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Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.
(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.
'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.' [1]
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.. .' [2]
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.’ [4]
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’ [5]. 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. [6]. 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.' [7]
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 [8]). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.
John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect
‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.” [9]
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’ [10], 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.
Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’ [11]
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.’ [12]
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 [13], 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. [14]
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. [15]
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. [16]
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. [17]. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.
The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘ Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias ( Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.
(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank
When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'. [18]. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed ' Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-
'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.' [19]
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 [20] resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.
The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' [21] 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. [22] [23]
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.” [24]<
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. [25]
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’ [26]
The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew [27] 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 ’ [28]
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) [29]. In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.
(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.
‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’ [30]
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. [31]
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 [32] 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. [33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power [34]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank [35] [36]. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy. [37]
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.' [38]
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.' [39]
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.’ [40]
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’. [41]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovoked [42] invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state [43] 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 [44]. 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. [45] 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. [46]
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 [47] 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' [48] Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.
Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area. [49].
This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them ' Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), [50], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.
'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".' [51]
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). [52] [53] According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide. [54]
(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [55]
'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.' [56]
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.
Further reading:-
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(
help)Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.
This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism. Nishidani ( talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.
If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.
This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration. Nishidani ( talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'
In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped. Nishidani ( talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
More remarkable statements
Nishidani ( talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023
Honourable men (once upon a time)
After the war, we heard that the first target usually seen by the pilots in the enclosed waterway was the Canberra. By chance, she was painted white, which was taken by the attackers to mean that she was a hospital ship. Without exception, the Argentinian pilots were honourable men, and not one attacked what they thought was a sanctuary for the injured.' Sharkey Ward,Sea Harrier over the Falklands, Cassell (1992) 2000 p.273.
Et cetera
Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party. Nishidani ( talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Retired Major-General Giora Eiland:
The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.
The whole article is worth reading for a clue as to the kind of mentality that one often notes among the upper echelons of the IDF. Nishidani ( talk) 17:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be.
That is almost identical in tone and content to the drift of Himmler's speech addressing troops who had just mown down about 150 Jews near Minsk in 1941. Nishidani ( talk) 18:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
In Berlin, the city senate is considering pulling funding for the Oyun cultural centre in the German capital’s Neukölln district, after the centre’s directors reportedly refused to cancel a peace vigil by a leftwing Jewish group.
I.e.German hypervigilance against a recrudescence of antisemitism as part of its programmatic if clichéd Vergangenheitsbewältigung has now ironically morphed into a vigilante punishing of Jews who are critical of Israel. Nishidani ( talk) 21:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
Hamas operatives are also trained to fire on IDF soldiers when they see them' Yaakov Lappin, 'Some 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions ‘significantly damaged’,' Jewish News Syndicate 20 November 2023
It's reported than despite the vast IDF bulldozing and uprooting of Gazan agriculture, a patch of strawberries was found by a group of invasive settlers, so the compromised land of the Philistines can once more offer fertile prospects as a promised land for settlers Nishidani ( talk) 06:01, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Taking a leaf out of battle descriptions of the Israelites against the Philistines in the Bible, the Israeli minister for Telecommunications Shlomo Karhi has apparently called for the circumcision of captured Hamas fighters.(Oren Ziv , Yotam Ronen, Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace, +972 magazine 22 November 2023 Nishidani ( talk) 09:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC))
Yafa Adar is home.The sub-humans around her are already lying deep underground, their house has probably been turned into rubble by the army of the state of Israel. That’s Jewish, Israeli power.(Yosef Israeli a reporter for Channel 13 cited Canaan Yidor, Israelis celebrate the return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ‘embodies Zionism’, The Times of Israel 25 November 2023 )
The Salah al-Din Trail of Tears or something like that will probably be written some years down the track, when testimonies from masses of survivors of the trek involving over a million individuals are cross-checked. The killing of several dozen local reporters has made the collection of evidence extremely difficult, the systemic bias of giving intense coverage to Jewish victims of Hamas's outrage while only referring to the obvious death march in generic allusions to an abstract mass's plight in a line or two. Some of Hajjaj's material consists of rumours, but the hallucinating experiences of people like the lad with the smashed leg look typical and not unlikely for at least several thousands. Nishidani ( talk) 07:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
I don't think the saying, 'scum always rises to the surface' is invariably true, but the bags here do appear to follow the rule. Thanks. Nishidani ( talk) 06:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.” Jonathan Ofir, 'I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer,' Mondoweiss 8 December 2023
Nothing of this surprises me. What does is the moral cowardice of the communities who stand by. Nishidani ( talk) 00:13, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.
the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. Ralph Nader, What the Mass Media Needs to Cover Re: Israel/Gaza Conflict CounterPunch 26 February 2024
The number of trucks crossing into Gaza rose slightly to about 190 a day – less than half the peacetime daily total. Israeli inspectors were still turning back 20 to 25 each day, NBC News reported, citing an Egyptian aid official, on grounds as arbitrary as the wooden pallets bearing the food not being exactly the right dimensions. Israel has banned Unrwa, the main UN relief agency in the region, from using the crossing.' Julian Borger, Toby Helm, Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum Israel alone? Allies’ fears grow over conduct – and legality – of war in Gaza The Guardian 31 March 2024
Since the mainstream sources in English refuse to mention what the Israeli press is stating, the only way to get an RS-quality picture is to systematically comb the four sources above and cite the material from RS they cite or allude to.
The counterattack on Be'eri was conducted by Major General Itai Veruv.
Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages
The Hamas militants held hostages. So stating that tank fire was used to blast kibbutz buildings where Hamas militants were hiding only begs the question: were Israelis detained by them also present in those buildings?
Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Gaza Division, when the Erez Crossing and military installations close to it, his own Coordination and Liaison Office were attacked, locked himself and some staff in the subterranean war-room (underground refuges are not unique to Hamas) called down an airstrike on his own base, though many soldiers lay wounded above/outside
Nishidani ( talk) 21:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
I've yet to see, but I don't read around that much, any mention of what is the most logical explanation for the systematic closing down of hospitals throughout the Israeli controlled north. Since they have no strategic value to anyone, one reasonable conjecture is that the whole Gazan system of registering deaths is centered on hospitals, esp. al-Shifa. The procedure is that deaths are entered into the register as corpses or the dying are carried there, and a preliminary control is made by technicians to correlate the dead, and identify them, with archival records. Once this is done, the resulting data is collated and the statistics are updated. If one dismantles the hospitals and their administrative staff, no further empirical work of precise record-keeping would be possible, something also consolidated by the lack of power to maintain or recharge servers and computers. Perhaps something like that infrastructure survives in Khan Younis and Rafah, but the data from the north would, I suppose, now be frozen. Worth keeping an eye out for this technical issue if RS come round to examining it. Nishidani ( talk) 18:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
i.e., Manuel Musallam doesn't and never did exist. It-s extraordinary what influential morons can get away with. Nishidani ( talk) 09:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded. Ten days ago, Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, published information obtained from the ministry of defence’s rehabilitation department. This put casualty numbers at more than 5,000, with 58% of them classed as serious and more than 2,000 officially recognised as disabled. There have also been a number of friendly fire casualties, with the Times of Israel reporting 20 out of 105 deaths due to such fire or accidents during fighting. Paul Rogers, 'Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
When the White House announced additional funding to UNRWA for its Gaza emergency response, Almadhoun said he had to balance gratitude with reality. “OK, yes you are giving a mom a can of tuna, but you also killed her son and bombed her house,” he says he told Biden administration officials.' Rhana Natour, 'He’s raising millions in aid for Gaza. But still he couldn’t save his family,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
'In a Dec. 21 video report based on analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.” Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.” Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs” to Israel.' Norman Solomon, President Biden: Learn the Names of Children You’ve Helped Israel to Murder, CounterPunch 27 December 2023.
In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing one of its staff. Mouin Rabbani, The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, Mondoweiss 28 December 2023
'Political value is not the only merit in underscoring this disturbing comparison. The unsettling analogy is also a crucial means of exploding long-held myths: in other words, that Jewish victimhood is beyond compare, exalted and singular in its gravity. Indeed, it is precisely the exceptionalism with which Israel envelops itself that has allowed the Zionist political elite (wherever it may be – in the US, UK, Europe, or Israel) to flout international law repeatedly for more than 75 years. It is this cultivated sense of transcendent sublimity (arising from the weaponization of the Holocaust and the manipulative use of the Bible) that elevates Israel’s status to an arrogant actor on the world stage, one that is indifferent to all red lines (that is, to virtually all Geneva conventions and UN resolutions). . . Once pitied as the collective victim of genocide, Israel is now the perpetrator, the state that, paradoxically, wields victimhood as its quintessential raison d’être.' Michelle Weinroth, Why we have to make the Jewish Ghetto comparison Mondoweiss 7 January 2024
Peter Beinart, What Will Happen to Gaza’s People? New York Times 7 January 2024
Yadlin. . .said the IDF’s southern command, which has responsibility for Gaza, had started planning buffer zones within the territory that would be heavily mined to prevent any repeat of the 7 October attack. Jason Burke, Israel says Gaza fighting could last a year, amplifying fears of regional war The Guardian 8 January 2024
Wael al-Dahdouh al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza, lost his wife Amna, his son Mahmoud (15) his daughter Sham, and his grandson Adam, aged 1 and a half, on 25th October while sheltering in a private home in Nuseirat refugee camp. Then he himself was wounded by an Israeli airstrike on a school in Khan Younis on 15th of December. Yesterday they took out his son Hamza Dahdouh when a drone hit the car he and other journalists were travelling in en route to the Moraj area.
There are about 700,000 people in the world currently facing catastrophic hunger, 577,000 of them are in Gaza.' Archie Bland,'The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza,' The Guardian 8 January 2024
And this record.
The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US. According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. Nina Lakhani, Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe The Guardian 9 January 2024
“Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.” Eugene Borowitz cited Marc Tracy, 'Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?,' New York Times 14 January 2024.
It's the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God. But it's the fate of only a very few races that they're sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.' The Jewish German detective Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not, Quercus 2009 p.305. Nishidani ( talk) 06:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Trump recently made an appearance in which - even as he was calling Biden "cognitively impaired" - he suggested that we were headed toward "World War Two".' p.10
I enjoy reading about your travel and outdoor experiences as well as your various interactions with domestic and wild animals. And thanks for your reference to the beautiful, moving
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by
Thomas Gray. Moreover, my cat sends a big thank-you to his beloved granpa Nishidani for all the pets and caresses you sent him, he enjoyed them.
Ijon Tichy (
talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
When Biden assumed the US presidency he recruited a team of prodigious foreign policy talent, perhaps the most venerated ensemble of such experts in modern US history. They were given a clear mission: to rebuild US alliances, repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and prepare for the challenge in the South China Sea. The Palestinian issue had not been a White House priority but at best something to be managed. . .Biden misread how Israeli society had changed over the last two decades, and consequently how best to influence Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attacks. Biden “lives with an Israel in his head which probably never existed and certainly doesn’t exist today,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator in peace talks with Palestinian leaders. Patrick Wintour, The new world disorder: how the Gaza war disrupted international relations The Guardian 6 April 2024
'one that ‘will be studied at top military academies like West Point in the U.S. and Sandhurst in the U.K. as the "gold standard for urban warfare". (Aya Batrawy, Omar El Qattaa, Here's what we found after Israel's raid on Al-Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital NPR 6 April 2024)
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press 2023 TrangaBellam ( talk) 18:28, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
'There has been some incremental improvement in the south. Palestinian deaths, according to statistics from Gaza health officials, have averaged about 171 a day so far in January, down from 230 during the last week of December.' (Karen DeYoung, John Hudson, Despite U.S. pressure on Israel, casualty count in Gaza remains high,' Washington Post 14 January 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 04:36, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Please self revert this revert, which is currently under talk page discussion (which you have not participated in). And please refrain from accusing me of POV edit (this is the second time you have done so) Longhornsg ( talk) 22:54, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 ( talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
Hello! I'm looking for a source and thought you/your talk page watchers would be a better first stop than WP:RX. The source is:
That's all the information I have about it. I saw it cited exactly like that in Pappe's 2006 Ethnic Cleansing book, p. 273 n. 35. I have no idea what Between the Lines is and I cannot seem to find that publication (there is a 2007 book with a similar name but it doesn't appear to be the right source), or anything written by Abu Sitta with that title ("Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present"), or anything on Google scholar with that title. When I search Google web for that exact phrase with quotes, the only place I find is in Pappe's 2006 book.
There is of course another Abu Sitta article from 2003 that is often cited, which is this one, but that has a different title ("Traces of Poison"), is in a different publication ( al-Ahram Weekly), and a different date, 27 Feb-3 Mar, 2003.
Did Pappe just mis-cite the 2003 Abu Sitta article? Or is there another Abu Sitta article that was published a couple of weeks after "Trace of Poison"? I suspect it may be that it was written in another language (I presume Arabic but maybe something else), and the title Pappe used in his citation is his own English translation, and that's why I'm not finding it. Anybody have any ideas here? If not, I'll ask at RX. Thanks, Levivich ( talk) 18:56, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
This book contains a selection of articles from Between the Lines (BTL), a political journal first published soon after the eruption of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000. BTL was published on a regular basis from Ramallah and Jerusalem until September 2003, when it was forced to stop due to difficulties in its material circumstances.Note 1 (attached to that quote) says this:
Between the Lines was cofounded and coedited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad in November 2000. From its inception, it was produced on a volunteer basis, with great help provided by our writers and a circle of individuals and organizations who likewise believed in its mission. It ceased publishing as a consequence of its accumulated debt.This review of the book contains some more information about the journal's history.
mailed to readers around the world—perhaps it was never available online)
My apologies to you Lev, and joining you in expressing deep thanks to Malerisch for their timely and insightful response.My access to the internet, since I don't have a laptop or one of those smartphoney thingamijigs is somewhat restricted by continual travelling.(even the police in Seymour detained me, if gently, when they found me enjoying a night walk at 3.30 a.m. Apparently, old men with backpacks sauntering around empty streets looking for a petrol pump and all night cafe where one might intercept trucks at dawn and hitch a ride to a busless destination is thougbt indicative of an altzheimer's condition these days). Nishidani ( talk) 02:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani ( talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ----
Ijon Tichy (
talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-
‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” ( William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)
A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.
This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.
I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.
I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani ( talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024. "A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine." --- Ijon Tichy ( talk) 15:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scuttle around like cockroaches in a bottle.'
'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'
But in the meantime let us rejoice:
Hamas has sure made a lot of Israeli religious people exultantly happy. Rapoport gives several other examples of this messianic exhilaration at the spectacle of genocide. Nishidani ( talk) 15:14, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo ( talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
When I read over a half century ago what Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia, with trenchant pithiness, something to the effect that 'to say we when one means I is one of the most recondite of insults,' I took the apophthegm to heart as a ruling guideline in life. Distracted at one point into the massive literature on ethnic identity, it assumed even greater cogency. What was nationalism, not only in its formal ideology but in the public language shaped under its muscled authority, if not a discursive mode where this core distinction was utterly lost, as its spokesmen made the most varied claims about what being part of an ethnic, cultural or political community entailed, for everyone captured up into its defining set. The 'we-ness' component trumped any trace of individualism. Before being oneself, one was one of us, and owed obeisance to the communal substrates' definition of who anyone in their ranks was,basically.Being some-one meant being primarily a member of a someone-else-ish national or ethnic group. One was defined by groupthink before one could even learn to find and articulate one's own voice.
Adorno's point held particular force for me because, reading widely in modern European history, and especially after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre's classic postwar text, Reflexions sur la question juive,the 'Jews' emerged as the outstanding example of what can happen when Others presume to define a minority community in their midst, otherwise as thoroughly acculturated as anyone else in a country, and by dominating as a we what they supposedly were, lay the bedrock for their eventual extermination, through sheer discursive carelessness over the longue durée.
