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Please
do not attack other editors. If you continue, you will be
blocked from editing Wikipedia. Your personal attacks, such as
this, against Jaakobou, are unacceptable. Even if you honestly believe the statement, which I don't consider supported by the evidence, it's inappropriate. —
Arthur Rubin
(talk)
16:54, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
The Arab world, Islam inspired cultural structure is the main cause of the Arab-Palestinian 91 year racist terror campaign against the Jewish-Palestinians
Unlike others here, nobody has asked me to involve myself, but I want to intercede because the way that Nishidani is being treated makes me feel deeply uneasy. If somebody makes a claim for themselves, I think that it is entirely justified to quote their own earlier remarks back at them if they show that the claim is untrue, particularly if the claim is made on the Administration Enforcement page. The quoted remark may have been retracted, but it was retracted because it breached Wikipedia rules rather than because the remarker thought the remark was untrue. The claim that Nishidani called Jaakobou a racist is absurd and I think that Nishidani is owed an apology rather than the other way round. To give only Nishidani (and PalestineRemembered, I think) a warning for a comment that was nowhere near the worst of what might be construed as personal attacks in a section of the Administration Enforcement page where they were flying thick and fast looks like victimisation. "No matter how right we are, we should always avoid causing offence." Really? Since, then, it looks as though Nishidani was offended by being given a warning, by being told that he had called someone a racist and, possibly, by being told that his reactions came across as childishness, does that mean that all those things shouldn't have been done or said? -- ZScarpia ( talk) 20:46, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
Speaker A (1):'The Arab world, Islam inspired cultural structure is the main cause of the Arab-Palestinian 91 year racist terror campaign against the Jewish-Palestinians,'
Speaker A (2)'I have absolutely nothing against Muslims and/or Arabs'
Speaker B. 'Statement (2) is contradicted by Statement (1).'
Administrator C. 'To remind speaker A of the contradiction between his two statements constitutes a personal attack on A. Repeat a notification of this contradiction to A and you will be punished.'
Speaker B. 'Let me contextualize. Speaker A made his first comment in the presence of an Arab (D). He made his second comment when D later complained of harassment by A, whose first statement implicitly defined that Arab's world as one whose culture is characterised historically by terrorism and racism against Jews. It was therefore an attack on D as hailing from a civilisation that is structured by antisemitism and terrorism.'
Administrator C 'It appears that you are directly accusing A of racism.'
Speaker B. 'No, I am reminding A that he accused D of racism.'
Administrators C, E, F. 'Forget about D. In reminding A of his attack on D, you are attacking A, and some of us think you are accusing A of racism and terrorism. What is important here is what we consider to be an attack by you on A, not the fact that A attacked D as heir to a racist terroristic culture, and then prevaricated when the two clashed again.'
Speaker B.'To remind a person of what he said is not an attack.'
Administrators (apparently). 'Four of us think you, in that diff, are accusing A of belonging to an Israeli world, Judaism-inspired cultural structure which you think is the main cause of the Israeli-Jewish 91 year racist terror campaign against the Palestinians.'
At this point B is forced to retire. The possibilities are three. Either (a) he is an idiot, (b) administrators can't read English, though they write it, or (c) ethnic sympathies and subtextual politics trump logic. Whatever, this is too eerily reminiscent of
Harold Pinter's dialogues in his comedies of menace, and he has no intention of playing the eternal role of a whingeing victim against a cast of people unable to construe a simple piece of English, or understand the elementary forms of the syllogism, especially when such people exercise administrative functions. Alternatively, he may indeed be an idiot, in which case his aspirations to contribute to wikipedia are misplaced and rightly blocked by administrative consensus.
Nishidani (
talk)
11:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
'more or less; I don't see (1) as being identical to what J said.'
Above I gave the historical background. I should conclude with the logical reasoning for my remark, which you construe as an attack.
This remark, as was the 'clarification' on the AN/I thread, was addressed to, among others, Tiamut.
Tiamut is (a) Palestinian, (b) she is an Arab, (c) she is a heir to Islamic civilization (Arabic mother-language and culture, as opposed to faith) (d) Jaakobou’s interlocutor at the time these remarks were made(e) She is critical of the Zionist construction of the history of Palestine and Israel, a construction Jaakobou edits to defend.
From these contextual elements I simply remarked, when Jaakobou said he had absolutely nothing against Muslims and/or Arabs, that to the contrary,
‘your (original) outburst proves you think Tiamut is heir to a terrorist and racist culture is obvious.’
In propositional terms.
My inference was that, contextually, Jaakobou did imply by his remark, and later clarification, that he took Tiamut’s views as corroborating his perception that Palestinians/Arabs, of which she is one, are victims/heirs of a terrorist/racist culture.
That may be disputed as an incorrect inference. It cannot be construed as a personal attack, since it is simply a perfectly legitimate construal of Jaakobou’s own stated views, within the specific contexts (conflict with Tiamut over I/P articles) where they were expressed. To warn one here is to establish a precedent for challenging perfectly legitimate inferences from explicit statements made by a party, as an attack on that party. Nishidani ( talk) 12:35, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
I was troubled that you beleive that Israel has turned Gaza into a concerntration camp. You find two interesting similarites: "since no one can get in, or out, and all have been on starvation rations." Yet this does not automatically designate a place a Concerntration Camp. You could maybe call it a POW camp. When the Israelis start sending the children, women and the infirm off to the left, then we can start comparing. Chesdovi ( talk) 01:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
Your "found an accomplice or willing executioner" in reference to Israel
[1] is a grotesque soapbox and more fitting for an antisemitic Iranian holocaust denying blogger than a Wikipedia editor. Please avoid calling Israeli self-defense a "willing executioner" in the future.
Cordially,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
12:03, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
'the enginer(is)Hoist with his own petar
I think this "warning" is an extreme overreaction to his comment, which itself was an unnecessary reply to a comment that should not have been made. Neither of you really need to be reminded, but just in case - article talkpages are for discussing ways to improve the article. Debating your biases, or lack thereof, has no place here. Debating the subject itself, and not the article, has no place here. If you aren't able to hold to this and still converse with each other, then you should refrain from interacting anymore than absolutely necessary - that includes correcting inflammatory and wrong remarks that are unrelated to improving an article. Both of you know better, and Jaakobou -using words like grotesque and obscene to describe the comments of others, particularly (in my opinion) Nishidani, is completely unacceptable. Avruch T 23:35, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
2 Notes to self. Everytime I hear Hamas quoted on the 'desire for death', I will now recall (a) the graffiti scribbled by occupying soldiers on the walls of a house near the Samouni's home, where some 48 died.
(a)'Inside and outside the home, graffiti had been daubed in Hebrew and English, with slogans including Arabs need to die, "Arabs: 1948 to 2009" and "Make war, not peace".' Cited Rory McCarthy, ‘Inside Gaza: Israeli troops have vanished but the damage is plain to see,’ The Guardian, 19/01/2009
and (b) 'On Monday, on one of the walls of the house that became the IDF position from which soldiers shot the two brothers who died at their father's side, we found two inscriptions in Hebrew: "The Jewish people lives" and "Kahane was right," referring to right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.' Amira Hass, 'Life in Gaza is not 'back to normal' Haaretz, 28/01/2009
and (c)'Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer'. Yigal Bronner, Neve Gordon, 'Fueling the Cycle of Hate,' Counterpunch January 27, 2009
Happy new year, Nishidani. It's been a little while; I hope things have been going well for you. Looking at your talk page it would seem that you are fighting a little war. I must respect your vigor in the face of questionable opposition.
The Israeli / Palestinian situation of late certainly is tragic. Other than following the news, I regret that I am not versed enough to make any useful contributions, though. Once upon a time you used to make extremely valuable contributions to Japan-related topics. If you feel like taking a break from the status-quo, let me renew that invitation. You're always welcome. Best wishes, Bendono ( talk) 12:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I thought you might be interested. -- J.Mundo ( talk) 21:57, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello, would you mind taking a look at the lead I proposed at [2]; I would like to get this to the point that there cannot be any possible contention with any of it, and JGGardiner makes some interesting points. Thanks (and much respect for everything I have seen you write), Nableezy ( talk) 20:59, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
Hi. Thanks and I did see your compliment on the article talk so thanks for that also. I appreciate your work on the talk page also. It feels funny sometimes patting ourselves on the back for merely being a little reasonable. But somehow that deserves it around here.
Don't feel bad, I think that Nableezy agrees with Cerejota as well. And I do also really. But I think one can agree with Cerejota's point and support our version as well. The "intensified" part of the paragraph really had nothing to do with the version we created. We were just incorporating what was already there. It was more about modifying the third sentence and adding the fourth.
I don't feel bad either. I always say what I think on the talk page. We only started working together because Nableezy was good enough to react to my concerns. If he wasn't involved in the page my comments have just ended up in the ether. Like most of my comments do.
The only really upsetting thing is that someone keeps adding that picture of the Pears soap with the "get out of the soap box" caption. You stand on a soap box, not in it! -- JGGardiner ( talk) 22:06, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
I guess the one thing I learned from this is that it is impossible to achieve an accurate, neutral wording by just trying to offer that accurate neutral wording. So many people are going to fight for their extreme that it almost necessitates going to the other extreme to get it back to what is neutral. That somebody even offered that 'option 2' as a neutral suggestion is beyond me. Whatever, I guess some people are so far gone out of reality that it won't matter at all what is actually real. Thanks for the help though, and best wishes. Nableezy ( talk) 22:36, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Our penchant for asking too many inconvenient questions reveals our pathetically archaic insistence on belonging to "the reality-based community," as one top White House advisor famously put it to reporter Ron Suskind:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
-- Justin Raimondo (2005-03-11). "The Wonderful Wizard of Washington / If ever a Wiz there was -- our fantasy-based foreign policy".
For short: Godwin's law - That said, the problem with "fascism" as epithet is that when everything is fascism, then nothing is. -- Cerejota ( talk) 20:26, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
I just saw your contrib at my special page. Keep 'em coming. I just think we need to improve the MILHIST aspect. Thank you!-- Cerejota ( talk) 20:19, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
Hi Nishidani!
I was a bit surprised to come back from the week-end and see this. The lead, as it was, was written by User:Jacob2718 and myself ( here) and was, as far as I could tell, factual and unbiased. What are/were your objections?
The second paragraph, as it stands now, is only confusing and extremely diffuse. The compromise established a sequence of events: ceasefire, breach by Israel, non-renewal of truce by Hamas, Israeli attack. The text, at the time, was:
I realise somebody tweaked some of the formulations to make it sound nasty, but can we try to fix this up again?
As for the cease-fire fork, I just did a copy-paste job to get it out of the way. As soon as I have some time I'll un-fluff it.
Cheers and thanks, pedrito - talk - 19.01.2009 07:57
Let's see on the one hand an editor named Nishidani says Dr. Ledeen is a known liar and not a reliable source and therefore can not be cited as a source in Wikipedia. On the other hand, Dr Ledeen has been a senior Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for 20 years. He is also a contributing editor at National Review Online. He has served as a consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He has also served as a special adviser to the United States Secretary of State. He holds a Ph.D. in modern European history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rome. Furthermore, Dr. Ledeen provides links to his references in the cited article. And his thesis is supported by the Prime Minister of Israel himself. The Prime Minister said, "Iran, which strives for REGIONAL HEGEMONY, tried to replicate the methods used by Hizbullah in Lebanon IN THE GAZA STRIP as well. You are disrupting the Wikipedia project and could ultimately lose the privilege of editing Israel related articles. Please review WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:OR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict#Remedy_for_documented_.5BWP:POV.5D_violation Doright ( talk) 11:53, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
‘I was astonished that Ledeen would write something that the record of the past four years would so readily show to be false. . .Some years later it was revealed that during my years in Italy, Ledeen was under contract as a consultant to General Giuseppe Santovito, Italy’s chief of military intelligence, and that a great deal of Ledeen’s “information” about Billy Carter had come from SISME sources. Ledeen’s partner in the Billy Carter and other affairs was Francesco Pazienza, an influential SISME Adviser who was subsequently charged in Italy with extortion by violence, possession of cocaine, leaking state secrets, and criminal associations of a Mafia type. . .According to the Wall Street Journal, the indictment on which he was convicted read in part; “With the illicit support of the SISME and in collaboration with the well known ‘italianist’ Michael Ledeen, Pazienza succeeded in extorting, also using fraudulent means, information – then published with great evidence in the international press –on the Libyan business of Billy Carter, the brother of the then President of the United States’. After Reagan’s victory, Ledeen and Pazienza set themselves up as the preferred channel between Italian political leaders and members of the new administration. For these and other services, Ledeeen was eventually rewarded with a position as an assistant to President reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig.’ Richard N. Gardner, (with Zbigniew K. Brzezinski), Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005 p.291
for your comment. It was very thoughtful of you. Nableezy ( talk) 21:49, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I would begin by finishing the merger of 2008 Israel-Gaza conflict into 2007—2008 Israel-Gaza conflict and then working that article. There is also the rocket attack articles and 2008 Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Ultimately a fix up is to be given to Israeli-Palestinian conflict to reflect a more updated chronology. I think the article in The Economist about a 100 year war provides a recent RS framework for historical narrative, although for much of the older stuff there is plenty of scholarly sources.-- Cerejota ( talk) 12:27, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
Please discuss on Talk Background. High percentage of children in population and use of human shield are relevant points for background section and go hand in hand together and are relevant. AgadaUrbanit ( talk) 15:47, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
How do you deal with dumb people? You are obviously an extremely intelligent man, how do you deal with people who can't go beyond a 5 yr olds logic? Now this is obviously a question in general and in no way can be portrayed as construing that certain people are dumb.
Nableezy (
talk)
04:48, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
And I find your deconstruction of the phrase 'bogus nonsense' to be one of the finer things I have read on Wikipedia.
Nableezy (
talk)
04:49, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
Nishandi, I was referring to the post where you said, "Don't be so rude. Your time is no more valuable than my own. Were I as ill-mannered as you seem to be above . . ." I realize that calling someone rude and ill mannered (particularly when he has been somewhat rude and ill mannered) is not exactly be epic on the personal attack scale, but the discussion on the article has been remarkably civil for such a contentious topic, I was just trying to put the brakes on before things got out of hand. Blackeagle ( talk) 23:25, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed your present archive is approaching a reasonable size limit, so I've created a nice shiny new one for you (Archive 8), labelled "February 2009" above. I've re-labelled your existing archive "November 2008 - January 2009" above.
There's enough room for you to put all the "logorrhoea" above into the existing archive, if you want to; new stuff from February onwards should go in the new archive.
Hope this is OK with you. -- NSH001 ( talk) 00:43, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, if you were offended by "Middle East anecdote". Please consider I'm the part of that region AgadaUrbanit ( talk) 12:01, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Umm... here. Pardon my ignorance - what does "et idem indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus?" mean? To my shame, I never studied Latin. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 01:02, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
You probably already saw this but I thought it might make a nice addition to your reading list: Riz Khan, 'The Future of Gaza: An Interview with Jimmy Carter,' Counterpunch, January 29, 2009 Nableezy ( talk) 00:56, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Thought you might find
this page interesting.
