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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.

• An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.

• The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.

• The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.

(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.

'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'

Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:

‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”

Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’

The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.”

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’, 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’

Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora , the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands.

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.

(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Misplaced Pages itself.

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.

Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” <

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.

Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,

’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’

and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache). In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued.

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.'

The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'

A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’

Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’.

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Misplaced Pages, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area..

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), , thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.

'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo). According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'

After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8

We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh

The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.

1. T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
2. Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
3. For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
4. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
5. George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
7. Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
8. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
9. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
10. Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
11. Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
12. M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
13. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
14. ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
15. John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
16. Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
17. Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
18. Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
19. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
20. Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
21. Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
22. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
23. Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
24. Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
25. ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
26. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
27. cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
28. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
29. Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
30. Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
31. 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
32. Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
33. Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
34. Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
35. 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
36. 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
37. 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
38. Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
39. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
40. William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
41. William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
42. Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
43. Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
44. James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
45. Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
46. See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
47. Numbers, 32:18
48. David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
49. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
50. Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
51. Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
52. Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
53. Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
54. Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
55. John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
56. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13

Further reading:-

• Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010

Notes

Citations

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• Yablonka, Hanna (Spring 2012). "The Eichmann Trial: Was It the Jewish Nuremberg?". Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law. 34 (3): 301–313.

AE

Since this AE report morphed into repeated insinuations there is some antisemitic clique of anti-Israel editors, of which (I am cited in the evidence by a certain Walt Yoder as being one), and since I cannot comment there, I should just note that the big divide in this area is between those who insist on very high quality sources, on comprehensive topic reading, and on collaborative searching for materials that are difficult to access to write those articles, etc. Secondly, they prioritize Israeli and diaspora scholarship as the, by the nature of the field, default source for our best information on the I/P area, be it historical, social or otherwise. Then there are those who, in my view at least, approach the subject with a standard collection of memes that have semi-official status in Israeli discourse. I'd say rough 99% of the 100+socks who have over 15 years repeatedly tried to influence the shaping of articles share the latter viewpoint (it's a legitimate POV but not taken very seriously academically, as oopposed to newspapers). As I see it, what is spun as a conflict between two POV-pushing groups reflects simply the contrast between scholarship with its rigorous methodologies and an ideological vision of the topic. Yes, I do suffer from something of what the Japanese called a hōgan-biiki (判官贔屓) empathy in my approach to the world. It does influence what attracts my attention, meaning I sympathise with the silenced underdog in so many conflicts, be they Aboriginals or Palestinians or Tibetans. This as far as I am aware does not translate into being uncomfortable with my country of origins, or antisemitic, or hostile to Chinese. From distinct backgrounds, I gather, several editors share this interest and they tend to work well together because they subscribe to the same principles of evidence which are commended in academia as they are on wikipedia as ideals. They are consistently alluded to, for this, as a conspirational anti-Israeli or antisemitic gang, offline and, desultorily, here from time to time. I always ignore the insinuations, as off-topic baiting. What those who suscribe to this viewpoint are doing is taking, generally, their disgruntlement with the Israeli and diaspora scholarship 'we' privilege, and characterizing it as 'anti-jewish/Israeli'. It is, basically, a distaste for the intellectual and moral integrity of scholarship in the Jewish tradition because it doesn't fit easily with the politics of simplification. Now that said, back to something serious. I couldn't care less that a handful of editors here are committed Zionists. They earn one's respect because they don't drag that into the excellent contributions they make but find a common meeting ground here on the necessity for strong scholarly sources and thorough coverage, whatever the cost may be to an 'Israeli' or 'Palestinian' POV. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Have never come across you but I have followed a couple of I/P discussions from afar and this is a very fair summary. Ought to be essay-fied. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:10, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks but it would distract from important things. When A1 machines begin to replace editors and write articles, perhaps one could ask the governing algorithm to write such an essay by exhaustively picking up all cases of I/P sockpuppetry as reported in AE/ANI cases, and yield up the statistical pattern of where that toxic abuse comes from. The editors this offline conspiracy meme refer to, often repeated here, have a bit of their historic record spotted by suspensions and temporal bans, which is to be expected in a 'toxic area' where either pure farce (patiently dealing with an obvious but unproven sock for months of extenuating negotiation over this or that) or Rafferty's rules often ruled the roost (before the 500/30 ARBPIA principle thankfully came into play). I can recall two excellent editors who might be partially defined as 'pro-Palestinian' exploding in a way that earned them the ineludible ban. but this is marginal compared to the huge number of sock and meat puppets with an implicit or otherwise 'pro-Israel' stance (my ideology right or wrong would be a better description) which afflicted the editing area and contributed to its reputation as a POV-toxic area where all should be run out of town. I'm sure they run into several scores. Their only argument was that anyone outside the fold critical of Israel was, ipso facto, antisemitic, hostile to Jews themselves, by definition. That looks incredulously naive, but it it now inscribed in legislation that draws its inspiration from a frankly dictatorial and poplitical attempt to limit free speech by making any reference to that country a matter of tip-toeing through a labyrinthine set of definitions that circumscribe, rope off, render taboo zones in, discourse on these issues. I once noticed something similar underway in Japan, in a genre of policy study discussions, and sponsored by the Nakasone government, to finance a global programme of monitoring everything in the public sphere that mentioned that country, and having an organization capable of picking up the echoes out there immediately, and drawing on prepared spokesmen to rebut anything negative. So it's by no means unique to this other context. The only way such a definition could work would be to set up committees in every city, town and country where whatever one might wish to say would have to pass the scrutiny and earn the imprimature of the relevant Jewish community's representatives on the board. Pure operational lunacy, an outlandishly modern variation of the notorious Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But it has traction, and many people are raised to believe that there is some truth to these endless rumours that antisemitism is endemic, takes a million disguises, and is tacit in all talks of geopolitical or cultural discussion on the Middle East (well, I prefer 'Muddled Yeast').

What was striking in most cases on wikipedia was the adamant refusal to read up on the topic, the ignorance of political history, and, more disturbingly nothing but a brushing word-by-mouth glancing acquaintanceship with the great cultural history of the world they perhaps thought they were defending from an antisemitic 'gang of four'. Even in the present AfD one gets no impression that anyone objecting to it is aware of the fact that in classic Judaism, Maimonides did not think that being a Jew necessarily required one embody that identity in corporeal traits. It was a matter of devoted adherence to, and commitment to, Jewish law.Nishidani (talk) 14:53, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo (talk) 02:27, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

The Socratic elenchus is a logical tool. In the Ion, Euthyphro or Gorgias for example, Socrates examines what his respective interlocutors say, eliciting the logical frailties of their opinions. However, anyone could read these exchanges for psychological undercurrents and, by ignoring the logical arguments, claim that Socrates is a bully. Is then Socrates engaged in the pursuit of logical/evidential truth or is he just showing 'aggressive disdain' for his interlocutors? If the latter, then logic and evidence are of no importance, political correctness is paramount.

I used the word ‘stonewalling’. I had in mind Drsmoo's repeating for an entire month, the same opinion, with variations, regardless of considerable efforts to disabuse him of his belief that evidence from researchers amounted to a disparaging attack on both the researchers and Israelis. He made this claim first here, then here, and here (the innuendo is that the very article is antisemitic). See also here, here,here, here, and here.

A full month later, he was still repeating it to Pharos, ignoring every disproof or request for evidence in the interim. Apparently it is I who bludgeons people. I am not Socrates, but was raised to admire the foundations of logic. I have no objections to Tamzim’s proposal, though I think the shared sanction should be motivated, depending on how the respective problematical behaviours imputed to both are interpreted. Nishidani (talk) 04:13, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Honesty compels me to add that, in a post-Freudian world, even someone who might prove to be logically correct, might still harbour morally corrupt intentions. I cannot (re)read the Ion, for instance, without feeling Socrates (Plato rather) is making easy game of a decent fellow. It's called instrumental reason by Adorno and others (the prolific Jon Elster is good on all this).Nishidani (talk) 04:46, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

The nags trot slowly down the cobbled street.

No lash is needed. They've been there before.

The coachman too, liveried up a treat,

Drowses at the reins: this part's a bore.

The passenger in portage shifts a little

To watch, now right, now left, the bustling town,

And bends at times to catch the tat-and-tittle

Of whispering folks who, staring, smile or frown.

Light spruces the way, churchbells tune the air

I've journeyed with zest, worked hard as anyone

And paid my dues, he thinks. The rest is fair.

The festive motley begins to hoot their hallo(w)s.

The tumbril halts, this last stage reached and run.

Ah! More! he chuckles, and steps up to the gallows.

The first two quatrains popped into my mind, somewhat spontaneously, as I took my midday cappuccino in a bar. I walked home and finished the sestet over lunch. But I wondered where the comic hyperbole of the analogy came from. Now I remember, after a nap. In the summer of 1970, at Perugia, I read Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939). There is a passage that must have stuck in my memory to resurface in these lines.

'This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the Womb, we emerge into solitude among our Fellows, and return again to solitude within the Grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But propinquity is never fusion. The most populous City is but an agglomeration of wildernesses. We exchange Words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. . The most intimate contact is only of Surfaces, and we couple, as I have seen the condemned Prisoners at Newgate coupling with their Trulls, between the bars of our cages.' p.174.Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

R. C. Zaehner

Thank you. Rimbaud is mentioned in the sections Sacred and Profane and Nature Mysticism. Elfelix (talk) 23:15, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

No need to thank me. Zaehner was a very very complex man, as I learnt later. But, since I had had a kind of experience not too dissimilar to what he describes, and I too had been utterly absorbed in reading Rimbaud, that when I came across his book in the late sixties, I read it with passionate interest, and kept my eye out for anything of his that came my way ever after. Cheers and best regards Nishidani (talk) 00:16, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

ARBPIA logged warning

Hi, Nishidani. As a result of a recent AE thread, I am giving you the following logged warning, in my capacity as an uninvoled administrator acting under the contentious topics procedures for the Arab-Israeli conflict:

You are warned for fostering a battleground environment at Zionism, race and genetics and and its talkpage. Further disruption on those pages, including comments on the talkpage that go against the general reminder that has been issued as a result of the same AE thread, may result in a page ban, topic ban, and/or block, at the discretion of any uninvolved administrator, without further warning.

-- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 16:57, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

:Thanks, Tamzin. A balanced assessment, duly noted. I hope you don't take it amiss if I suggest that 'warned for fostering' would be more precise were it 'warned for having fostered'. Little things like that make me sleepless, not the sanctions themselves- Best regards Nishidani (talk) 19:29, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I spend a decent portion of my time these days speaking and thinking in a tenseless language, and it's so liberating. In terms of how enwiki sanctions are phrased, though, for whatever reason the standard is to frame the offense in the present tense, even when it's a solitary event, like "is desysopped for deleting the Main Page". I guess we get it from legal contexts, where newspapers tend to write "charged with arson", not "charged with having committed arson". That's a distinction I'll think about in the future. In this case, yes, to be clear, I am referring to your past conduct on the talkpage. Things moved in a positive direction during the AE thread, and I appreciate your having taken on the criticism you received.Maybe next time I'll just write the warning in said tenseless language... sina utala ike is arguably more accurate than anything I could say in English: sina can be either singular or plural 'you'; utala means both 'argue' and 'battle' (or 'argued', 'battled', 'will argue', or 'will battle'); and ike means 'in a bad way' but also 'in a manner tending against peace'. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 21:16, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for wasting your time. Actually I got up from my sickbed (some odd fever that struck today, nothing related to wiki) to strike out my point, what now appears to me to be a lame smartarsed joke. You folks do a marvellous job, reading sedulously through mountains of molehill bickering. I'd have long been committed to an asylum after a week or two had I had to undertake such work. Fin est regards Nishidani (talk) 21:56, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Hoping—non-exclusively and non-demandingly—for a speedy recovery. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 00:11, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that this is a potential problem with regard to adhering to this warning. Please be aware of what I said here. I'm just pointing this out, as an expression of concern, but if this kind of thing (coming so soon after the AE discussion was closed!) happens again, I may open a new AE complaint. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh come now, dear fellow, This is extreme overreading. The rulling was neither a gag or muzzle, nor intimidatory. More concentration on the merits of edit suggestions, and less on fine reading between the lines to tease out a possible tripwire clues for further arbitration, please. Nishidani (talk) 19:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Too bad that this was your response. I had wanted to just let you know about it, and had hoped that you would take it seriously. But consider yourself notified: WP:AE, again. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:49, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Notice that you are now subject to an arbitration enforcement sanction

The following sanction now applies to you:

You are page-banned from Zionism, race and genetics and its talkpage for 2 weeks from this timestamp.

This sanction is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Index/Palestine-Israel articles#Final decision and, if applicable, the contentious topics procedure. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. If the sanction includes a ban, please read the banning policy to ensure you understand what this means. If you do not comply with this sanction, you may be blocked for an extended period, by way of enforcement of this sanction—and you may also be made subject to further sanctions.

You may appeal this sanction using the process described here. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you.  -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 21:00, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

No. I never appeal such things. Technically, this just means I should never edit wikipedia again, because my prose style, in its occasional use of an exclamatory, is unacceptable, and that I must work under a sword of Damocles, in the twitching hands of any editor in a contentious area to definitely resolve their disagreements with me over what are merely technical issues of (a) thorough familiarity with the topic (b) cogent analysis of sources. So be it. Bye (and of course, best personal wishes). Nishidani (talk) 21:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Don't know whether you should appeal or not, but I think it's too harsh a sanction personally. I can imagine myself making a similarly worded comment and not know who added the original content (and not check either, as I agree it doesn't matter). I would think such a comment is really aimed to be about the content, and not about who wrote it. (Indeed, I would personally make the same comment about the text preceding TF's edit, Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races.) Tamzin I'd request reconsidering? I really don't think this is an infraction or raising the temperature of the page, or intended to. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:55, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader, I might be missing something obvious, but it looks to me like the text Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races was added by Nishidani here and here. – bradv 23:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani put "Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races"

and TP edited it to read "Beginning in the late 19th century, science provided evidence for the idea that humanity was divided into genetically distinct races" and then Nishidani quite properly queried on the talk page, the italicized phrases. Selfstudier (talk) 23:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Aren't both of those italicized phrases better than the words they replaced? Science regularly evaluates evidence both for and against something, but the word "affirms" implies something was proven. And "genetically distinct", while still probably not the best wording (or even an accurate statement), is less wrong than claiming a "hierarchy" of races exists. – bradv 23:45, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

No. To affirm is to "declare, state, assert, aver, proclaim, pronounce" and so on, according to a handy thesauraus. The subject of the sentence is "Late 19th century science" (not just science but late 19th century science, because "late 19th century" modifies science); the verb is "affirm" (or plug in a synonym from the list above), which is correct. It doesn't mean that which has been "affirmed" has been proven or that evidence has been supplied - it means that 19th century science stated/proclaimed/asserted/affirmed an idea, which we in the 21st century know to be incorrect. Nish's sentence is better than the correction and it's important to understand the distinction since we deal with words, grammar, writing on this site. Furthermore, any writer knows that the first attempt is always only a draft that will be rewritten ad nauseam until perfect - well, a person such as myself has to work to get it right, but a writer with Nish's facility with language may well get a good rendition more quickly. Apologies for butting in, but have seen this on my watchlist and aside from being upset at seeing the loss of an excellent editor, am upset that the language is misunderstood. I won't get into a back-in-forth. Victoria (tk) 02:14, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Victoria is perfectly correct. In fact the only real problem with Nish's use of "affirm" is that some fraction of readers won't know what it means. As Brad's comment illustrates. Zero 02:30, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

If this is the way that the text was intended, then I indeed misread it, and I suspect others did too. In fact, this whole dispute can likely be attributed to a genuine misunderstanding of these two competing lede sentences. I don't know where this needs to go from here, but I do think it would have been helpful to get to the bottom of this before the AE thread was closed. (cc: Callanecc, Tamzin) – bradv 03:23, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Victoria. @Bradv. I didn't follow this section of my talk page. My bible is the OED 1989 edition. I read it every day. It gives some obsolete uses, then provides the basic formal definition:

To make a statement and stand by it, to maintain or assert strongly, to declare or state positively, to aver.' vol.1 p.218 column 2.

As to the rest, simply check in google books: (a)'science+19th century+hierarchy of races'. (b) 'affirmed+19th century+hierarchy of races.' It's never a question of 'evidence'. But this is now history. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I'll just reiterate what I've said on my talk, which is that I didn't close the AE thread, don't object to a reopen, and don't object to reversing this sanction if a reopened thread finds rough consensus against it. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 03:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Actually, sorry, that's kind of a cop-out. Callan closed the thread on the premise that my sanction settled the matter. If I'm open to further discussion, then I should be the one to reopen it. So I have. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 03:43, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Just want to call your attention to...

...WP:Close paraphrasing, which I'm certain you are aware of. Best, Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:05, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Immaterial now. I saw this coming a month ago. That's the whole point of my verses above from 12 August ('The nags trot slowly down the cobbled street' etc). So I didn't walk into it. To the contrary, I took every precaution to exercise even more care than is normal around here. Not enough, and since the conditions set make it impossible to work in the way I always do, well, 17 years and about 1,000 articles is a fair record as a volunteer. I hate to admit it, but at a certain age, egoism reasserts its rights, and it's time I enjoyed myself (I hate that reflexive) by reading up on things I am really passionate about( rather than the dull grind of boring topics), and by travelling (France, and Australia first) It will be entertaining to see the last article I wrote gutted. No regrets. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 02:47, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

This is terrible

Hi, Nishidani. This is terrible. I couldn't sleep, so I went look at WP:AE, made a tiny change here, and, without reading the new section "Nishidani 2" to the end, thought "Tomorrow, I absolutely must comment", and fell asleep again. But on getting up just now, I find the section already closed, less than nine hours after it was opened. (Was it impossible to allow editors, including uninvolved admins, in different timezones a chance to comment, Callanecc? Not that anything from me would surely have made any difference, when the very fair comments by Iskandar2, Selfstudier, Firefangledfeathers, and Zero0000 did not.) I'm shocked first of all at Tryptofish requesting a pound of flesh ("Nishidani's reply to my message ... strikes me as defiant" — ooh, can't have that). Surely Tryptofish didn't use to be so.. I can't think of the right word.. to act like that? Perhaps that's just the rose-tinted glasses of my memory. And I'm also shocked that Tamzin followed it up with a humiliating sanction. You have been treated outrageously, in my opinion, and I understand your reaction 100%. I can't in conscience try to persuade you to stay — only wish you the best of luck. If you're really gone (people have been known to change their minds when the wiki-addiction strikes, and that's no shame either) I'll miss you so much. Bishonen | tålk 08:24, 20 August 2023 (UTC).

I noticed this just per the edit summary, and have no time to look into it right now, but will miss you, too, if this is final. (I decided eleven years ago that I wouldn't leave, pleasing those who would want it.) Best wishes, and remember you are precious. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:32, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

1; 2;34;5) On second though that personal tweak of B's note above might appear to attribute to her diffs I drew up when reported, but withheld from using in my own defense, which I improperly used to gloss her kind remarks of perplexity. My apologies. Perhaps you might consider locking this page down, Bish, to avoid prolonging this silly business and ugly recriminations.Nishidani (talk) 11:37, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

But.. but.. there aren't any ugly recriminations, only commiseration so far, and people are likely to want to add more when America wakes up. How about I close it down if/when there's something ugly? Bishonen | tålk 11:54, 20 August 2023 (UTC).