In the slumbering toils of this late bespoke Woke world, itself the retarded offspring of an era of codifying politically correctness, the vast plain of the sayable is increasingly hemmed in, allotments staked out, taboo lines of no trespass roped off, by constituencies sharing little more than a common grievance over the way the parliament of language misrepresents them.Any discussion or remarks touching on the Jewish world furnishes no exception, and indeed perhaps presents an extreme instance of the pathologies one discerns more generally in identitarian debates, for which it provides, moreover a template for ethnic grievance strategies in recent decades. Perhaps arbitrarily I'd take 1967-1969 as marking a dividing line, when sensitivities underwent a radical shift. The former date refers to the fear and subsequent triumphant euphoria widespread in the diaspora at the outcome of the Six Days War. The latter alludes to the deserved success of Philip Roth's wonderfully vulgar, inimitably comical Portnoy's Complaint.
in the postwar era down to this juncture, people in the diaspora could grow up, as witness the autobiographical remarks of people like Norton Mezvinsky, Robert Manne and Ramona Koval alluded go in a prior section, completely unaware of any social interest in let alone antipathy to, the fact that one's background was Jewish. That was a private matter, one could even frequent Christian schools, and in so far as one had a national identity it was as an American, Australian etc. An engagement with Israel, let alone the holocaust was, in these early decades, very low key. Nishidani ( talk) 12:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
I enjoyed reading your poem. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted your original prose comment into that infernal machine and asked it to rewrite it as a poem, and this is what it came out with (with only minor tweaks by me):
In a realm where words dance with intent,
AE ponders the stain the accusation lent.
For over a decade, this slur's been sent,
From editors, none victorious, who leave a scent,
A lingering cloud that whispers "Repent."
Chess, with a sly leap, adds a new layer,
Innuendos fly, a subtle flare.
"Perhaps not antisemitic," they dare,
"But you question identity," a wound to bear.
Provocation lingers, a silent snare.
Unproductive, they say, to respond in kind.
Yet the offense stings, a truth to find,
Repetitive whispers, a relentless grind,
Before the eyes of admins who find
A smear that echoes, leaving scars behind.
Though water off a duck's back, I claim,
The weight of repetition, a relentless game,
A subliminal poison, with a hidden aim,
To erode, to decay, to maim.
Tolerance wanes, as dignity's flame.
I like yours much better. But damn, is that good or what, from a computer? It understood what you were saying, and frankly, is capable of writing better poetry than probably like 99%+ of fluent English speakers. The computer's choice of monorhyming quintains surprised me. Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it. Levivich ( talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
I'll try to get my pedantic mania offloaded or reined in into a footnote. Our Sumerian bard working off his furor poeticus would have dashed off his melodious ire on a soft clay tablet, wielding with deft speed a reed quill (Akkadian qantuppi, or something like that. I can't open another page on this laptop to check simultaneously as I write here).Chiselling came much later (though not financially) when imperial orderx commanded monumental narratives to be inscribed on rockfaces. Does anyone write good poetry in anger? Most early ancient poetry was composed in the style still preserved in the practice of Osip Mandelshtam, as his wife Nadezhda describes it, pacing up and down or along a street, murmuring various syllable and word combinations, until line after line the poem shapes itself in memory and, only then, is it written down or, as anciently, was recited and often committed to memory on the spot by the listeners. There's not much place for useless emotions like anger in these traditional modes, as anyone who has attended extempore bardic competitions in provincial Italian villages can attsst. Two or more oral poets stand before an audience, a theme is selected by lot, one takes it up, say 'war', and slowly but fluently produces two quatrains (abab) with tercets to round it off. The next poet must reply on theme by say praising by contrast its antithesis, playing off the ideas of his earlier rival,and this seemingly effortless to and fro can go one for hours. The sheer pleasure of technical challenges, the extraordinary level of concentration required to do this doesn't leave room for silly distemper, ire or anger,even were that the topical issue, as it is in the Iliad(mËnis).
I'm sure you read the AE filing so I won't get too into the weeds, but try and keep commentary on point without rhetorical flourishes that can be misunderstood. There are a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds with a lot of views who've been exposed to a lot of information and have a lot of different take-aways on that information. Using phrases like "dumb goyim," regardless of your intent, is likely to turn into a big waste of time for everyone involved rather than moving the discussion forward. Please keep that in mind. ScottishFinnishRadish ( talk) 12:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Finally found a source in my random reading to undergird my understanding of the cognitive puzzle I find in the inability to grasp the repetitious obviousness of the tragedy unfolding since 1967 (coming from the theory of остранение in one vein of modern aesthetic theory). Its neurological basis. Analogy with Nazism is not the point, that is only the authors' most dramatic instancing of this everyday scotoma via habituation that afflicts us all as a natural consequence of the the normative economy of evolutionary adaptations to our perception of the world.
For Milton Mayer’s staggering book about the rise of Nazism, for example, a man who lived in Germany at the time described the regime to the author: “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.” He added: “If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.” Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them,' The New York Times 26 February 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 00:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
The whole article, premised on the view that, if what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, holocaust exceptionalism will implode, is worth reading. Nishidani ( talk) 15:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of the Hesder Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa said in a yeshiva conference on Thursday that the entire population in the Gaza Strip should be killed. Head of Jaffa yeshiva says all Gazans should be killed Haaretz 9 March 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
The question in the title is rhetorical. Kushner dwells in the real world, unlike the fanners of the new witchhunting wave of antisemitism claimants, now at pandemic or tidal proportions. Nishidani ( talk) 11:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Re Media coverage of the Israel–Hamas war. This article so far is totally inadequate, given the serious overviews correlating thematic emphases with specific changes in the war. Such issues cannot be adequately covered by episodic tidbits. The following provide useful guidelines to the topic. Any additions that consist of links to studies on the coverage blackout of the realities of the conflict in the Israeli media in particular would be appreciated.
Nishidani ( talk) 07:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
Negative Terms for Palestinians in Israeli discourse Crampcomes ( talk) 07:35, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. The proper title would be Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse which I cannot now work on because it just supplies a redirect to another general article. If someone could do me the courtesy of annuling the redirect, so that my proposed title becomes redlinked, I will start writing the article under that rubric. Nishidani ( talk) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
I cut up a length of cardboard into a square
Running a yard or so along each side,
And piled on blobs of plasticine here and there
To tizzy the flat with hills, and when it dried
I filled a pot with water and began to pour
A flood of
H2O swimmingly over the map.
Most of the wash though leaked onto the floor
As I kept on filling the pot from the kitchen tap
And splashing the model to submerge it under the drink.
"Bugger those edges and corners", I swore. "They drain
All of the water away",and as I began to think
That yarn the nuns spun at bubs was bloody inane
A scream broke up my experiment. It was my mum
Weeping a flood of tears, a deluge of woe
As, slipping on her kitchen floor, she kicked my bum,
Saying, "it’s even filthier here than what you leave in the po."
I was only five years old, and wet behind the ears.
But it taught me a lesson: the bible’s bullshit for one,
And as for my prospects in science, my mother’s jeers
Meant, like my religious teachers, that I had none.
Nishidani (
talk) 10:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Very good, old chap. But enough of yer doggerel, how about a real poem?
Su Hui's Xuanji Tu
palindrome poem in
simplified characters (left) and in the original
traditional characters (Sorry for editing your file. I can't stand the sight of simplified Chinese characters, which destroy the aesthetics and ideogrammatic games in the traditional script)
-- NSH001 ( talk) 11:20, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Wow, I thought that would get you going! Very impressive.
On Latin, I've forgotten almost everything I learned at school – which was only a 2-year introduction course. Basically rote learning of endless declensions and conjugations, and that was about it. Not the way to learn a language properly. Our Latin teacher spent a lot of his lessons moaning about his having to do National Service. His was the last year group to be required to do NS before it was abolished, which really annoyed him. Moaned a lot about the pointlessness of army life and the incompetence of the officers. He did say that he much preferred classical Greek to Latin. As you know I was forced to drop Latin in order to do German along with the science course, though I would have preferred to continue Latin. The head of the classics department was the only woman head of department (other than "domestic science"), and the only teacher at the school to hold a PhD. Everybody held her in very high regard.
No need to apologise for anything, little Asha just loves to tidy up after her beloved "Onki Nishi", and she saves me a lot of time. Did you know that while you were away she was put in prison for 30 days by Microsoft because (a) I changed something I shouldn't have done, and Microsoft didn't like it (b) I had stupidly neglected to set up a proper backup system (c) Microsoft is able lock you out of YOUR OWN COMPUTER (so after you've set up a new computer, switch from using a Microsoft Account, to using a local one) I'm a terrorist, apparently (= I hate the genocide being perpetrated by Israel)? Only kidding, but I think you'll get the point. Lesson: when and if you get a new computer to replace your dinky one, I recommend setting it up to use a local account. Probably best to allow it to set itself up using the defaults (which means using a Microsoft A/c), but then get someone who knows what they're doing to set you up with a local a/c ASAP.
"How does one put a space between two quatrains. Those above are too distant?" comme ci:
Perhaps they fuck you up: who knows?
For victimhood prefers to rate
Especial value to what shows
Some foreignness in our self-hate.
That they were fucked up in your case
Is possible: I know that most
Are hardly saints - they have to face
Each day the dangers of that coast
No one prepared them for, or taught
What sudden tides await them there,
Whèn love dives, wild, into the fraught
And deeper waters of despair.
The misery's passed on. Each child
Shies at the sea beyond his shore.
Most learn to trust, plunge into the wild
Surges of doubt, survive, and ask for more.
Because, perhaps, they find at last
The strength to venture on their own,
Beyond the footholds of the past,
The tender-treacherous shallows of home.
The trick is simply to use a pair of poem.../poem tags. Which I strongly recommend, since you then don't have to bother typing out all those ugly </br>
tags at the end of every line. Not only that, it has the effect that the lines, and line spacing, appear in the rendered text the same as you typed them. Much easier, and more elegant.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 18:41, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I second that, Philip. Nishi is,
Like Ted my husband, somewhat prone
To see the brighter side and miss
The Nazi side of life at home.
The brutal Fascist- German who
Lurked behind my father's smile
Treated his daughter like a Jew,
With jackboot love in cosy style.
I got my own back on him, though,
And snuffed his memory out when I
Turned on the gas, and watched his slow
Tortured image fade and die.
Best regards as always Nishidani ( talk) 19:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
</br>
tags offend my sense of elegance, in addition to being redundant when you're using poem.../poem tags. Save yourself a little effort, and don't bother typing them. --
NSH001 (
talk) 21:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Neil. Bit late but here's the chime from Shagspere I promised, as it came through the noise disturbances of the email line from edenville. That may account for the curious running enjambment in a sonnet form:)
Desist from this miscarriage of rude minds
Dis-pairing spirits in a wasteful shame.
Parents are various as the lesser kinds
Which nature's bounty breeds. Those who complain
Perhaps have merit in their suit; yet life
Bridles at monotony, and, often will
Paint her stage outrageously, for strife
Is dramaturgic nature's way to thrill
The Lord of her creation, that sovereign king
Who, settled in eternity's chair, looks on
While art sifts man’s travails and joys to bring
Fresh entertainments from His motley throng.
Our snatch of time from eternity’s all too brief
But better than naught: live it, in grace or grief.
Shagspere aka Nishidunny~~~~
We must play our puppet parts: that is the fee
For our brief purchase on eternity.~~~~
Elisha Ben Kimon, Palestinian convert to Judaism fatally shot in West Bank Ynet 21 March 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 13:51, 21 March 2024 (UTC) The grandfather, Eid al Zaitoun, of this Sameh Zaitoun, saved 25 Jews from the 1929 Hebron massacre. The grandson converted to Judaism, and was shot to death by IDF soldiers at a Gush Etzion busstop after a knife was found in his baggage. Nishidani ( talk) 13:57, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
Idem for Rami Al-Halhouli. (Arwa Mahdawi, As Gaza is destroyed, Israel is killing dozens of children in the West Bank The Guardian 23 March 2024) A 12 year old, one of a 100 children (of 400 West Bank Palestinians) murdered since Oct 7. He lit some fireworks to celebrate Ramadan, and was shot dead because, the IDF state, he aimed the fireworks at them. Itamar Ben-Gvir called the officer who killed him a 'hero' for having eliminated a terrorist.
The point is, that on-the-spot judgment of intent to kill (against all the probabilities) warranting the child's murder. The ICJ is to deliberate on whether Israel has an intent to commit the genocide (or whether it is just an unintended consequence of the war) which, by any reckoning, is taking place. The massive evidence will be equivocated and pettifogged to death to deny the charge, because intent is hard to prove legally, as opposed to it being easy to establish when a child lights a firecracker in the vicinity of IDF troops. Nishidani ( talk) 13:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
This recent edit includes what is probably an accidental change to another editor's comment. Just letting you know, an old Mac of mine used to do this all the time - make rogue edits! Pincrete ( talk) 10:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi, you are probably aware already but if you weren’t you are probably going to have an arbitration case request filed against you. v/r - Seawolf35 T-- C 20:28, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
When I saw the immense amount of time an excellent editor like Piotrus felt himself required to waste to clear his name of a patent smear in the preceding Arbcom case on articles dealing with Jews and Poland, an example I will studiously avoid, I nonetheless I thought I should respond at least to the defamatory claims against me made in that screed. My change of thought was generated this morning by reading Or Kashti, Gili Izikovich, 'The IDF Uses Revenge Poems to Boost Soldiers' Morale in Gaza,' Haaretz 26 March 2024, and in particular by one snippet of a 'poem' partially paraphrased there as part of an official anthology to supply troops with a sense that their combative mission was potentially redolent of lyrical possibilities (though a wider world, including that of scholarship, seriously queries whether the havoc visited on the Strip amounts to genocide, where some 13,000 children have been killed). The verses in question which caught my eye seemed to capture an underlying feeling of appalled estrangement from the way realities are experienced by others as perfectly normal, indeed culturally vindicated. The version of the Hebrew poem been read by soldiers in the field runs in a version of it I made as follows:-
There are at least two direct Biblical allusions here. (a) The first is to Psalm 137, which begins with overpowering beauty:'By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept/when we remembered Zion . .' only to conclude:
(b) The second is to Amos chapter 1, 6-7.
What startles me as a reader evidently has no such effect on the religiously orthodox writer who penned these lines, nor on the IDF editors who selected it for their morale-boosting anthology of war poetry, and perhaps they assume the same attitude for their potential readership in Israel. So I am engaged with a world which, apparently, shares none of the shaming restraints on articulating emotions which I was raised to think 'normal' and whose observed presence in oneself demanded a penitental self-examination. To the contrary, from the other perspective, my instinctive perplexity that what struck me as obscenely inhumane, voiced lyrically, is anomalous, at least in terms of the cultural code native readers there take as acceptable, 'normal'. So I am forced to ask myself wherein lies this dissonance in expectations, a dissonance I have encountered every other day while engaged with editing the I/P area. Does, as is often asserted, -most recently in MSchwartz's horrified indictment, my attempts to document that world betray some 'antisemitic' undercurrent, a fastidious repudiation of Jews? Nishidani ( talk) 13:45, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
This user has consistently demonstrated behaviors that appear to be in violation of Wikimedia’s Universal code of conduct and general policy, especially in the form of "Psychological manipulation" and "Hate-speech”. Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine and has expressed extreme views on Jews, Jewish heritage, and explicitly, Jewish genetics. In their editing, the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view. Furthermore it seems that this user has also violated some of Wikipedia’s’ “five pillars”, requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4) and editing from a neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). It seems that these non-neutral and sometimes offensive edits rise to harassment, therefore violating art. 3.1 of the UCOC.
