Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz
I am a Senior Land Registrar in the Civil Administration for Judea and Samaria, and I want to be clear: I have never held a weapon in my professional capacity.
My tools are a surveyor's plat, a GIS database, a stack of Ottoman-era property records that conveniently lack the documentation standards we now require, and a stamp that says APPROVED in Hebrew and English but not Arabic. I process between 40 and 60 land status determinations per week. Each one takes approximately 90 minutes. I drink two coffees per determination. My colleagues call me thorough.
I've been doing this for eleven years. In that time I have processed approximately 14,000 individual determinations. If you converted my career output into a map overlay — which our GIS department did last year for the annual review — it would show a territory roughly the size of Luxembourg redesignated from "ambiguous ownership" to "state land." My director presented this at the ministry's year-end function. There was cake. Someone made a joke about me being the most productive person in the building. I am. By parcel count, no one else comes close.
When I redesignate a parcel as state land, I am not "taking" anything. I am correcting a clerical ambiguity. The land was always state land — it simply hadn't been properly registered. The fact that a family has grazed sheep on it for four generations is not, in a legal sense, documentation. A hand-drawn boundary marker is not a cadastral survey. An olive grove planted by someone's grandfather is not a title deed. I don't make the rules. I apply them. Consistently. 60 times per week. The consistency is the point.
Let me explain the permit system, because the international press gets it wrong every time.
A Palestinian resident of Area C may apply for a building permit. This is their right. We process every application through the standard review framework: zoning compliance, infrastructure capacity, environmental impact, archaeological sensitivity, security corridor proximity, and what we call "master plan alignment" — whether the proposed structure fits within the approved development outline for that locality. The issue is that most Palestinian localities in Area C do not have approved development outlines. We have not yet gotten to them. There are staffing constraints. We are, I should note, processing Israeli settlement development outlines at a rate of approximately 12 per quarter. The Palestinian ones are in the queue.
My rejection rate on Palestinian building permit applications is 99.3%. I know this because a European NGO published it, and my supervisor forwarded the article to the department with a single comment: "consistency." I took it as a compliment. Consistency is what separates administration from chaos. If I approved permits selectively, THAT would be discrimination. I reject them uniformly. On identical grounds. With identical language. There is an elegance to it that I don't think the NGOs appreciate.
When a structure is built without the permit I've denied, my colleagues in the enforcement division issue a demolition order. 1,768 last year. Some people call this a cycle. I call it a system functioning correctly. You apply for a permit. The permit is denied based on established zoning criteria. You build without authorization. The unauthorized structure is removed. Each step follows from the last with the inevitability of arithmetic. I don't demolish homes. I maintain the integrity of the planning framework. The distinction matters to me professionally.
There's a form — I won't bore you with the number, but it's a green form — that we file after each demolition confirming the enforcement action was "consistent with the applicable planning regime." I have signed this form 1,768 times in the last fiscal year. My signature is the same every time. The form is the same every time. Only the GPS coordinates change.
The new staff sometimes ask about appeals. There is an appeals process. It routes through our office. The appeal is reviewed against the same criteria that produced the initial denial. The criteria have not changed. The appeal is denied. There is an elegance to closed systems that young people don't yet appreciate. Give them time. After 14,000 determinations, you stop seeing individual cases and start seeing the architecture. It's cleaner that way.
The Minister visited our office last month. Smotrich. He toured the open-plan floor where my team sits — 23 registrars, four GIS analysts, two cartographers, and a woman named Dina who manages the Ottoman-era archive. He reviewed the quarterly land registration targets. 200 square kilometers redesignated by end of fiscal year. We're ahead of schedule. He told us we were "building the state one parcel at a time." I appreciated that he understood the granularity.
The newspapers write about settlements in the abstract. Grand strategy. Geopolitics. They don't understand that a settlement is, at its foundation, a series of correctly filed forms. A sovereignty claim is a stack of cadastral surveys with the appropriate ministerial stamps. A border is wherever the last registration order reaches. I know because I process the registration orders. The border is currently 14 kilometers further east than it was when I started this job. I moved it. With a stamp. Over 4,000 working days. At a rate of 90 minutes per determination.