Unlike me, you actually understand how wikipedia works. I defer. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Dude, its one page for two weeks, wtf cares. Im trying to get Israeli occupation of the West Bank to GA so we can get that DYK that was withheld for bullshit reasons way back when, and the reviewer has given some solid feedback so far imo. You gonna quit over a two week ban on some page that nobody is ever going to even read besides the people bickering over it? Cmon, stop being silly, still lots of work to do on things that are worth your time. nableezy - 20:00, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I've been there before, in the good old days when one was reported mostly unsuccessfully by an assortment of sockpuppets and militant POV-pushers to AE two or three times every year. One mark like that on your log, and it sticks: that's what the admin sees when a new complaint is opened. Just on one article (and it is now a very good one) we've had two crowded, ridiculous AfDs in a mere week, denying even what an acute legal analyst like Levivich, with whom I have had a conflicted relationship, admitted with integrity from the outset, when he stated, that the topic was legitimate, a serious focus of notable scholarship (even while honestly disagreeing with my handling of it). That didn't work? Stonewalling, and then 2 AE complaints within a few days. If that doesn't mean after two weeks that I'd be forced every time I edit to look over my shoulder, rather than read the sources, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

I reread Auden's New Year Letter today. I recommend it strongly. It really does bring home that working in here under impossible conditions is masochistic. No prima donna act (quick exit hoping for a recall) I've lots of work to do that have a better readership, i.e. myself:) Cheers, Nab. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

No, it does not stick lol. Nobody will give a half a shit about Nishidani being page banned for two weeks for being mildly petulant in about three weeks time. Yes, some person might in seven years time say hey this is a recurring pattern, eg like so, but that will generally be taken as sour grapes and ignored. You disagree with the sanction? Appeal it. You dont care enough to do that? Then ignore that page for two weeks. But this is a among the most pointless things Ive seen on this website, and we both know how high that bar is. For a fucking article with 38 watchers and probably a hundred non-involved page views. nableezy - 02:49, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

• I wrote a long paragraph, but when I stripped out all the stuff that sounded trite, or angry, or patronizing, or something that would cause someone to issue me a Contentious Topic Alert, all I'm left with is this: I'll miss your way with words, I'll miss your honesty, and we probably didn't deserve having you here for as long as we did. --Floquenbeam (talk) 00:04, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

  What Floq said, I can't improve on that. Nice to see what I viewed as a travesty of justice fixed and that Tamzin finally listened, with a very nice response below in her removal of the ban. I hope you will come back at least from time to time; I'll always remain in your debt for rescuing my draft of the article on Michael Astour Doug Weller talk 07:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Pageban vacated

Hi, Nishidani. Per comments at AE from admins who know what they're doing better than I do, I've vacated your pageban. (Intentional word choice—vacatur, not reversal.)

You've been quite courteous about this and not asked for any retraction let alone apology, but nonetheless, I'm sorry that I came down too hard here. I tend to break my admin work into "tours of duty", the endpoints of which I define based on what Coren said when he unblocked me: don't delve too deeply and quickly in the back-office aspects of the project – it's rather seedy back there and you'll end up with a jaundiced view, and when I find myself reaching for admin tools before most of my colleagues, that's my jaundice alarm, time to seek out some friendlier sky.

So, I'm going to get back to work on a silly article about Marines eating crayons. That seems like a more pleasant use of my time than trying to create peace in the Middle East one AE sanction at a time. (That is said with commiseration and respect for the denizens of that topic area, not as criticism of anyone.) Maybe write a few more GAs, remind myself why I do this before I return to these seedy back areas.

As I said before, I'll stop short of asking you to come back, because I never want to talk someone back into a situation they feel is bad for them... But I'll put it this way: I hope the day comes, be it tomorrow or a long time from now, where editing Misplaced Pages is something you feel is good for you. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 05:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

How courteous and decent. No, dear young lady, you stay in there. Don't feel admonished. I actually owe you. I stopped smoking, the stimulating narcotic (oxymoron) that gets me through the strainful patches of wiki editing, once I absorbed your original decision. The community restored to me an option, that I may or may not exercise, but expressions of goodwill rightly put my pride in its place.

As above, I read Auden, and the following lines spoke to me, and no one else, though they apply to us all, in the civil community of wiki.

Our news is seldom good: the heart.
As Zola said, must always start
The day by swallowing its toad
Of failure and disgust. Our road
Gets worse and we seem altogether
Lost as our theories, like the weather,
Veer round completely every day,
And all that we can always say
Is: true democracy begins
With free confession of our sins.
In this alone are all the same,
All are so weak that none dare claim
“I have the right to govern,” or
"Behold in me the Moral Law,”
And all real unity commences
In consciousness of differences.
That all have needs to satisfy
And each a power to supply.
We need to love all since we are
Each a unique particular
That is no giant, god, or dwarf.
But one odd human isomorph;
We can love each because we know
All, all of us, that this is so:
Can live because we’ve lived, the powers
That we create with are not ours. 1625-1650

Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a city where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and peace.
And pent-up feelings their release.
Send strength sufficient for our day,
And point our knowledge on its way,
O da quod jubes, Domine. 1676-1684 Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

(Stray thought: In high school I had the honor of sleeping through a lecture by Auden's friend Richard Howard, and, once I'd woken up, getting to see a second lecture in which he, in his 80s, utterly scandalized a stodgy New England faculty by reciting poetry about homosexuality. I see Howard died last year... Wonder how hard it would be to get his article to GA... But for now I'll stick to writing about crayons.)ust always start / The day by swallowing its toad / Of failure and disgust was an interesting line to wake up to. I do find it true many mornings, nagging thoughts of all the things that are wrong in my world and the world. And then I go talk to my partner and seek out the other things that ground me (remembering my own essay—primarily about mental illness, but also relevant in any discussion of healthy mentalities for editing and for life).I'll answer, partly, with Yeats' "Politics":

And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

An older classmate selected that poem for me in 8th grade as representative of my nature—knowing my Irish heritage, but not the familial lore that it was Yeats' lover Maud Gonne who recruited my great-grandfather into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The poem's been more applicable to my life than I might have expected (gendered language aside). At that age I expected I'd be ruling the world someday. Instead my life's taken a path of making a big difference for a few people, and a small difference for a lot of people, and I'm happy with that. Happy to not always be focused "On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics".All that is to say, I'm not going anywhere. And I hope you aren't either. Let me know if anything on this list ever catches your eye. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 13:57, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Poetry! Boy (oops sorry, my residual genderunmindedness), could we, had one just 'world enough and time,' riff on that!

Of course, those poignantly melancholic lines, ‘But O that I were young again/ And held her in my arms!” were a late case of Yeats alluding to what he wrote 10 years earlier.

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

As for Auden, I’ve never read his poems as gendered. Some time back, discussing films with my sister who was visiting, she asked me if I could recall the poem used in the funeral oration of the film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. So I recited Stop all the clocks for her, but couldn’t help running on with a follow-up of the equally overpoweringly poignant Lullaby, as if they were one poem. It is utterly immaterial who the beloved and the griever may be genderwise. Those speak to everyone, across all socially-constructed lines.

My first fiancée was a woman who sought me out after several years of a lesbian relationship. –she’d been attracted to me at high school as the really odd person out in a class of drop-outs or misfits - My lifelong best mate (other than my wife and two siblings) was a male homosexual, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, who married and proved himself to be a magnificent father and fine husband. I’ve never had the slightest personal interest in these gender, clinical, political or ethnic discriminations that infest and vex humanity, as opposed to attentively studying the intellectual genealogies of these cognitive biases in our world and the way they inflect our social perceptions.

A final anecdote to complement/compliment your's. I was walking home at midday today, and saw an unusual (for here) species of white butterfly flying backwards down the steep path that leads to my place. I figured out that, caught in a greenless, shadeless tract under a broiling sun, it had worked out an ingenious strategy of lifting off with a slight flutter and carefully slowing its wing beat so that the very warm current of air it would only have exhausted itself in flying against, bore it gently backwards, about 10 paces each time. It kept landing on the scalding metal lids of manholes, by freakish chance, instead of the cooler pebbled roadway, and would again lift off and repeat the same gliding manoeuvre. I thought of catching it to place it in shade, but it was headed or rather bum-firstwise drifting, into a pleasant grove, and, indeed, finally settled there.

I went to bed for my afternoon oneiromancy nap, which takes 25-30 minutes and gives me dream material. In this, I was walking hand in hand with my wife down to a jewellery store but we were stopped by the side of a church called St.Lucy’s (I recently had retinal problems) by a friar (my wife was a devout lay Franciscan) who look distressed, saying their nativity crib was being wrecked. I left them, went inside, and found a bevy of women frantically milling around a straw-strewn corner, the crib. A bulldog squatted there, muzzling what was underneath, a writhing mess of half-eaten worms. (Neighbours here often call on me to remove snakes, toads, the afterbirth of litters of pups, and other slimy things from their properties because ‘the Australian’ reputedly grew up coping with filthy slithering creatures and appears to like them). I shooed the bulldog off, cleaned the mess and managed to save several of the surviving and largish worms, clean them, and set them aside in safety. Then, remembering my wife, I walked out, past a long line of local people, all familiar faces, who however didn’t recognize me, but were intent on visiting the now restored crib that was the renewed object of popular curiosity. My wife was no longer there. I woke. If one approaches this carefully, it, with the butterfly prompt ((ψυχή.'life, soul, intellect, ghost, butterfly/moth') that immediately preceded it, summarizes aspectually my whole life, and, at the same time, aspects of this recent incident, portrait and cameo inset in dialogue, the general and particular. It's not exhaustive. Dreams never are. Perspectives are infinite.

This little vignette to replace a poem that refuses to rhyme, in thanks for the very interesting anecdote you shared with ‘this tattered coat upon a stick’ busying himself until he is gathered into ‘the artifice of eternity.‘ Finest regards Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Your dream reminded me of an anecdote I mentioned in my RfA debrief: As the sun set, the rising tide brought in six horseshoe crabs. A wave would push them up the beach, over a berm near the low-tide mark, and they would slowly right themselves and stagger back toward the water, just in time for the next wave to push them back. A few hours after I read your comment, my metamour and I went for a nice walk on the beach, where we encountered a single horseshoe crab caught on its back. It was in direct moonlight on an otherise unlit beach, so we lost night vision momentarily as we looked at it, and at first thought it was dead. But I prodded it and could just make out its legs moving. She and I righted it together, and last I saw it was fighting its way back to sea.I'll leave it to you to decide whether to read anything into that, but I thought I would share. (P.S., wasn't meaning to call Auden's work gendered, but rather referencing the "girl standing there" in "Politics". P.P.S., speaking of which.) -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 02:52, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

What a nice way to wake up to a new day, with a wonderful new word. Proof if any of the dictum in Goethe's Faust (lines 1334-1336, a sanction = bad, leads to a good, by this early positive statement of the law of unintended effects). Metamour. Beautiful.