Hysteron proteron. The gravamen is in the last line alluding to section 3.1 of the [ Wikimedia Foundation Universal Code of Conduct]
Concretely therefore MSchwartz is claiming that my behaviour (or, as they put it ‘my behaviors’, which is an odd way of putting it. I haven’t been diagnosed for split personality disorders yet, at least to my knowledge) has been ‘consistently’ intended primarily to intimidate, outrage or upset a person,’ and that I do this consistently under any number of the indictable headings, namely Insults,Sexual harassment,Threats,Encouraging harm to others,Disclosure of personal data (Doxing),Hounding,Trolling.
Where's the evidence since 2018 (that is the date MSchwartz sets) for any of these charges? What functionally does 'psychological manipulation' mean? And whose minds have I stealthily plagiarized in Svengali fashion? The answer apparently is in UCOC 3:2:
Psychological manipulation: Maliciously causing someone to doubt their own perceptions, senses, or understanding with the objective to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want.
One must presume from this that my argumentative style on talk pages is taken here to be primarily fueled by a devious malice dryly calculated to subvert an interlocutor's identity, and coerce them thereby to become my puppets in a form of cynical gamesmanship. In Italian law down to 1981 this was a criminal offense ( Plagio) until a court deemed it in violation of Italy's constitution since, 'specifically, the substance of the crime was impossible to fully assess with logical-rational criteria, creating an intolerable risk of arbitrary prosecution and conviction.' It is quite striking that this unverifiable crime, now abolished, has reared its bizarre head in the UCOC. But there it is, and if recourse to it is jumped at, expect a humongous number of inconclusive threads to follow, because the way the policy is framed, nothing of the sort can be adjudicated and verified conclusively. Nishidani ( talk) 14:46, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Hate speech? What magician's hat was that smear pulled out by its rabbity ears? If you assert another editor uses hate speech, with zero evidence to that end, that is a violation of the very principles outlined in the UCOC about editorial interactions. Indeed, if one cannot prove it, it gives grounds for laying a complaint about adventitious innuendoes aimed to smear a fellow wikipedian. Nishidani ( talk) 14:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine' expressing
Aside from that polemically beloved term extreme why 'explicitly?' Is MSchwartz not aware that in using this of the last in a series of three claims, grammatically they are suggesting that the other two claims are 'implicit'?)
Since anyone familiar with my work and these archives could readily google up strong evidence that I take extreme exception to any kind of talk, loose or otherwise, that collectivizes 'Jews' (or any other group) and that, theoretically, I have repeatedly stated that notions of collective identity (Jewish, Israeli, Chinese, Russian whoever) are dangerous, aside from being conceptually inane, if politically and rhetorically potent, I ask myself how on earth, on what evidence, does the plaintiff claim I entertain an idea that I have 'consistently' repudiated as repugnant?
Jewish heritage. What extreme take have I adopted in writing articles extensively on that infinitely complex and variegated dominion of tradition, which includes the following articles written wholly or in good part by me.? Your scurrilous caricature is a wild smear based on a studied ignorance of the record, which includes
to name just a handful? In 18 years of contributing to wikipedia, I have yet to see even one of the hundreds of editors identifiably and legitimately editing from a 'pro-Israeli' perspective who have responded positively to my suggestion that they show their neutrality by creating articles on Palestinian history, people or culture. I have stated several times that displaying an ability to write neutrally, and yet sympathetically, about the side one may less identify with in a conflict at article length should be one of the qualifications for working in this area, other than 500 edits. Nishidani ( talk) 17:03, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
'Jewish genetics'. The expression means, 'genetic studies on Jews' understood here however as 'genetic studies that essay to determine the origins of the Jewish people, and the interrelations of their various groups'. Yes, I edit those articles. Is there any evidence I have tampered with them to skew their content ideologically? No. Nishidani ( talk) 15:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view.
requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4).
The user recently used disrespectful, threatening language that borders anti-semitism. goody. I can't wait to peeve (slip =perve) on the discussion there when it gets to his beliefs about the genetic superiority of his own ethnic group. Dumb goyim beware.”
The term "dumb goyim" can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to a narrative of a Jewish superiority over non-Jews, a theme found in antisemitic rhetoric, where Jews are sometimes falsely accused of harboring a sense of superiority towards non-Jews. This comment is uncivil and violates Art. 2.2 of Wikimedia’s UCOC. Moreover, the threatening nature of this comment’, it’s attempted “trolling”, and insulting antisemitic reference, rise to Harassment, violating article 3.1 of the UCOC. Although a complaint filed against him] for using this phrase was closed with warning, with one admin stating that “if it happened again, I would not take so charitable a view”. But this is not the first time that User:Nishidani has used this phrase.
The user has also stated that the article Jews is "untouchable in its POV sacrality".
This reference to the POV sacrality of the wiki page Jews occurs on the Samaritans talk page in this discussion.
An editor challenged the lead language which asserted that Samaritans ‘claim’ to be descended from the Israelites, noting that in the parallel article on Jews, the origins of Jews as descended from Israelites is not a claim but stated in wikivoice as a fact. He removed ‘claim’ to establish parity. An I/P editor stepped in ( they edited for one week, with a total of 22 edits) and protested that this is taking things ‘too far’. Without asking what justified this random opinion, a compromise was reached, restoring ‘claim’ per Iskandar]] (usually identified as ‘pro-Palestinian’.)
This meant that across wiki pages, Jewish descent from the Israelites was asserted as a fact, whereas the Samaritans’ descent was described as a ‘claim’ (when historically these two groups were adversaries). To understand what was going on, one needs some degree of area competence and familiarity with the scholarship on these respective issues, something diff evaluation in arbitration does not consider important.
The POV dissonance is this. In rabbinical tradition, Samaritans (heirs of the northern kingdom) are depicted as Cuthites, not authentic Israelites but rather an imported people dumped there by Assyria to replace ‘real’ Israelites/Jews who had been expelled from Palestine. Samaritans (the dominant population in their area for a millennium until the Christian Byzantines virtually wiped them out) always rebuffed this injurious put-down. The source on the page, Peidong Shen Tal Lavi, et al., Reconstruction of Patrilineages and Matrilineages of Samaritans and Other Israeli Populations From Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation 2004 supported the notion that the Samaritan patrilineal line predate the Assyrian conquest, which renders the rabbinical tradition of Samaritan inferiority suspect.
At a glance therefore, it is quite apparent that in restoring the Samaritan tradition of Israelitic descent as a ‘claim’ while describing the Jewish tradition affirming Israelitic descent as a fact on the sister Jews page, Wikipedia was inadvertently endorsing a rabbinical tradition in favour of Jews over Samaritans as the direct authentic heirs to the Israelites.
This kind of deconstruction of the context in which that single diff is embedded is, of course, not taken into account in arbitration, where etiquette and rule-compliant evaluation, not familiarity with the scholarly state of the art, is the overriding concern. Nishidani ( talk) 14:41, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
The phrase 'untouchable in its sacrality' refers to the opening formulation on that page. Anyone can edit that article, obviously. Attempts to emend the lead sentence over the years come up against a wall of objections and reverts: The questionable 'sacred' phrasing is:
The Jews ( Hebrew: יְהוּדִים, ISO 259-2: Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation: [jehuˈdim]) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites of the ancient Near East,
Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.' Simon Schama, 'The Invention of the Jewish People,' Financial Times November 13, 2009
They also attributed the survival of Jews to what they termed "diasporic promiscuity," a phrase that reflects a deeply biased and offensive perspective on Jewish history and genetics.
- So MSchwartz personally disagrees with the massive literature on Jewish historical origins, a snippet of which I allude to just above, where conversion, intermarriage was commonplace. No evidence given. Perhaps what he defines as 'offensive' is the word 'promiscuity' in 'diasporic promiscuity'. I first began to enjoy using that term as a boy, about 15, when a religious friend took me to task for my 'intellectual promiscuity'. I read outside the narrow field of doctrinal history, written by true believers, and he found books written on his interests by non-believers offensive. In any case, the objection is religious, based on Deuteronomy 7:4. Philo of Alexandria says that the riffraff accompanying the (mythical) exodus from Egypt were the result of a 'promiscuous mixing' (in the original Greek at de Vita Mosis). The term comes from my own professional field, it being used by Sonia Ryang in her work on Koreans in Japan. There is nothing offensive in it, unless one thinks the term cannot be used metaphorically. Nishidani ( talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
More on genetics, the user has written that the Middle Eastern component among Ashkenazi Jews is “ estimated to range from 3% upwards”, a distortion of common scholarship that half of Ashkenazi ancestry is Middle Eastern, promoting a fringe outlier instead.
- I cited on a talk page a datum given in Das, Elhaik, Wexler, 'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017
- MSchwartz clearly, and/or the anonymous organization he represents, in thinking this is cogent evidence for violating UCOC, has no idea of how wikipedia works. Had they wished to make a point, examining the subject closely, they would have just pointed out that I had confused there 'Levantine' with 'Ashkenazi'. To do that in my book is reprehensible, there is no excuse for disattention here. But such lapses on a talk page have nothing reportable about them. My point was that the Southern Levant/Israel-Palestine origin of the Ashkenazi is not endorsed by modern genetics, which of course has revised its earlier Levantine argument in favour of the extremely vague term 'Middle Eastern', meaning that evidence exists for a founding population hailing from in part anywhere from Turkey to Iran, but not from the southern Israelites. And, one gathers, mentioning this is distasteful for MSchwarz. Nishidani ( talk) 20:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
According to the user, “As any rabbi competent in modern historiography will confirm, Jews have their origin in Judaism, not in an ethnos”. However, Jews have always seen themselves as a people with shared ancestry.
- It should take anyone just a few minutes to ascertain at google books that, down to the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th century and well beyond, the consensus of certainly Ashkenazi rabbis emphasized Judaism, and its followers as a religion, not an 'ethnic' matter.
MSchwartz makes a generalization about Jews, that down to the last man they have always seen themselves to share the same ancestry. The fragility of that claim is easily disproved. I mentioned above that Josephus, writing in the Ist cent.CE, stated that 'Judeans' referred also to Gentiles who lived in Palestine at that time and adopted Jewish law. Obviously, their fellow Jews familiar with such Judeans would not have believed these ex-gentiles in their fold share their own ancestry, any more than the forced conversion of the tens of thousands of Edomites by John Hyrcanus over a century and a half earlier would have meant that traditional Jews would have immediately believed that they shared the same ancestry with the newcomers (to the contrary). This is the kind of historical detail that always makes confident generalizations like the one above meaningless. Nishidani ( talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
The above raises serious concerns regarding genetics-related articles such as ' Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism', originally “Zionism, race and genetics”, where Nishidani has 62% authorship. The article has an essayistic tone and sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature.
- This is frankly incomprehensible in its lack of any logic. What is the asserted connection between the controversies over the genetic origins of the Ashkenazi to do with the article Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism which, yes, I wrote? The latter is a survey of modern scholarship's historical references to the way Zionism conceptualized the Jews, as a race, a radical innovation at the time (1900s) It is not, as three editors argued, an 'essay' unless any article written mostly by one editor is an 'essay'. Worse, in stating that it sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature. No. What happened that it was subject to a push for it to be deleted, and in the discussion, those who kept insisting that it 'synthesized three topics...not commonly analyzed together in (the existing literature' were comprehensively shown, particularly by a very neutral wikipedian, Levivich, to be unfamiliar with the existing literature, refusing to read it while making unsupported claims like the one MSchwartz exhumes.
User:Nishidani has stated that "The word 'settlement' is an Israeli/US euphemism born of the necessity to camouflage or underplay the fact that the old ideology is still kicking (out Palestinians) for lebensraum". This comment uses the term ‘lebensraum’ which is primarily associated with German nationalism and later with the territorial expansion policies of Nazi Germany
.
In my book, the notion of 'extreme' is already in the word 'bias'. MSchwartz appears to think that it may be okay to be 'biased against Israel' but deplorable to be 'extremely biased' against that country. These kinds of distinction are weird. If someone has a bias against Israel, then one might have good reason to wonder whether that person might harbour antisemitic feelings, in my understanding. If one is critical of a number of policies implemented by any state, Israel included, that is not evidence of bias if the critical content is grounded in a reasoned analysis. What is the first piece of evidence. On a talk page, nota bene, I expressed my view that Israeli settlements in the West Bank reflect a Lebensraum ideology.
Why this is classified as an 'inflammatory remark' about Jews or Judaism escapes me. MSchwarz confuses Israel with Jews/Judaism, evidently. To be critical of the former is to be prejudiced with regard to the latter.
Now in the literature on antisemitism written explicitly and often polemically in defence of Israel, it is quite true that a number of scholars have asserted that drawing of any analogy between Nazi and Israel practices is, ipso facto, antisemitic. [1] [2] [3]
- ^ Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz, Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft im 21. Jahrhundert, de Gruyter ISBN 978-3-110-27772-2 2013 pp.231ff = NS-Vergleiche als Mittel der Daemonisierung. The tendentiousness of the book, whose thesis comes from an otherwise useful analysis of the mass of emails etc., sent to Israeli institutions in Germany during the various wars with Gaza, is underlined by the claim an analogy of Israel's separation policy with SAfrican apartheid is antisemitic ‘Israel ist so wenig Apartheidstaat wie die Bundesrepublik Deutschland' ('Israel is no more an apartheid state than the Federal Republic of Germany' p.217). Unfortunately, Amnesty International, B'tselem and Human Rights Watch disagree, and they are not antisemitic.
- ^ 'Lebensraum, which is associated with the historical context (‘Nazi’, ‘German’, ‘concept’, ‘Germany’, ‘Germans’), but also with Israel, pointing to a Middle Eastern context and adopting a critical stance on Israeli politics. . .In these contexts, Israeli politics is seen as pursuing a quest for Lebensraum, whereas the use of the German Nazi word can only be interpreted as an implicit comparison of Israeli to Nazi politics, and the criticism of Israeli politics by way of Nazi comparisons needs to be understood as a part of modern anti-semitic discourse.' Melani Schroeter, 'How words behave in other languages: the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English,' Pragmatics and Society, 9 (1). 2018 pp. 93-118.Online version pp1-24 pp.12,17,21
- ^ Note however, that these scholars stay quiet about the other side of this equation:it is allowable for an analogy to be drawn between Nazism and Palestinians, particularly in the political rhetoric of the longterm Prime minister Binjamin Netanyahu. To cite but one of many examples, when the issue was raised of Palestinians requesting the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from territory defined in international law as Palestinian, Netanyahu told Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then then Foreign Minister of Germany, that 'Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein'. Judenrein -ethnically cleansing a country of Jews- is Nazi usage and commonly used of Palestinians who, being subject to ethnic cleansing to allow Jewish settlement, are Nazis if they want their own land back. Steinmeier didn't object. He simply nodded. He is now President of Germany.
So MSchwartz's assertion here reflects a point of view entertained by some scholars. The problem is, both MSchwartz, and those scholars, ignore the fact that this analogy is widespread in critical views on or positive endorsements of, the policies implemented in the West Bank, which one encounters regularly in Israeli newspapers and Israeli and diasporic scholarship. Were the contention true, then not only am I an antisemite, but leading (Jewish and Israeli) scholars and journalists are also.