I processed the Sa-Nur reopening paperwork personally. This was a point of professional pride. Eight forms. Three ministerial signatures. One environmental impact waiver (expedited track — the site had been previously developed, so the environmental baseline was already established). One security corridor certification. One infrastructure capacity assessment (pre-approved — the road was already built in 2003). The total processing time was four hours and eleven minutes. The Minister called it a "historic correction" on television that evening.
I liked that. "Correction." It's the same language I use in my determination memos when a previous assessment is found to contain a classification error. We are correcting. Not conquering. Not expanding. Correcting a 2005 administrative error, remedied through the standard review process, filed under the appropriate statute, stamped with the same stamp I use 60 times per week. The stamp doesn't know the difference between a routine parcel redesignation and the reopening of an evacuated settlement. It just stamps. Like me.
My favorite part of the job is the roads. I don't process roads directly — that's the Infrastructure Planning Division — but I handle the land designations that make roads possible. When a road needs to connect Settlement A to Settlement B, the parcels along the proposed route must first be redesignated as state land available for infrastructure development. This is where I come in. I process the redesignation determinations — typically 30 to 50 per road, depending on length and terrain — and then the Infrastructure Division handles the construction authorization.
When completed, the road creates what we call "territorial continuity" in the planning language. The newspapers call it "facts on the ground." My GIS colleagues call it "reducing the solution space" — meaning that the geometric options for any future border decrease with each road built. But from my desk, it's simply a transportation infrastructure request routed through the standard approval process. The road doesn't know it's political. It's just asphalt. It just happens to be asphalt that makes a future Palestinian state geometrically impossible — but that's a question for cartographers and diplomats, not land registrars. I don't draw borders. I draw parcels. The borders happen as a consequence.
The 34-settlement approval from March was the largest batch I've ever processed. My team worked weekends — something we normally reserve for end-of-fiscal-year deadlines. Each settlement requires between 80 and 120 individual parcel determinations. Multiply by 34. My coffee consumption that month was medically inadvisable. But we met the deadline. The Minister's office sent a commendation email. Form letter. Same language they use for any department that meets quarterly targets. "Your contribution to the national mission is appreciated." I have received 11 of these emails over my career. I keep them in a folder labeled RECOGNITION.
Someone from a European fact-finding delegation visited last year and asked me if I ever thought about "the human impact" of my work. I told her that I think about zoning compliance, infrastructure capacity, environmental impact, archaeological sensitivity, security corridor proximity, and master plan alignment. Those are the criteria. They are applied uniformly. There is no field on my forms for "human impact." If there were, I would fill it in. Consistently. With the same attention to accuracy that I bring to every other field.
She asked a follow-up question about whether I'd ever visited the communities affected by my determinations. I told her that site visits are conducted by the survey team, not the registration team. Division of labor. I work from satellite imagery, GIS overlays, and the Ottoman archive. I have never set foot on most of the parcels I've redesignated. I don't need to. The data is sufficient. The forms are complete. The stamp is the same regardless of what's physically on the ground.
I understand that 14,000 determinations, viewed from a certain altitude, might look like something other than administration. I understand that a territory the size of Luxembourg, redesignated over eleven years, might look like something other than clerical correction. I understand that a 99.3% rejection rate, sustained over a decade, might look like something other than consistent application of established criteria.
But I would ask: at what point in my daily work did I cross a line? Which specific determination? Which form? Which stamp? There is no moment in 14,000 determinations where administration becomes something else. There is only the next form. The next coffee. The next 90-minute assessment. A spreadsheet that grows. Cell by cell. Row by row. Until the map matches the plan that the Minister published eight years before I received the quarterly targets that translated it into parcel counts.
But the plan is above my pay grade. I just file the paperwork.
Sixty times per week. Two coffees per filing. Luxembourg in eleven years.
I have never held a weapon.