I just had a look at the wiki page on Yeats' Politics, There's a dating error. The 24th May as date of composition is wrong. The manuscript note with that date states that it was composed the day before, 23rd. Then there's that supposed quote from Thomas Mann. That should be attributed 'according to Archibald McLeish' because that's where Yeats pulled it from, unless there's a source which specifically identifies the passage in Thomas Mann where he states what he is quoted for. That I know this is pure coincidence, because 45 years ago , I read T Reed's book, Thomas Mann:The Uses of Tradition, (1974) where I picked up a remark by Mann which is close to the one cited here from McLeish, but different- I.e. In jeder geistigen Haltung ist das Politische latent (The political is latent in every 'cultural' outlook.) I later checked it up and tracked it down to Mann's 1929 essay, Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte ,(Freud's Position in the History of Modern Culture). My guess, it's nothing more than that, is that McLeish would have rephrased this from the passage in the Faber & Faber version of that essay which came out in 1933. It would be nice to chase this all down, but pointless because it would not be able to be used on wiki (like thousands of things one notes in reading) per WP:OR. You're safe, in any case, with the companionship of poetry throughout life. Politics by definition, as the art of lying in prose, can never be poetry. Poetry can be read politically, only by excluding every other level of address, intimation, lilt and resonance and reducing the symphony where all the players have left the stage, leaving only the chap with a broken violin scratching away to a tone-deaf audience. Well, I'm turning over a new leaf, (to see if it's got rust on the underside), i.e. just taking indefinite time out to write up a few things without the tedious, but ineludible, constraint of seeking for some 'authority' on the subject to back up my own inferences. There's a remarkable amount of things one notes about great poems that appear not to be noticed by the critical tradition. That was the hardest thing about editing here, though I have always accepted it as absolutely necessary to provide the readership with an ironcast guarantee that what they read is authoritatively sourced, neutral and verifiable. Best wishes, wiki and worldwise. Nishidani (talk) 07:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Should I, shouldn't I

https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Genetic_studies_on_Jews#POV_tag We are citing you here. Of course, you may pay no attention:) Selfstudier (talk) 14:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Glad to see you around

I've been checking your contribs intermittently, and today was happy to see some recent edits. Won't ask you if you're back, but anything is good. Meanwhile, I suppose you've gotten your wish regarding my own activity levels. Avoiding admin areas has proven easier said than done, this time around. Still, less of the noisy stuff, bit more content work. If there were an option to be desysopped for 2 weeks out of every 3 months, I'd take it. (I guess I could just ask for that, but sooner or later I might get pocket-vetoed on the resysop request.) Anyways, just thought I'd say hi and happy editing, to whatever extent you plan to edit. :) -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 20:20, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Not back. Too hectic a schedule offline. Just tidying up. I'll write a decent reply tomorrow. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Did that special diff suggest to you I wished something about your own activity levels? 'Boh!' as the Italians say (i.e. 'I dunno'.)

I finally had the check-up last Monday. Surprisingly, I read the Snellen chart from top to bottom without a hitch. The optometrist was somewhat disconcerted at this, and I think, might have suspected I'd taken a tip from Donald Sutherland in Space Cowboys by memorizing the charts beforehand. So he poked at the smallest print randomly, and asked me to identify the letters. Which I did, except for a slight pause between a 'c' and'o', quickly corrected. He shook his head. Highly abnormal at my age. So he set me up before the slit lamp and examined both eyes for 10 minutes. Nothing that 2 carrots a day for two months wouldn't fix, just a comprehensible fatigue from doing that wiki article at speed. By the way, to increase the absorption of vitamin A, the tip is to lightly smear the carrot in olive oil before consumption. It increases the capacity to absorb more of it than otherwise. So here I am, speaking Japanese to myself with a bugsbunny accent as I give the meat pies a vacation.Nishidani (talk) 20:12, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, "stay in there". Maybe extrapolating too far from there, but I appreciated the sentiment regardless.And your eyesight's certainly better than mine, then. You can roughly work out how bad my vision is by looking at the refraction on my right cheek in File:Jew Trans Soul Rebel.jpg. Y'know, tattoos make for a much nicer topic area than politics and war. Been doing some work on Cover-up tattoo, but got sidetracked by dragging myself into an ArbCom case. But I have a friend who's getting a self-harm cover-up soon, and might talk them into a freely-licensed picture of it—except it's complicated, because strictly the tattoo itself ought to also be freely licensed, which probably I could get away with not doing (cf. c:Category:Tattoos), but having written Mike Tyson's tattoos I can't exactly claim ignorance of the law (or the academics'-best-guess-of-what-the-law-is). All a tangent, but, glad to hear of your health. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 22:14, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thinking recently about the immense complications that can arise from simple issues on that page, the line Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto kept cropping up, as I tried to think how editors who repeatedly disagreed with me thought. When I read Crime and Punishment, as a mental exercise I tried to apply it to imagining what it must have been like to be Rashkolnikov, applying the Terentian dictum to the situation ('could I find myself in a position of murdering someone?'). It's become ever since somewhat of a habit. So when you mentioned tattoes, I wondered about getting one myself. I never have even considered the idea, perhaps because of a native prejudice against social statements, be they in clothes, haircuts, or anything else connected with one's body. I try to be a minimalist, lifewise. But my wife wanted to be tattoed. She never could as long as she was a teacher, for a scruple that a nice butterfly tattoo on her arm would influence her impressionable 5-10 age students, for whom she had but one aim - teach them to master with great precision the rules of grammar and composition (several who went on to graduate at tertiary level have since told me they never needed to study grammar at the later middle or high school levels). By the time she retired and started to reconsider the idea, she was diagnosed with cancer, and so this project was forgotten. Your remarks have brought me round to considering that I might complete her desire by getting the tattoo she missed, and for that unintended prompt I am very grateful. I'll book-mark your tattoo pages to keep me up to date.

'Stay in there', i.e. 'hang in there to your administrative function. Even when subjected to sanctions I thought inexplicable, I've never impugned administrators: it is an exasperatingly hard volunteer vocation, with few rewards, and they are as rare as hen's teeth, rarer even that our lonely content editors. Most talk page argufying illustrates a general lack of experience of how articles are written, rather than bits and pieces tweaked. There's a sociological reason for this: most editors don't have the time to read widely the literature on any one topic, page by page, and, most recently, social media tend to re-engineer minds to a very short attention span, while militating against the kind of detachment and curiosity that comes with focused study of any subject-matter. So I just suggested that the exercise of article composition gives one a kind of rare training that is of equal value to the project.

As to eyesight, like my father I was an early bookworm: I didn't formally study much at school, which was only useful because it had several sports on the curriculum which I loved to play. Worrying that, like him, I would end up needing spectacles in my 20s, he gave me a book and a set of rules and exercises to avoid the worst. Never read for more than 40 minutes consecutively. That is the natural limit for concentration's absorptive powers, which return after a short relaxed break. Take frequent 10 minute breaks - go out, kick a footy, climb a tree, throw a cricket ball a few overs at a wicket, whatever. Secondly, immediately on breaking off, roll the eyes for 30 seconds, and rapidly alternating focus from the nose to a distant object several times, etc.etc. I was the only one of three reading siblings to do this, and the only one not to require glasses. It's not genetic, then, but just mechanical. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:26, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Funny, I got my first tattoo—the litany against fear in 16-point Courier—while working at a middle school. A few friends asked if it would be an issue to have that on my forearm, and I explained that I was still one of the least tattooed people who worked there. How times (and cultures) change. Getting my third tattoo in an hour and a half, actually! A khamsa on my back, because if there's one thing Misplaced Pages's convinced me of, it's the existence of the ayin hara.I do agree (generally, not necessarily about the specific case you have in mind) that everyone ought to try writing a (non-cookie-cutter) article before sitting in judgment of other ones. And even with that experience, ought to familiarize themselves with the strengths and weaknesses of the sources cited in an article, and of those not cited, before demanding radical change. I come at this from the perspective of being a rare RfA pass at 0 GAs, and having since written a few of those. Someone said to me at RfA or around that time that the main issue with admins who don't do much content is that they don't have a sense of how it feels to have written an article and see it come (as it feels subjectively) under attack. I do get that feeling now, and it definitely helps me be a better admin. But not always perfectly (as you've seen firsthand).Anyways, off to get stabbed a few thousand times by someone I barely know. I'll refrain from comparing or contrasting several hours of sharp pain along my spine to any things I could be doing on-wiki. -- Tamzin (she|they|xe) 16:03, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Glad

September songs

my story today

what Tamzin said -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:29, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Today I remember Raymond Arritt, who still helps me, five years after he died, per what he said in my darkest time on Misplaced Pages (placed in my edit-notice as a reminder), and by teh rulez. - Latest pics from a weekend in Berlin (one more day to come). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:57, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō once complained that autumn in Berlin was lonely for the Japanese because you couldn’t hear the sound of cicadas! When I read that, I wondered how the Berlin street Zikadenweg got its name. One of the pleasures of walking home at night in autumn is to tune in to their chirring, from corner to corner. Best wishes Nishidani (talk) 20:35, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

For your lib

Jews and Science Selfstudier (talk) 18:45, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Self. As always your tip-offs on RS I've missed are spot on. Keep me tuned. In my retirement, I'm going to look into this line of material even more closely than the haste of quick research allowed. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Verily, the Jews doth prove most fascinating, warranting a lifelong dedication to research. Infinity Knight (talk) 21:44, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Look up solecism. 'Jews', like any other plural subject, cannot take the archaic third person singular (doth). Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

In the scrolls, thou shalt happen upon many instances of "the Jews doth" therefore I am not particularly enamored with the notion of solecism. I do tend to incline toward a descriptive approach in the field of linguistics. I find prescriptive stance somewhat archaic. The tongue is employed as it is, not as dictated by tomes of grammar. Infinity Knight (talk) 22:41, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

As your Kierkegaardian monicker suggests, you should resign yourself to not trying to fudge up some semi-literate sub-Chatter-toned squib of pseudo-archaic prose, attributed to non-existent 'scrolls', commingled with give-away and, to my eye, ugly, 'Americanisms' like 'enamored with'. Noah Webster was justly enamoured of a new 'people's language', but would have dismissed sophomoric attempts to spout in an hi-falutin’ style, as is the crass case here, as another of the 'odious distinctions of provincial' idiolects instanced in the above. It is particularly tin-eared (in the sense of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) to evoke the Bloomfieldian prescriptive/descriptive dyad to justify your blooper. The effect is comical - feigning to disabuse your prose sketch of warranted imputations of 'archaisms' while, precisely, mugging up a 'thumbled' piece of imitative archaicism. You're weigh(ed) out of your depth, full fathom five in the genre of sunken sub-Icarean flights of fancy, even if the 'tongue' you speak of is that of the flippancy of a vagrant 'tongue in cheek'. Now, as agreed long ago, don't harass this page with your dabblings, that's a good chap. You might find 'prescriptive stance' to be acceptable, but in English, American or otherwise, it requires the introductory definite or indefinite article. And 'tomes of grammar' in any man's language is, colloquially, 'grammatical tomes'. Further otiose adlibbings here will be automatically reverted, unread.Nishidani (talk) 03:27, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Condolences

I saw your comment about your Israeli friend('s friend). I'm very sorry about their ordeal. What happened was cruel and unjust.VR _talk 00:11, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

The world's foremost authority on Gaza

here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

In recent weeks, Norman Finkelstein on his blog has been providing additional context and insights into Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:28, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. I try to avoid checking his blog frequently, and do so only once a month. I refrain because he anticipates most of what I would think, and reading him before I thought things out myself would be economical, but an inducement to mental laziness. It is very rare to encounter a brilliant mind informed by a moral passion which however never muddles the lucid analysis of the facts. There have been two Holocaust voices that stand out, that, formerly, of Elie Wiesel and that of Norman Finkelstein. One made a fortune out of it, the other had his career destroyed and his life ghettoized because he absorbed in the marrow of his being the experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz and elsewhere of his parents, and drew a general, not an ethnic, lesson for how to read history, all history and empathize with its silenced victims.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Norman Finkelstein, exactly because of the reasons you have so beautifully articulated.

