Price Tag op goes awry

A sunflower field belonging to a settler was uprooted and destroyed by Jewish extremists who mistakenly identified it as Palestinian-owned.

The field’s actual owner, a resident of Hebron, initially thought that the vandalism had been carried out by local Palestinians and filed a complaint with police, Channel 10 news reported on Sunday.

A short while later, however, the property owner received an anonymous apology letter from the perpetrators, saying that his field wasn’t meant to have been the target of their machinations, and that they’d assumed it belonged to Palestinians.

The letter explained that, had they known it was Jewish-owned property, they wouldn’t have laid a finger on it.

The letter’s remorseful authors attached a NIS 200 bill ($55) to the envelope as symbolic redress for the field owner’s losses, the report said.

After launching an investigation into the matter, police arrested two men from the settlement of Bat Ayin in the Etzion Bloc on suspicion that they had carried out the failed “Price Tag” attack.

The term “Price Tag” is used to describe crimes, typically but not always vandalism or arson of Palestinian property, carried out by extremist Jews as ostensible retribution for Israeli government actions — such as demolition of illegal West Bank construction — which they deem contrary to settler interests.