- ‘the calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs in A. D. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a lebensraum for themselves in Palestine by force of arms in that year’. Arnold Toynbee, cited Omer Bartov Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, Berghahn Books 2021 ISBN 978-1-800-73130-1 p.53
- '‘There are certain people in Israel who have hinted (that) they would like Israel to retain the West Bank for Lebensraum.' Findley Burns Jr., The American ambassador to Jordan (1966-1967) speaking to Jordan's King Hussein after the Six Days War. Cited in Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry_:Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War, ISBN 978-0-300-18353-5 Yale University Press 2012
- ‘To me, who grew up under the Nazi occupation, the determined conquest of the Palestinian patrimony echoed Germany’s Drang nach Osten to provide its Herrenvolk with greater Lebensraum.' Milan Kubic, From Prague to Jerusalem:An Uncommon Journey of a Journalist, Cornell University Press 2017 ISBN 978-1-501-75703-7 p.231 (Kubic was a Czechoslovakian-American journalist who was head of Newsweek’s Beirut office from 1967 to mid 1971)
- ‘Israel’s Quest for Lebensraum,' section heading in Shlomo Ben-Ami's Prophets Without Honor:The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-state Solution, Oxford University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-190-06047-3 p.256
- Effi Eitam, IDF brigadier general and Knesset member stated in an interview 2002 interview with the Jewish-French writer Sylvain Cypel:
"The western part of Eretz Yisrael . .from the Mediterranean to the Jordan: that’s the Jewish people’s vital space. Eitam, who apparently skipped his history classes in school, didn’t seem to know that “vital space” was at the heart of the Nazi lebensraum concept. Otherwise he might have suggested another formation. But the fact remains that the idea came to him spontaneously. And in that space, only Jews would be alliowed to rule. People who talk about “human rights” and “peace” were “psychopaths,” he added.' Sylvain Cypel, . L'Etat d'Israël contre les Juifs,' La Découverte 2020 ISBN 978-2-348-04344-4.p.95('vital space'/espace vitale is the standard French translation of Lebensraum.)
- Yossi Sarid, 'Lebensraum as a Justification for Israeli Settlements,' Haaretz 26 August 2011
- 'Quite an accomplishment, considering the Settler Einsatzgruppen stealing Lebensraum and concreting Palestinians' wells.' Gideon Levy 'Israel's Next Surprise Is Coming From the West Bank,' Haaretz 16 November 2023
- Lebensraum was used just recently by the Arab Israeli lawmaker MK Ahmad Tibi in the Knesset to describe the proposals by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to reoccupy and settle the Gaza Strip. Sam Sokol, 'Far-right ministers call to ‘resettle’ Gaza’s Palestinians, build settlements in Strip,' The Times of Israel 1 January 2024, Nishidani ( talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
But, above all, if one googles Russia+Ukraine+lebensraum one obtains over 225,000 hits, the first up for me being from the German Foreign Ministry, which likened what Putin does to what its own Germany did in WW2. So it is quite acceptable to use this of a geopolitical adversary of the West like Russia, but, the assumption here is, totally unacceptable, indeed 'antisemitic' to ever use the word with regard to Israel's seizure of, and colonization of, the West Bank after 1967, though Israeli critics in Israeli sources have no problem in drawing that analogy. Nishidani ( talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
The user labelled Zionism "a Jewish heresy" that may generate antisemitism. He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine", wondering "to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people."
- Again, the evidence cited is (a) a view I expressed on my Talk page, where I respond to editors who want me to discuss material, articles or the content of this dispute (b) has nothing to do with attacks on Jews or Judaism.
- Unless, as it again appears, MSchwartz considers Zionism as interchangeable with both the Jewish people and Judaism, and therefore to be critical of the former is, ipso facto to be hostile to both the latter. It is reasonably fair to assume that the premise here is underwritten by the highly controversial definition advocated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for a Working definition of antisemitism which critics argue weaponizes antisemitism as an instrument against those who criticise Israel, viewed as a Zionist state, subjecting them to a linguistic surveillance that would restrict the exercise of free speech. Nishidani ( talk) 12:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- (1) (a) I labelled Zionism, which is, as is openly admitted, an 'ideology', a 'Jewish heresy' because (i) at the turn of the 19th-20 centuries, is was roundly and very widely condemned as such by the majority of Western orthodox rabbis, and could garner a consensus of less than 1% of the Jewish people, despite a lot of drum-beating:
Herzl’s charismatic powers had their limits. By the time of his death, less than 1 percent of world Jewry was officially affiliated with the Zionist Organization, and Herzlian Zionism provoked considerable opposition. Most Orthodox Jews dismissed it as blasphemous. Derek Penslar, Theodor Herzl:The Charismatic Leader, Yale University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-300-18040-4 p.7
'Rabbi Elmer Berger was often seen as an heretic. A graduate of the Hebrew Union College (USA) and an enthusiastic adept of Classical Reform, he opposed Zionism naturally, as did, then, most of his peers. What distinguishes him from other Reform rabbis is that he remained loyal to his beliefs throughout his life.Jack Ross, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism, Potomac Books, 2011 ISBN 978-1-597-97697-8
Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project. Michael Walzer Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism:What’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. (With a response from Joshua Leifer.) Dissent Fall 2019
- (b) This is the formal theological position of an important component of Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism.Giles Fraser, For Haredi Jews secular Zionism remains a religious heresy The Guardian 12 May 2016. See also Haredim and Zionism.
- I.e., MSchwartz considers that my view, informed by history, and shared by the religious leaders of 1.8 million Jews, worldwide, and who make up roughly 15% of Israel's population, is, if only because I repeated it, evidence of an inflammatory statement about 'Jews/Judaism'. Go figure. Nishidani ( talk) 13:45, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- 2 a second reconsideration of what I briefly wrote in response to this passage below, cited earlier.
He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine",
- Again, this is taken from my talk page, a view I expressed when referred to read an article by Chris Hedges.
- What is scandalous about expressing the view that Zionism has, throughout its history, persistently worked to displace and disperse (disintegrate) the autochthonous population of Palestine? That is remarked upon, let us say, argued in a great number of books, starting with Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer"in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948 Institute for Palestine Studies 1992 ISBN 0-88728-242-3. I won't make a list or give the massive details, but in synthesis
- It was Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism who, in proposing massive Ashkenazi immigration into Palestine where 95% of the historic population of the time was Arab, wrote of his hope Zionism would find a way to ’spirit the penniless population across the border.’ And this was reaffirmed time and again, not least by Ben-Gurion in 1937 writing of "the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state...we have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself." Dispersal from their homes, villages and properties (730,000 in 1948, 150,000 in 1967) of Palestinians over the borders to a scattered refugee life in camps from Lebanon, Syria to Jordan, together with the bantustanization of those Palestinians who remain in their occupied lands in 165 enclaves, cut off from each other, and most recently compelling most of the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza to flee south into provisory camps on a miniscule patch of their former territory, is part of an uncontroversial record. Perhaps what MSchwartz dislikes is the word 'mission'?, in the sense that my view presumes a design, and this recurrent pattern is just a striking coincidence of haphazard events without forethought. Well, I think I am entitled to assess the evidence otherwise, without it being taken as an indication of hostility against Jews or Judaism. In any case, it is not my unique opinion.
The fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the core method through which Israel enforces apartheid.' Richard Falk, Virginia Tilley, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, Southern Illinois University 15 March 2017 p.37 Nishidani ( talk) 14:36, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- I bolded 'penniless population' because from 1896 to 1948, Jewish purchases of land in Palestinian managed to accumulate 6% in title. The outcome of 1948 was that the state ended up with 78% of the land and declared all property owned by refugees fleeing the havoc and uncertainty of war as 'enemy property' effectively with a stroke of the pen appropriating 200,000 lots of land, housing and property. After 1967, the West Bank was seized without any real resistance, and most of the area declared '(Israeli) state land', with the result that, without any transfer of money or compensation to those who owned or worked the land, Israel effectively took control of the real estate of 93% of the original country, and the Palestinians exercise legal control over about 7%, exactly the figure for Jewish land purchase down to 1948. This may be all accidental, but Herzl's population, many of whom once enjoyed the modern villas and conveniences of West Jerusalem, found themselves indeed penniless, as he hoped, if not yet 'spirited' across the borders. Nishidani ( talk) 14:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
The user wrote blatantly inflammatory comments here, for example calling Israeli media outlets: “militant mouth organ-grinders or trumpeting blowhards for a constituency of religio-fascist landgrabbers”. Israel Hayom is Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, while Arutz 7 has the third-largest weekend circulation in the country. Again this is from my talk page.
- I did not speak of Israeli media outlets (generic, and nothing implied of Haaretz, Times of Israel, Ynet or Jerusalem Post etc.). I named two minor league papers, Arutz 7 and Israel Hayom.
- The former caters (notable for always pushing the meme that Barak Obama is a secret Muslim) to a constituency of settlers and has consistently written in defense of the most violent among them, Hilltop youth, which our article describes as “hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who establish outposts without an Israeli legal basis in the West Bank’. [1]
- ^ (in their defense to cite two of dozens: Jonathan Pollard, Vigilante actions are a result of absence of government counter terror policy in Arutz Sheva 2 July 2023. What is remarkable about such articles ( for Israel Hayom see David M. Weinberg, The myth of escalating settler violence,' Israel Hayom 12 October 2023) is that they try to rebut (as merely a myth concocted of ‘fake news’ in the ‘fog of war’) the US State Department's remark about a settler rampage after Oct.7 to seize more property on the West Bank. The USSD claimed there was an uptick, and "unprecedented levels of violence by Israeli extremist settlers targeting Palestinians and their property, displacing entire communities.’ Pollard And Weinberg look at Shin Bet statistics of violence against WB Palestinians and say:'untrue'. In 2022 1,000 such incidents occurred and that figure has been stable with only 1,000 acts of violence against Palestinians and their property in 2023. The writers assume, we are left to suppose, that three assaults a week on Palestinians in 'normal' (in those statistics no consideration is taken of the several raids per week IDF forces conduct after midnight into Palestinian homes, a terrifying normality).
- True, my language is harsh but it is directed not against Jews, but against settlers who either engage in or support these violent expropriations, or if they murmur, do nothing to stop it and continue reading papers that endorse the violence. 15% of West Bank settlers -60,000 Americans - come from solid family homes in the United States and they are at the forefront of settler violence. So they must be perfectly culturally familiar with the Lockean compact - a core element of democracy -that property is sacred and transferred only by a negotiated sale between the parties. This awareness is congealed by the 'religious' pretext that the land is all Jewish since the year dot, and Palestinians who have dwelt there for millenia have no title, even if they do possess one under Israeli law and may be dispossessed. Very convenient if you live in Brooklyn and find buying a house too expensive in the US, as opposed to settling with a government subsidy on some WB village's lands).
- David Dean Shulman, describing in detail his first hand observations of what settlers do to the poorest of Palestinian goatherds (poisoning their grazing land etc) in his classic Dark Hope (2007) called it 'absolute evil'.
- Eva Illouz an Israel-French sociologist writing for Le Monde, analysing the rise to political power of the leader of Religious Zionism Itamar Ben-Gvir, who now has considerable say in West Bank settlement policy, argued that ‘(h)e represents what we must reluctantly call "Jewish fascism".' 'The third political force in Israel represents what we must reluctantly call Jewish fascism Le Monde 16 November 2022.
- So, however harsh my language (and I must, to keep abreast, read articles in the Israeli press that give weekly accounts of this violence) my target was the two Israeli popular newspapers who consistently find reason to defend examples of what everyone knows is unprovoked violence) it corresponds to a documented reality, that, aside from exceptions like eminently admirable settlers like the late lamented rabbi Menachem Froman, violent landgrabbers exist, are tolerated, and never punished. In any case, I'll meet you on a compromise, by agreeing that here, and only here, I let my personal feelings get the upper hand over detached analysis on my talk page. Nishidani ( talk) 13:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- Nishidani edited large portions and added much content to an article titled: Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, while violating one of the main “pillars” of Wikipedia; NPOV and at times also being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews. This was after he wrote on his talk page that he will "make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians". In his first edit he writes that both Palestinians and Israelis tend to refer to each other by the usage of animal stereotypes, yet the title of the article and the rest of it, solely accuses the Israeli-Jewish side of this mutual practice. </ref>
- So what? Where ‘at times was I ‘being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews?’ There are a very large number of articles on Palestinian rocket attacks and terrorism on wiki (look at Palestinian political violence), on none of which have I insisted that, to NPOV balance, we must add a balancing section in each outlining Jewish terrorism or the continual Israeli missile and artillery assaults on the Gaza Strip. I haven’t argued that editors who make these pages are disrespectful and uncivil to Palestinians.
- While I read I write notes topically collated, and 10 years ago I had enough on animal metaphors for an article. (I might note that there is a splendid work of great erudition by Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews, Fordham University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-823-27560-1 which influenced my article, and would well deserve an article on its own.) When Yoav Gallant on 7 October called all Gazans ‘animals’, I voiced the idea that it might be time to write up those notes for an article. But I didn’t. Then some months later, another editor tried to do so with a poorly formatted stub, and alerted me. The stub was rejected, but I took it in hand and produced the article you see, which diligently has a prefatory remark that both sides indulge in this, but addresses the far less familiar terrain of Israeli political caricatures of Palestinians. As I said on the talk page, any one is free to write a corresponding page on Palestinian stereotypes of Israelis, but they will have difficulty getting that depth of coverage of statements from senior and influential Palestinian figures, and I certainly am far too busy in real life to do everyone’s work. I write up what I know of relatively comprehensively. Nishidani ( talk) 14:20, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem, created by Selfstudier, and Nishidani (who joined 40 minutes after the article was created), presents contested claims in WP:VOICE. Source [a], for example, is from al-Haq, a Palestinian group. Stating opinions and contested assertions as facts, rises to violation of Wikimedia’s policy of writing from a NPOV. Similar concerns arise with the Palestinian enclaves article, which seems to endorse a biased perspective and presents one-sided viewpoints in violation of WP:NPOV guidelines. The first paragraph immediately draws comparisons to the Apartheid, and then cherry-picks a quote from Amira Hass, a journalist known in Israel for her radical left opinions. Despite these issues, it is classified as a good article. Nishidani, a significant contributor to this article, has strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias, as can be seen here, also adding personal attacks, violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of UCOC.
- So I edited a newly created article - Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem - and violated NPOV by adding a material from, al-Haq, and citing Amira Hass. The former is a Palestinian source, and the latter is (here we go) a cherry-picked ref for a journalist known for her ‘radical left opinions’. Citing a Palestinian Human Rights source, high respected abroad, and an Israeli journalist who rather than being the daughter of Holocaust survivors and a recipient of multiple awards internationally for her defense of Palestinian human rights, is a ‘radical leftist’. It’s pointless responding, except to note that the I/P area is about two national subjects, Israel and Palestine, and to assume that the narrative should exclude Palestinian sources is bizarre for any wikipedian who know what NPOV requires.
- Finally, my 'strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias'. The article (another one, not the one on Palestinian displacements in East Jerusalem' from which this is taken) refers to my dismissal of an anachronistic tagging by Tombah of Palestinian enclaves. Now I think it fair to state that everyone interacting with Tombah knew for a year or so he was a sockpuppet. Mostly, given there was no checkuser case, one responded pretending he was a serious contributor. Shortly after that tagging, the proof was finally forthcoming. But the point is, a very substantial amount of effort and time earlier had thoroughly addressed concerns raised by several editors, Tombah included, and in that note, Tombah alone remained unsatisfied, without giving any serious evidence for a reasonable 'concern'. So I dismissed it, as did others. Nishidani ( talk) 14:25, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- The user labelled an NYT article on sexual violence during the October 7 attacks "pseudo-journalism".
- The article is Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7 New York Times 28 December 2023. A wiki article was written up precisely on this piece, Screams Without Words. Read it. It was controversial from day 1. There are several competent critics, among them Ben Smith, who challenged the claim it was way below the quality to be expected from the venue in which it was published. The data weren't collected and written by competent or experienced journalists. In any case, what is wrong with expressing one's view that something written about this topic, and appearing in a mainstream source, is 'pseudo-journalism'. The NYTs published Judith Miller who extraordinary disinformation helped gain consensus for the war on Iraq, though, and I remember it well, her articles were contradicted by evidence readily available. Nishidani ( talk) 14:45, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- The user presents themselves, and another user he frequently collaborated with, User:Nableezy, as I/P specialists. When users approach them asking to pay attention for their conduct, they responded aggressively. In one example, they told one user to "stop shitstirring", to refrain from editing certain pages, and blaming them for "appalling ignorance", violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of wikimedia's UCOC.