Warm regards,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
23:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
On the business of Hussayni being jailed for 10 years by the British, I have a source that says no record of his trial has ever surfaced. Is it possible that there was no such trial, and Samuel simply announced he'd been amnestied, in order to "balance" the otherwise extraordinary release of the violent revolutionary? PR talk 09:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
On the business of Hussayni being jailed for 10 years by the British, I have a source that says no record of his trial has ever surfaced. Is it possible that there was no such trial, and Samuel simply announced he'd been amnestied, in order to "balance" the otherwise extraordinary release of the violent revolutionary? PRtalk 09:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Quoi qu’il en soit, au bout de[s] 3 jours [suivant le vote par l’ONU de la résolution sur la partition], les correspondants de presse étrangers qui suivaient les manifestations et les grèves constatèrent (...) un désir évident de retour à la normale Mais le rapide retour à la normale et le souhait des Palestiniens de ne pas se laisser entraîner dans une guerre civile posaient problème [aux] dirigeants sionistes (...)"
'In general, by the end of 1947 the Palestinians had a healthy and demoralising respect for the Yishuv's military power. A Jewish intelligence source in October 1947 described the situation in the countryside:</blockquote
'The fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists . .who might bomb his village and destroy his property . .The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside . .the moderate majority . .are confused, frightened . .They are stockpiling provisions . .are are being coerced and pressured by extremists . .(but) all they want is peace.'Morris, 2004, p.32
Chapter title : "Le déchainement de la violence"
Le lendemain du vote par l’ONU de la résolution sur la partition, la Palestine fut balayée dès l’aube par un vent de violence, début de la guerre civile qui allait durer jusqu’au 15 mai 1948.
Comment. There is no contradiction between the two statements. For the first refers to what foreign correspondents regarded as a desire for normality and peace in the immediate aftermath of the resolution, from late Nov to early Dec., and Morris himself says that the majority wished for peace at that specific period. The second remark (p.76 of the first English edition) is somewhat hyperbolic in its metaphor, since what is referred to are two attacks on buses, a general strike for three days, and otherwise only 'sporadic' violence for a few weeks. Pappé's phrasing is belied by his own details, which is not a crime in narrative historians. But he does specify that the first attacks after the Resolution were made by Arabs. Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
Comment. This is a security report made two and a half months after the 'lendemain', (February)and refers to a report made in January. No one denies things precipitated from late December onwards. Pappéìs own book reflects precisely all the points made in the primary sources you give here (above and below)
‘The Arab attacks, which culminated in January 1948, were of such scope and force that they succeeded in shaking the confidence of the Jewish community, whose last experience of such a period of hostilities had been back in 1937. Israeli historians have called this period the ‘nadir of the Yishuv’ -summarizing the mood of the Jewish community in Palestine in those days. The actions against the settlements and the major routes certainly caught the Zionist leadership off its guard, and it had already misjudged the intensity and severity of the Arab reaction. The dismay and despair comes out very clearly from notes of the Mapai council meetings at the beginning of February 1948. Mapai members were particularly concerned about Jerusalem’s fate and blamed Ben Gurion, who was present at those meetings, for inadequately preparing the community for the struggle. The Arab siege of isolated Jewish settlements in the Negev was another sore point. Ben Gurion refused to describe the situation in dire terms and insisted, in this hindsight proved him right, that the local Arab effort in Palestine had failed.’ Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,, 1957-1951, I.B.Tauris, 1994, London p.78
Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
§ I.2 : "2. It is because of the extreme gravity of the situation in Palestine now, and the anticipated worsening of the conditions there
§ II.3 : "The representative of the Mandatory Power informed the Commission at its sixteenth meeting on January 1948, that as regards Arabs and Jews in Palestine "elements on each side were engaged in attaching or in taking reprisals indistinguishable from attacks", and that as a result, were it not "for the efforts of the security forces over the past month, the two communities would by now have been fully engaged in internecine slaughter"
§ II.5 : The documents reports 46 casualities (deaths) among British, 427 among Arabs and 327 among Jews... The [Palestinian] arabs were killed by the Jews... According to Pappé who killed the Jews?
"[En décembre, les dirigeants arabes], en particulier ceux des pays limitrophes de la Palestine préféraient ne pas prendre de décision individuelle ou radicale."
§I.3.C : "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."
§II.6 : " (...) The Subsequent communication of 6 February (...) from the representative of the Arab Higher Committee :
"b. The Arabs of Palestine consider that any attempt by the Jews or any power or group of powers to establish a Jewish State in Arab territory is an act of aggression which will be resisted in self-defense by force."
"g. The Arabs of Palestine made a solemn declaration before the United Nations, before God and history, that they will never submit or yield to any power going to Palestine to enforce partition. "The only way to establish partition is first to wipe them out – man women and child."
Referred it to WP:ANI - please add your comments. I can see no hope of making any headway with his stance. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 22:01, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
I keep having to look up words - things which I've heard or sometimes used, but haven't actually ever known the precise definition of! Argh! Brain hurts. Too... much... reading... middle-school-language-newspapers! :) GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 23:56, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
:Please review
this diff, and check positions on history. Time. Dates. Remove this message
GrizzledOldMan (
talk) 16:26, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Nope, not so irrelevant now - wikilawyering continues.
GrizzledOldMan (
talk)
11:45, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
No worries but thanks for the response. I see the article still has the 24 number but sourced with the Haaretz article that says 20. So you'd like to change it back to 20? I think that's what I'd do. At least until we can find a good source for a higher number. -- JGGardiner ( talk) 09:18, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Cerejota ( talk) 10:51, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Milhist stuff on Gaza. If anyone comes by material, please refer the info with a link to
User:Cerejota/OpCastLead
Nishidani (
talk)
10:59, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
I noticed among your comments on GOM's talk page: "I find it very odd that a bot might make content adjustments or prefer one edit against another." It didn't (and no bot would be permitted that status if it did). The diff provided above by GOM (and now struck out) shows the net effect of 26 edits - at the top of the diff you will see the note "(25 intermediate revisions not shown)". You can easily produce such diffs yourself by clicking any pair of those little round buttons opposite the relevant diffs on any "history" page; or clicking "(curr)" on any old version will show the cumulative diff between that version and the current one.
Hope this helps -- NSH001 ( talk) 13:35, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the problem with using a primary source is, if there's no interpretation or conclusions drawn from it - this provides what seems to be a decent explanation. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 23:01, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
There is a formal system for recording this sort of stuff (most commonly applies to images, but can also be used for text) called OTRS. If you need help on OTRS, Avi's your man (he's a long-standing OTRS volunteer).
I'll just add that it's ludicrous, all that bizarre shit that you're having to put up with on Israel Shahak (the world would be a much better and safer place with a few hundred more Shahaks around). I wish I had more time to follow it all.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 23:14, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
Apologies for the
offensive approach; I would have changed it had it been possible. Perhaps it's best if we both consider
WP:CIV as it seems to be lacking in our communications. Certainly, that Ariel Sharon comment still lies as it was after
I've asked you to refactor it.
Regards,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
09:04, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Jaakobou. I don't think that, in this, you need apologize, though I appreciate the gesture. You made a judgement, and someone else disagreed. Though our differences are, as often our exchanges on broader themes underline, irreconcilable, we are both grown men. Were I to dwell at length on 'tone', 'innuendo', 'the etiquette of address', minor things that catch my attention in the flow of comments, and in turn harp on them by reference to WP:AGF, WP:Civil, WP:whatever. I could take exception to a huge range of things, and make heavy weather of them on various administrative sites. Many otherwise innocuous (for the editor) remarks by my interlocutors rub me up the wrong way, perhaps because of my training in literature. I try to keep these sensitivities offpage, and not interpret publicly exchanges as I would were one discussing a Henry James novel. Efficiency in editing requires this distinction, and those various rules are predominantly, I assume, for newbies coming of internet forums, rather than for experienced wiki editors. Otherwise the temptation is to consistently 'work the rules' as though they were instruments of a duel, rather than a means to facilitate the collective writing of a text. As to Sharon, I wrote, 'in a minor key'. My substantive point was, no population should be told it mirrors its leaders. I have a harsh view of him, and instanced him to underline that point. I could have said as well that Mohammad Amin al-Husayni or Saddam Hussein did not 'mirror' the people they claimed to represent. Warm hummus! Nishidani ( talk) 10:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello Nishidani, I think the proper response to such silliness is one of the first Arabic words I learned as a youngster. Tuz, emphasis on the t, is most easily translated as 'fuck it', where fuck it takes the meaning 'I dont give a fuck anymore, this is dumb as hell'. If you get really frustrated, you can use 'elf tuz', or a thousand fuck its. I realize you are fond of words that make me consult a dictionary, but I though this might be a little simpler and hopefully allow you to spare some energy for things that matter. Hope to see you around, Nableezy ( talk) 20:23, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
And a rather interesting lesson in how to revise history to prove yourself right. If a professor did such a thing he would be fired. I am starting to understand why this whole thing is hopeless. Nableezy ( talk) 22:29, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Apropos King David Hotel Bombing/ Israel Shahak. The following discussion arose on the former article's talk page, and has been removed here.
Apologies for wandering off-topic everyone. --
ZScarpia (
talk)
01:27, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't know what your access to sources is like, but perhaps a way that I can be of help is looking up references. I have access to a copyright library that has a copy of everything published in the UK. Most other things I can obtain by using inter-library loans.
Reading the
West Bank - Judea and Samaria arbitration case, I hope that the outcome is a Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Israeli-Palestinian articles) as suggested by ChrisO.
--
ZScarpia (
talk)
15:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
During his testimony before the Shaw Commission two months later (the commission interviewed him in his offices) on December 4, 1929, al-Husayni was apparently described as holding a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his hand'. Palestine Commission on the Disturbances of August 1929, Minutes of Evidence, (London 1930), Vol 2 page 539 paragraph 13,430, page 527 paragraph 13,107.
I read Horace Samuel's Beneath the Whitewash yesterday. Unfortunately it doesn't have anything to say about the Mufti and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Near the front, it has a summary of the principal events, which includes the following:
So, it looks as though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was considered a bit naughty, but that's probably not big news. As the title indicates, the conclusion of the booklet is that the report of the Shaw Commission was a whitewash. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 08:55, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments, and of course you are right. As the text on Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Runtshit states, "This Sock Puppet sedulously perpetrates a sustained persecution under a steady procession of stupid pseudonyms".
Interestingly, this latest avatar began by edit-warring on Neve Gordon, adding a link to the Jewish Press blog at thejewishpress.blogspot.com (I don't want to add a wikilink). This was a blatant attempt at well-poisoning, directed at a frequent target of abuse on and off Wikipedia.
There are many other confirmatory facts, but I'm not going to list them here. Openness is not always preferable.
RolandR ( talk) 19:01, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
I couldnt stop laughing after reading "as tight as a nun's nasty". Nableezy ( talk) 17:52, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Re the above, I am a member of the University of Sussex library, so may be able to help. The URL for their catalogue is here - anything you can find there I should be able to get my hands on. I also have access, through the library, to various subscription-only online journals. A couple of provisos:
I'm also, of course, a member of my local library, which gives access to some online material. The only one I've found useful is the ODNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), which I can access at any time. They also allow inter-library loans for a small fee (about £2, I think).
The British Library? That might be a possibility. Some day I intend to try to find out more about Kruschev's visit to Hunterston A nuclear power station at around the time it opened in 1964. I know it happened, since I saw him with my own eyes, but there is nothing on it in either wiki article. National newspapers are bound to have reported it, but it could be a difficult search to find it. Quite ironical really, inviting the head of state of a foreign country to what was effectively (part of) a nuclear bomb factory for weapons targeted at that country - the Magnox design was perfect for producing military-grade plutonium, though of course none of that was mentioned publicly at the time.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 17:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
What would you say is the best course of action? Should I notify Durova, another admin, or just leave the whole thing to ArbCom? MeteorMaker ( talk) 17:58, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi, sorry to be so rude – I've been meaning to say hello and thanks for the video link. Thanks also for your kind words and recent valiant defense. And to say such things about a boozy girl who once cracked wise about your 'verbal chandeliers'! You are the old-world craftsman of chandelier-builders, Nishidani, the maestro. Downright Ruskinian.-- G-Dett ( talk) 23:03, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
I didn't expect to be asking for a favour so quickly, but I could do with some advice. Game? -- ZScarpia ( talk) 21:26, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Bang goes another day writing in a talkpage rather than doing something more productive. And bang goes a lot of time for you too, I'm afraid. Hopefully the finding of the 2007 reference to Katz as the person in charge of propaganda for the Irgun will stop attempts to change the description to anything else without producing sources or other justification. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 23:28, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Since I have not been around for a while, I thought I'd pop in to say marhaba. Have missed you very much during my absence and have enjoyed reviewing your eloquent additions here and there. If you need anything, let me know. You and others seem to be doing a bang up job of bringing light to some of the problems afflicting our domain here at Wikipedia. I will likely sit this one out, but if you do need someone to present evidence or otherwise intervene, just drop me a note. Much love, Tiamut talk 15:41, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
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Your Opinion is More Important than You Think Barnstar | |
You should know, Nishidani, that you have fans even far-removed from your areas of interest. Your wit and scholarship are only matched by your gentility. You have demonstrated admirable tenacity in the difficult editorial realms you frequent, and I hope you will keep up the exemplary work. Thibbs ( talk) 17:19, 12 March 2009 (UTC) |
One I promise to look at the screen while typing and turn the auto spell check on...so that someone known as Nishidani doesn't pick on my spelling....promise...PS nice to see you picking on me.. Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 17:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
sorry nishidani I removed your bit on league of nation mandate as it is already mentioned further up the article.. Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 18:36, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I love the chuckleheads. I've always just got on with thing, I don't so much lead with the chin as charge in full steam ahead. I had a great laugh at cool making out that I had done the "large make over" when it was one of them, I just added bits to his make over. They don't seem to appreciate quotes from books that can't be found in JVL...bye the bye, nice bit on Lebanon not invading Israel. greatly appreciated..The tripe tripe that Israelophiles trot out has been found to be false many years ago and still they try to shovel manure...