I was going to write more about both Elie Wiesel (a sellout) and Finkelstein, but my cat is persistently demanding my attention, he is ready for his dinner followed by our customary evening walk in our neighborhood. He sends his love to his granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-

‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)

A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.

This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.

I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.

I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• I am now deeply moved to learn that Yesh Din’s Ziv Stahl, a Kfar Aza resident who survived the massacre, publicly opposed revenge and spoke of the tragic plight Palestinians were suffering over the border. Orly Noy Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 magazine 25 October 2023.
• Coincidence as usual. I make an edit about the destruction of bakeries in Gaza, then return to my reading, totally unconnected to any wiki interest, and immediately come across this note re de Gaulle in his first stay in Poland after WW1. ‘Notre civilisation tient à peu de chose, dit-il, toutes les beautés, toutes les commodités, toutes les richesses dont elle est fière auraient vite disparu sous la lame de fureur des masses désespérées . .Il ne peux oublier ces ‘’interminables files de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants hagards attendant des heures à la porte du boulanger municipal le morceau de pain noir hebdomadaire’’ Max Gallo, De Gaulle, Robert Laffont 1998 volume 1 p.172.

Nakba denial

I know you're retired, and far be it from me to disturb your book scribbling, but I've created Nakba denial and I was wondering if you had any pointers on grossly overlooked sources or perspectives. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:28, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

No book scribbling. A friend took a photo of me today, on my knees, tweezing out with my fingers weed blade after weed blade from a pebble garden whose plastic undersheath has succumbed to nature's rooted refusal to be suffocated. I still have forty square metres to pluck clean. Occasionally I make tea, interrupt the Gordon Lightfoot/Roy Orbison/Righteous Brothers etc (being in Normandy I also checked out Johnny Hallyday's French version of Unchained Melody. pas mal, but he couldn't imitate Bobby Hatfield's soaring crescendo of register in the climax) crooning from youtube to glance at wiki. Thanks for the Nakba denial article, a good solid start. Unfortunately reading it, I noted that doddering PA quisling in his dotage declared it a criminal offence to deny the nakba. If we set precedents for criminalizing the refusal to accept the facts of anything, science or history, nakba/holocaust etc., then half of mankind will risk a term or two in porridge (including a few dear wiki editors) for one thing or another. But for some months I will have precious little spare time from doing what I do best, nothing. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

I saw your note on Kfar Asa - what I wasn't able to note, since it's been archived, is that page began with a count of 200 casualties, based on a Russian language source of all things and alongside the infamous 40 babies, long before any sort of due diligence kicked in. The drastic revisions in numbers, and the likes of the Russian source we have here, can't help but give one the feeling that the entire information cycle has been taken for a pretty almighty ride. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:00, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

It's predictable. Someday one will have to write an article on deliberate information distortion in this area.On another related matter, have we an article on Settler attacks during the Hamas-Israel war?

Quite a large amount of reportage mentions this, some in considerable detail, i.e.

But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Zanuta’s 150 residents have made a collective decision to leave. Armed settlers – some in reservist army uniforms, some covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying the children. (Bethan McKernan ‘A new Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages The Guardian 31 October 2023).

Some background can be found in David Dean Shulman’s review of Nathan Thrall’s new book, in the New York Review of Books 19th October where he writes:

over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops…. What finally broke the villagers’ spirits came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen and handed it over to the settlers, Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.

I was there on May 24th, 2023. I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people, evacuated their homes and moved to various sites in the territories.”

What happened at Khirbet Zanuta repeated itself at A'nizan just across the road the other day ([https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/residents-of-southern-west-bank-hamlet-fleeing-due-to-settler-violence/ 'Residents of southern West Bank hamlet fleeing due to settler violence,' The Times of Israel, 29 October 2023

I'm retired, so I'm not in a position to do this, but it is definitely a subject that deserves its own page.Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Since October 7, Israeli settlers and military have been terrorizing Palestinian communities across the West Bank. At least 10 villages in the South Hebron Hills have been displaced through violence, and over 120 Palestinians have been killed. (Leila Warah, Israeli settler violence has been surging across the West Bank since October 7 Mondweiss 1 November 2023)Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  I don't believe we have that yet (unless I'm behind), but I agree its overdue. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:24, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• This past Saturday morning, Bilal Mohammad Saleh, a Palestinian sidewalk vendor of sage and thyme, went out with his family to pick olives.

It’s olive harvesting season in the West Bank and Mr. Saleh was helping pluck the fruit from the gnarled trees that his family has owned for generations.

Then, four armed Jewish settlers showed up, witnesses said. They started yelling, and the olive pickers stopped what they were doing and began to run.

But Mr. Saleh forgot his phone.

“I’ll be right back,” he told his wife. Two gunshots rang out, and in an instant, Mr. Saleh, who was known for his love of fresh leaves and being a fun dad, was face down in the olive grove, dead. (Jeffrey Gettleman, Rami Nazzal and Adam Sella,How a Campaign of Extremist Violence Is Pushing the West Bank to the Brink New York Times 2 November 2023)

thought you should see this

Page views on a very well written article. nableezy - 20:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Cripes. Well, I'll be a monkey's nuncle! And there I was, thinking with the snarky prejudices of huffy old age that 35,000 was way beyong the probable limit of the literate in Western societies. Go figure.Thanks, pal.Nishidani (talk) 21:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani

Hi Nishidani, in the last 24hrs, you have once again started a thread attacking individual editors on the talk page. I invite you to strike some of those messages, before I pursue them at AE. Andre🚐 00:32, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, as I haven't heard from you, I wanted to let you know that I'm notifying you that I'm going to report your recent comments to AE. Andre🚐 04:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting. As anyone should know reading my work, I am on European time. I mentioned above I am in Normandy. So you inform this page well after the witching hour of midnight when all good people sleep that I should erase a comment, and wait two hours. Then, is it that one is unable to bear the suspense of a natural silence?, you tell me you have reported me at AE 'because I haven't heard from you'. The nth example of disattentiveness.

Do you really think that the demand on our time made by you and Tryptofish for three months to ask us to keep discussing, and rediscussing ad nauseam a peculiar discontent you share with three words strung together on just one wiki article must now extend its fingers even into the drowsy nooks of our nocturnal, otherwise well-merited repose from this ongoing serial nightmare of WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT behaviour? Nishidani (talk) 08:08, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I make no demand on time, I ask only civility. You are not obligated to reply or respond. That's WP:OWN. Andre🚐 16:43, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Andre🚐 04:37, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The original AfD discussion took place here. I'll cite just two comments (not addressed to you)

• (1)I'll say it again: anyone who claims this topic is not the subject of scholarly study is lying. There isn't a "good faith" explanation. It's not a content dispute. Just concede that this is a topic of scholarly study. If you want to argue some other reason for deletion -- POVFORK, TNT, whatever -- go ahead, but don't misrepresent the sources by suggesting they are not about Zionism, race, and genetics, as a single cohesive topic, discussed by many academic sources, for decades. 13 July 2023
• (2)Scroll up and read. And in the future, don't vote in an AfD when you haven't read any of the sources, you're wasting everyone else's time. Scanning the titles in the article isn't good enough (though it seems you missed the titles that mention Zionist eugenics and Zionists and the genomic Jew...). Hot takes aren't helpful at AFD. 14 July 2023 see also here

On the article talk page, many of these following are in response to your remarks:

• (3)I literally just quoted a source that covers Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians in the same paragraph. How are you saying "and not Palestinians" when the quote is right here? Have you actually opened any of the sources I just listed to see if they cover Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians? If not, please do so before making any more comments here. 28 September 2023
• (4)(If this sounds familiar it's because I literally just copied and pasted my previous comments from earlier discussions.) . Students who don't do the reading shouldn't try to participate in the class discussion. Same for editors who haven't read any of the sources. 20 October 2023
• (5)For the umpteenth time, these books are, indeed, about (1) Zionism, (2) race, and (3) genetics, including (3a) molecular genetics. 20 October 2023
• (6)You continue make these misrepresentations of the sources, and I keep posting quotes debunking those misrepresentations. I really, really think it's time for you to stop talking about sources you very obviously have not read. 21 October 2023
• (7)There is no substitute for reading the sources. No shortcuts. Reading the Misplaced Pages articles about the authors is not enough, you have to read the literature in the field. If you skip the research and comment about things which you do not know about, you waste everyone else's time.20 October 2023

That is just the briefest list of irritations expressed over an exhausting three month period of pointless hairsplitting and errant argufying by another, indisputably neutral editor, whose palmary acuity in cutting to the chase and summarizing complex talk page or arbitration disputes is universally acknowledged. I call it, less urbanely, evidence of incompetence, and stand by that. Nishidani (talk) 15:16, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Noted that you have no remorse or concern for your civility issues. Andre🚐 16:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Note that you have completely missed or ignored the gravamen of those quotations. I.e. you are the third person in as many months who has trawled through the minutiae of my generally polite replies to find some leg-in for an AE ban on my presence on wikipedia, while more capable wikipedians than I have been equally severe in protesting the game of attrition in those threads.

Remorse, for what? Some ayenbite of inwyt for exercising over three months an extraordinary patience in observing, and often responding to, courteously, at extenuating length a huge number of weirdly distracted, unfocused opinions about a topic from many editors who, from the outset, appear not to have the slightest interest in actually reading either the article or its 3,000 pages of incisive scholarly texts, while insisting of voicing their impressionistic viewpoints.

Were I to get into the question of the moral evaluation of language used, I imagine I would find myself writing some untractably lengthy and boring psychoanalytic screed on how much of what has been written has everything to do with implied attitudes there and almost nothing to do with the actual content of the article or topic. I would start with Oh, you suffer so!, an exemplary instance of Schadenfreude thrown my way after I expressed frustration at the waste of time caused by thoughtless and repetitive argufying, a sardonic sneer at the perceived pain a sensitive reader of language might imaginably feel when exposed to consistent nonsense. Were I perturbed by such attitudes, so prevalent in careless writing, I wouldn't have lasted 17 years on wikipedia.