- I have edited in the I/P area for 16 years, Nableezy slightly less. It is reasonable to note that we have some topic familiarity, indeed specialize in that area. The diff you cite referring to this heading and discussion on my talk page above does not refer to the I/P area, but to an article regarding Japan. I won't go into the details, but I read it as an attempt, in my view malicious, to out my identity, in revenge for a near block (I think he failed to get me sanctioned) and an interaction ban he had just copped, and I noted this to an administrator, giving the details in an email. Had I addressed the merits with a formal complaint, the editor in question would almost certainly have been permabanned. I preferred telling him he was a 'shit-stirrer' and not complaining, because of the principle enunciated above, that I don't use ANI or AE to conduct vendettas or 'get at' editors I disagree with. Nishidani ( talk) 14:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
* On August 29th 2018 at 16:41, administrator named Sandstein wrote: “I will consider imposing a block or an indefinite topic ban, with or without any prior discussion, in the event of continued battleground-like conduct by Nishidani in this topic area”. A few hours later, at 20:12 the user stated he retired. Despite that, and putting a retired tag on his page, he is clearly still active.
- I persist in maintaining a very high regard for Sandstein, notwithstanding that remark which I considered injurious and more a matter of impatience than the cool judgment I have long admired in him. Others of course are welcome to see it differently. In any case, he left me the possibility of appealing his decision, which, on principle, I declined. I have said: if an arbitration decision goes against me, I take it on the chin - I was brought up to regard whingeing as poor form -and sit out the consequences. For the record, my reasoning on his decision is here. Nishidani ( talk) 15:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
:oh and by the way, you missed citing the evidence that I viciously attacked Nableezy (actually it was an injoke exchange on our user pages someone eavesdropped on) just after the Sandstein incident. I even used shit-stirrer there. Nishidani ( talk) 15:38, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- All of MSchwartz's points basically express a deep distaste for my views (which are basically those I drew from reading Israeli and diasporic scholarship), and have little to do with a case for my putative repeated infraction of wikipedia protocols. I understand the distaste, but all I can see here is unfamiliarity with the way actually editing wikipedia works. Nishidani ( talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
I am not averse to trying to adjust the "dreaming" text, what would you suggest though? Selfstudier ( talk) 15:00, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- It's taken me, still without success because I simply cannot research contributions through technical ineptitude, and perhaps age: 1 hr 45 minutes to try to find just one diff that would refer to something I remember doing around 2015, consulting the No Original Research Noticeboard about precisely this lead formulation. I really have to push myself to ferret and burrow into the tedious reconstruction of my wiki past. If it were a book-related issue, I'd swim through a library like a dolphin around a prow. So, really, just replying to that silly screed above is going to exhaust me spare time to the point that I lose interest in editing. Thank goodness I have a novel to read every day after the noisomeness of this kind of disruptive intrusion. Cheers and good luck with it. Nishidani ( talk) 15:21, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
This? Selfstudier ( talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, indeed, and my heartful thanks for finding it. I could remember the discussion (independent editors confirmed the phrasing was a synth violation, while the I/P editors merely yakked. I must apologize also if it took what looked like 40 minutes out of your time. Best regards. Nishidani ( talk) 20:56, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- Np ) it didn't take but a few minutes, given your NOR 2015 cue, splash of Israelites, and up she came. Selfstudier ( talk) 21:02, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- That's the sort of thing I am absolutely dumb at. And why when things come to arbitration, I always flounder when obliged to dredge up diffs to establish the whole picture distorted by the diffs someone complaining about me amasses with, apparently, effortless facility. For me, that just means afternoons burnt up in a trivial pursuit not reading something interesting . So I prefer just to allow any sentence to pass, and wear the penalty whatever it may be. It means my productive working day remains safe and pleasurable. Thanks pal. Nishidani ( talk) 21:11, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
Leaked Documents Expose how Israeli war Ministers Created IDF Policy of Mass Killing With US Support Selfstudier ( talk) 14:42, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
- Unusable of course. It's not new that the mass killing of civilians is part of IDF theory and practice, and that we do not need wikileaks to tell us that, since it has been reported openly in the New York Times. The author could have cited Ethan Bronner's article from 2010 part of which runs:
The caution is at least in part because Hamas wants to keep ruling in Gaza, not return to its previous role as a pure resistance movement. Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.
“Hamas is the dominant organization in Gaza,” a top military official said in a briefing last week that was given on condition of anonymity. “They are the regime and feel very connected to the people. They do not want to lose that connection to the people.”
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: baal habayit hishtageya, or the boss has lost it. It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.
'This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.
It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.
The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza, especially because Israel’s antirocket attacks in previous years had been more measured.' Ethan Bronner, 'Parsing Gains of Gaza War,’ New York Times 18 January 2009.
- That verb hishtageya comes from the same root as nishtagea ('We'll go mad') which a shocked Moshe Sharett recorded in his diaries where he confided a remark he'd heard from Pinhas Lavon back in the 50s. The point was, if Israel felt 'crossed' in any way, it should adopt a policy of, we'd say now 'shock and awe', reacting by coolly going completely off the handle, to put the wind up everyone or, as Moshe Dayan put it, Moshe Dayan act like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother. That was the thinking behind the Dahiya doctrine (1982 Lebanese invarion onwards) and the Samson Option.
- It might look quite creative, a sort of apocalyptic endgame response that completely jumps the step-by-step theories of managing conflict escalation, but it has roots that go way back, not to anything 'Israeli' but to the Yishuv's adoption of the British imperial model of suppressing rebel uprisings by attacking the whole civilian society where the rebels were embedded. Yishuv militants were trained to do that in the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, under people like that nutter Orde Wingate. I noted early today that Rashid Khalidi drew the same comparison in his Guardian article today, on the historic roots of the present Israeli war on Gaza:
Another shift rooted in the military fiasco of 7 October is that it represents the temporary collapse of Israel’s security doctrine. This is often misnamed “deterrence”, but it is in fact derived from the aggressive approach first taught to the founders of Israel’s armed forces – officers such as Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Sadeh, chosen members of the Haganah and Palmach militias who were trained in the late 1930s by veteran British colonial counter-insurgency experts. 'The doctrine holds that by attacking pre-emptively or in a retaliatory fashion with overwhelming force, and by striking directly at civilian populations considered supportive of insurgents, the enemy can be decisively defeated, permanently intimidated and forced to accept the terms of the coloniser. In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.' Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine,' The Guardian 11 April 2024
- Of course, in all this, those who don't speedread history via snippets and newsheadlines or the obiter dicta of talking heads, will connect all this to earlier aspects of Zionism, Max Nordau's Muscular Judaism and later to Zeev Jabotinsky's seminal Iron Wall essay where he argues, with penetrating realism the necessity for Zionism, if it is to transform an overwhelmingly Arab society into Greater Israel, to override the will of the Arab majority (and he openly admitted that the Arabs had understood from the beginning that Zionism was an existential threat to their own aspirations) by facing it down with an 'iron wall of Jewish bayonets' (manu militari).
- These are some of the many dots that are rarely connected in RS. I admire Jabotinsky for his intellectual honesty which dismissed all the 'vegetarian' waffle of public Zionist spokesmen with their wooing of the global public by talking about accommodations, negotiations and roadmaps to a fair settlement between equally fair claims. Unfortunately, his humanitarian instincts and concern for an eventual equality with, not dispersal of, Palestinians was ignored as fine print and only the realist violence found a receptive hearing in his heirs. History is made and remade by political actors who know nothing of history, willingly so, since they would be forced to think several times and over the long term instead of invariably blundering optimistically into the next imaginary future where all our problems will be definitively resolved- in the sense that they will remain more or less as they were, only not recognizable as such. Nishidani ( talk) 17:12, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Idk if you looked, there are three articles in the series, 1, 2 is the one above and here is 3. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:05, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks again. I've been rather busy in RL, since it's spring, and I have to sodbust, prepare vegetable beds, cut bamboo props, mow lawns that do not consist of Gazan weeds and, just until now, conduct a substantial burnoff without burning the neighbourhood (minor collateral damage if my own home and patch remains sweet and trim?). Time to slake my thirst at the local boozer. I'll look into it tomorrow. Nishidani ( talk) 17:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Done my burning, not allowed past end March. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Same here, but an all but smokeless set of small fires, lasting a half an hour each, in invisible corners of my 4 gardens, within a valley with few residents (who don't object) though siding on the village centre, at an hour when the cops go off duty, with a water pumnp nearby, and the ashes doused before evening, and, well, I succumb to a rational delinquency. Nishidani ( talk) 19:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
The growing frequency of Germany police crackdowns on any form of manifesting solidarity for, or even publicly discussing, the issues of Israel's treatment of Palestinians suggests there might be an article covering this recent phenomenon.
- Yanis Varoufakis here, i.e. addio Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Nishidani ( talk) 20:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
- idem Ghassan Abu-Sittah Nishidani ( talk) 08:15, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
- idem Nancy Fraser here Nishidani ( talk) 08:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
This page was nominated for deletion on October 9, 2010. The result of the discussion was keep. |
Index |
This page has archives. Sections older than 100 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 20 sections are present. |
Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.
(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.
'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.' [1]
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.. .' [2]
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.’ [4]
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’ [5]. 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. [6]. 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.' [7]
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 [8]). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.
John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect
‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.” [9]
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’ [10], 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.
Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’ [11]
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.’ [12]
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 [13], 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. [14]
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. [15]
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. [16]
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. [17]. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.
The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘ Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias ( Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.
(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank
When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'. [18]. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed ' Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-
'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.' [19]
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 [20] resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.
The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' [21] 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. [22] [23]
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.” [24]<
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. [25]
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’ [26]
The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew [27] 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 ’ [28]
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) [29]. In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.
(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.
‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’ [30]
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. [31]
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 [32] 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. [33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power [34]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank [35] [36]. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy. [37]
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.' [38]
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.' [39]
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.’ [40]
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’. [41]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovoked [42] invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state [43] 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 [44]. 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. [45] 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. [46]
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 [47] 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' [48] Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.
Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area. [49].
This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them ' Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), [50], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.
'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".' [51]
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). [52] [53] According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide. [54]
(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [55]
'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.' [56]
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.
Further reading:-
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(
help)Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.
This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism. Nishidani ( talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.
If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.
This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration. Nishidani ( talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'
In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped. Nishidani ( talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
More remarkable statements
Nishidani ( talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023
Honourable men (once upon a time)
After the war, we heard that the first target usually seen by the pilots in the enclosed waterway was the Canberra. By chance, she was painted white, which was taken by the attackers to mean that she was a hospital ship. Without exception, the Argentinian pilots were honourable men, and not one attacked what they thought was a sanctuary for the injured.' Sharkey Ward,Sea Harrier over the Falklands, Cassell (1992) 2000 p.273.
Et cetera
Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party. Nishidani ( talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Retired Major-General Giora Eiland:
The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.
The whole article is worth reading for a clue as to the kind of mentality that one often notes among the upper echelons of the IDF. Nishidani ( talk) 17:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be.
That is almost identical in tone and content to the drift of Himmler's speech addressing troops who had just mown down about 150 Jews near Minsk in 1941. Nishidani ( talk) 18:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
In Berlin, the city senate is considering pulling funding for the Oyun cultural centre in the German capital’s Neukölln district, after the centre’s directors reportedly refused to cancel a peace vigil by a leftwing Jewish group.
I.e.German hypervigilance against a recrudescence of antisemitism as part of its programmatic if clichéd Vergangenheitsbewältigung has now ironically morphed into a vigilante punishing of Jews who are critical of Israel. Nishidani ( talk) 21:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
Hamas operatives are also trained to fire on IDF soldiers when they see them' Yaakov Lappin, 'Some 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions ‘significantly damaged’,' Jewish News Syndicate 20 November 2023
It's reported than despite the vast IDF bulldozing and uprooting of Gazan agriculture, a patch of strawberries was found by a group of invasive settlers, so the compromised land of the Philistines can once more offer fertile prospects as a promised land for settlers Nishidani ( talk) 06:01, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Taking a leaf out of battle descriptions of the Israelites against the Philistines in the Bible, the Israeli minister for Telecommunications Shlomo Karhi has apparently called for the circumcision of captured Hamas fighters.(Oren Ziv , Yotam Ronen, Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace, +972 magazine 22 November 2023 Nishidani ( talk) 09:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC))
Yafa Adar is home.The sub-humans around her are already lying deep underground, their house has probably been turned into rubble by the army of the state of Israel. That’s Jewish, Israeli power.(Yosef Israeli a reporter for Channel 13 cited Canaan Yidor, Israelis celebrate the return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ‘embodies Zionism’, The Times of Israel 25 November 2023 )
The Salah al-Din Trail of Tears or something like that will probably be written some years down the track, when testimonies from masses of survivors of the trek involving over a million individuals are cross-checked. The killing of several dozen local reporters has made the collection of evidence extremely difficult, the systemic bias of giving intense coverage to Jewish victims of Hamas's outrage while only referring to the obvious death march in generic allusions to an abstract mass's plight in a line or two. Some of Hajjaj's material consists of rumours, but the hallucinating experiences of people like the lad with the smashed leg look typical and not unlikely for at least several thousands. Nishidani ( talk) 07:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
I don't think the saying, 'scum always rises to the surface' is invariably true, but the bags here do appear to follow the rule. Thanks. Nishidani ( talk) 06:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.” Jonathan Ofir, 'I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer,' Mondoweiss 8 December 2023
Nothing of this surprises me. What does is the moral cowardice of the communities who stand by. Nishidani ( talk) 00:13, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.
the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. Ralph Nader, What the Mass Media Needs to Cover Re: Israel/Gaza Conflict CounterPunch 26 February 2024
The number of trucks crossing into Gaza rose slightly to about 190 a day – less than half the peacetime daily total. Israeli inspectors were still turning back 20 to 25 each day, NBC News reported, citing an Egyptian aid official, on grounds as arbitrary as the wooden pallets bearing the food not being exactly the right dimensions. Israel has banned Unrwa, the main UN relief agency in the region, from using the crossing.' Julian Borger, Toby Helm, Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum Israel alone? Allies’ fears grow over conduct – and legality – of war in Gaza The Guardian 31 March 2024
Since the mainstream sources in English refuse to mention what the Israeli press is stating, the only way to get an RS-quality picture is to systematically comb the four sources above and cite the material from RS they cite or allude to.
The counterattack on Be'eri was conducted by Major General Itai Veruv.
Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages
The Hamas militants held hostages. So stating that tank fire was used to blast kibbutz buildings where Hamas militants were hiding only begs the question: were Israelis detained by them also present in those buildings?
Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Gaza Division, when the Erez Crossing and military installations close to it, his own Coordination and Liaison Office were attacked, locked himself and some staff in the subterranean war-room (underground refuges are not unique to Hamas) called down an airstrike on his own base, though many soldiers lay wounded above/outside
Nishidani ( talk) 21:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
I've yet to see, but I don't read around that much, any mention of what is the most logical explanation for the systematic closing down of hospitals throughout the Israeli controlled north. Since they have no strategic value to anyone, one reasonable conjecture is that the whole Gazan system of registering deaths is centered on hospitals, esp. al-Shifa. The procedure is that deaths are entered into the register as corpses or the dying are carried there, and a preliminary control is made by technicians to correlate the dead, and identify them, with archival records. Once this is done, the resulting data is collated and the statistics are updated. If one dismantles the hospitals and their administrative staff, no further empirical work of precise record-keeping would be possible, something also consolidated by the lack of power to maintain or recharge servers and computers. Perhaps something like that infrastructure survives in Khan Younis and Rafah, but the data from the north would, I suppose, now be frozen. Worth keeping an eye out for this technical issue if RS come round to examining it. Nishidani ( talk) 18:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
i.e., Manuel Musallam doesn't and never did exist. It-s extraordinary what influential morons can get away with. Nishidani ( talk) 09:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded. Ten days ago, Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, published information obtained from the ministry of defence’s rehabilitation department. This put casualty numbers at more than 5,000, with 58% of them classed as serious and more than 2,000 officially recognised as disabled. There have also been a number of friendly fire casualties, with the Times of Israel reporting 20 out of 105 deaths due to such fire or accidents during fighting. Paul Rogers, 'Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
When the White House announced additional funding to UNRWA for its Gaza emergency response, Almadhoun said he had to balance gratitude with reality. “OK, yes you are giving a mom a can of tuna, but you also killed her son and bombed her house,” he says he told Biden administration officials.' Rhana Natour, 'He’s raising millions in aid for Gaza. But still he couldn’t save his family,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
'In a Dec. 21 video report based on analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.” Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.” Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs” to Israel.' Norman Solomon, President Biden: Learn the Names of Children You’ve Helped Israel to Murder, CounterPunch 27 December 2023.
