The Accidental Empire reconstructs how Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza transformed from temporary military positions into permanent communities, ultimately becoming one of the conflict's most intractable elements. Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli-American journalist and scholar, draws on newly opened archives, internal government documents, and interviews with key participants to trace decisions and non-decisions that created facts on the ground. The book reveals a process neither fully planned nor truly accidental: some settlements resulted from explicit government policy, others from settler initiative that governments subsequently legitimized, and still others from military decisions that took on civilian character. Gorenberg traces the role of religious Zionism in motivating settlers, the bureaucratic mechanisms that transferred resources to the territories, and the political dynamics that prevented Labor and Likud governments alike from defining clear borders. He captures the irony that a movement imagined as temporary—settlements as bargaining chips for future negotiations—became permanent precisely because negotiations never concluded. For readers seeking to understand how settlements became so central to the conflict, Gorenberg provides essential historical context.