Ashley kennedy3 (
talk)
20:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm sorry if the word offends...I don't know of any other word that can be used to describe someone who is in love with Israel...Its use is the same as Anglophile or francophile...I have come to the conclusion that nationalism is a destructive force with very few redeeming qualities.... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 23:04, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
The "niggling" makes the difference between POV and NPOV...as with the Israel Palestine conflict page where the supporters of Israel want capture or conquered for areas that Israel entered and invade for areas that Jordan, Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, ALA or even local militias entered. And all that when one group was opposed by the locals and the other group wasn't....What you pursue is not "niggardly" in any shape or form, it is what other editors should be emulating... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 12:56, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia's BLP policy expressly prohibits making unsourced negative comments about living people. This policy applies on every page of the project, with no exceptions. The policy also states that 'Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons—whether the material is negative, positive, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion.' - I have accordingly removed a Talk page comment of yours which describes a living person as an "agitprop operator".(note 1) Please don't do it again. Canadian Monkey ( talk) 00:16, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
(1)For the record, one of thirty odd quotes from MB which lie behind my remark that he is an agitprop operator:
'The majority (of Arabs), like the thousands of Palestinians who demonstrated in the Palestinian Authority, share bin Laden’s world view.' Mitchell Bard, ‘The Myth of ‘Peaceful’ Islam’
MB can wave his apocalyptic demonizations of an occupied people, to justify the landgrab, as he wishes. People who dismiss their human rights with this sort of cant should be disqualified as sources for I/P articles. They wear their agitprop ranting on their sleeves, and have no credibility as informed and judicious students of the Middle East. Nishidani ( talk) 10:43, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
I share your sentiments Nishidani. Although I used more florid language at home when I saw the standard of RS used for rebuttal. You write so much more elegantly than I do... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 19:52, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Know the source, know of the raid...There are more holes in the Israeli argument than you could shake a stick at...I will be returning to the subject at some time in the future I can only do one set of unsubstantiated unreferenced pieces of work at a time..And each year there are more books coming out especially since Palestine is being written about by Palestinian historians...no longer do Israeli historian have a monopoly on the topic..... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 20:36, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Morris is clear about Lebanon's involvement in his new book 1948: "But at the last moment, Lebanon - despite Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh's fiery rhetoric - opted out of the invasion. On 14 May, President Bishara Khouri and his army chief of staff, General Fuad Shihab (both Maronite Christians), decided against Lebanese participation; Colonel Adel Shihab, commander of the army's First Regiment (battalion), designated to cross into Israel, apparently refused to march. The Lebanese parliament, after bitter debate, ratified the decision the same day." (Morris, Benny, (2008) 1948: A Hisory of the First Arab-Israeli War. London: Yale University Press, p. 258.) Morris also confirms that the Palmah crossed into Lebanon on the night of 28/29 May, i.e, before the Lebanese army attacked al-Malikiya on 5-6 June. Ian Pitchford ( talk) 22:13, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
From Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Evidence
I find User:Jayjg’s use of the rule book completely erratic, except if one reads it as a strategy for excising unwelcome material, and including material he likes, according to his personal impression of what is good or bad for Israel’s image. There is no attempt at cogency of interpretation, or coherence of application, or respect for encyclopedicity. I have numerous memories of the bewildering volte-faces in his method. But this will have to do to illustrate the principle, and the perplexity of colleagues. If asked, I could provide several other instances of this strategic rule-bending.
At Israeli Settlement, he removed a quotation by a distinguished academic Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books ( WP:RS on two counts) reviewing a book acclaimed by a senior editor at Slate as one of the best books of the year (2007), written by a front-ranking world expert on Indian and Dravidian languages, an Israeli professor, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, with a professional interest also in Islam in India, with years as a peace activist on the West Bank, namely David Shulman, whose study of settlers on the West Bank was published by the University of Chicago Press, He then proceded to challenge it, saying who's Shulman? His book's just one of any number of sources, and nothing to do with human rights in the territories, when this happens to be the theme of the book, stressed by the reviewer. He never checked. He just bracketed ‘David Shulman’ and found there was no wiki article on him at the time (since changed), concluded he was non-notable, and just a nondescript ‘peace activist’. No amount of intensive elucidation 1, 2 3 4 of who Avishai Margalit is, who Shulman is, why the University of Chicago Press, the New York Review of Books were guarantors of the high quality of the source, or why the claim is not exceptional would make him change his mind or moderate his refusal. Informed of who Shulman was, he dismissed him, despite his field experience on the West Bank and expertise in Arabic, because as an expert in Tamil, he could not be quoted for on settler psychology, his judgement was an ‘extraordinary claim’ requiring an extraordinary source and thus ‘This lengthy, pejorative quote from a non-expert is about as blatant a violation of WP:V and WP:UNDUE as I’ve seen in a long time. ‘ He just kept reiterating a scholar of Tamil is not a reliable source on Israeli settler psychology All of which is interesting, but ignores the fact I was not quoting Shulman, but one of Israel’s most distinguished professors of philosopher, Avishai Margalit, in the NYRB, who confirms Shulman’s analysis by drawing on his own experience, and the view of other distinguished Israeli sources, with the group of settlers about whom, according to Jayjg, Shulman the student of Tamil (actually a dozen Indian languages) is writing about. He concludes by twisting my remarks about ‘bad faith’ in editors removing this material by saying that I am admitting that this is how I myself edit Wikipedia. He commends me for this ‘confession’ and ‘based on your new self-awareness, request that you desist from doing so in the future’. The argument ran to three archives. Several days later, I complain of his lack of response, and point out a glaring contradiction in his attitude to sources.
On the Israel Shahak page, which Jayjg has monitored with hostile eyes, and edited with malicious joy since its virtual inception five years ago, and cannot be written because of his wikilawyering, we have a rack of smears, most of which are extraordinary claims about Shahak, a Chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who wrote several books on Jewish fundamentalism, from the perspective of a Popperian secularist. Jayjg dislikes the man and his works intensely. He defends quotes from Werner Cohn, a retired sociologist with no knowledge of rabbinical thought, about Shahak’s putative anti-Semitism. Shulman, the linguist fluent in Hebrew and Arabic cannot be cited, even through a prestigious tertiary source (Margalit) on settler psychology, though he has worked in the West Bank on these conflicts for years as a notable peace activist. It’s just an extraordinary smear by a nondescript student of Tamil. Werner Cohn, though unfamiliar with rabbinical thought and from an unrelated academic field, can be cited for reviewing Shahak’s analysis of rabbinical Judaism. The point is underlined by G-Dett in her familiar, eloquently acerbic comment. Jayjg's commitment to WP:RS is such that at the same time he was holding the Shulman quote hostage from Israeli Settlement, he was pasting a quote from an execrably poor agenda-driven source, FrontPage Magazine to the Shahak article, not from a psychologist or expert on philosophy, or Shahak, or rabbinical thought, saying that Shahak was ‘a disturbed mind who made a career out of recycling Nazi propaganda about Jews and Judaism’, which is a lie. G-Dett points out the contradiction in method, taking place, note, contemporaneously (Febr 2008) while he worked on two different articles.
According to Jay, you need a PhD in psychology in order to say something general about society's "violent, sociopathic elements," or something specific about "destructive individuals" in the Israeli settlement enterprise – even if the source is a highly acclaimed book put out by University of Chicago Press. But to diagnose a celebrated writer and critic of Israel as having a "disturbed mind," all you need to be is some gasbag interviewed by David Horowitz's online tabloid. "The material seems well and reliably enough sourced," Jay assures us.
This is the way he works in the I/P area. Poor sources are RS if the person smeared is a critic of Israel. High quality sources are rejected by endless wikilawyering if they are critical of Israel. I have no intention of citing him for suspension. But someone up there should address this extremely erratic gaming behaviour with some strong words in his direction.
Robert L.Pollock, A Dialogue With Lebanon's Ayatollah, Wall Street Journal, 14/03/2009
Thank you very much for your kind words about me, Nishidani. I truly appreciate them, and I hope to be able to continue to be viewed as both scrupulous and fair by those with whom I interact. Forgive me for dropping a link to the meta page on your user page here, but as you do not have a linked account, that was necessary to make your vote eligible. I am sorry that you feel the need to remove yourself from the project; we need more intelligent, well-spoken, level-headed, open-to-compromise editors who are able to work with people with differing opinions, not fewer. But the frustration that comes from trying to be the voice of reason in a sea of cacophonous dissension is all to real and overwhelming at times. Thank you again! -- Avi ( talk) 20:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
I have started a Request for Arbitration regarding the use of northern/southern West Bank vs. Judea and Samaria. Since you have been involved in this debate, I have included you in the request.
Cheers, pedrito - talk - 25.02.2009 09:31
An Arbitration case involving you has been opened, and is located here. Please add any evidence you may wish the Arbitrators to consider to the evidence sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Evidence. Please submit your evidence within one week, if possible. You may also contribute to the case on the workshop sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Workshop.
On behalf of the Arbitration Committee, Tznkai ( talk) 04:51, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Mayhap a statistical analysis of the amount of words used to put a minority perspective forward would be useful? Along the lines of:
just to have a look for any undue weight that may be within the article?
PS thanks for the BtS link; I'm not sure where best to place it... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 16:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view.
Henry Siegman... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 14:29, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
there are just some references that are too good not to include: ( Hebrew: הגדה המערבית, HaGadah HaMa'aravit)Dishon (1973) Dishon Record 1968 Published by Shiloah Institute (later the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies) ISBN 0470216115 p 441
Hello,
I gathered the information I had
here.
So, Lebanon would not have participated at all... Soldiers would have been allowed to "leave" the army and fight with the ALA or the Syrians and 300 Muslim volunteers would have been taken the opportuny...
Ceedjee (
talk)
07:40, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
L'historiographie traditionnelle prend en compte les 3000 hommes des forces libanaises dans les armées arabes. Benny Morris parle quant à lui d'une « poignée » d'hommes.Dans les faits, quelques jours avant l'entrée des forces arabes en Palestine, les Libanais annoncent qu'ils ne participeront pas aux opérations ce qui oblige les Syriens et les Irakiens à revoir leurs plans[39]. Ben Gourion aurait obtenu en juin 1947 du gouvernement maronite libanais de ne pas intervenir dans les combats pour quelques milliers de livres[40] et certains chiites libanais auraient émis des réserves quant à une intervention[39]. L'armée libanaise se déploie le long de la route côtière, côté libanais et les commandants chrétiens autorisent 300 volontaires à rejoindre l'Armée de libération arabe ou les Syriens[39]
I've had the same problem in finding a reliable map of the area, but will continue looking. I have Hughes' chapter, but will follow up the Barak and Ma’ayan material, which I haven't seen at all. BTW if you wrote the splendidly articulate essay on appropriative naming above you should turn it into an article. Ian Pitchford ( talk) 08:43, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
But there is an alternative...I do believe that during the early camp David discussions it was resolved by a hand shake...The Palestinians would stop using the term Occupied Palestinian Territory and the Israeli delegation would stop referring to Judea and Samaria...The two terms are in effect the opposite and equivalent...to have NPOV West Bank is the preferred neutral term but if Judea and Samaria is used then Occupied Palestinian Territory must also be used as Judea and Samaria (Occupied Palestinian Territory) so that the two terms are then seen as synonymous and equal...I sure a bot could go round including the (Occupied Palestinian Territory) at the relevant points...
Ashley kennedy3 (
talk)
11:42, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
look at this. I have been wiping tears from my eyes over this one (laughing not crying). Some of the excuses for removing material are lame but this takes the biscuit. Removed for being accurate and well sourced, so it doesn't belong in the Israel-Palestine conflict article. is the rest of the article of such poor quality that accurate referenced work stands out?..this one is too good to keep to myself...I haven't enjoyed myself as much since someone challenged the fact that the Gaza port in Rimal being in Rimal... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 17:57, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
You are absolutely right, as you were when you pointed out that Judaization also affects seculars in the city. Do you have some sources I can access discussing those issues? I think they would make a valuable addition to the article. Hope you are doing well my friend and thanks for your input. Tiamut talk 17:48, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
So sorry for my late reply ya sayyed Nishidani. Thanks for the congrats. And nonsense, I don't think your vote would have had a negative affect on the turnout. Keep up your good work in quality edits! Admin or not, WP Palestine is a priority, so I'll continue to contribute. I might not be as active as usual for the next week though (Spring break here in Florida!). Regards, -- Al Ameer son ( talk) 19:29, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
’Reading nationalist texts is a lesson in the power of silence.’ [1]
'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.' [2]
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.. .' [3]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
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.’ [5]
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’ [6]. 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. [7]. 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.' [8]
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 [9]). 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. Under these pressures, in ther words of Saul Cohen and Nurit Kliot,
Place names are intrinsic compents of political landscape, and their study should be an important part of political geography.’ [10]
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.” [11]
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’ [12], 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, though there is a fascinating inverse relation between the two in the case of Israel. The Jews of the diaspora assimilate to another nation’s history, accepting fully their country’s historical nomenclature and cultural self-definitions. The Jews who perform aliyah or who are raised in Israel, find themselves part of a process of radical toponymic and cultural-engineering to re-establish an ancient identity between people and land which cannot but involve the dispossession, cultural and linguistic of the former linguistic and cultural majority of Palestine.
Julie Marie Peteet describes the typical form this process takes
colonialism typically generates a set of terms and discourses to describe conquered lands as uninhabited, virgin territory, terra nullius, uncharted and undiscovered territory, the frontier, wasteland, wilderness, untamed and unoccupied, regardless of the presence, often extensive and hardly unnoticed, of the indigenous population. Inhabitants of these colonised or subjugated areas have been referred to as savages, heathens, barbarians or primitives; more recently they are ‘terrorists’.’ [13]
For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’ [14]
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.’ [15]
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 [16], 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. [17]
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. [18]
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. [19]
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. [20]. 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.
The toponymic shifts that have taken place in Palestine over the last century are particularly instructive for analysing the relations of naming conventions and the struggle for cultural and strategic power. As Julie Peteet writes, speaking of the way terminological fluxes are part of the historical process of power, and mastery of the lexicon constitutes ‘moral worlds and the humanity of participants and thus, ultimately, the distribution of rights,’
’Contests over names in the Palestine-Israel conflict, in which two parties are vastly disparate in terms of weaponry, support from the USA, the prevalence and circulation of narrative and voice in the West, and institutional infrastructure are certainly an example of this and thus changes in naming should be traced along the lines of power.’ [21]
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'. [22]. As early as 1920 two Zionists [23] 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:-
In the project of Jewish colonization as understood by its promotors, ‘(b)etween a Jewish presence in the biblical era and modern Zionism, Palestine was conceptualized as a wasteland.’ [25]'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.' [24]
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 Wikipedia 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 [26] 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.
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.' [27], a process that Benvenisti himself describes as equivalent to ‘an act of war’ on Palestine’s heritage. [28] 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. [29]
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.” [30]<
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. [31]
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’ [32]
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. In Peteet’s words, ‘(n)aming a place functions as a public claim.’ [33]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 [34] 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 ’ [35]
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) [36]. 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.