In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing one of its staff. Mouin Rabbani, The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, Mondoweiss 28 December 2023
'Political value is not the only merit in underscoring this disturbing comparison. The unsettling analogy is also a crucial means of exploding long-held myths: in other words, that Jewish victimhood is beyond compare, exalted and singular in its gravity. Indeed, it is precisely the exceptionalism with which Israel envelops itself that has allowed the Zionist political elite (wherever it may be – in the US, UK, Europe, or Israel) to flout international law repeatedly for more than 75 years. It is this cultivated sense of transcendent sublimity (arising from the weaponization of the Holocaust and the manipulative use of the Bible) that elevates Israel’s status to an arrogant actor on the world stage, one that is indifferent to all red lines (that is, to virtually all Geneva conventions and UN resolutions). . . Once pitied as the collective victim of genocide, Israel is now the perpetrator, the state that, paradoxically, wields victimhood as its quintessential raison d’être.' Michelle Weinroth, Why we have to make the Jewish Ghetto comparison Mondoweiss 7 January 2024
Peter Beinart, What Will Happen to Gaza’s People? New York Times 7 January 2024
Yadlin. . .said the IDF’s southern command, which has responsibility for Gaza, had started planning buffer zones within the territory that would be heavily mined to prevent any repeat of the 7 October attack. Jason Burke, Israel says Gaza fighting could last a year, amplifying fears of regional war The Guardian 8 January 2024
Wael al-Dahdouh al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza, lost his wife Amna, his son Mahmoud (15) his daughter Sham, and his grandson Adam, aged 1 and a half, on 25th October while sheltering in a private home in Nuseirat refugee camp. Then he himself was wounded by an Israeli airstrike on a school in Khan Younis on 15th of December. Yesterday they took out his son Hamza Dahdouh when a drone hit the car he and other journalists were travelling in en route to the Moraj area.
There are about 700,000 people in the world currently facing catastrophic hunger, 577,000 of them are in Gaza.' Archie Bland,'The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza,' The Guardian 8 January 2024
And this record.
The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US. According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. Nina Lakhani, Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe The Guardian 9 January 2024
“Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.” Eugene Borowitz cited Marc Tracy, 'Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?,' New York Times 14 January 2024.
It's the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God. But it's the fate of only a very few races that they're sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.' The Jewish German detective Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not, Quercus 2009 p.305. Nishidani ( talk) 06:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Trump recently made an appearance in which - even as he was calling Biden "cognitively impaired" - he suggested that we were headed toward "World War Two".' p.10
I enjoy reading about your travel and outdoor experiences as well as your various interactions with domestic and wild animals. And thanks for your reference to the beautiful, moving
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by
Thomas Gray. Moreover, my cat sends a big thank-you to his beloved granpa Nishidani for all the pets and caresses you sent him, he enjoyed them.
Ijon Tichy (
talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
When Biden assumed the US presidency he recruited a team of prodigious foreign policy talent, perhaps the most venerated ensemble of such experts in modern US history. They were given a clear mission: to rebuild US alliances, repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and prepare for the challenge in the South China Sea. The Palestinian issue had not been a White House priority but at best something to be managed. . .Biden misread how Israeli society had changed over the last two decades, and consequently how best to influence Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attacks. Biden “lives with an Israel in his head which probably never existed and certainly doesn’t exist today,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator in peace talks with Palestinian leaders. Patrick Wintour, The new world disorder: how the Gaza war disrupted international relations The Guardian 6 April 2024
'one that ‘will be studied at top military academies like West Point in the U.S. and Sandhurst in the U.K. as the "gold standard for urban warfare". (Aya Batrawy, Omar El Qattaa, Here's what we found after Israel's raid on Al-Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital NPR 6 April 2024)
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press 2023 TrangaBellam ( talk) 18:28, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
'There has been some incremental improvement in the south. Palestinian deaths, according to statistics from Gaza health officials, have averaged about 171 a day so far in January, down from 230 during the last week of December.' (Karen DeYoung, John Hudson, Despite U.S. pressure on Israel, casualty count in Gaza remains high,' Washington Post 14 January 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 04:36, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Please self revert this revert, which is currently under talk page discussion (which you have not participated in). And please refrain from accusing me of POV edit (this is the second time you have done so) Longhornsg ( talk) 22:54, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 ( talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
Hello! I'm looking for a source and thought you/your talk page watchers would be a better first stop than WP:RX. The source is:
That's all the information I have about it. I saw it cited exactly like that in Pappe's 2006 Ethnic Cleansing book, p. 273 n. 35. I have no idea what Between the Lines is and I cannot seem to find that publication (there is a 2007 book with a similar name but it doesn't appear to be the right source), or anything written by Abu Sitta with that title ("Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present"), or anything on Google scholar with that title. When I search Google web for that exact phrase with quotes, the only place I find is in Pappe's 2006 book.
There is of course another Abu Sitta article from 2003 that is often cited, which is this one, but that has a different title ("Traces of Poison"), is in a different publication ( al-Ahram Weekly), and a different date, 27 Feb-3 Mar, 2003.
Did Pappe just mis-cite the 2003 Abu Sitta article? Or is there another Abu Sitta article that was published a couple of weeks after "Trace of Poison"? I suspect it may be that it was written in another language (I presume Arabic but maybe something else), and the title Pappe used in his citation is his own English translation, and that's why I'm not finding it. Anybody have any ideas here? If not, I'll ask at RX. Thanks, Levivich ( talk) 18:56, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
This book contains a selection of articles from Between the Lines (BTL), a political journal first published soon after the eruption of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000. BTL was published on a regular basis from Ramallah and Jerusalem until September 2003, when it was forced to stop due to difficulties in its material circumstances.Note 1 (attached to that quote) says this:
Between the Lines was cofounded and coedited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad in November 2000. From its inception, it was produced on a volunteer basis, with great help provided by our writers and a circle of individuals and organizations who likewise believed in its mission. It ceased publishing as a consequence of its accumulated debt.This review of the book contains some more information about the journal's history.
mailed to readers around the world—perhaps it was never available online)
My apologies to you Lev, and joining you in expressing deep thanks to Malerisch for their timely and insightful response.My access to the internet, since I don't have a laptop or one of those smartphoney thingamijigs is somewhat restricted by continual travelling.(even the police in Seymour detained me, if gently, when they found me enjoying a night walk at 3.30 a.m. Apparently, old men with backpacks sauntering around empty streets looking for a petrol pump and all night cafe where one might intercept trucks at dawn and hitch a ride to a busless destination is thougbt indicative of an altzheimer's condition these days). Nishidani ( talk) 02:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani ( talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ----
Ijon Tichy (
talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-
‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” ( William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)
A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.
This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.
I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.
I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani ( talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024. "A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine." --- Ijon Tichy ( talk) 15:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scuttle around like cockroaches in a bottle.'
'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'
But in the meantime let us rejoice:
Hamas has sure made a lot of Israeli religious people exultantly happy. Rapoport gives several other examples of this messianic exhilaration at the spectacle of genocide. Nishidani ( talk) 15:14, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo ( talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
When I read over a half century ago what Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia, with trenchant pithiness, something to the effect that 'to say we when one means I is one of the most recondite of insults,' I took the apophthegm to heart as a ruling guideline in life. Distracted at one point into the massive literature on ethnic identity, it assumed even greater cogency. What was nationalism, not only in its formal ideology but in the public language shaped under its muscled authority, if not a discursive mode where this core distinction was utterly lost, as its spokesmen made the most varied claims about what being part of an ethnic, cultural or political community entailed, for everyone captured up into its defining set. The 'we-ness' component trumped any trace of individualism. Before being oneself, one was one of us, and owed obeisance to the communal substrates' definition of who anyone in their ranks was,basically.Being some-one meant being primarily a member of a someone-else-ish national or ethnic group. One was defined by groupthink before one could even learn to find and articulate one's own voice.
Adorno's point held particular force for me because, reading widely in modern European history, and especially after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre's classic postwar text, Reflexions sur la question juive,the 'Jews' emerged as the outstanding example of what can happen when Others presume to define a minority community in their midst, otherwise as thoroughly acculturated as anyone else in a country, and by dominating as a we what they supposedly were, lay the bedrock for their eventual extermination, through sheer discursive carelessness over the longue durée.
In the slumbering toils of this late bespoke Woke world, itself the retarded offspring of an era of codifying politically correctness, the vast plain of the sayable is increasingly hemmed in, allotments staked out, taboo lines of no trespass roped off, by constituencies sharing little more than a common grievance over the way the parliament of language misrepresents them.Any discussion or remarks touching on the Jewish world furnishes no exception, and indeed perhaps presents an extreme instance of the pathologies one discerns more generally in identitarian debates, for which it provides, moreover a template for ethnic grievance strategies in recent decades. Perhaps arbitrarily I'd take 1967-1969 as marking a dividing line, when sensitivities underwent a radical shift. The former date refers to the fear and subsequent triumphant euphoria widespread in the diaspora at the outcome of the Six Days War. The latter alludes to the deserved success of Philip Roth's wonderfully vulgar, inimitably comical Portnoy's Complaint.
in the postwar era down to this juncture, people in the diaspora could grow up, as witness the autobiographical remarks of people like Norton Mezvinsky, Robert Manne and Ramona Koval alluded go in a prior section, completely unaware of any social interest in let alone antipathy to, the fact that one's background was Jewish. That was a private matter, one could even frequent Christian schools, and in so far as one had a national identity it was as an American, Australian etc. An engagement with Israel, let alone the holocaust was, in these early decades, very low key. Nishidani ( talk) 12:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
I enjoyed reading your poem. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted your original prose comment into that infernal machine and asked it to rewrite it as a poem, and this is what it came out with (with only minor tweaks by me):
In a realm where words dance with intent,
AE ponders the stain the accusation lent.
For over a decade, this slur's been sent,
From editors, none victorious, who leave a scent,
A lingering cloud that whispers "Repent."
Chess, with a sly leap, adds a new layer,
Innuendos fly, a subtle flare.
"Perhaps not antisemitic," they dare,
"But you question identity," a wound to bear.
Provocation lingers, a silent snare.
Unproductive, they say, to respond in kind.
Yet the offense stings, a truth to find,
Repetitive whispers, a relentless grind,
Before the eyes of admins who find
A smear that echoes, leaving scars behind.
Though water off a duck's back, I claim,
The weight of repetition, a relentless game,
A subliminal poison, with a hidden aim,
To erode, to decay, to maim.
Tolerance wanes, as dignity's flame.
I like yours much better. But damn, is that good or what, from a computer? It understood what you were saying, and frankly, is capable of writing better poetry than probably like 99%+ of fluent English speakers. The computer's choice of monorhyming quintains surprised me. Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it. Levivich ( talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
I'll try to get my pedantic mania offloaded or reined in into a footnote. Our Sumerian bard working off his furor poeticus would have dashed off his melodious ire on a soft clay tablet, wielding with deft speed a reed quill (Akkadian qantuppi, or something like that. I can't open another page on this laptop to check simultaneously as I write here).Chiselling came much later (though not financially) when imperial orderx commanded monumental narratives to be inscribed on rockfaces. Does anyone write good poetry in anger? Most early ancient poetry was composed in the style still preserved in the practice of Osip Mandelshtam, as his wife Nadezhda describes it, pacing up and down or along a street, murmuring various syllable and word combinations, until line after line the poem shapes itself in memory and, only then, is it written down or, as anciently, was recited and often committed to memory on the spot by the listeners. There's not much place for useless emotions like anger in these traditional modes, as anyone who has attended extempore bardic competitions in provincial Italian villages can attsst. Two or more oral poets stand before an audience, a theme is selected by lot, one takes it up, say 'war', and slowly but fluently produces two quatrains (abab) with tercets to round it off. The next poet must reply on theme by say praising by contrast its antithesis, playing off the ideas of his earlier rival,and this seemingly effortless to and fro can go one for hours. The sheer pleasure of technical challenges, the extraordinary level of concentration required to do this doesn't leave room for silly distemper, ire or anger,even were that the topical issue, as it is in the Iliad(mËnis).
I'm sure you read the AE filing so I won't get too into the weeds, but try and keep commentary on point without rhetorical flourishes that can be misunderstood. There are a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds with a lot of views who've been exposed to a lot of information and have a lot of different take-aways on that information. Using phrases like "dumb goyim," regardless of your intent, is likely to turn into a big waste of time for everyone involved rather than moving the discussion forward. Please keep that in mind. ScottishFinnishRadish ( talk) 12:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Finally found a source in my random reading to undergird my understanding of the cognitive puzzle I find in the inability to grasp the repetitious obviousness of the tragedy unfolding since 1967 (coming from the theory of остранение in one vein of modern aesthetic theory). Its neurological basis. Analogy with Nazism is not the point, that is only the authors' most dramatic instancing of this everyday scotoma via habituation that afflicts us all as a natural consequence of the the normative economy of evolutionary adaptations to our perception of the world.
For Milton Mayer’s staggering book about the rise of Nazism, for example, a man who lived in Germany at the time described the regime to the author: “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.” He added: “If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.” Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them,' The New York Times 26 February 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 00:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
The whole article, premised on the view that, if what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, holocaust exceptionalism will implode, is worth reading. Nishidani ( talk) 15:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of the Hesder Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa said in a yeshiva conference on Thursday that the entire population in the Gaza Strip should be killed. Head of Jaffa yeshiva says all Gazans should be killed Haaretz 9 March 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
The question in the title is rhetorical. Kushner dwells in the real world, unlike the fanners of the new witchhunting wave of antisemitism claimants, now at pandemic or tidal proportions. Nishidani ( talk) 11:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Re Media coverage of the Israel–Hamas war. This article so far is totally inadequate, given the serious overviews correlating thematic emphases with specific changes in the war. Such issues cannot be adequately covered by episodic tidbits. The following provide useful guidelines to the topic. Any additions that consist of links to studies on the coverage blackout of the realities of the conflict in the Israeli media in particular would be appreciated.
Nishidani ( talk) 07:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
Negative Terms for Palestinians in Israeli discourse Crampcomes ( talk) 07:35, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. The proper title would be Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse which I cannot now work on because it just supplies a redirect to another general article. If someone could do me the courtesy of annuling the redirect, so that my proposed title becomes redlinked, I will start writing the article under that rubric. Nishidani ( talk) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
I cut up a length of cardboard into a square
Running a yard or so along each side,
And piled on blobs of plasticine here and there
To tizzy the flat with hills, and when it dried
I filled a pot with water and began to pour
A flood of
H2O swimmingly over the map.
Most of the wash though leaked onto the floor
As I kept on filling the pot from the kitchen tap
And splashing the model to submerge it under the drink.
"Bugger those edges and corners", I swore. "They drain
All of the water away",and as I began to think
That yarn the nuns spun at bubs was bloody inane
A scream broke up my experiment. It was my mum
Weeping a flood of tears, a deluge of woe
As, slipping on her kitchen floor, she kicked my bum,
Saying, "it’s even filthier here than what you leave in the po."