I am reminded by your peculiar choice of the word remorse to recall what Stephen Dedalus thought of Haines in Ulysses. He thought the Englishman's demure reserve and patient niceness must disguise feelings of guilt arising from a suffered awareness of what his country had wrought on Ireland for several hundred years.Nishidani (talk) 17:53, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani, it's incredibly hard to read and respond to you. I appreciate literary allusions as much (probably quite a bit more) than the next guy, but, your whole 4 paragraphs which could have been a simple "OK, you're right, I'm getting a little overwrought, and I'll rein it in"; no, instead, the only diff in your message is one to @Tryptofish, as though, because we're on the "same team" in this dispute, anything he says is an insult from me to you. Is that what you think? Andre🚐 18:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

What gave you the impression I am, or was, 'overwrought'? Those who know me personally recognize that were my house to fall down, or some disaster hit, I would seem imperturbable. Simply because, when anything negative happens, my reflex is to stand aside and think what is the most rational thing to do, and certainly not panic. I was told to learn to do this as a child.

There is an idiom in Italian: lanciare un sasso e poi ritirare la mano. 'Throw a stone and then withdraw the hand'. It describes behaviour that causes a ripple among people, while the person responsible for the ensuing mayhem stands aside and watches, amused, the confusion their unobserved action caused. It means, concretely, that in instances of social upset or conflict, all cause and effect is forgotten or not noted, but one simply copes with the uproar, whatever the cause. Much conversation is like that. I'm afraid I must dial up a film on youtube for some guests to view. They are waiting for me, and unfortunately that takes precedence over anything else.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm trying to give you an opening to retract or amend your statements and characterizations which on Misplaced Pages are personal attacks and incivil, such as speculating on editors' motivations, insisting any good faith content dispute is a waste of time, continuously whinging on about obscure references in impenetrable walls of text, and refusing to get the point or acknowledge at all that there is a civility issue. Good day. Andre🚐 19:55, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Actually, it is close to midnight here (the film was The Scapegoat (1959, with a script by Gore Vidal) , and tomorrow's forecast of cloud and rain mean I will be deprived of a good day to enjoy the pleasures of gardening. I appreciate the sentiment of generosity in offering me an opportunity to apologize for something I did not do. What you call incivility is, I think, within the leeway of editors' rights to remonstrate if threads just drag on inconclusively for months and months. I think it an objective fact that the talk pages, for three months, have been characterised by misbehaviour, whatever the intentions of some interlocutors, covered by WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT. To persistently revive variations on arguments that have been comprehensively deconstucted and buried, and thereby assume that other editors must, again and again waste valuable time, at the risk of repeating themselves to their own annoyance, once more addressing the same old unfocused disgruntlements, is, in real world terms, uncivil. To consistently, in argument, give the impression one is unfamiliar with the scholarly sources that others have diligently read and yet demand that one's guesses or impressions about them must be treated seriously, even for several days of headachy exchanges that give no evidence of having grasped the point, is uncivil. To expect that anyone (and, see the above, I am not alone in this), must never let slip the slightest innuendo that this tiresome behaviour is aggravating in its resolute demand to be heard and reheard, is uncivil. It is uncivil, then, when this peculiar impasse keeps repeating itself, to resort to AE to ban people as uncivil, when they have reasonable grounds for remonstrating over the extraordinary lengths, over months, editors of long standing are expected to go to to keep listening to the same arguments, the same words, the same misconceptions, the same frailty of command over the core academic sources. It is uncivil, indeed indecent, to impugn a reputable academic source by raising the issue of the ethnicity of its author(ess) a Palestinian. It is incompetent to challenge a book she published in 2012, which we use, by referring to one review (by Alan F. Segal) of a book she wrote in 2001. I could go on for several hours excavating the weird indifference to fundamental methods of analysis and argument I have read in these threads for months, but, after midnight, Henry James commands my attention. Perhaps it's his style which makes my own inferior prose so unreadable , and offensive. Yes, dammit, I'll blame him. Unfortunately, he's dead and I can't take him to AE. Perhaps my own impression that I have been very patient with what I privately think is a persistence in making pointless arguments is flawed. I'll leave that to AE. I think all that has to be said has been said here, so let's drop it. Pursue it elsewhere. Nishidani (talk) 22:21, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I, uh, I guess I should go to my talk page and ask me to stop making comments like that? Levivich (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

However this ends up (my guess is I'll cop a term in porridge, but I eat that for breakfast most mornings so I'll enjoy it), instead of the virtual barnstar you deserve, I suggest something practical. If you ever come by Rome, drop me a note here (of course, provided I'm still kicking, (rather than rattling the bucket!)). I think the least I can do to thank you is to suggest lunch on me, and a pleasant stroll through its archaeology and architecture (with no other matters like wiki etc., disturbing the serenity of the day). Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:51, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

You lucky so-and-so, Rome is one of my favorite cities. I will let you know next time I'm in town! I'm going to get there in the next few years. Levivich (talk) 04:03, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

The lucky one is the one who gets a Nishidani guided tour through all the sites you might have never seen. nableezy - 14:38, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

on the other hand

while singing this one should mull over some great opportunities to improve one's investment portfolio. A lot of great prime Mediterranean beachfront properties will perhaps be shortly on the market. Nishidani (talk) 18:02, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Personal Notes

• More children have been killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than the total killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019, Save the Children said.(Rory Carroll, Peter Beaumont, Israeli forces appear to be advancing on Gaza City from two sides, The Guardian 30 October 2023

Nishidani (talk) 14:37, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• Rafael Eitan, in an address to the Knesset as far back as 1983 once spoke of Palestinians as drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle. I.e. 'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.’(Lawrence Joffe, ’ Lieut-Gen Rafael Eitan,’ The Guardian 25 November 2004

That was a bit too gentle. In an imitation of classical antisemitic cartooning we now get this Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Israel is using the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack as its latest excuse to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

I had read the article you allude to, before your first mention of it earlier. I should have replied but it is such a long (and very good) article it would have required a lengthier analysis than I have had time to do justice to for the moment. I would still insist that one should call things by their proper name, which in this case, as has been amply apparent since 1948, the structural logic of Zionism dictates ethnocide rather than genocide, despite many notable figures from politicians to influential rabbis speaking directly of the need to finish 'them' off over the last decades. That doesn't make things more palatable via a euphemism: it just fits the record better. It is true that massacres played an important role in the establishment of the state - Benny Morris records 24, the Palestinians upwards of 60 such incidents in 1947-1949, - and that they continued intermittedly, the Rafah massacre affecting Gazan's memory in particular (Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi if I recall correctly saw his uncle mowed down at Khan Younis by an Israeli death squad, something which drew him decades later, into Hamas).* But the point has usually been to seed the kind of panic that leads to mass flight, as when in July 1948 the Palmach threw grenades, or in one account, shot a missile into a mosque full of refugees, killing hundreds of Muslims taking refuge there, and thereby, as with the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that year the flight of tens of thousands).

Aref al-Aref, whose honesty with figures shamed his contemporary Israeli historical colleagues (it was he who established that the figures for Palestinians murdered at Deir Yassin were less than half the figure the Irgun boasted of) estimated that 13,000 Palestinians died in 1948. Almost all of Israel's 6,000 fatalities in the war fell fighting Arab armies in formal combat. The gap has never been explained.

The systematic fragmentation into 165 bantustans of Palestinians in the West Bank is not genocidal, but ethnocidal - as hamula structures, kinship, become the primary locus of identity. One of the technical problems facing Israel in destroying Gaza - plans envisage extending the border significantly into the Strip to 'protect the (reconstructed) kibbutzim' by thereby seizing that 25% of the land which is agriculturally fertile) is that 2.3 million will be squeezed into an even more crowded, foodless and waterless inferno, forcing identitarian consolidation rather than the ethnocidal dispersion engineered for the West Bank.

Nathan Thrall's historical observation (in his The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine , 2017), that in the history of Palestine/Israel, Palestinians have always initially protested the usurpation of their rights peacefully and, on each four occasions, have found their strikes/ civil demonstrations put down with furious violence, first by the British Mandatory Authorities and then by Israel, after which they have had recourse to the same language as their adversaries, holds even in the latest case, the fifth. This October war comes in the wake of The Great March of Return, a civil protest demanding an exit from the world's largest concentration camp which lasted for 18 months, openly to be met with by the weekly mowing down of selected protesters, 223 murdered by Israeli soldiers shooting safely from embankments at youths some 100+ metres over the border, and wounding 9,000. Gaza is full of crippled, limping survivors from just that episode.

Rodi Rudoren in The Forward some days ago wrote an essay What if thousands of Gaza residents breached the border fence carrying only Palestinian flags?. She never asked herself the same question of Israel adopting a different response every time over the last 75 years when Palestinians, including Hamas, have sought a stay in the violence. Again, the Palestinians are failed for not proving themselves more pacifistic than their masters.