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.’ [37]
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. [38]
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 [39] 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. [40] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power [41]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, reviving an old Haganah project elaborated before the state of Israeli was achieved, [42]pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’ as part of a symbolic strategy for territorial annexation. [43] 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. [44] [45] [46] Notably, the government's imposing of these terms, very much Likud-specific terminology, [47] 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. [48]
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. In January 1990, the American press reported in the official Middle East maps of the United States, published by the State Department and the CIA, the term “West Bank” was recently replaced with “Judea and Samaria.” The maps also indicated the cease-fire lines between Israel and Jordan, whereas previously the disputed territories were marked as belonging to Jordan.’ [49]
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.' [50]
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.’ [51]
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’. [52]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, to create, as the metaphor ran, an Israeli cheese pitted with a few Palestinian holes, over the West Bank [53] as 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 unprovoked [54] invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state [55] 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 [56]. 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. [57] 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. [58]
Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, 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 [59] 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' [60] 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. Technically therefore in the varnished rhetorical lexicon of possession and dispossession, there is no room for language that might betray the nature of this carpetbagging. Much of the international media obliges, calling areas in the West Bank around Jerusalem, like Gilo, ‘neighbourhoods’. In May 2002 it was reported [61] that the Israeli media had been prohibited from using the euphemisms of ‘settler’ and ‘settlement’ themselves for areas built up and occupied on Palestinian territory. [62] By successively pressuring the media to redefine the settlers themselves as ‘Israelis’, i.e., ‘non-military personnel’ and citizens of Israel, people who are properly colonists on foreign land expropriated under conditions of military occupation and martial law, Israel manages to interpret any act of resistance against the colonists, which might otherwise be construed frequently as legitimate according to the Genevan conventions, as tantamount to an act of terrorism against Israel and Israelis. Likewise, Israel’s asserted right to preemptive self-defence by murdering Palestinians its security organs believe pose a threat to Israeli interests, in Israel or the occupied territorie, is no longer ‘assassination’ or ‘murder’, but a ‘targeted killing’, a military euphemism which is apparently de rigueur for prestigious foreign news agencies like the BBC. [63]
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. [64]. Julie Peteet argues that the now current term in Western sources for this area, which still remains under Muslim administration, namely the ‘Temple Mount’, is of relatively recent usage, whereas the term described as the year of ‘independence’ by the former, and of ‘catastrophe’ (Haram al-Sherif was been standard in the disciplines of art history and history generally. [65] If so, this would be another example of recent Israeli usage prevailing even in Western sources, over the traditional topological conventions.
This goes right through several spheres of discourse, from the language of historical description for the area, which is split into two distinct and mutually exclusive idiolects [66] 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), [67], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
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). [68] [69]
As for the Palestinians, driven into a life as refugees by the Jewish desire to end their millennial exile ( Galut) through the establishment of a national homeland in Palestine, their only recourse in the experience of diaspora imposed on them has been to retain the topological memories of their former world, and reinscribe them on the camps where they are compelled to eke out their new ‘lives’. Thus we find in Lebanese territory allotted for them, that the Galilean landscape of their forefathers is reproduced, toponymically and spatially. Thus Bourj el-Barajneh consists of a ‘spatial array of a number of northern villages in six named areas: Kuwaykat, Tarshisha, Al-Kabri, Sheikh Daoud, Al-Ghabisiyya and al-Chaab’ and Ain al-Hilweh has quarters named for the villages of Saffuriyya, ’Amqa , Loubia and Bassa/al-Zeeb. This and the process of naming children after the toponyms of ancestral villages in their homeland is one strategy for resisting the intense discursive pressure within Zionist sources to treat the indigenous Palestinian ethnos as ‘Arabs’, by which it is intended to forge an impression that the Palestinian people Israel drove out or still displaces from its ethnic state only have a non-national identity, which fits them for assimilation within the vast ‘Arab’ world where power-politics and fate has consigned them. Defined as ‘Arabs’, they are no longer ‘native’ to the area, while the immigrant David Gruens (David Ben-Gurion), in taking on eminently Hebrew names, are nativized. [70]
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [71]
'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.' [72]
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.
In a tiff over the editing of Susya, I reverted Ynhockey for eliding information he thought poorly sourced (from Counterpunch, though the authors are all notable scholars with a published record for studying settlements on the West Bank) concerning the Palestinian origins of that town. His response was to upload a map onto the Susya page (30/03/2009). Though his map image gives Susya as south of Hebron and, without words, within the boundaries of what an attentive reader knows to be the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, as one runs the cursor over the map, a pop-up suggests to us the falsehood that 'Susya is located in Israel'. If one clicks on the map for details, again, one finds the pushpin map he created described as 'Southern West Bank ( Judea region)'. Whether the pop-up comes from him, or, as Nableezy now tells me, is a collateral effect from the Susya web-site (?) I cannot judge. But User:Ynhockey's practice on wiki, where his cartographic gifts are acknowledged, is ambiguous. His maps are so drawn, or glossed on the Wiki Commons page that at times a false impression, or subliminal message, is conveyed to Wiki browsers. In Karameh, certainly, the occupied areas are in Israel. In Susya, the pop-up effect, whoever is responsible, should have been removed. Nishidani ( talk) 08:54, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Interesting reading the above is. Perhaps essay like User:Ravpapa/Tilt write you should. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:26, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
The above, interesting reading is. You User:Ravpapa/Tilt like Essay write should perhaps.
I am not sure your accusation of Ynhockney putting that caption on the image is correct, it looks like the description is just generated by using the infobox_kibbutz class. Nableezy ( talk) 10:06, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
I too was looking at Susya today and thought how inappropriate to have an Israeli coloured village banner on the village article before they've evicted the last Palestinian....as to the other, you know me take the bull by the horns and worry about the blood loss later... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 21:27, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm in agreement with what you said about Jayjg, so if you feel that it would be useful for someone to back you up in your conversation with Malcolm Schosha, I'd be happy to do it. My opinion is that Jayjg interprets and applies the rules in an indiosyncratic, self-serving, biased and non-commonsensical manner. For starters, if he was unbiased and balanced, he wouldn't be at the heart of attempts to represent Judea and Samaria as neutral names for areas of the West Bank and, furthermore, ridiculously misrepresenting sources to try to justify doing so. Has anybody ever challenged Jayjg as to whether he is in effect a professional Wikipedia editor? If he is, I think that it is obvious that he shouldn't have access to the privileges which he does. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 23:47, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Your account is blocked for one week for
this edit. We do not allow taunting, teasing, attacking or harassing other editors (even when those editors blocked for 1 year) drama mongering and fanning the flames of disputes.
Jehochman
Talk
13:53, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Could I ask you for one final, of so many favours, Neil. I tried to archive this page, but cannot do so. Final irony, I can't even wipe myself without permission. Could you just, as I do, cut the text and paste it into my last archive (perhaps retitling it February-April 2009)? Thanks in anticipation, and apologies to one or two, Ian Pitchford in particular, for not now being in a position to finish that essay. Best wishes for the future Nishidani ( talk) 14:46, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Look, I can't fault you for wanting to leave, particularly under the circumstances here. But you have been a very valuable editor working without much respect in a very contentious field, and we definitely need as many decent editors in those areas as we can get. It would be a real loss to the effort here if you were to leave permanently. I would very sincerely ask you to reconsider. In any event, you have my thanks, and that of several others, for all you have done here. Hope to see you back soon. John Carter ( talk) 14:58, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
We'll miss your presence and work here on the 'pedia, Nishidani. For what its worth, which isn't much, I think the block was a serious overreaction - 1 week for that comment, with no history of blocks/warnings for the behavior cited in the block reason? Unfortunate that excessively punitive reactions, unevenly applied, take away some of our best editors but leave us with many of lesser worth. Avruch T 16:14, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Please see
here.
Avruch
T
19:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
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The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar | |
For your brave attempts to uphold scholarly standards in the Israel/Palestine-area of WP. Deep regards to Nishidani from Huldra ( talk) 16:38, 1 April 2009 (UTC) |
My name ain't Neil, but I did copy everything to the last archive, if you didn't want that let me know and will remove. With sincerity, peace and happiness Nishidani, Nableezy ( talk) 17:47, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Bishonen unblocked you. I hope we can see you back again very soon. John Carter ( talk) 21:57, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I would have posted earlier to save you all the trouble and embarrassment here. I didn't follow things, having watched Banderas's Take the Lead instead. Against instincts I feel I must drop a clarification in, to explain why Jehochman's reading, though wrong, is understandable, and to clear Ashley's mind of any sense of responsibility for what happened. He's only responsible for what happened to him.
(Or of course, you could apologize, and promise to pull your finger out, which is rather difficult for seppuku aficionados, since a preliminary requires the moriturus to stuff his rectum with a ball of cottonwool in order not to soil the scene)
I can understand why Jehochman should take exception to this. He did not rule on my remonstration, but only on this specific addition.
As soon as I had posted, I realized that I had neglected to suggest to Ashley that he apologize. Since I'd used (he being a military man) the example of seppuku to remonstrate with him, and since we have always spoken to each other straight from the shoulder I thought I'd tell him to pull his 'finger out'.(there's a cultural difference here: people of our background speak like that, 'rough as bags' even to express affection. It does shock outsiders to the Irish/English world, esp. Americans).
I still had Mishima's death in mind, but, I suppose I should add, a private memory influenced me while telling him to extract the digit. The last man (to my knowledge) who actually managed to execute himself in the classic style, (in a manner so ritually flawless his brother, of an old samurai family, only came to the morgue to see whether his younger brother had done things correctly), that man was a friend of mine. At the scene of his death, the forensic police were amazed he had not, as should have been the case, soiled himself, until they were informed about the ritual cotton wool. I thought the joke about the cotton wool (that word itself has comically rude undertones in cockney slang) would make Ashley laugh enough to take my berating words of admonition to heart: humour, in remonstration, shaves off any misunderstanding of ill-will in otherwise harsh language, as anyone raised on the streets, or in close tribal families knows.(That particular memory of my friend's suicide, for me, evokes only melancholy however, but had this not caused a fuss, no one should have known about this).
So Jehochman's misreading is understandable. I feel some considerable blame for what happened,though not in the least for what I wrote, except for some slipshod or subpar grammar. I tried to avoid the forseeable drama by twice wiping the page of comments. I wouldn't have written this at all, since I intended just to drop a note to Avruch's page to apologize to him for any carelessness on my part, and express my gratitude for his exquisitely gentlemanly manner, but have found myself blocked for another day.
I'll otherwise stay off for the week Jehochman thought proper. On things like this, full consensus is, in my book, necessary, and if there is any equivocation remaining, any shade of suspicion I was misbehaving, I've no problem sitting the full sanction out. best wishes to my fellow wikipedians, to John Carter and the others, whatever I decide. Cheers Nishidani ( talk) 23:01, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
While you may be a pompous prick, I do not think it is pomposity or vanity that led to the oversight that another user had already added Huldra's barnstar to your collection. You will see that you have the same barnstar twice now (3rd to last and last). Glad to see you plan on staying, and sorry to muddy the waters of your analysis, Nableezy ( talk) 20:14, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Nishidani,
I'd hate to be rude but you're being a huge disruption. No one was mentioning either the American revolution or the supposed huge difference between "militant" and "militia". Please let it go.
With respect,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
16:37, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
You aint got nothing to learn from me. But thank you very much, Nableezy ( talk) 18:30, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Your comments on the talk page of the J/S case are very much appreciated. -- Avi ( talk) 14:49, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Sigh, I've clearly failed in all I've been trying to do here ....-- Nickhh ( talk) 16:27, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
There is some information there that you might find useful. In any event your comments are welcome. harlan ( talk) 12:56, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
Otherwise, nothing will get done. There is so much to write about it. I mean can you even believe that until yesterday there was no such article on Lydda Death March, which had a higher death toll than the Deir Yassin massacre? (Another page in dire need of some good editing). Someone's got to do it. It's sure as hell gonna be me if I have any say in the matter. I'm not about to let the history of things be written the way they were at Lod, before I started tackling it today. Tiamut talk 19:13, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
Hello my friend :),
Je suis bien entendu d'accord avec tout ce que tu as écrit sur la page de discussion. Je voudrais juste commenter ceci : "by such a mass of people forced onto a march under guard by a hostile enemy that was obliged by the Geneva Conventions to supply water, then of course it was, objectively, a 'death march'."
Les Israéliens les ont menés à 2 km (1/2 heure) de Latroun. Ils sont morts de soif sur le chemin de Ramallah (2-3 jours). Je crains fort que les responsables de ne pas leur avoir fourni nourriture et eau ainsi que le soutien minimum (tranports des enfants) sont les hommes de la Légion arabe... Même si le crime reste dans le chef des Israéliens qui ont expulsés plus de 50,000 personnes (après un massacre), personne n'est innocent dans l'histoire.
Ceedjee (
talk)
15:51, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
Cnaan Liphshiz,Wikipedia editors: Coverage of Israel 'problematic', Haaretz 04/05/2009 Nishidani ( talk) 12:30, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
It turns out that the following elements are problematic for coverage of 'Israel-related issues', according to one editor here, Eli Hacohen, director of Tel Aviv University's Netvision Institute for Internet Studies.
What is curious here is the assumption (apart from the errors of fact, Irving was regarded as an accomplished historian by his peers for his early works: the Gaza Strip was the object of intense bombardment, not civilians etc.) that in writing on Hamas ( Lebanon), or David Irving, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), or Gaza ('Palestine'), a required perspective is one that takes these issues as 'Israeli-related' coverage. Is writing on Saddam Hussein, Noam Chomsky, or Cuba or Trail of Tears of the Cherokee ever interpreted by anyone as 'America-related coverage'? Nishidani ( talk) 13:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
Hello,
Could you have a look at my additions
here. I try to paraphrase the info you gave me from Laurens (excellent source) but it is hard for me. To equilibrate everything; I also introduce info about Deir Yassin. Thank you !
Ceedjee (
talk)
11:42, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
Dear Nishidani, First, may I ask you to email me? It is about a total non-Wikipedia matter. If you want, I can post my email here.
Secondly: I am very sorry to see that you will now apparently be topic-banned from the I/P area; I will greatly miss yours (and G-Detts) comments about matters. However; I´m very happy that you are now editing the Dogon-people, absolutely fascinating, aren´t they? I actually edited a bit there when I arrived on WP back in 2005; before I got caught up in I/P affairs. I really love their art/architecture; & I hope to go there one day.
Anyway, take care, Huldra ( talk) 20:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
PS: BTW, the claim here that "Jerusalem Post has never faced mainstream accusations of lying" is as wrong as it can be. Only 6-7 weeks ago the "Jerusalem Post" claimed on their web-site that Norways Minister of Finance (and leader of the Socialist Party), Kristin Halvorsen, had shouted "death over the Jews" in an demonstration earlier this year. They had to withdraw the allegations (which caused an absolute outrage in Norway), as their only "source" turned out to be a convicted fraudster who goes under the alias of "David Weiss." It is discussed here (and many, many other places):
(And Aftenposten is about as mainstream as you can get in Norway. Lots of other media discussed it too.)