I was only five years old, and wet behind the ears.
But it taught me a lesson: the bible’s bullshit for one,
And as for my prospects in science, my mother’s jeers
Meant, like my religious teachers, that I had none.
Nishidani (
talk) 10:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Very good, old chap. But enough of yer doggerel, how about a real poem?
Su Hui's Xuanji Tu
palindrome poem in
simplified characters (left) and in the original
traditional characters (Sorry for editing your file. I can't stand the sight of simplified Chinese characters, which destroy the aesthetics and ideogrammatic games in the traditional script)
-- NSH001 ( talk) 11:20, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
Wow, I thought that would get you going! Very impressive.
On Latin, I've forgotten almost everything I learned at school – which was only a 2-year introduction course. Basically rote learning of endless declensions and conjugations, and that was about it. Not the way to learn a language properly. Our Latin teacher spent a lot of his lessons moaning about his having to do National Service. His was the last year group to be required to do NS before it was abolished, which really annoyed him. Moaned a lot about the pointlessness of army life and the incompetence of the officers. He did say that he much preferred classical Greek to Latin. As you know I was forced to drop Latin in order to do German along with the science course, though I would have preferred to continue Latin. The head of the classics department was the only woman head of department (other than "domestic science"), and the only teacher at the school to hold a PhD. Everybody held her in very high regard.
No need to apologise for anything, little Asha just loves to tidy up after her beloved "Onki Nishi", and she saves me a lot of time. Did you know that while you were away she was put in prison for 30 days by Microsoft because (a) I changed something I shouldn't have done, and Microsoft didn't like it (b) I had stupidly neglected to set up a proper backup system (c) Microsoft is able lock you out of YOUR OWN COMPUTER (so after you've set up a new computer, switch from using a Microsoft Account, to using a local one) I'm a terrorist, apparently (= I hate the genocide being perpetrated by Israel)? Only kidding, but I think you'll get the point. Lesson: when and if you get a new computer to replace your dinky one, I recommend setting it up to use a local account. Probably best to allow it to set itself up using the defaults (which means using a Microsoft A/c), but then get someone who knows what they're doing to set you up with a local a/c ASAP.
"How does one put a space between two quatrains. Those above are too distant?" comme ci:
Perhaps they fuck you up: who knows?
For victimhood prefers to rate
Especial value to what shows
Some foreignness in our self-hate.
That they were fucked up in your case
Is possible: I know that most
Are hardly saints - they have to face
Each day the dangers of that coast
No one prepared them for, or taught
What sudden tides await them there,
Whèn love dives, wild, into the fraught
And deeper waters of despair.
The misery's passed on. Each child
Shies at the sea beyond his shore.
Most learn to trust, plunge into the wild
Surges of doubt, survive, and ask for more.
Because, perhaps, they find at last
The strength to venture on their own,
Beyond the footholds of the past,
The tender-treacherous shallows of home.
The trick is simply to use a pair of poem.../poem tags. Which I strongly recommend, since you then don't have to bother typing out all those ugly </br>
tags at the end of every line. Not only that, it has the effect that the lines, and line spacing, appear in the rendered text the same as you typed them. Much easier, and more elegant.
-- NSH001 ( talk) 18:41, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
I second that, Philip. Nishi is,
Like Ted my husband, somewhat prone
To see the brighter side and miss
The Nazi side of life at home.
The brutal Fascist- German who
Lurked behind my father's smile
Treated his daughter like a Jew,
With jackboot love in cosy style.
I got my own back on him, though,
And snuffed his memory out when I
Turned on the gas, and watched his slow
Tortured image fade and die.
Best regards as always Nishidani ( talk) 19:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
</br>
tags offend my sense of elegance, in addition to being redundant when you're using poem.../poem tags. Save yourself a little effort, and don't bother typing them. --
NSH001 (
talk) 21:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Neil. Bit late but here's the chime from Shagspere I promised, as it came through the noise disturbances of the email line from edenville. That may account for the curious running enjambment in a sonnet form:)
Desist from this miscarriage of rude minds
Dis-pairing spirits in a wasteful shame.
Parents are various as the lesser kinds
Which nature's bounty breeds. Those who complain
Perhaps have merit in their suit; yet life
Bridles at monotony, and, often will
Paint her stage outrageously, for strife
Is dramaturgic nature's way to thrill
The Lord of her creation, that sovereign king
Who, settled in eternity's chair, looks on
While art sifts man’s travails and joys to bring
Fresh entertainments from His motley throng.
Our snatch of time from eternity’s all too brief
But better than naught: live it, in grace or grief.
Shagspere aka Nishidunny~~~~
We must play our puppet parts: that is the fee
For our brief purchase on eternity.~~~~
Elisha Ben Kimon, Palestinian convert to Judaism fatally shot in West Bank Ynet 21 March 2024 Nishidani ( talk) 13:51, 21 March 2024 (UTC) The grandfather, Eid al Zaitoun, of this Sameh Zaitoun, saved 25 Jews from the 1929 Hebron massacre. The grandson converted to Judaism, and was shot to death by IDF soldiers at a Gush Etzion busstop after a knife was found in his baggage. Nishidani ( talk) 13:57, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
Idem for Rami Al-Halhouli. (Arwa Mahdawi, As Gaza is destroyed, Israel is killing dozens of children in the West Bank The Guardian 23 March 2024) A 12 year old, one of a 100 children (of 400 West Bank Palestinians) murdered since Oct 7. He lit some fireworks to celebrate Ramadan, and was shot dead because, the IDF state, he aimed the fireworks at them. Itamar Ben-Gvir called the officer who killed him a 'hero' for having eliminated a terrorist.
The point is, that on-the-spot judgment of intent to kill (against all the probabilities) warranting the child's murder. The ICJ is to deliberate on whether Israel has an intent to commit the genocide (or whether it is just an unintended consequence of the war) which, by any reckoning, is taking place. The massive evidence will be equivocated and pettifogged to death to deny the charge, because intent is hard to prove legally, as opposed to it being easy to establish when a child lights a firecracker in the vicinity of IDF troops. Nishidani ( talk) 13:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
This recent edit includes what is probably an accidental change to another editor's comment. Just letting you know, an old Mac of mine used to do this all the time - make rogue edits! Pincrete ( talk) 10:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi, you are probably aware already but if you weren’t you are probably going to have an arbitration case request filed against you. v/r - Seawolf35 T-- C 20:28, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
When I saw the immense amount of time an excellent editor like Piotrus felt himself required to waste to clear his name of a patent smear in the preceding Arbcom case on articles dealing with Jews and Poland, an example I will studiously avoid, I nonetheless I thought I should respond at least to the defamatory claims against me made in that screed. My change of thought was generated this morning by reading Or Kashti, Gili Izikovich, 'The IDF Uses Revenge Poems to Boost Soldiers' Morale in Gaza,' Haaretz 26 March 2024, and in particular by one snippet of a 'poem' partially paraphrased there as part of an official anthology to supply troops with a sense that their combative mission was potentially redolent of lyrical possibilities (though a wider world, including that of scholarship, seriously queries whether the havoc visited on the Strip amounts to genocide, where some 13,000 children have been killed). The verses in question which caught my eye seemed to capture an underlying feeling of appalled estrangement from the way realities are experienced by others as perfectly normal, indeed culturally vindicated. The version of the Hebrew poem been read by soldiers in the field runs in a version of it I made as follows:-
There are at least two direct Biblical allusions here. (a) The first is to Psalm 137, which begins with overpowering beauty:'By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept/when we remembered Zion . .' only to conclude:
(b) The second is to Amos chapter 1, 6-7.
What startles me as a reader evidently has no such effect on the religiously orthodox writer who penned these lines, nor on the IDF editors who selected it for their morale-boosting anthology of war poetry, and perhaps they assume the same attitude for their potential readership in Israel. So I am engaged with a world which, apparently, shares none of the shaming restraints on articulating emotions which I was raised to think 'normal' and whose observed presence in oneself demanded a penitental self-examination. To the contrary, from the other perspective, my instinctive perplexity that what struck me as obscenely inhumane, voiced lyrically, is anomalous, at least in terms of the cultural code native readers there take as acceptable, 'normal'. So I am forced to ask myself wherein lies this dissonance in expectations, a dissonance I have encountered every other day while engaged with editing the I/P area. Does, as is often asserted, -most recently in MSchwartz's horrified indictment, my attempts to document that world betray some 'antisemitic' undercurrent, a fastidious repudiation of Jews? Nishidani ( talk) 13:45, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
This user has consistently demonstrated behaviors that appear to be in violation of Wikimedia’s Universal code of conduct and general policy, especially in the form of "Psychological manipulation" and "Hate-speech”. Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine and has expressed extreme views on Jews, Jewish heritage, and explicitly, Jewish genetics. In their editing, the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view. Furthermore it seems that this user has also violated some of Wikipedia’s’ “five pillars”, requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4) and editing from a neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). It seems that these non-neutral and sometimes offensive edits rise to harassment, therefore violating art. 3.1 of the UCOC.
Hysteron proteron. The gravamen is in the last line alluding to section 3.1 of the [ Wikimedia Foundation Universal Code of Conduct]
Concretely therefore MSchwartz is claiming that my behaviour (or, as they put it ‘my behaviors’, which is an odd way of putting it. I haven’t been diagnosed for split personality disorders yet, at least to my knowledge) has been ‘consistently’ intended primarily to intimidate, outrage or upset a person,’ and that I do this consistently under any number of the indictable headings, namely Insults,Sexual harassment,Threats,Encouraging harm to others,Disclosure of personal data (Doxing),Hounding,Trolling.
Where's the evidence since 2018 (that is the date MSchwartz sets) for any of these charges? What functionally does 'psychological manipulation' mean? And whose minds have I stealthily plagiarized in Svengali fashion? The answer apparently is in UCOC 3:2:
Psychological manipulation: Maliciously causing someone to doubt their own perceptions, senses, or understanding with the objective to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want.
One must presume from this that my argumentative style on talk pages is taken here to be primarily fueled by a devious malice dryly calculated to subvert an interlocutor's identity, and coerce them thereby to become my puppets in a form of cynical gamesmanship. In Italian law down to 1981 this was a criminal offense ( Plagio) until a court deemed it in violation of Italy's constitution since, 'specifically, the substance of the crime was impossible to fully assess with logical-rational criteria, creating an intolerable risk of arbitrary prosecution and conviction.' It is quite striking that this unverifiable crime, now abolished, has reared its bizarre head in the UCOC. But there it is, and if recourse to it is jumped at, expect a humongous number of inconclusive threads to follow, because the way the policy is framed, nothing of the sort can be adjudicated and verified conclusively. Nishidani ( talk) 14:46, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Hate speech? What magician's hat was that smear pulled out by its rabbity ears? If you assert another editor uses hate speech, with zero evidence to that end, that is a violation of the very principles outlined in the UCOC about editorial interactions. Indeed, if one cannot prove it, it gives grounds for laying a complaint about adventitious innuendoes aimed to smear a fellow wikipedian. Nishidani ( talk) 14:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine' expressing
Aside from that polemically beloved term extreme why 'explicitly?' Is MSchwartz not aware that in using this of the last in a series of three claims, grammatically they are suggesting that the other two claims are 'implicit'?)
Since anyone familiar with my work and these archives could readily google up strong evidence that I take extreme exception to any kind of talk, loose or otherwise, that collectivizes 'Jews' (or any other group) and that, theoretically, I have repeatedly stated that notions of collective identity (Jewish, Israeli, Chinese, Russian whoever) are dangerous, aside from being conceptually inane, if politically and rhetorically potent, I ask myself how on earth, on what evidence, does the plaintiff claim I entertain an idea that I have 'consistently' repudiated as repugnant?
Jewish heritage. What extreme take have I adopted in writing articles extensively on that infinitely complex and variegated dominion of tradition, which includes the following articles written wholly or in good part by me.? Your scurrilous caricature is a wild smear based on a studied ignorance of the record, which includes
to name just a handful? In 18 years of contributing to wikipedia, I have yet to see even one of the hundreds of editors identifiably and legitimately editing from a 'pro-Israeli' perspective who have responded positively to my suggestion that they show their neutrality by creating articles on Palestinian history, people or culture. I have stated several times that displaying an ability to write neutrally, and yet sympathetically, about the side one may less identify with in a conflict at article length should be one of the qualifications for working in this area, other than 500 edits. Nishidani ( talk) 17:03, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
'Jewish genetics'. The expression means, 'genetic studies on Jews' understood here however as 'genetic studies that essay to determine the origins of the Jewish people, and the interrelations of their various groups'. Yes, I edit those articles. Is there any evidence I have tampered with them to skew their content ideologically? No. Nishidani ( talk) 15:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view.
requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4).
The user recently used disrespectful, threatening language that borders anti-semitism. goody. I can't wait to peeve (slip =perve) on the discussion there when it gets to his beliefs about the genetic superiority of his own ethnic group. Dumb goyim beware.”
The term "dumb goyim" can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to a narrative of a Jewish superiority over non-Jews, a theme found in antisemitic rhetoric, where Jews are sometimes falsely accused of harboring a sense of superiority towards non-Jews. This comment is uncivil and violates Art. 2.2 of Wikimedia’s UCOC. Moreover, the threatening nature of this comment’, it’s attempted “trolling”, and insulting antisemitic reference, rise to Harassment, violating article 3.1 of the UCOC. Although a complaint filed against him] for using this phrase was closed with warning, with one admin stating that “if it happened again, I would not take so charitable a view”. But this is not the first time that User:Nishidani has used this phrase.
The user has also stated that the article Jews is "untouchable in its POV sacrality".
This reference to the POV sacrality of the wiki page Jews occurs on the Samaritans talk page in this discussion.
An editor challenged the lead language which asserted that Samaritans ‘claim’ to be descended from the Israelites, noting that in the parallel article on Jews, the origins of Jews as descended from Israelites is not a claim but stated in wikivoice as a fact. He removed ‘claim’ to establish parity. An I/P editor stepped in ( they edited for one week, with a total of 22 edits) and protested that this is taking things ‘too far’. Without asking what justified this random opinion, a compromise was reached, restoring ‘claim’ per Iskandar]] (usually identified as ‘pro-Palestinian’.)
This meant that across wiki pages, Jewish descent from the Israelites was asserted as a fact, whereas the Samaritans’ descent was described as a ‘claim’ (when historically these two groups were adversaries). To understand what was going on, one needs some degree of area competence and familiarity with the scholarship on these respective issues, something diff evaluation in arbitration does not consider important.
The POV dissonance is this. In rabbinical tradition, Samaritans (heirs of the northern kingdom) are depicted as Cuthites, not authentic Israelites but rather an imported people dumped there by Assyria to replace ‘real’ Israelites/Jews who had been expelled from Palestine. Samaritans (the dominant population in their area for a millennium until the Christian Byzantines virtually wiped them out) always rebuffed this injurious put-down. The source on the page, Peidong Shen Tal Lavi, et al., Reconstruction of Patrilineages and Matrilineages of Samaritans and Other Israeli Populations From Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation 2004 supported the notion that the Samaritan patrilineal line predate the Assyrian conquest, which renders the rabbinical tradition of Samaritan inferiority suspect.
At a glance therefore, it is quite apparent that in restoring the Samaritan tradition of Israelitic descent as a ‘claim’ while describing the Jewish tradition affirming Israelitic descent as a fact on the sister Jews page, Wikipedia was inadvertently endorsing a rabbinical tradition in favour of Jews over Samaritans as the direct authentic heirs to the Israelites.
