods until the Stamp Act was repealed , a restraint upon the merchants, as I wrote at the time, and one that worked because the pain was shared. The Crown called it rebellion; we called it leverage. The distinction depends entirely on who holds the pen. The Albany Plan of '54 proposed that the Crown alone purchase Indian lands, preventing the monopolies of vast tracts to particular persons... which are prejudicial to the settlement and peopling of a country. The Crown refused. The settlers kept settling.

The disputes kept coming. Now London proposes to restrict trade with settlements in occupied territory , the same principle, inverted. The sovereign draws a line on the map and says: ... commerce stops here. I wonder whether Ed Miliband has read the correspondence of 1777, where Mr. Jefferson observed that free trade by alliance with a naval power is most eligible, because more conformable to the habits and wishes of our people. Habits and wishes. They are stubborn things.

Israel has already warned of retaliation. Of course it has. When Parliament taxed our tea, we threw it in the harbor. When the non-importation agreements held, New York merchants broke them and ordered goods anyway , and Philadelphia merchants, who had long lain idle, sent them immense quantities, expecting a quick sale. The event was very uncertain then. It remains so. Trade follows the flag, until the flag becomes inconvenient. Then trade follows the ledger.

The ledger always wins in the end.