I think people here was absolutely astounded by the total ignorance shown by the "Jerusalem Post." Needless to say; any politician in Scandinavia who start saying/shouting "Death to the Jews" will be completely ostracized here in about 1/2 second. To think that any half-educated or semi-intelligent being can fall for such a fraud is, to me, and to other people here in Scandinavia, completely incredible, and I am afraid it left us with no great admiration for "Jerusalem Post". Cheers, Huldra ( talk) 21:13, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
'Pro-Israel'
'Pro-Palestinian/independent'
Anyone is welcome to add to this list, for sockpuppets on either side, active over the past few years, or now and in the future. A proper analysis would list the number of editors on the other side each sock has managed to harass to the point of having him sanctioned, as notoriously, Tundrabuggy succeeded, despite being to the eyes of all a patent sock, in almost getting User:ChrisO banned. Nishidani ( talk) 14:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | → | Archive 15 |
Please
do not attack other editors. If you continue, you will be
blocked from editing Wikipedia. Your personal attacks, such as
this, against Jaakobou, are unacceptable. Even if you honestly believe the statement, which I don't consider supported by the evidence, it's inappropriate. —
Arthur Rubin
(talk)
16:54, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
The Arab world, Islam inspired cultural structure is the main cause of the Arab-Palestinian 91 year racist terror campaign against the Jewish-Palestinians
Unlike others here, nobody has asked me to involve myself, but I want to intercede because the way that Nishidani is being treated makes me feel deeply uneasy. If somebody makes a claim for themselves, I think that it is entirely justified to quote their own earlier remarks back at them if they show that the claim is untrue, particularly if the claim is made on the Administration Enforcement page. The quoted remark may have been retracted, but it was retracted because it breached Wikipedia rules rather than because the remarker thought the remark was untrue. The claim that Nishidani called Jaakobou a racist is absurd and I think that Nishidani is owed an apology rather than the other way round. To give only Nishidani (and PalestineRemembered, I think) a warning for a comment that was nowhere near the worst of what might be construed as personal attacks in a section of the Administration Enforcement page where they were flying thick and fast looks like victimisation. "No matter how right we are, we should always avoid causing offence." Really? Since, then, it looks as though Nishidani was offended by being given a warning, by being told that he had called someone a racist and, possibly, by being told that his reactions came across as childishness, does that mean that all those things shouldn't have been done or said? -- ZScarpia ( talk) 20:46, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
Speaker A (1):'The Arab world, Islam inspired cultural structure is the main cause of the Arab-Palestinian 91 year racist terror campaign against the Jewish-Palestinians,'
Speaker A (2)'I have absolutely nothing against Muslims and/or Arabs'
Speaker B. 'Statement (2) is contradicted by Statement (1).'
Administrator C. 'To remind speaker A of the contradiction between his two statements constitutes a personal attack on A. Repeat a notification of this contradiction to A and you will be punished.'
Speaker B. 'Let me contextualize. Speaker A made his first comment in the presence of an Arab (D). He made his second comment when D later complained of harassment by A, whose first statement implicitly defined that Arab's world as one whose culture is characterised historically by terrorism and racism against Jews. It was therefore an attack on D as hailing from a civilisation that is structured by antisemitism and terrorism.'
Administrator C 'It appears that you are directly accusing A of racism.'
Speaker B. 'No, I am reminding A that he accused D of racism.'
Administrators C, E, F. 'Forget about D. In reminding A of his attack on D, you are attacking A, and some of us think you are accusing A of racism and terrorism. What is important here is what we consider to be an attack by you on A, not the fact that A attacked D as heir to a racist terroristic culture, and then prevaricated when the two clashed again.'
Speaker B.'To remind a person of what he said is not an attack.'
Administrators (apparently). 'Four of us think you, in that diff, are accusing A of belonging to an Israeli world, Judaism-inspired cultural structure which you think is the main cause of the Israeli-Jewish 91 year racist terror campaign against the Palestinians.'
At this point B is forced to retire. The possibilities are three. Either (a) he is an idiot, (b) administrators can't read English, though they write it, or (c) ethnic sympathies and subtextual politics trump logic. Whatever, this is too eerily reminiscent of
Harold Pinter's dialogues in his comedies of menace, and he has no intention of playing the eternal role of a whingeing victim against a cast of people unable to construe a simple piece of English, or understand the elementary forms of the syllogism, especially when such people exercise administrative functions. Alternatively, he may indeed be an idiot, in which case his aspirations to contribute to wikipedia are misplaced and rightly blocked by administrative consensus.
Nishidani (
talk)
11:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
'more or less; I don't see (1) as being identical to what J said.'
Above I gave the historical background. I should conclude with the logical reasoning for my remark, which you construe as an attack.
This remark, as was the 'clarification' on the AN/I thread, was addressed to, among others, Tiamut.
Tiamut is (a) Palestinian, (b) she is an Arab, (c) she is a heir to Islamic civilization (Arabic mother-language and culture, as opposed to faith) (d) Jaakobou’s interlocutor at the time these remarks were made(e) She is critical of the Zionist construction of the history of Palestine and Israel, a construction Jaakobou edits to defend.
From these contextual elements I simply remarked, when Jaakobou said he had absolutely nothing against Muslims and/or Arabs, that to the contrary,
‘your (original) outburst proves you think Tiamut is heir to a terrorist and racist culture is obvious.’
In propositional terms.
My inference was that, contextually, Jaakobou did imply by his remark, and later clarification, that he took Tiamut’s views as corroborating his perception that Palestinians/Arabs, of which she is one, are victims/heirs of a terrorist/racist culture.
That may be disputed as an incorrect inference. It cannot be construed as a personal attack, since it is simply a perfectly legitimate construal of Jaakobou’s own stated views, within the specific contexts (conflict with Tiamut over I/P articles) where they were expressed. To warn one here is to establish a precedent for challenging perfectly legitimate inferences from explicit statements made by a party, as an attack on that party. Nishidani ( talk) 12:35, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
I was troubled that you beleive that Israel has turned Gaza into a concerntration camp. You find two interesting similarites: "since no one can get in, or out, and all have been on starvation rations." Yet this does not automatically designate a place a Concerntration Camp. You could maybe call it a POW camp. When the Israelis start sending the children, women and the infirm off to the left, then we can start comparing. Chesdovi ( talk) 01:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
Your "found an accomplice or willing executioner" in reference to Israel
[1] is a grotesque soapbox and more fitting for an antisemitic Iranian holocaust denying blogger than a Wikipedia editor. Please avoid calling Israeli self-defense a "willing executioner" in the future.
Cordially,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
12:03, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
'the enginer(is)Hoist with his own petar
I think this "warning" is an extreme overreaction to his comment, which itself was an unnecessary reply to a comment that should not have been made. Neither of you really need to be reminded, but just in case - article talkpages are for discussing ways to improve the article. Debating your biases, or lack thereof, has no place here. Debating the subject itself, and not the article, has no place here. If you aren't able to hold to this and still converse with each other, then you should refrain from interacting anymore than absolutely necessary - that includes correcting inflammatory and wrong remarks that are unrelated to improving an article. Both of you know better, and Jaakobou -using words like grotesque and obscene to describe the comments of others, particularly (in my opinion) Nishidani, is completely unacceptable. Avruch T 23:35, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
2 Notes to self. Everytime I hear Hamas quoted on the 'desire for death', I will now recall (a) the graffiti scribbled by occupying soldiers on the walls of a house near the Samouni's home, where some 48 died.
(a)'Inside and outside the home, graffiti had been daubed in Hebrew and English, with slogans including Arabs need to die, "Arabs: 1948 to 2009" and "Make war, not peace".' Cited Rory McCarthy, ‘Inside Gaza: Israeli troops have vanished but the damage is plain to see,’ The Guardian, 19/01/2009
and (b) 'On Monday, on one of the walls of the house that became the IDF position from which soldiers shot the two brothers who died at their father's side, we found two inscriptions in Hebrew: "The Jewish people lives" and "Kahane was right," referring to right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.' Amira Hass, 'Life in Gaza is not 'back to normal' Haaretz, 28/01/2009
and (c)'Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer'. Yigal Bronner, Neve Gordon, 'Fueling the Cycle of Hate,' Counterpunch January 27, 2009
Happy new year, Nishidani. It's been a little while; I hope things have been going well for you. Looking at your talk page it would seem that you are fighting a little war. I must respect your vigor in the face of questionable opposition.
The Israeli / Palestinian situation of late certainly is tragic. Other than following the news, I regret that I am not versed enough to make any useful contributions, though. Once upon a time you used to make extremely valuable contributions to Japan-related topics. If you feel like taking a break from the status-quo, let me renew that invitation. You're always welcome. Best wishes, Bendono ( talk) 12:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I thought you might be interested. -- J.Mundo ( talk) 21:57, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello, would you mind taking a look at the lead I proposed at [2]; I would like to get this to the point that there cannot be any possible contention with any of it, and JGGardiner makes some interesting points. Thanks (and much respect for everything I have seen you write), Nableezy ( talk) 20:59, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
Hi. Thanks and I did see your compliment on the article talk so thanks for that also. I appreciate your work on the talk page also. It feels funny sometimes patting ourselves on the back for merely being a little reasonable. But somehow that deserves it around here.
Don't feel bad, I think that Nableezy agrees with Cerejota as well. And I do also really. But I think one can agree with Cerejota's point and support our version as well. The "intensified" part of the paragraph really had nothing to do with the version we created. We were just incorporating what was already there. It was more about modifying the third sentence and adding the fourth.
I don't feel bad either. I always say what I think on the talk page. We only started working together because Nableezy was good enough to react to my concerns. If he wasn't involved in the page my comments have just ended up in the ether. Like most of my comments do.
The only really upsetting thing is that someone keeps adding that picture of the Pears soap with the "get out of the soap box" caption. You stand on a soap box, not in it! -- JGGardiner ( talk) 22:06, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
I guess the one thing I learned from this is that it is impossible to achieve an accurate, neutral wording by just trying to offer that accurate neutral wording. So many people are going to fight for their extreme that it almost necessitates going to the other extreme to get it back to what is neutral. That somebody even offered that 'option 2' as a neutral suggestion is beyond me. Whatever, I guess some people are so far gone out of reality that it won't matter at all what is actually real. Thanks for the help though, and best wishes. Nableezy ( talk) 22:36, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
Our penchant for asking too many inconvenient questions reveals our pathetically archaic insistence on belonging to "the reality-based community," as one top White House advisor famously put it to reporter Ron Suskind:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
-- Justin Raimondo (2005-03-11). "The Wonderful Wizard of Washington / If ever a Wiz there was -- our fantasy-based foreign policy".
For short: Godwin's law - That said, the problem with "fascism" as epithet is that when everything is fascism, then nothing is. -- Cerejota ( talk) 20:26, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
I just saw your contrib at my special page. Keep 'em coming. I just think we need to improve the MILHIST aspect. Thank you!-- Cerejota ( talk) 20:19, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
Hi Nishidani!
I was a bit surprised to come back from the week-end and see this. The lead, as it was, was written by User:Jacob2718 and myself ( here) and was, as far as I could tell, factual and unbiased. What are/were your objections?
The second paragraph, as it stands now, is only confusing and extremely diffuse. The compromise established a sequence of events: ceasefire, breach by Israel, non-renewal of truce by Hamas, Israeli attack. The text, at the time, was:
I realise somebody tweaked some of the formulations to make it sound nasty, but can we try to fix this up again?
As for the cease-fire fork, I just did a copy-paste job to get it out of the way. As soon as I have some time I'll un-fluff it.
Cheers and thanks, pedrito - talk - 19.01.2009 07:57
Let's see on the one hand an editor named Nishidani says Dr. Ledeen is a known liar and not a reliable source and therefore can not be cited as a source in Wikipedia. On the other hand, Dr Ledeen has been a senior Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for 20 years. He is also a contributing editor at National Review Online. He has served as a consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He has also served as a special adviser to the United States Secretary of State. He holds a Ph.D. in modern European history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rome. Furthermore, Dr. Ledeen provides links to his references in the cited article. And his thesis is supported by the Prime Minister of Israel himself. The Prime Minister said, "Iran, which strives for REGIONAL HEGEMONY, tried to replicate the methods used by Hizbullah in Lebanon IN THE GAZA STRIP as well. You are disrupting the Wikipedia project and could ultimately lose the privilege of editing Israel related articles. Please review WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:OR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict#Remedy_for_documented_.5BWP:POV.5D_violation Doright ( talk) 11:53, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
‘I was astonished that Ledeen would write something that the record of the past four years would so readily show to be false. . .Some years later it was revealed that during my years in Italy, Ledeen was under contract as a consultant to General Giuseppe Santovito, Italy’s chief of military intelligence, and that a great deal of Ledeen’s “information” about Billy Carter had come from SISME sources. Ledeen’s partner in the Billy Carter and other affairs was Francesco Pazienza, an influential SISME Adviser who was subsequently charged in Italy with extortion by violence, possession of cocaine, leaking state secrets, and criminal associations of a Mafia type. . .According to the Wall Street Journal, the indictment on which he was convicted read in part; “With the illicit support of the SISME and in collaboration with the well known ‘italianist’ Michael Ledeen, Pazienza succeeded in extorting, also using fraudulent means, information – then published with great evidence in the international press –on the Libyan business of Billy Carter, the brother of the then President of the United States’. After Reagan’s victory, Ledeen and Pazienza set themselves up as the preferred channel between Italian political leaders and members of the new administration. For these and other services, Ledeeen was eventually rewarded with a position as an assistant to President reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig.’ Richard N. Gardner, (with Zbigniew K. Brzezinski), Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005 p.291
for your comment. It was very thoughtful of you. Nableezy ( talk) 21:49, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I would begin by finishing the merger of 2008 Israel-Gaza conflict into 2007—2008 Israel-Gaza conflict and then working that article. There is also the rocket attack articles and 2008 Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Ultimately a fix up is to be given to Israeli-Palestinian conflict to reflect a more updated chronology. I think the article in The Economist about a 100 year war provides a recent RS framework for historical narrative, although for much of the older stuff there is plenty of scholarly sources.-- Cerejota ( talk) 12:27, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
Please discuss on Talk Background. High percentage of children in population and use of human shield are relevant points for background section and go hand in hand together and are relevant. AgadaUrbanit ( talk) 15:47, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
How do you deal with dumb people? You are obviously an extremely intelligent man, how do you deal with people who can't go beyond a 5 yr olds logic? Now this is obviously a question in general and in no way can be portrayed as construing that certain people are dumb.
Nableezy (
talk)
04:48, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
And I find your deconstruction of the phrase 'bogus nonsense' to be one of the finer things I have read on Wikipedia.
Nableezy (
talk)
04:49, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
Nishandi, I was referring to the post where you said, "Don't be so rude. Your time is no more valuable than my own. Were I as ill-mannered as you seem to be above . . ." I realize that calling someone rude and ill mannered (particularly when he has been somewhat rude and ill mannered) is not exactly be epic on the personal attack scale, but the discussion on the article has been remarkably civil for such a contentious topic, I was just trying to put the brakes on before things got out of hand. Blackeagle ( talk) 23:25, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed your present archive is approaching a reasonable size limit, so I've created a nice shiny new one for you (Archive 8), labelled "February 2009" above. I've re-labelled your existing archive "November 2008 - January 2009" above.
There's enough room for you to put all the "logorrhoea" above into the existing archive, if you want to; new stuff from February onwards should go in the new archive.
Hope this is OK with you. -- NSH001 ( talk) 00:43, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, if you were offended by "Middle East anecdote". Please consider I'm the part of that region AgadaUrbanit ( talk) 12:01, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Umm... here. Pardon my ignorance - what does "et idem indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus?" mean? To my shame, I never studied Latin. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 01:02, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
You probably already saw this but I thought it might make a nice addition to your reading list: Riz Khan, 'The Future of Gaza: An Interview with Jimmy Carter,' Counterpunch, January 29, 2009 Nableezy ( talk) 00:56, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Thought you might find
this page interesting.