The latest statistics suggest that 1,000 children are being killed in Gaza each week, and Israel states that it will be a long war.('It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.'(That is the first time, albeit privately, that Israel has admitted that, in defiance of international law, it thinks disprortionately killing large numbers of civilians to achieve its aims is legitimate. The parallel made is all the more extraordinary because Nazi Germany and Japan were major powers occupying other countries. Israel is the belligerent occupying power in this case) Michael D. Shear, David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, 'Biden’s Support for Israel Now Comes With Words of Caution,' The New York Times 30 October 2023)Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• There can be no equivocation over Hamas's resort to terrorism, but at the same time, when a string of six retired and historically illiterate Australian Prime Ministers try to elbow their way back into the headlines by screaming about some putative 'cult of death', one can't but murmur that three serial terrorists later rose to be the elected leaders of Israel. The 7th,Paul Keating, an extremely well-read man, withheld his signature. Perhaps he recalled what Churchill stated in the House of Commons on the 17th November 1944, in commemorating his friend Lord Moyne who had been assassinated some days earlier by Lehi:

If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. (Andrew Roberts,Churchill:Walking with Destiny, (2018) Penguin ed. 2019 p.846 - I read that yesterday and checking, see that the wiki page on Moyne quotes from Hansard a primary source. Roberts' book should replace the source.)Nishidani (talk) 00:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

That quote from Churchill, if unsurprising in the context, is a remarkable one. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:30, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Just a reminder that Helena is worth reading, as usual. Nowadays she's active mostly on her new site globalities. --NSH001 (talk) 08:31, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Neil and sorry for neglecting to reply. I've been shifting loads of mulch, and with what free time left over, reading bios of people who had some claim to political greatness, (at the moment Jean-Luc Barré's monumental De Gaulle: Une Vie,) something that has disappeared from the world's horizon in recent decades. Sometimes I think anyone aspiring to political office should be asked to accept a public interrogation consisting of a spelling bee, and one hundred select questions on history - and they'd have to get a C grade before obtaining a right to candidature. That reflection arose when, during a summit in Rome, as big shots sat for a photo opportunity in the heart of Rome, they were asked to name the 7 (actually 11) hills of ancient Rome. Boris Johnson has a reputation as an ancient history buff, fluent in classical languages, and screwed up. I read yesterday an overview by Alain Gresh entitled Barbares et civilisés (Le Monde diplomatique Novembre 2023 pp.1,17) a trenchant historical analysis of the imposture of Western geopolitical discourse, with its comfortable distinction between civilised nations that can affirm themselves as legal great powers on the basis of genocidal colonialism and the 'savages' who, after decades, 'answer' their massacres and dispossession by rising up to slaughter even innocents among their tormentors. The latter are dismissed as 'terrorists' and the middle class press is awash with grievance and outrage calling for revenge, as if only those with dish washers, nice homes, fine educations merit empathy and earn the right to exact massive retribution against entire populations in which the terrorists are embedded. It's refreshingly asceptic, stringent in its lucid deconstruction of the hysterical partisanship of the mainstream's take (or is that 'takeaway', ugh!) on recent tragedies, which I well recommend, if you can access it. A rare antidote against the flushing of our sensibilities by the constant tide of prestigious drivel you get from the Bernard-Henri Lévy-Thomas Friedman-Anthony Blinken blatherers that add lustre to the slipshod slapdash opinionizing on events . . and the huge sutler army of rocketpolishing bullshit artistes who chime in in the wake of events to make out that even ethnocide must be understood as well, an unfortunate measure to defend the civilised ordure of our contemporary world.Nishidani (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers. "A leader of the settlement movement on expanding into Gaza, and her vision for the Jewish state." Written by Isaac Chotiner, published in The New Yorker, 11 Nov 2023. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

That's the usual piddling murmur in the mainstream press that, yes, Israel also has its problems but these are individuals, minorities, groups like settlers or hilltop youth. The military and political elite, the heart of Zionism, is, to judge from the following florilegium of statements, beating along quietly with the so-called disruptive margins of Israeli society. Read,slowly,

Yaniv Cogan and Jamie Stern-Weiner, 'Fighting Amalek in Gaza: What Israelis Say and Western Media Ignore,' Norman Finkelstein.com 12 November, 2023

It would be remarkable for anyone who doesn't follow events over the decades there, but will be ignored, at least until Finkelstein writes the definitive account of this final episode in the extinction of Gaza, and even thgen responses will be buried in book reviews. Remarkable because almost all of those statements in a wartime context express, boastfully, criminal intentions, with no more restraint than Mein Kampf.Nishidani (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I hope someone out there is compiling an encyclopedic list of moronic comments made by journalists interviewed for their insights into the present conflict. A few minutes ago, I learnt from one of these authoritative donkeys that after Hamas is eradicated, the world must build a university in the Gaza Strip (whose several universities apparently don't exist) where Novel Prize Winners will teach this unfortunate people, so long indoctrinated to hate, to learn the virtues of peace. Reality check here.(Just anecdotally, many of the 37,000 who annually study for their finals have to do so with candleliught, given the chronic power outages)Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

a request

For an old friend, mind working on User:Tiamut/St H Stephan? nableezy - 02:14, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

It's be easy - well, a couple of hours reading the sources - to fix if was then immediately shifted to article space. Otherwise, it would be pointless.Nishidani (talk) 23:46, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

It will be shifted to article space and and DYK proposed for another one on her list. nableezy - 00:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Ya tryen ta drag a senile old fart retiré back in'a wikipaedia? The divine Huldra's already dunnit yonks ago.Stephan Hanna Stephan Nishidani (talk) 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Just want to send a gift to somebody I miss is all. Figured you would too. nableezy - 18:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

help

User:Nableezy/aditloas. nableezy - 18:48, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Several thousand Israelis will each have a story like Abed Salama's to tell about what happened 7 Oct. Close to 2 million Gazans will too for what they experienced from October 7 for several months if not, as Netanyahu suggests, indefinitely. I don't expect we'll hear much of the latter, since it will remain oral. This is the way history is usually 'framed' there.

But yeah, I can help there, but you'll have to wait a bit. I'll get a copy of the book in December when I go downunder. Nishidani (talk) 21:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Sderot

I see you decided to hide "ethnic cleansing" under the word "depopulated". It seems inappropriate to me. I again suggest opening a discussion about the latest changes on the article's talk page. Eladkarmel (talk) 09:25, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The secondary sources all speak of over 400 villagers being driven out of Najd at gunpoint. We have the euphemism 'depopulated' which is widespread on wiki but used in the passive voice, meaning editors 'hide' the facts about who did the depopulating, which however in the best historical sources always has an historical actor, namely various parts of the Israeli forces fighting at that time.

I already posted on the talk page what you request me to do. There I note that your own edit removed facts in a form of historical denialism, asserting that there is something controversial about the facts. The pot calling the kettle black. If you excise historical facts referrable to first rate sources, on wiki, you are edit warring.Nishidani (talk) 09:31, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Some reflections

• Stephen F. Eisenman 'A Small Boy and Israel, Counterpunch 10 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• Yuval Abraham, 'Gazans worked in Israeli kibbutzim for decades. Then came Oct. 7,' +972 magazine 6 November 2023
• Anna Morrow, 'Israel’s war is the biggest threat to Jewish peoplehood,' The Forward 8 November 2023
• Erika Solomon, 'Germany’s Stifling of Pro-Palestinian Voices Pits Historical Guilt Against Free Speech,' New York Times 10 November 2023
• Tareq S. Haijaj The stories we don’t know how to tell Mondoweiss 10 November 2023 (Issam Ileywa RIP)
• Linda Dayan, 'Ahmed Wanted Israelis to Listen to Gazans. Then 23 of His Family Members Were Killed,' On the Facebook page 'Across the Wall,' Israelis read personal stories by Gazans in Hebrew, until the last update came in: 'The entire family of this page’s founder has been bombed to death.' The Israeli co-founder of the page now says: 'I don’t know if we’ll be able to build that bridge again Haaretz 2 November 2023
• Raja Shehadeh, 'Israel has long wanted Palestinians out of Gaza – my father saw it firsthand,' The Guardian 20 November 2023

Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.

This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

• Raji Sourani, 'I Live in Gaza. Israel’s Horrific Bombing Campaign Is Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen Before,' Jacobin 7 November 2023

We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.

If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.

• Alison Avigayil Ramer, 'Bassem and Ahed Tamimi are in Israeli prison because they stand for Palestinian freedom,' 19 November 2023.

This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration.Nishidani (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'

• 'Israel/OPT: ‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’: Unlawful Israeli strikes illustrate callous disregard for Palestinian lives,' Amnesty International 20 November 2023

In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped.Nishidani (talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Your list provides informative and thoughtful insights. BTW, did you get a chance to read the article from Oct. 27 by Max Blumenthal, saying there is high probability that many (perhaps even most) of the Israeli civilians (as well as Israeli soldiers) killed on October 7 were killed by so-called 'friendly' fire? It is not my intention to minimize, belittle or trivialize the proven fact that Palestinians killed many Israeli civilians on October 7, but it appears likely the Israeli military has also killed many Israeli civilians (and soldiers) on that day. Your thoughts? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

What is remarkable about all these articles (only 1 is RS)

• David Sheen, Ali Abunimah, 'Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says,' Electronic Intifada 16 October 2023.
• Max Blumenthal, 'October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles,' The Greyzone 27 October 2023
• 'A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,'Mondoweiss 22 October 2023
• Ali Abunimah,“Shoot at everything”: How Israeli pilots killed their own civilians,'Electronic Intifada 11 November 2023

is that they (a) draw directly on numerous reports in the Israeli press that however (b) like these articles themselves, are ignored by the Western mainstream press. So you have a paradox: Israel's press is 'freer' than its Western counterparts in reporting on the conflict, but its political elites (including the IDF) allow themselves a far more restricted set of options than would normally be the case in deliberations on critical situations in Western countries.

Why destroy an entire landscape when the enemy is underground? There is a very simple technological weakness in Hamas's tunnel-system. It needs large numbers of audible generators, detectable by sensors, to induct and circulate fresh air. Any network could be 'neutralized' by destroying the generators, giving those inside the option of surrender or asphixiation.(Trying to think in strictly military terms, as though I were an IDF commander) Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

More remarkable statements

• Jonathan Ofir, Israeli rabbis tell Netanyahu that Israel has a right to bomb Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza,' Mondoweiss 31 October 2023
• Tali Shapiro Jonathan Ofir, Israeli doctors urge the bombing of Gaza hospitals, Mondoweiss 5 November 2023

Nishidani (talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023

Et cetera

• Elliot Colla, On the History, Meaning, and Power of 'From the River to the Sea,' Mondoweiss 16 November 2023

Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party.Nishidani (talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Interview with Max Blumenthal, posted on 17 Nov 2023. He summarizes his article above, and provides additional insights and analysis, not only on the events of Oct. 7-8 but also on more recent military, political, social and cultural trends in Gaza, Israel, the US and Western Europe.

(As a Jewish Israeli-American who has many good childhood memories of growing up in Israel and still has a small number of dear family and friends in beautiful Israel, I personally found the part about the increasingly insane, increasingly ethnocidal/ genocidal indoctrination and incitement inside Israeli society to be particularly concerning, although not surprising.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I have many wonderful memories of my time in Israel, and also of the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When enjoying a day off (I chose to work three shifts, from 3.30 am to 7 pm), I hitchhiked and invariably was picked up and given a free ride by taxi-drivers from Gaza, which I visited after talking my way past border guards who insisted I'd risk being murdered by terrorists. My father had been stationed in Gaza in WW2, and left a letter describing his pleasant evenings there).