Warm regards,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
23:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
On the business of Hussayni being jailed for 10 years by the British, I have a source that says no record of his trial has ever surfaced. Is it possible that there was no such trial, and Samuel simply announced he'd been amnestied, in order to "balance" the otherwise extraordinary release of the violent revolutionary? PR talk 09:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
On the business of Hussayni being jailed for 10 years by the British, I have a source that says no record of his trial has ever surfaced. Is it possible that there was no such trial, and Samuel simply announced he'd been amnestied, in order to "balance" the otherwise extraordinary release of the violent revolutionary? PRtalk 09:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
Quoi qu’il en soit, au bout de[s] 3 jours [suivant le vote par l’ONU de la résolution sur la partition], les correspondants de presse étrangers qui suivaient les manifestations et les grèves constatèrent (...) un désir évident de retour à la normale Mais le rapide retour à la normale et le souhait des Palestiniens de ne pas se laisser entraîner dans une guerre civile posaient problème [aux] dirigeants sionistes (...)"
'In general, by the end of 1947 the Palestinians had a healthy and demoralising respect for the Yishuv's military power. A Jewish intelligence source in October 1947 described the situation in the countryside:</blockquote
'The fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists . .who might bomb his village and destroy his property . .The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside . .the moderate majority . .are confused, frightened . .They are stockpiling provisions . .are are being coerced and pressured by extremists . .(but) all they want is peace.'Morris, 2004, p.32
Chapter title : "Le déchainement de la violence"
Le lendemain du vote par l’ONU de la résolution sur la partition, la Palestine fut balayée dès l’aube par un vent de violence, début de la guerre civile qui allait durer jusqu’au 15 mai 1948.
Comment. There is no contradiction between the two statements. For the first refers to what foreign correspondents regarded as a desire for normality and peace in the immediate aftermath of the resolution, from late Nov to early Dec., and Morris himself says that the majority wished for peace at that specific period. The second remark (p.76 of the first English edition) is somewhat hyperbolic in its metaphor, since what is referred to are two attacks on buses, a general strike for three days, and otherwise only 'sporadic' violence for a few weeks. Pappé's phrasing is belied by his own details, which is not a crime in narrative historians. But he does specify that the first attacks after the Resolution were made by Arabs. Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
Comment. This is a security report made two and a half months after the 'lendemain', (February)and refers to a report made in January. No one denies things precipitated from late December onwards. Pappéìs own book reflects precisely all the points made in the primary sources you give here (above and below)
‘The Arab attacks, which culminated in January 1948, were of such scope and force that they succeeded in shaking the confidence of the Jewish community, whose last experience of such a period of hostilities had been back in 1937. Israeli historians have called this period the ‘nadir of the Yishuv’ -summarizing the mood of the Jewish community in Palestine in those days. The actions against the settlements and the major routes certainly caught the Zionist leadership off its guard, and it had already misjudged the intensity and severity of the Arab reaction. The dismay and despair comes out very clearly from notes of the Mapai council meetings at the beginning of February 1948. Mapai members were particularly concerned about Jerusalem’s fate and blamed Ben Gurion, who was present at those meetings, for inadequately preparing the community for the struggle. The Arab siege of isolated Jewish settlements in the Negev was another sore point. Ben Gurion refused to describe the situation in dire terms and insisted, in this hindsight proved him right, that the local Arab effort in Palestine had failed.’ Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,, 1957-1951, I.B.Tauris, 1994, London p.78
Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
§ I.2 : "2. It is because of the extreme gravity of the situation in Palestine now, and the anticipated worsening of the conditions there
§ II.3 : "The representative of the Mandatory Power informed the Commission at its sixteenth meeting on January 1948, that as regards Arabs and Jews in Palestine "elements on each side were engaged in attaching or in taking reprisals indistinguishable from attacks", and that as a result, were it not "for the efforts of the security forces over the past month, the two communities would by now have been fully engaged in internecine slaughter"
§ II.5 : The documents reports 46 casualities (deaths) among British, 427 among Arabs and 327 among Jews... The [Palestinian] arabs were killed by the Jews... According to Pappé who killed the Jews?
"[En décembre, les dirigeants arabes], en particulier ceux des pays limitrophes de la Palestine préféraient ne pas prendre de décision individuelle ou radicale."
§I.3.C : "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."
§II.6 : " (...) The Subsequent communication of 6 February (...) from the representative of the Arab Higher Committee :
"b. The Arabs of Palestine consider that any attempt by the Jews or any power or group of powers to establish a Jewish State in Arab territory is an act of aggression which will be resisted in self-defense by force."
"g. The Arabs of Palestine made a solemn declaration before the United Nations, before God and history, that they will never submit or yield to any power going to Palestine to enforce partition. "The only way to establish partition is first to wipe them out – man women and child."
Referred it to WP:ANI - please add your comments. I can see no hope of making any headway with his stance. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 22:01, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
I keep having to look up words - things which I've heard or sometimes used, but haven't actually ever known the precise definition of! Argh! Brain hurts. Too... much... reading... middle-school-language-newspapers! :) GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 23:56, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
:Please review
this diff, and check positions on history. Time. Dates. Remove this message
GrizzledOldMan (
talk) 16:26, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Nope, not so irrelevant now - wikilawyering continues.
GrizzledOldMan (
talk)
11:45, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
No worries but thanks for the response. I see the article still has the 24 number but sourced with the Haaretz article that says 20. So you'd like to change it back to 20? I think that's what I'd do. At least until we can find a good source for a higher number. -- JGGardiner ( talk) 09:18, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Cerejota ( talk) 10:51, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Milhist stuff on Gaza. If anyone comes by material, please refer the info with a link to
User:Cerejota/OpCastLead
Nishidani (
talk)
10:59, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
I noticed among your comments on GOM's talk page: "I find it very odd that a bot might make content adjustments or prefer one edit against another." It didn't (and no bot would be permitted that status if it did). The diff provided above by GOM (and now struck out) shows the net effect of 26 edits - at the top of the diff you will see the note "(25 intermediate revisions not shown)". You can easily produce such diffs yourself by clicking any pair of those little round buttons opposite the relevant diffs on any "history" page; or clicking "(curr)" on any old version will show the cumulative diff between that version and the current one.
Hope this helps -- NSH001 ( talk) 13:35, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the problem with using a primary source is, if there's no interpretation or conclusions drawn from it - this provides what seems to be a decent explanation. GrizzledOldMan ( talk) 23:01, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
There is a formal system for recording this sort of stuff (most commonly applies to images, but can also be used for text) called OTRS. If you need help on OTRS, Avi's your man (he's a long-standing OTRS volunteer).
I'll just add that it's ludicrous, all that bizarre shit that you're having to put up with on Israel Shahak (the world would be a much better and safer place with a few hundred more Shahaks around). I wish I had more time to follow it all.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 23:14, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
Apologies for the
offensive approach; I would have changed it had it been possible. Perhaps it's best if we both consider
WP:CIV as it seems to be lacking in our communications. Certainly, that Ariel Sharon comment still lies as it was after
I've asked you to refactor it.
Regards,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
09:04, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Jaakobou. I don't think that, in this, you need apologize, though I appreciate the gesture. You made a judgement, and someone else disagreed. Though our differences are, as often our exchanges on broader themes underline, irreconcilable, we are both grown men. Were I to dwell at length on 'tone', 'innuendo', 'the etiquette of address', minor things that catch my attention in the flow of comments, and in turn harp on them by reference to WP:AGF, WP:Civil, WP:whatever. I could take exception to a huge range of things, and make heavy weather of them on various administrative sites. Many otherwise innocuous (for the editor) remarks by my interlocutors rub me up the wrong way, perhaps because of my training in literature. I try to keep these sensitivities offpage, and not interpret publicly exchanges as I would were one discussing a Henry James novel. Efficiency in editing requires this distinction, and those various rules are predominantly, I assume, for newbies coming of internet forums, rather than for experienced wiki editors. Otherwise the temptation is to consistently 'work the rules' as though they were instruments of a duel, rather than a means to facilitate the collective writing of a text. As to Sharon, I wrote, 'in a minor key'. My substantive point was, no population should be told it mirrors its leaders. I have a harsh view of him, and instanced him to underline that point. I could have said as well that Mohammad Amin al-Husayni or Saddam Hussein did not 'mirror' the people they claimed to represent. Warm hummus! Nishidani ( talk) 10:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello Nishidani, I think the proper response to such silliness is one of the first Arabic words I learned as a youngster. Tuz, emphasis on the t, is most easily translated as 'fuck it', where fuck it takes the meaning 'I dont give a fuck anymore, this is dumb as hell'. If you get really frustrated, you can use 'elf tuz', or a thousand fuck its. I realize you are fond of words that make me consult a dictionary, but I though this might be a little simpler and hopefully allow you to spare some energy for things that matter. Hope to see you around, Nableezy ( talk) 20:23, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
And a rather interesting lesson in how to revise history to prove yourself right. If a professor did such a thing he would be fired. I am starting to understand why this whole thing is hopeless. Nableezy ( talk) 22:29, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Apropos King David Hotel Bombing/ Israel Shahak. The following discussion arose on the former article's talk page, and has been removed here.
Apologies for wandering off-topic everyone. --
ZScarpia (
talk)
01:27, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't know what your access to sources is like, but perhaps a way that I can be of help is looking up references. I have access to a copyright library that has a copy of everything published in the UK. Most other things I can obtain by using inter-library loans.
Reading the
West Bank - Judea and Samaria arbitration case, I hope that the outcome is a Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Israeli-Palestinian articles) as suggested by ChrisO.
--
ZScarpia (
talk)
15:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
During his testimony before the Shaw Commission two months later (the commission interviewed him in his offices) on December 4, 1929, al-Husayni was apparently described as holding a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his hand'. Palestine Commission on the Disturbances of August 1929, Minutes of Evidence, (London 1930), Vol 2 page 539 paragraph 13,430, page 527 paragraph 13,107.
I read Horace Samuel's Beneath the Whitewash yesterday. Unfortunately it doesn't have anything to say about the Mufti and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Near the front, it has a summary of the principal events, which includes the following:
So, it looks as though the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was considered a bit naughty, but that's probably not big news. As the title indicates, the conclusion of the booklet is that the report of the Shaw Commission was a whitewash. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 08:55, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments, and of course you are right. As the text on Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Runtshit states, "This Sock Puppet sedulously perpetrates a sustained persecution under a steady procession of stupid pseudonyms".
Interestingly, this latest avatar began by edit-warring on Neve Gordon, adding a link to the Jewish Press blog at thejewishpress.blogspot.com (I don't want to add a wikilink). This was a blatant attempt at well-poisoning, directed at a frequent target of abuse on and off Wikipedia.
There are many other confirmatory facts, but I'm not going to list them here. Openness is not always preferable.
RolandR ( talk) 19:01, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
I couldnt stop laughing after reading "as tight as a nun's nasty". Nableezy ( talk) 17:52, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Re the above, I am a member of the University of Sussex library, so may be able to help. The URL for their catalogue is here - anything you can find there I should be able to get my hands on. I also have access, through the library, to various subscription-only online journals. A couple of provisos:
I'm also, of course, a member of my local library, which gives access to some online material. The only one I've found useful is the ODNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), which I can access at any time. They also allow inter-library loans for a small fee (about £2, I think).
The British Library? That might be a possibility. Some day I intend to try to find out more about Kruschev's visit to Hunterston A nuclear power station at around the time it opened in 1964. I know it happened, since I saw him with my own eyes, but there is nothing on it in either wiki article. National newspapers are bound to have reported it, but it could be a difficult search to find it. Quite ironical really, inviting the head of state of a foreign country to what was effectively (part of) a nuclear bomb factory for weapons targeted at that country - the Magnox design was perfect for producing military-grade plutonium, though of course none of that was mentioned publicly at the time.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 17:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
What would you say is the best course of action? Should I notify Durova, another admin, or just leave the whole thing to ArbCom? MeteorMaker ( talk) 17:58, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi, sorry to be so rude – I've been meaning to say hello and thanks for the video link. Thanks also for your kind words and recent valiant defense. And to say such things about a boozy girl who once cracked wise about your 'verbal chandeliers'! You are the old-world craftsman of chandelier-builders, Nishidani, the maestro. Downright Ruskinian.-- G-Dett ( talk) 23:03, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
I didn't expect to be asking for a favour so quickly, but I could do with some advice. Game? -- ZScarpia ( talk) 21:26, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Bang goes another day writing in a talkpage rather than doing something more productive. And bang goes a lot of time for you too, I'm afraid. Hopefully the finding of the 2007 reference to Katz as the person in charge of propaganda for the Irgun will stop attempts to change the description to anything else without producing sources or other justification. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 23:28, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Since I have not been around for a while, I thought I'd pop in to say marhaba. Have missed you very much during my absence and have enjoyed reviewing your eloquent additions here and there. If you need anything, let me know. You and others seem to be doing a bang up job of bringing light to some of the problems afflicting our domain here at Wikipedia. I will likely sit this one out, but if you do need someone to present evidence or otherwise intervene, just drop me a note. Much love, Tiamut talk 15:41, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
![]() |
Your Opinion is More Important than You Think Barnstar | |
You should know, Nishidani, that you have fans even far-removed from your areas of interest. Your wit and scholarship are only matched by your gentility. You have demonstrated admirable tenacity in the difficult editorial realms you frequent, and I hope you will keep up the exemplary work. Thibbs ( talk) 17:19, 12 March 2009 (UTC) |
One I promise to look at the screen while typing and turn the auto spell check on...so that someone known as Nishidani doesn't pick on my spelling....promise...PS nice to see you picking on me.. Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 17:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
sorry nishidani I removed your bit on league of nation mandate as it is already mentioned further up the article.. Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 18:36, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I love the chuckleheads. I've always just got on with thing, I don't so much lead with the chin as charge in full steam ahead. I had a great laugh at cool making out that I had done the "large make over" when it was one of them, I just added bits to his make over. They don't seem to appreciate quotes from books that can't be found in JVL...bye the bye, nice bit on Lebanon not invading Israel. greatly appreciated..The tripe tripe that Israelophiles trot out has been found to be false many years ago and still they try to shovel manure...