Over the last few decades, I've come to the conclusion that Israel is caught up in an historical and structural logic, following on from the racial premises of Zionism, which militates against any resolution of its internal contradictions. Forget (in the sense of thinking they are part of the problem) about Palestinians: history has long wiped its arse on them. The problem is essentially what the internal, downspiralling dynamics of its limited options creates for the 'diaspora'. Zionism arose as an aggressive challenge to Jewish diaspora civilization. It took several decades of colonial accomplishments and intensive diplomatic and emotional pressuring to get Jewish communities throughout the world to anneal their vision of Jewishness, in all of its varieties, with the model Israel produced, a muscular, nationalist concept of the 'new Jew'. For readers of Josephus, all this is not 'new'. Rabbinical wisdom drew a lesson from the latter, which has now been forgotten in the tragic euphoria of successive, superficially successful wars. This latest episode, in a world where the mainstream media narrative no longer holds water because everyone, esp. the young, can access alternative media or the work of people likew Blumenthal, will tend to give rise to exasperations which Israel and its commentariat will exploit to spin as a 'new' new antisemitism. No doubt antisemitism will indeed be strengthened - most cannot distinguish 'Jews' from Israel precisely because Zionism has insisted on theoir interchangeability. But that will not relieve Jews in the diaspora of the difficult choices it must now make - retention of its assimilative humanism which has been the glory of its haskalah heritage, or endorsement, no ifs or buts, of a fierce ethnonationalism as the logic of history drives Israel even further down the path of maximalism. Best wishes 21:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)

Israeli sources on friendly fire 7 October

Since the mainstream sources in English refuse to mention what the Israeli press is stating, the only way to get an RS-quality picture is to systematically comb the four sources above and cite the material from RS they cite or allude to.

• Quique Kierszenbaum '‘It was a pogrom’: Be’eri survivors on the horrific attack by Hamas terrorists,', The Guardian 11 October 2023

The counterattack on Be'eri was conducted by Major General Itai Veruv.

Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages

The Hamas militants held hostages. So stating that tank fire was used to blast kibbutz buildings where Hamas militants were hiding only begs the question: were Israelis detained by them also present in those buildings?

• Yoav Zitun, tricked Israeli helicopters, and pilots over WhatsApp | The Air Force on Day 1 Ynet 15 October 2023

• Amos Harel, 'Failures Leading Up to the Hamas Attack That Changed Israel Forever,' Haaretz 20 October. In summary form Harel's article states

Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Gaza Division, when the Erez Crossing and military installations close to it, his own Coordination and Liaison Office were attacked, locked himself and some staff in the subterranean war-room (underground refuges are not unique to Hamas) called down an airstrike on his own base, though many soldiers lay wounded above/outside

Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello Nishidani. There was a subsection in one of the main article related to the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, covering Israeli sources on the October 7 friendly fire. I can't find it now. can you help? Ghazaalch (talk) 04:23, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I only dropped a note re this on the talk page, listing 3 RS for the matter though noting it was perhaps premature to add to the article itself.I don’t think it’s worth bothering about those articles too much. Some intelligible work can begin when the hundreds of eager editors jumping at the opportunities to make dogleg additions or subtractions to its Protean mess, move on and stop fiddling as Gaza burns. Then editors can do something useful harvesting what scholarship and NGO analysts report in their morticians’ death notes from the various autopsies to be made on the corpus relicti of this 1948 nakba remake. It’s too early, in short to cover this Srebrenica-like massacre as the IDF slowly but triumphantly nudges its meticulously efficient juggernaut trajectory towards the halfway mark as the exhausted world shifts its bleary attention over pancakes and cornflakes, to the fresh breaking news of Sinora’s upandcoming match with Djokevic or the details of a murder case in Italy (55 minutes of breaking news here – whose content details can be summed up as (a) the culprit was arrested (b) the community grieves, and (c) the relatives are distraught)Nishidani (talk) 11:34, 19 November 2023 (UTC) music festival massacre

One may add this to the RS.

An Israeli police investigation indicated an IDF helicopter which had fired on Hamas militants "apparently also hit some festival participants." (Re'im music festival massacre). Josh Breiner, Israeli Security Establishment: Hamas Likely Didn’t Have Advance Knowledge of Nova Festival,' Haaretz 18 November 2023. Nishidani (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

When I saw the videos of helicopters (drones?) firing on fleeing figures in a desert landscape , videos promoted by the IDF as evidence of their hunting down Hamas militants, I was disconcerted, thinking 'how do they know those fleeing figures are armed militants as opposed to the numerous Gazans who apparently profited from the breaches in the wall simply to walk around. Soon after, reading of 20 Apache helicopters making 300 strikes that day on people, together with the admission (or fiction) that this aerial fire had been indiscriminate, shooting anyone who ran, as opposed to anyone who walked, and the accompanying suggestion that Hamas had instructed its militants to walk (extremely unlikely and smacking like a cover-up storey to mask from error), I realised that one possibility was that, in the confusion of the day, the many fleeing Israelis might well have been inaddvertently targeted. Breiner's piece now corroborates, apparently, that suspicion. This doesn't mitigate the horror of what terrorists did captured on video, but confirms that some unknown percentage of the listed victims died from 'friendly fire'. We now have at least 4 RS for this.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Nishidani.Ghazaalch (talk) 04:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

The Cradle. More ominous insider testimony emerging. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Consensus note regarding Israeli settlements

Hi. Can you point me to the consensus note you are talking about in this revert? --Orgullomoore (talk) 23:36, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

For that you will have to ask Nableezy, who organized the consensual phrasing which you will see on every page dealing with Israeli settlements. Someone has manipulated the text on Mehola by adding and the US government (meaning, I assume, the Trump administration) uniquely there, whereas this is not the consensus form agreed on. I.e. someone has rewritten the text while ignoring the source, thus WP:OR.Nishidani (talk) 00:01, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

I found it here. Yes, the USA part should go. I'll do that. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Well done. Thanks for your diligence and scruple. Nishidani (talk) 00:08, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Ha! You're welcome. Thank you for keeping calm. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:11, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

That is indeed it, by the time I saw this you had already found it. Though there was a later discussion that sought to overturn that RFC, but it ended with no consensus. I can find that if you need me to. But, remarkably, that discussion ended what had been a conflict that spanned dozens of pages over years with topic bans for all sides, and it’s held up for the 14 years (god damn I been here too long). Everybody is of course welcome to see if consensus has changed. nableezy - 04:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Noooo... I honestly think it's a decent result. I was just under the impression that we're not supposed to imply conclusions from broader statements even if the connection is obvious. For example, , , . With that impression I removed this consensual statement from a settlement article I came across in proofreading the Hamas article, which Nishidani reverted me on. But if there is relative peace and quiet and people are not fussing about this "The world knows settlements in occupied territories are illegal, but Israel believes this does not apply to them," then my position is we should let well enough alone. --Orgullomoore (talk) 04:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

We generally aren’t, and if somebody wanted to push it they could probably insist on including only a reference that includes that specific settlement but that will almost always be trivially simple. The consensus came around to just using the BBC general ref even though I agree it isn’t the best source (I’d go with the Barak Erez source in the lead of International law and Israeli settlements personally cus then I can be like uh look at her job to anybody challenging it as biased) but the fact that the most notable thing about almost all of these places is that they violate GCIV will typically make it pretty easy to find a specific ref for each. nableezy - 05:16, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Nomination of Palestinianism for deletion

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Typo?

This looks like you went in to fix a typo but deleted a line instead. Iskandar323 (talk) 23:10, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I'll readily confess to advanced senescence, but most of the many errors I make seem due to the neopaleolithic laptop I use. It's fine for reading, with just a four inch window, but plays up tremendously if two windows are open, and the mouse has developed an A1/Chatbox capacity to run amuck according to its own lights, or darks. I fixed a reduplicated piece of copy and pasted text there.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Ha. There's no problem is there. I misread the edit. My mistake for peering at screens late at night. My eyes played a trick on me, and I don't even have your antiquated tech excuse to save me. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:17, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

'Excuse?' Pretext! There's that odd nonsensical expression, a pathetic euphemism, we have about the 'wisdom of old age', which essentially consists of old codgers thinking up dodges and ruses to mask the proliferating spoors of their decline and fall(ure), ways of covering up for the foibles of the enfeebled. It's not a matter of lacking a quid or two to pop out and buy a new laptop, but rather a canny feeling that were I to manage such a rational solution, I'd lose any residual excuse or pretext I have for explaining orthographical and other screw-ups. Come to think of it (and at this stage one does gradually come around to actually doing a bit of thinking), 'the wisdom of old age' is a somewhat evil smear on younger generations: it implies one is stupid until one's senescence kicks in, the opposite of the case. Cheers. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

People are often criticised for the indelicacy of wearing their hearts on their sleeves. In an age where evidence for that organ's survival is growing scarcer by the day, perhaps the practice warrants less disdain, but only in so far as the shirt itself is cut from the cloth of intimate historical recall. Watching the Palestinian Trail of tears (almost all of Israel's history can be read as a systematic, consciously applied reevocation of the American Conquest of the West, displaced to the Muddle Yeast), I recalled something I read a few days ago the following description of the flight of French people south out of the way of the German assault on northern France in 1940:-

la situation matérielle, physique, morale d'un peuple jeté sur les routes, mitraillé par les avions ennemis, impuissant à comprendre les raisons du malheur qui l'accable e n'aspirant plus qu'à voir l'issue de son cauchemar.'(the material, physical and moral situation of a people cast out onto the roads, machine-gunned by enemy aircraft, powerless to grasp the reasons for the misfortune which has overwhelmed them and desiring nothing more than to see an end to/escape from their nightmare').Jean-Luc Barré, De Gaulle:Une Vie,Bernard Grasset volume 1, 2023 p.410 13:52, 19 November 2023 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)

Closure of hospitals

I've yet to see, but I don't read around that much, any mention of what is the most logical explanation for the systematic closing down of hospitals throughout the Israeli controlled north. Since they have no strategic value to anyone, one reasonable conjecture is that the whole Gazan system of registering deaths is centered on hospitals, esp. al-Shifa. The procedure is that deaths are entered into the register as corpses or the dying are carried there, and a preliminary control is made by technicians to correlate the dead, and identify them, with archival records. Once this is done, the resulting data is collated and the statistics are updated. If one dismantles the hospitals and their administrative staff, no further empirical work of precise record-keeping would be possible, something also consolidated by the lack of power to maintain or recharge servers and computers. Perhaps something like that infrastructure survives in Khan Younis and Rafah, but the data from the north would, I suppose, now be frozen. Worth keeping an eye out for this technical issue if RS come round to examining it. Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)