Ashley kennedy3 (
talk)
20:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm sorry if the word offends...I don't know of any other word that can be used to describe someone who is in love with Israel...Its use is the same as Anglophile or francophile...I have come to the conclusion that nationalism is a destructive force with very few redeeming qualities.... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 23:04, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
The "niggling" makes the difference between POV and NPOV...as with the Israel Palestine conflict page where the supporters of Israel want capture or conquered for areas that Israel entered and invade for areas that Jordan, Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, ALA or even local militias entered. And all that when one group was opposed by the locals and the other group wasn't....What you pursue is not "niggardly" in any shape or form, it is what other editors should be emulating... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 12:56, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia's BLP policy expressly prohibits making unsourced negative comments about living people. This policy applies on every page of the project, with no exceptions. The policy also states that 'Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons—whether the material is negative, positive, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion.' - I have accordingly removed a Talk page comment of yours which describes a living person as an "agitprop operator".(note 1) Please don't do it again. Canadian Monkey ( talk) 00:16, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
(1)For the record, one of thirty odd quotes from MB which lie behind my remark that he is an agitprop operator:
'The majority (of Arabs), like the thousands of Palestinians who demonstrated in the Palestinian Authority, share bin Laden’s world view.' Mitchell Bard, ‘The Myth of ‘Peaceful’ Islam’
MB can wave his apocalyptic demonizations of an occupied people, to justify the landgrab, as he wishes. People who dismiss their human rights with this sort of cant should be disqualified as sources for I/P articles. They wear their agitprop ranting on their sleeves, and have no credibility as informed and judicious students of the Middle East. Nishidani ( talk) 10:43, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
I share your sentiments Nishidani. Although I used more florid language at home when I saw the standard of RS used for rebuttal. You write so much more elegantly than I do... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 19:52, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Know the source, know of the raid...There are more holes in the Israeli argument than you could shake a stick at...I will be returning to the subject at some time in the future I can only do one set of unsubstantiated unreferenced pieces of work at a time..And each year there are more books coming out especially since Palestine is being written about by Palestinian historians...no longer do Israeli historian have a monopoly on the topic..... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 20:36, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Morris is clear about Lebanon's involvement in his new book 1948: "But at the last moment, Lebanon - despite Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh's fiery rhetoric - opted out of the invasion. On 14 May, President Bishara Khouri and his army chief of staff, General Fuad Shihab (both Maronite Christians), decided against Lebanese participation; Colonel Adel Shihab, commander of the army's First Regiment (battalion), designated to cross into Israel, apparently refused to march. The Lebanese parliament, after bitter debate, ratified the decision the same day." (Morris, Benny, (2008) 1948: A Hisory of the First Arab-Israeli War. London: Yale University Press, p. 258.) Morris also confirms that the Palmah crossed into Lebanon on the night of 28/29 May, i.e, before the Lebanese army attacked al-Malikiya on 5-6 June. Ian Pitchford ( talk) 22:13, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
From Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Evidence
I find User:Jayjg’s use of the rule book completely erratic, except if one reads it as a strategy for excising unwelcome material, and including material he likes, according to his personal impression of what is good or bad for Israel’s image. There is no attempt at cogency of interpretation, or coherence of application, or respect for encyclopedicity. I have numerous memories of the bewildering volte-faces in his method. But this will have to do to illustrate the principle, and the perplexity of colleagues. If asked, I could provide several other instances of this strategic rule-bending.
At Israeli Settlement, he removed a quotation by a distinguished academic Avishai Margalit in The New York Review of Books ( WP:RS on two counts) reviewing a book acclaimed by a senior editor at Slate as one of the best books of the year (2007), written by a front-ranking world expert on Indian and Dravidian languages, an Israeli professor, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, with a professional interest also in Islam in India, with years as a peace activist on the West Bank, namely David Shulman, whose study of settlers on the West Bank was published by the University of Chicago Press, He then proceded to challenge it, saying who's Shulman? His book's just one of any number of sources, and nothing to do with human rights in the territories, when this happens to be the theme of the book, stressed by the reviewer. He never checked. He just bracketed ‘David Shulman’ and found there was no wiki article on him at the time (since changed), concluded he was non-notable, and just a nondescript ‘peace activist’. No amount of intensive elucidation 1, 2 3 4 of who Avishai Margalit is, who Shulman is, why the University of Chicago Press, the New York Review of Books were guarantors of the high quality of the source, or why the claim is not exceptional would make him change his mind or moderate his refusal. Informed of who Shulman was, he dismissed him, despite his field experience on the West Bank and expertise in Arabic, because as an expert in Tamil, he could not be quoted for on settler psychology, his judgement was an ‘extraordinary claim’ requiring an extraordinary source and thus ‘This lengthy, pejorative quote from a non-expert is about as blatant a violation of WP:V and WP:UNDUE as I’ve seen in a long time. ‘ He just kept reiterating a scholar of Tamil is not a reliable source on Israeli settler psychology All of which is interesting, but ignores the fact I was not quoting Shulman, but one of Israel’s most distinguished professors of philosopher, Avishai Margalit, in the NYRB, who confirms Shulman’s analysis by drawing on his own experience, and the view of other distinguished Israeli sources, with the group of settlers about whom, according to Jayjg, Shulman the student of Tamil (actually a dozen Indian languages) is writing about. He concludes by twisting my remarks about ‘bad faith’ in editors removing this material by saying that I am admitting that this is how I myself edit Wikipedia. He commends me for this ‘confession’ and ‘based on your new self-awareness, request that you desist from doing so in the future’. The argument ran to three archives. Several days later, I complain of his lack of response, and point out a glaring contradiction in his attitude to sources.
On the Israel Shahak page, which Jayjg has monitored with hostile eyes, and edited with malicious joy since its virtual inception five years ago, and cannot be written because of his wikilawyering, we have a rack of smears, most of which are extraordinary claims about Shahak, a Chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who wrote several books on Jewish fundamentalism, from the perspective of a Popperian secularist. Jayjg dislikes the man and his works intensely. He defends quotes from Werner Cohn, a retired sociologist with no knowledge of rabbinical thought, about Shahak’s putative anti-Semitism. Shulman, the linguist fluent in Hebrew and Arabic cannot be cited, even through a prestigious tertiary source (Margalit) on settler psychology, though he has worked in the West Bank on these conflicts for years as a notable peace activist. It’s just an extraordinary smear by a nondescript student of Tamil. Werner Cohn, though unfamiliar with rabbinical thought and from an unrelated academic field, can be cited for reviewing Shahak’s analysis of rabbinical Judaism. The point is underlined by G-Dett in her familiar, eloquently acerbic comment. Jayjg's commitment to WP:RS is such that at the same time he was holding the Shulman quote hostage from Israeli Settlement, he was pasting a quote from an execrably poor agenda-driven source, FrontPage Magazine to the Shahak article, not from a psychologist or expert on philosophy, or Shahak, or rabbinical thought, saying that Shahak was ‘a disturbed mind who made a career out of recycling Nazi propaganda about Jews and Judaism’, which is a lie. G-Dett points out the contradiction in method, taking place, note, contemporaneously (Febr 2008) while he worked on two different articles.
According to Jay, you need a PhD in psychology in order to say something general about society's "violent, sociopathic elements," or something specific about "destructive individuals" in the Israeli settlement enterprise – even if the source is a highly acclaimed book put out by University of Chicago Press. But to diagnose a celebrated writer and critic of Israel as having a "disturbed mind," all you need to be is some gasbag interviewed by David Horowitz's online tabloid. "The material seems well and reliably enough sourced," Jay assures us.
This is the way he works in the I/P area. Poor sources are RS if the person smeared is a critic of Israel. High quality sources are rejected by endless wikilawyering if they are critical of Israel. I have no intention of citing him for suspension. But someone up there should address this extremely erratic gaming behaviour with some strong words in his direction.
Robert L.Pollock, A Dialogue With Lebanon's Ayatollah, Wall Street Journal, 14/03/2009
Thank you very much for your kind words about me, Nishidani. I truly appreciate them, and I hope to be able to continue to be viewed as both scrupulous and fair by those with whom I interact. Forgive me for dropping a link to the meta page on your user page here, but as you do not have a linked account, that was necessary to make your vote eligible. I am sorry that you feel the need to remove yourself from the project; we need more intelligent, well-spoken, level-headed, open-to-compromise editors who are able to work with people with differing opinions, not fewer. But the frustration that comes from trying to be the voice of reason in a sea of cacophonous dissension is all to real and overwhelming at times. Thank you again! -- Avi ( talk) 20:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
I have started a Request for Arbitration regarding the use of northern/southern West Bank vs. Judea and Samaria. Since you have been involved in this debate, I have included you in the request.
Cheers, pedrito - talk - 25.02.2009 09:31
An Arbitration case involving you has been opened, and is located here. Please add any evidence you may wish the Arbitrators to consider to the evidence sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Evidence. Please submit your evidence within one week, if possible. You may also contribute to the case on the workshop sub-page, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/West Bank - Judea and Samaria/Workshop.
On behalf of the Arbitration Committee, Tznkai ( talk) 04:51, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Mayhap a statistical analysis of the amount of words used to put a minority perspective forward would be useful? Along the lines of:
just to have a look for any undue weight that may be within the article?
PS thanks for the BtS link; I'm not sure where best to place it... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 16:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view.
Henry Siegman... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 14:29, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
there are just some references that are too good not to include: ( Hebrew: הגדה המערבית, HaGadah HaMa'aravit)Dishon (1973) Dishon Record 1968 Published by Shiloah Institute (later the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies) ISBN 0470216115 p 441
Hello,
I gathered the information I had
here.
So, Lebanon would not have participated at all... Soldiers would have been allowed to "leave" the army and fight with the ALA or the Syrians and 300 Muslim volunteers would have been taken the opportuny...
Ceedjee (
talk)
07:40, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
L'historiographie traditionnelle prend en compte les 3000 hommes des forces libanaises dans les armées arabes. Benny Morris parle quant à lui d'une « poignée » d'hommes.Dans les faits, quelques jours avant l'entrée des forces arabes en Palestine, les Libanais annoncent qu'ils ne participeront pas aux opérations ce qui oblige les Syriens et les Irakiens à revoir leurs plans[39]. Ben Gourion aurait obtenu en juin 1947 du gouvernement maronite libanais de ne pas intervenir dans les combats pour quelques milliers de livres[40] et certains chiites libanais auraient émis des réserves quant à une intervention[39]. L'armée libanaise se déploie le long de la route côtière, côté libanais et les commandants chrétiens autorisent 300 volontaires à rejoindre l'Armée de libération arabe ou les Syriens[39]
I've had the same problem in finding a reliable map of the area, but will continue looking. I have Hughes' chapter, but will follow up the Barak and Ma’ayan material, which I haven't seen at all. BTW if you wrote the splendidly articulate essay on appropriative naming above you should turn it into an article. Ian Pitchford ( talk) 08:43, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
But there is an alternative...I do believe that during the early camp David discussions it was resolved by a hand shake...The Palestinians would stop using the term Occupied Palestinian Territory and the Israeli delegation would stop referring to Judea and Samaria...The two terms are in effect the opposite and equivalent...to have NPOV West Bank is the preferred neutral term but if Judea and Samaria is used then Occupied Palestinian Territory must also be used as Judea and Samaria (Occupied Palestinian Territory) so that the two terms are then seen as synonymous and equal...I sure a bot could go round including the (Occupied Palestinian Territory) at the relevant points...
Ashley kennedy3 (
talk)
11:42, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
look at this. I have been wiping tears from my eyes over this one (laughing not crying). Some of the excuses for removing material are lame but this takes the biscuit. Removed for being accurate and well sourced, so it doesn't belong in the Israel-Palestine conflict article. is the rest of the article of such poor quality that accurate referenced work stands out?..this one is too good to keep to myself...I haven't enjoyed myself as much since someone challenged the fact that the Gaza port in Rimal being in Rimal... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 17:57, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
You are absolutely right, as you were when you pointed out that Judaization also affects seculars in the city. Do you have some sources I can access discussing those issues? I think they would make a valuable addition to the article. Hope you are doing well my friend and thanks for your input. Tiamut talk 17:48, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
So sorry for my late reply ya sayyed Nishidani. Thanks for the congrats. And nonsense, I don't think your vote would have had a negative affect on the turnout. Keep up your good work in quality edits! Admin or not, WP Palestine is a priority, so I'll continue to contribute. I might not be as active as usual for the next week though (Spring break here in Florida!). Regards, -- Al Ameer son ( talk) 19:29, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
’Reading nationalist texts is a lesson in the power of silence.’ [1]
'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.' [2]
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.. .' [3]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
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.’ [5]
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’ [6]. 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. [7]. 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.' [8]
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 [9]). 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. Under these pressures, in ther words of Saul Cohen and Nurit Kliot,
Place names are intrinsic compents of political landscape, and their study should be an important part of political geography.’ [10]
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.” [11]
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’ [12], 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, though there is a fascinating inverse relation between the two in the case of Israel. The Jews of the diaspora assimilate to another nation’s history, accepting fully their country’s historical nomenclature and cultural self-definitions. The Jews who perform aliyah or who are raised in Israel, find themselves part of a process of radical toponymic and cultural-engineering to re-establish an ancient identity between people and land which cannot but involve the dispossession, cultural and linguistic of the former linguistic and cultural majority of Palestine.
Julie Marie Peteet describes the typical form this process takes
colonialism typically generates a set of terms and discourses to describe conquered lands as uninhabited, virgin territory, terra nullius, uncharted and undiscovered territory, the frontier, wasteland, wilderness, untamed and unoccupied, regardless of the presence, often extensive and hardly unnoticed, of the indigenous population. Inhabitants of these colonised or subjugated areas have been referred to as savages, heathens, barbarians or primitives; more recently they are ‘terrorists’.’ [13]
For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’ [14]
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.’ [15]
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 [16], 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. [17]
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. [18]
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. [19]
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. [20]. 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.
The toponymic shifts that have taken place in Palestine over the last century are particularly instructive for analysing the relations of naming conventions and the struggle for cultural and strategic power. As Julie Peteet writes, speaking of the way terminological fluxes are part of the historical process of power, and mastery of the lexicon constitutes ‘moral worlds and the humanity of participants and thus, ultimately, the distribution of rights,’
’Contests over names in the Palestine-Israel conflict, in which two parties are vastly disparate in terms of weaponry, support from the USA, the prevalence and circulation of narrative and voice in the West, and institutional infrastructure are certainly an example of this and thus changes in naming should be traced along the lines of power.’ [21]
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'. [22]. As early as 1920 two Zionists [23] 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:-
In the project of Jewish colonization as understood by its promotors, ‘(b)etween a Jewish presence in the biblical era and modern Zionism, Palestine was conceptualized as a wasteland.’ [25]'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.' [24]
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 Wikipedia 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 [26] 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.
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.' [27], a process that Benvenisti himself describes as equivalent to ‘an act of war’ on Palestine’s heritage. [28] 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. [29]
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.” [30]<
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. [31]
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’ [32]
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. In Peteet’s words, ‘(n)aming a place functions as a public claim.’ [33]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 [34] 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 ’ [35]
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) [36]. 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.
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.’ [37]
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. [38]
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 [39] 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. [40] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power [41]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, reviving an old Haganah project elaborated before the state of Israeli was achieved, [42]pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’ as part of a symbolic strategy for territorial annexation. [43] 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. [44] [45] [46] Notably, the government's imposing of these terms, very much Likud-specific terminology, [47] 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. [48]
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. In January 1990, the American press reported in the official Middle East maps of the United States, published by the State Department and the CIA, the term “West Bank” was recently replaced with “Judea and Samaria.” The maps also indicated the cease-fire lines between Israel and Jordan, whereas previously the disputed territories were marked as belonging to Jordan.’ [49]
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.' [50]
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.’ [51]
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’. [52]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, to create, as the metaphor ran, an Israeli cheese pitted with a few Palestinian holes, over the West Bank [53] as 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 unprovoked [54] invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state [55] 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 [56]. 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. [57] 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. [58]
Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, 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 [59] 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' [60] 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. Technically therefore in the varnished rhetorical lexicon of possession and dispossession, there is no room for language that might betray the nature of this carpetbagging. Much of the international media obliges, calling areas in the West Bank around Jerusalem, like Gilo, ‘neighbourhoods’. In May 2002 it was reported [61] that the Israeli media had been prohibited from using the euphemisms of ‘settler’ and ‘settlement’ themselves for areas built up and occupied on Palestinian territory. [62] By successively pressuring the media to redefine the settlers themselves as ‘Israelis’, i.e., ‘non-military personnel’ and citizens of Israel, people who are properly colonists on foreign land expropriated under conditions of military occupation and martial law, Israel manages to interpret any act of resistance against the colonists, which might otherwise be construed frequently as legitimate according to the Genevan conventions, as tantamount to an act of terrorism against Israel and Israelis. Likewise, Israel’s asserted right to preemptive self-defence by murdering Palestinians its security organs believe pose a threat to Israeli interests, in Israel or the occupied territorie, is no longer ‘assassination’ or ‘murder’, but a ‘targeted killing’, a military euphemism which is apparently de rigueur for prestigious foreign news agencies like the BBC. [63]
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. [64]. Julie Peteet argues that the now current term in Western sources for this area, which still remains under Muslim administration, namely the ‘Temple Mount’, is of relatively recent usage, whereas the term described as the year of ‘independence’ by the former, and of ‘catastrophe’ (Haram al-Sherif was been standard in the disciplines of art history and history generally. [65] If so, this would be another example of recent Israeli usage prevailing even in Western sources, over the traditional topological conventions.
This goes right through several spheres of discourse, from the language of historical description for the area, which is split into two distinct and mutually exclusive idiolects [66] 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), [67], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
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). [68] [69]
As for the Palestinians, driven into a life as refugees by the Jewish desire to end their millennial exile ( Galut) through the establishment of a national homeland in Palestine, their only recourse in the experience of diaspora imposed on them has been to retain the topological memories of their former world, and reinscribe them on the camps where they are compelled to eke out their new ‘lives’. Thus we find in Lebanese territory allotted for them, that the Galilean landscape of their forefathers is reproduced, toponymically and spatially. Thus Bourj el-Barajneh consists of a ‘spatial array of a number of northern villages in six named areas: Kuwaykat, Tarshisha, Al-Kabri, Sheikh Daoud, Al-Ghabisiyya and al-Chaab’ and Ain al-Hilweh has quarters named for the villages of Saffuriyya, ’Amqa , Loubia and Bassa/al-Zeeb. This and the process of naming children after the toponyms of ancestral villages in their homeland is one strategy for resisting the intense discursive pressure within Zionist sources to treat the indigenous Palestinian ethnos as ‘Arabs’, by which it is intended to forge an impression that the Palestinian people Israel drove out or still displaces from its ethnic state only have a non-national identity, which fits them for assimilation within the vast ‘Arab’ world where power-politics and fate has consigned them. Defined as ‘Arabs’, they are no longer ‘native’ to the area, while the immigrant David Gruens (David Ben-Gurion), in taking on eminently Hebrew names, are nativized. [70]
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [71]
'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.' [72]
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.
In a tiff over the editing of Susya, I reverted Ynhockey for eliding information he thought poorly sourced (from Counterpunch, though the authors are all notable scholars with a published record for studying settlements on the West Bank) concerning the Palestinian origins of that town. His response was to upload a map onto the Susya page (30/03/2009). Though his map image gives Susya as south of Hebron and, without words, within the boundaries of what an attentive reader knows to be the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, as one runs the cursor over the map, a pop-up suggests to us the falsehood that 'Susya is located in Israel'. If one clicks on the map for details, again, one finds the pushpin map he created described as 'Southern West Bank ( Judea region)'. Whether the pop-up comes from him, or, as Nableezy now tells me, is a collateral effect from the Susya web-site (?) I cannot judge. But User:Ynhockey's practice on wiki, where his cartographic gifts are acknowledged, is ambiguous. His maps are so drawn, or glossed on the Wiki Commons page that at times a false impression, or subliminal message, is conveyed to Wiki browsers. In Karameh, certainly, the occupied areas are in Israel. In Susya, the pop-up effect, whoever is responsible, should have been removed. Nishidani ( talk) 08:54, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Interesting reading the above is. Perhaps essay like User:Ravpapa/Tilt write you should. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:26, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
The above, interesting reading is. You User:Ravpapa/Tilt like Essay write should perhaps.
I am not sure your accusation of Ynhockney putting that caption on the image is correct, it looks like the description is just generated by using the infobox_kibbutz class. Nableezy ( talk) 10:06, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
I too was looking at Susya today and thought how inappropriate to have an Israeli coloured village banner on the village article before they've evicted the last Palestinian....as to the other, you know me take the bull by the horns and worry about the blood loss later... Ashley kennedy3 ( talk) 21:27, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm in agreement with what you said about Jayjg, so if you feel that it would be useful for someone to back you up in your conversation with Malcolm Schosha, I'd be happy to do it. My opinion is that Jayjg interprets and applies the rules in an indiosyncratic, self-serving, biased and non-commonsensical manner. For starters, if he was unbiased and balanced, he wouldn't be at the heart of attempts to represent Judea and Samaria as neutral names for areas of the West Bank and, furthermore, ridiculously misrepresenting sources to try to justify doing so. Has anybody ever challenged Jayjg as to whether he is in effect a professional Wikipedia editor? If he is, I think that it is obvious that he shouldn't have access to the privileges which he does. -- ZScarpia ( talk) 23:47, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Your account is blocked for one week for
this edit. We do not allow taunting, teasing, attacking or harassing other editors (even when those editors blocked for 1 year) drama mongering and fanning the flames of disputes.
Jehochman
Talk
13:53, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Could I ask you for one final, of so many favours, Neil. I tried to archive this page, but cannot do so. Final irony, I can't even wipe myself without permission. Could you just, as I do, cut the text and paste it into my last archive (perhaps retitling it February-April 2009)? Thanks in anticipation, and apologies to one or two, Ian Pitchford in particular, for not now being in a position to finish that essay. Best wishes for the future Nishidani ( talk) 14:46, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Look, I can't fault you for wanting to leave, particularly under the circumstances here. But you have been a very valuable editor working without much respect in a very contentious field, and we definitely need as many decent editors in those areas as we can get. It would be a real loss to the effort here if you were to leave permanently. I would very sincerely ask you to reconsider. In any event, you have my thanks, and that of several others, for all you have done here. Hope to see you back soon. John Carter ( talk) 14:58, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
We'll miss your presence and work here on the 'pedia, Nishidani. For what its worth, which isn't much, I think the block was a serious overreaction - 1 week for that comment, with no history of blocks/warnings for the behavior cited in the block reason? Unfortunate that excessively punitive reactions, unevenly applied, take away some of our best editors but leave us with many of lesser worth. Avruch T 16:14, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Please see
here.
Avruch
T
19:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
![]() |
The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar | |
For your brave attempts to uphold scholarly standards in the Israel/Palestine-area of WP. Deep regards to Nishidani from Huldra ( talk) 16:38, 1 April 2009 (UTC) |
My name ain't Neil, but I did copy everything to the last archive, if you didn't want that let me know and will remove. With sincerity, peace and happiness Nishidani, Nableezy ( talk) 17:47, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Bishonen unblocked you. I hope we can see you back again very soon. John Carter ( talk) 21:57, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I would have posted earlier to save you all the trouble and embarrassment here. I didn't follow things, having watched Banderas's Take the Lead instead. Against instincts I feel I must drop a clarification in, to explain why Jehochman's reading, though wrong, is understandable, and to clear Ashley's mind of any sense of responsibility for what happened. He's only responsible for what happened to him.
(Or of course, you could apologize, and promise to pull your finger out, which is rather difficult for seppuku aficionados, since a preliminary requires the moriturus to stuff his rectum with a ball of cottonwool in order not to soil the scene)
I can understand why Jehochman should take exception to this. He did not rule on my remonstration, but only on this specific addition.
As soon as I had posted, I realized that I had neglected to suggest to Ashley that he apologize. Since I'd used (he being a military man) the example of seppuku to remonstrate with him, and since we have always spoken to each other straight from the shoulder I thought I'd tell him to pull his 'finger out'.(there's a cultural difference here: people of our background speak like that, 'rough as bags' even to express affection. It does shock outsiders to the Irish/English world, esp. Americans).
I still had Mishima's death in mind, but, I suppose I should add, a private memory influenced me while telling him to extract the digit. The last man (to my knowledge) who actually managed to execute himself in the classic style, (in a manner so ritually flawless his brother, of an old samurai family, only came to the morgue to see whether his younger brother had done things correctly), that man was a friend of mine. At the scene of his death, the forensic police were amazed he had not, as should have been the case, soiled himself, until they were informed about the ritual cotton wool. I thought the joke about the cotton wool (that word itself has comically rude undertones in cockney slang) would make Ashley laugh enough to take my berating words of admonition to heart: humour, in remonstration, shaves off any misunderstanding of ill-will in otherwise harsh language, as anyone raised on the streets, or in close tribal families knows.(That particular memory of my friend's suicide, for me, evokes only melancholy however, but had this not caused a fuss, no one should have known about this).
So Jehochman's misreading is understandable. I feel some considerable blame for what happened,though not in the least for what I wrote, except for some slipshod or subpar grammar. I tried to avoid the forseeable drama by twice wiping the page of comments. I wouldn't have written this at all, since I intended just to drop a note to Avruch's page to apologize to him for any carelessness on my part, and express my gratitude for his exquisitely gentlemanly manner, but have found myself blocked for another day.
I'll otherwise stay off for the week Jehochman thought proper. On things like this, full consensus is, in my book, necessary, and if there is any equivocation remaining, any shade of suspicion I was misbehaving, I've no problem sitting the full sanction out. best wishes to my fellow wikipedians, to John Carter and the others, whatever I decide. Cheers Nishidani ( talk) 23:01, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
While you may be a pompous prick, I do not think it is pomposity or vanity that led to the oversight that another user had already added Huldra's barnstar to your collection. You will see that you have the same barnstar twice now (3rd to last and last). Glad to see you plan on staying, and sorry to muddy the waters of your analysis, Nableezy ( talk) 20:14, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Nishidani,
I'd hate to be rude but you're being a huge disruption. No one was mentioning either the American revolution or the supposed huge difference between "militant" and "militia". Please let it go.
With respect,
Jaakobou
Chalk Talk
16:37, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
You aint got nothing to learn from me. But thank you very much, Nableezy ( talk) 18:30, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Your comments on the talk page of the J/S case are very much appreciated. -- Avi ( talk) 14:49, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Sigh, I've clearly failed in all I've been trying to do here ....-- Nickhh ( talk) 16:27, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
There is some information there that you might find useful. In any event your comments are welcome. harlan ( talk) 12:56, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
Otherwise, nothing will get done. There is so much to write about it. I mean can you even believe that until yesterday there was no such article on Lydda Death March, which had a higher death toll than the Deir Yassin massacre? (Another page in dire need of some good editing). Someone's got to do it. It's sure as hell gonna be me if I have any say in the matter. I'm not about to let the history of things be written the way they were at Lod, before I started tackling it today. Tiamut talk 19:13, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
Hello my friend :),
Je suis bien entendu d'accord avec tout ce que tu as écrit sur la page de discussion. Je voudrais juste commenter ceci : "by such a mass of people forced onto a march under guard by a hostile enemy that was obliged by the Geneva Conventions to supply water, then of course it was, objectively, a 'death march'."
Les Israéliens les ont menés à 2 km (1/2 heure) de Latroun. Ils sont morts de soif sur le chemin de Ramallah (2-3 jours). Je crains fort que les responsables de ne pas leur avoir fourni nourriture et eau ainsi que le soutien minimum (tranports des enfants) sont les hommes de la Légion arabe... Même si le crime reste dans le chef des Israéliens qui ont expulsés plus de 50,000 personnes (après un massacre), personne n'est innocent dans l'histoire.
Ceedjee (
talk)
15:51, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
Cnaan Liphshiz,Wikipedia editors: Coverage of Israel 'problematic', Haaretz 04/05/2009 Nishidani ( talk) 12:30, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
It turns out that the following elements are problematic for coverage of 'Israel-related issues', according to one editor here, Eli Hacohen, director of Tel Aviv University's Netvision Institute for Internet Studies.
What is curious here is the assumption (apart from the errors of fact, Irving was regarded as an accomplished historian by his peers for his early works: the Gaza Strip was the object of intense bombardment, not civilians etc.) that in writing on Hamas ( Lebanon), or David Irving, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), or Gaza ('Palestine'), a required perspective is one that takes these issues as 'Israeli-related' coverage. Is writing on Saddam Hussein, Noam Chomsky, or Cuba or Trail of Tears of the Cherokee ever interpreted by anyone as 'America-related coverage'? Nishidani ( talk) 13:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
Hello,
Could you have a look at my additions
here. I try to paraphrase the info you gave me from Laurens (excellent source) but it is hard for me. To equilibrate everything; I also introduce info about Deir Yassin. Thank you !
Ceedjee (
talk)
11:42, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
Dear Nishidani, First, may I ask you to email me? It is about a total non-Wikipedia matter. If you want, I can post my email here.
Secondly: I am very sorry to see that you will now apparently be topic-banned from the I/P area; I will greatly miss yours (and G-Detts) comments about matters. However; I´m very happy that you are now editing the Dogon-people, absolutely fascinating, aren´t they? I actually edited a bit there when I arrived on WP back in 2005; before I got caught up in I/P affairs. I really love their art/architecture; & I hope to go there one day.
Anyway, take care, Huldra ( talk) 20:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
PS: BTW, the claim here that "Jerusalem Post has never faced mainstream accusations of lying" is as wrong as it can be. Only 6-7 weeks ago the "Jerusalem Post" claimed on their web-site that Norways Minister of Finance (and leader of the Socialist Party), Kristin Halvorsen, had shouted "death over the Jews" in an demonstration earlier this year. They had to withdraw the allegations (which caused an absolute outrage in Norway), as their only "source" turned out to be a convicted fraudster who goes under the alias of "David Weiss." It is discussed here (and many, many other places):
(And Aftenposten is about as mainstream as you can get in Norway. Lots of other media discussed it too.)
I think people here was absolutely astounded by the total ignorance shown by the "Jerusalem Post." Needless to say; any politician in Scandinavia who start saying/shouting "Death to the Jews" will be completely ostracized here in about 1/2 second. To think that any half-educated or semi-intelligent being can fall for such a fraud is, to me, and to other people here in Scandinavia, completely incredible, and I am afraid it left us with no great admiration for "Jerusalem Post". Cheers, Huldra ( talk) 21:13, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
'Pro-Israel'
'Pro-Palestinian/independent'
Anyone is welcome to add to this list, for sockpuppets on either side, active over the past few years, or now and in the future. A proper analysis would list the number of editors on the other side each sock has managed to harass to the point of having him sanctioned, as notoriously, Tundrabuggy succeeded, despite being to the eyes of all a patent sock, in almost getting User:ChrisO banned. Nishidani ( talk) 14:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)