This kind of deconstruction of the context in which that single diff is embedded is, of course, not taken into account in arbitration, where etiquette and rule-compliant evaluation, not familiarity with the scholarly state of the art, is the overriding concern. Nishidani ( talk) 14:41, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
The phrase 'untouchable in its sacrality' refers to the opening formulation on that page. Anyone can edit that article, obviously. Attempts to emend the lead sentence over the years come up against a wall of objections and reverts: The questionable 'sacred' phrasing is:
The Jews ( Hebrew: יְהוּדִים, ISO 259-2: Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation: [jehuˈdim]) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites of the ancient Near East,
Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.' Simon Schama, 'The Invention of the Jewish People,' Financial Times November 13, 2009
They also attributed the survival of Jews to what they termed "diasporic promiscuity," a phrase that reflects a deeply biased and offensive perspective on Jewish history and genetics.
- So MSchwartz personally disagrees with the massive literature on Jewish historical origins, a snippet of which I allude to just above, where conversion, intermarriage was commonplace. No evidence given. Perhaps what he defines as 'offensive' is the word 'promiscuity' in 'diasporic promiscuity'. I first began to enjoy using that term as a boy, about 15, when a religious friend took me to task for my 'intellectual promiscuity'. I read outside the narrow field of doctrinal history, written by true believers, and he found books written on his interests by non-believers offensive. In any case, the objection is religious, based on Deuteronomy 7:4. Philo of Alexandria says that the riffraff accompanying the (mythical) exodus from Egypt were the result of a 'promiscuous mixing' (in the original Greek at de Vita Mosis). The term comes from my own professional field, it being used by Sonia Ryang in her work on Koreans in Japan. There is nothing offensive in it, unless one thinks the term cannot be used metaphorically. Nishidani ( talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
More on genetics, the user has written that the Middle Eastern component among Ashkenazi Jews is “ estimated to range from 3% upwards”, a distortion of common scholarship that half of Ashkenazi ancestry is Middle Eastern, promoting a fringe outlier instead.
- I cited on a talk page a datum given in Das, Elhaik, Wexler, 'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017
- MSchwartz clearly, and/or the anonymous organization he represents, in thinking this is cogent evidence for violating UCOC, has no idea of how wikipedia works. Had they wished to make a point, examining the subject closely, they would have just pointed out that I had confused there 'Levantine' with 'Ashkenazi'. To do that in my book is reprehensible, there is no excuse for disattention here. But such lapses on a talk page have nothing reportable about them. My point was that the Southern Levant/Israel-Palestine origin of the Ashkenazi is not endorsed by modern genetics, which of course has revised its earlier Levantine argument in favour of the extremely vague term 'Middle Eastern', meaning that evidence exists for a founding population hailing from in part anywhere from Turkey to Iran, but not from the southern Israelites. And, one gathers, mentioning this is distasteful for MSchwarz. Nishidani ( talk) 20:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
According to the user, “As any rabbi competent in modern historiography will confirm, Jews have their origin in Judaism, not in an ethnos”. However, Jews have always seen themselves as a people with shared ancestry.
- It should take anyone just a few minutes to ascertain at google books that, down to the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th century and well beyond, the consensus of certainly Ashkenazi rabbis emphasized Judaism, and its followers as a religion, not an 'ethnic' matter.
MSchwartz makes a generalization about Jews, that down to the last man they have always seen themselves to share the same ancestry. The fragility of that claim is easily disproved. I mentioned above that Josephus, writing in the Ist cent.CE, stated that 'Judeans' referred also to Gentiles who lived in Palestine at that time and adopted Jewish law. Obviously, their fellow Jews familiar with such Judeans would not have believed these ex-gentiles in their fold share their own ancestry, any more than the forced conversion of the tens of thousands of Edomites by John Hyrcanus over a century and a half earlier would have meant that traditional Jews would have immediately believed that they shared the same ancestry with the newcomers (to the contrary). This is the kind of historical detail that always makes confident generalizations like the one above meaningless. Nishidani ( talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
The above raises serious concerns regarding genetics-related articles such as ' Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism', originally “Zionism, race and genetics”, where Nishidani has 62% authorship. The article has an essayistic tone and sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature.
- This is frankly incomprehensible in its lack of any logic. What is the asserted connection between the controversies over the genetic origins of the Ashkenazi to do with the article Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism which, yes, I wrote? The latter is a survey of modern scholarship's historical references to the way Zionism conceptualized the Jews, as a race, a radical innovation at the time (1900s) It is not, as three editors argued, an 'essay' unless any article written mostly by one editor is an 'essay'. Worse, in stating that it sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature. No. What happened that it was subject to a push for it to be deleted, and in the discussion, those who kept insisting that it 'synthesized three topics...not commonly analyzed together in (the existing literature' were comprehensively shown, particularly by a very neutral wikipedian, Levivich, to be unfamiliar with the existing literature, refusing to read it while making unsupported claims like the one MSchwartz exhumes.
User:Nishidani has stated that "The word 'settlement' is an Israeli/US euphemism born of the necessity to camouflage or underplay the fact that the old ideology is still kicking (out Palestinians) for lebensraum". This comment uses the term ‘lebensraum’ which is primarily associated with German nationalism and later with the territorial expansion policies of Nazi Germany
.
In my book, the notion of 'extreme' is already in the word 'bias'. MSchwartz appears to think that it may be okay to be 'biased against Israel' but deplorable to be 'extremely biased' against that country. These kinds of distinction are weird. If someone has a bias against Israel, then one might have good reason to wonder whether that person might harbour antisemitic feelings, in my understanding. If one is critical of a number of policies implemented by any state, Israel included, that is not evidence of bias if the critical content is grounded in a reasoned analysis. What is the first piece of evidence. On a talk page, nota bene, I expressed my view that Israeli settlements in the West Bank reflect a Lebensraum ideology.
Why this is classified as an 'inflammatory remark' about Jews or Judaism escapes me. MSchwarz confuses Israel with Jews/Judaism, evidently. To be critical of the former is to be prejudiced with regard to the latter.
Now in the literature on antisemitism written explicitly and often polemically in defence of Israel, it is quite true that a number of scholars have asserted that drawing of any analogy between Nazi and Israel practices is, ipso facto, antisemitic. [1] [2] [3]
- ^ Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz, Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft im 21. Jahrhundert, de Gruyter ISBN 978-3-110-27772-2 2013 pp.231ff = NS-Vergleiche als Mittel der Daemonisierung. The tendentiousness of the book, whose thesis comes from an otherwise useful analysis of the mass of emails etc., sent to Israeli institutions in Germany during the various wars with Gaza, is underlined by the claim an analogy of Israel's separation policy with SAfrican apartheid is antisemitic ‘Israel ist so wenig Apartheidstaat wie die Bundesrepublik Deutschland' ('Israel is no more an apartheid state than the Federal Republic of Germany' p.217). Unfortunately, Amnesty International, B'tselem and Human Rights Watch disagree, and they are not antisemitic.
- ^ 'Lebensraum, which is associated with the historical context (‘Nazi’, ‘German’, ‘concept’, ‘Germany’, ‘Germans’), but also with Israel, pointing to a Middle Eastern context and adopting a critical stance on Israeli politics. . .In these contexts, Israeli politics is seen as pursuing a quest for Lebensraum, whereas the use of the German Nazi word can only be interpreted as an implicit comparison of Israeli to Nazi politics, and the criticism of Israeli politics by way of Nazi comparisons needs to be understood as a part of modern anti-semitic discourse.' Melani Schroeter, 'How words behave in other languages: the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English,' Pragmatics and Society, 9 (1). 2018 pp. 93-118.Online version pp1-24 pp.12,17,21
- ^ Note however, that these scholars stay quiet about the other side of this equation:it is allowable for an analogy to be drawn between Nazism and Palestinians, particularly in the political rhetoric of the longterm Prime minister Binjamin Netanyahu. To cite but one of many examples, when the issue was raised of Palestinians requesting the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from territory defined in international law as Palestinian, Netanyahu told Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then then Foreign Minister of Germany, that 'Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein'. Judenrein -ethnically cleansing a country of Jews- is Nazi usage and commonly used of Palestinians who, being subject to ethnic cleansing to allow Jewish settlement, are Nazis if they want their own land back. Steinmeier didn't object. He simply nodded. He is now President of Germany.
So MSchwartz's assertion here reflects a point of view entertained by some scholars. The problem is, both MSchwartz, and those scholars, ignore the fact that this analogy is widespread in critical views on or positive endorsements of, the policies implemented in the West Bank, which one encounters regularly in Israeli newspapers and Israeli and diasporic scholarship. Were the contention true, then not only am I an antisemite, but leading (Jewish and Israeli) scholars and journalists are also.
- ‘the calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs in A. D. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a lebensraum for themselves in Palestine by force of arms in that year’. Arnold Toynbee, cited Omer Bartov Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, Berghahn Books 2021 ISBN 978-1-800-73130-1 p.53
- '‘There are certain people in Israel who have hinted (that) they would like Israel to retain the West Bank for Lebensraum.' Findley Burns Jr., The American ambassador to Jordan (1966-1967) speaking to Jordan's King Hussein after the Six Days War. Cited in Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry_:Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War, ISBN 978-0-300-18353-5 Yale University Press 2012
- ‘To me, who grew up under the Nazi occupation, the determined conquest of the Palestinian patrimony echoed Germany’s Drang nach Osten to provide its Herrenvolk with greater Lebensraum.' Milan Kubic, From Prague to Jerusalem:An Uncommon Journey of a Journalist, Cornell University Press 2017 ISBN 978-1-501-75703-7 p.231 (Kubic was a Czechoslovakian-American journalist who was head of Newsweek’s Beirut office from 1967 to mid 1971)
- ‘Israel’s Quest for Lebensraum,' section heading in Shlomo Ben-Ami's Prophets Without Honor:The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-state Solution, Oxford University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-190-06047-3 p.256
- Effi Eitam, IDF brigadier general and Knesset member stated in an interview 2002 interview with the Jewish-French writer Sylvain Cypel:
"The western part of Eretz Yisrael . .from the Mediterranean to the Jordan: that’s the Jewish people’s vital space. Eitam, who apparently skipped his history classes in school, didn’t seem to know that “vital space” was at the heart of the Nazi lebensraum concept. Otherwise he might have suggested another formation. But the fact remains that the idea came to him spontaneously. And in that space, only Jews would be alliowed to rule. People who talk about “human rights” and “peace” were “psychopaths,” he added.' Sylvain Cypel, . L'Etat d'Israël contre les Juifs,' La Découverte 2020 ISBN 978-2-348-04344-4.p.95('vital space'/espace vitale is the standard French translation of Lebensraum.)
- Yossi Sarid, 'Lebensraum as a Justification for Israeli Settlements,' Haaretz 26 August 2011
- 'Quite an accomplishment, considering the Settler Einsatzgruppen stealing Lebensraum and concreting Palestinians' wells.' Gideon Levy 'Israel's Next Surprise Is Coming From the West Bank,' Haaretz 16 November 2023
- Lebensraum was used just recently by the Arab Israeli lawmaker MK Ahmad Tibi in the Knesset to describe the proposals by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to reoccupy and settle the Gaza Strip. Sam Sokol, 'Far-right ministers call to ‘resettle’ Gaza’s Palestinians, build settlements in Strip,' The Times of Israel 1 January 2024, Nishidani ( talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
But, above all, if one googles Russia+Ukraine+lebensraum one obtains over 225,000 hits, the first up for me being from the German Foreign Ministry, which likened what Putin does to what its own Germany did in WW2. So it is quite acceptable to use this of a geopolitical adversary of the West like Russia, but, the assumption here is, totally unacceptable, indeed 'antisemitic' to ever use the word with regard to Israel's seizure of, and colonization of, the West Bank after 1967, though Israeli critics in Israeli sources have no problem in drawing that analogy. Nishidani ( talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
The user labelled Zionism "a Jewish heresy" that may generate antisemitism. He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine", wondering "to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people."
- Again, the evidence cited is (a) a view I expressed on my Talk page, where I respond to editors who want me to discuss material, articles or the content of this dispute (b) has nothing to do with attacks on Jews or Judaism.
- Unless, as it again appears, MSchwartz considers Zionism as interchangeable with both the Jewish people and Judaism, and therefore to be critical of the former is, ipso facto to be hostile to both the latter. It is reasonably fair to assume that the premise here is underwritten by the highly controversial definition advocated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for a Working definition of antisemitism which critics argue weaponizes antisemitism as an instrument against those who criticise Israel, viewed as a Zionist state, subjecting them to a linguistic surveillance that would restrict the exercise of free speech. Nishidani ( talk) 12:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- (1) (a) I labelled Zionism, which is, as is openly admitted, an 'ideology', a 'Jewish heresy' because (i) at the turn of the 19th-20 centuries, is was roundly and very widely condemned as such by the majority of Western orthodox rabbis, and could garner a consensus of less than 1% of the Jewish people, despite a lot of drum-beating:
Herzl’s charismatic powers had their limits. By the time of his death, less than 1 percent of world Jewry was officially affiliated with the Zionist Organization, and Herzlian Zionism provoked considerable opposition. Most Orthodox Jews dismissed it as blasphemous. Derek Penslar, Theodor Herzl:The Charismatic Leader, Yale University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-300-18040-4 p.7
'Rabbi Elmer Berger was often seen as an heretic. A graduate of the Hebrew Union College (USA) and an enthusiastic adept of Classical Reform, he opposed Zionism naturally, as did, then, most of his peers. What distinguishes him from other Reform rabbis is that he remained loyal to his beliefs throughout his life.Jack Ross, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism, Potomac Books, 2011 ISBN 978-1-597-97697-8
Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project. Michael Walzer Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism:What’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. (With a response from Joshua Leifer.) Dissent Fall 2019
- (b) This is the formal theological position of an important component of Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism.Giles Fraser, For Haredi Jews secular Zionism remains a religious heresy The Guardian 12 May 2016. See also Haredim and Zionism.
- I.e., MSchwartz considers that my view, informed by history, and shared by the religious leaders of 1.8 million Jews, worldwide, and who make up roughly 15% of Israel's population, is, if only because I repeated it, evidence of an inflammatory statement about 'Jews/Judaism'. Go figure. Nishidani ( talk) 13:45, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- 2 a second reconsideration of what I briefly wrote in response to this passage below, cited earlier.
He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine",
- Again, this is taken from my talk page, a view I expressed when referred to read an article by Chris Hedges.
- What is scandalous about expressing the view that Zionism has, throughout its history, persistently worked to displace and disperse (disintegrate) the autochthonous population of Palestine? That is remarked upon, let us say, argued in a great number of books, starting with Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer"in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948 Institute for Palestine Studies 1992 ISBN 0-88728-242-3. I won't make a list or give the massive details, but in synthesis
- It was Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism who, in proposing massive Ashkenazi immigration into Palestine where 95% of the historic population of the time was Arab, wrote of his hope Zionism would find a way to ’spirit the penniless population across the border.’ And this was reaffirmed time and again, not least by Ben-Gurion in 1937 writing of "the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state...we have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself." Dispersal from their homes, villages and properties (730,000 in 1948, 150,000 in 1967) of Palestinians over the borders to a scattered refugee life in camps from Lebanon, Syria to Jordan, together with the bantustanization of those Palestinians who remain in their occupied lands in 165 enclaves, cut off from each other, and most recently compelling most of the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza to flee south into provisory camps on a miniscule patch of their former territory, is part of an uncontroversial record. Perhaps what MSchwartz dislikes is the word 'mission'?, in the sense that my view presumes a design, and this recurrent pattern is just a striking coincidence of haphazard events without forethought. Well, I think I am entitled to assess the evidence otherwise, without it being taken as an indication of hostility against Jews or Judaism. In any case, it is not my unique opinion.
The fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the core method through which Israel enforces apartheid.' Richard Falk, Virginia Tilley, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, Southern Illinois University 15 March 2017 p.37 Nishidani ( talk) 14:36, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- I bolded 'penniless population' because from 1896 to 1948, Jewish purchases of land in Palestinian managed to accumulate 6% in title. The outcome of 1948 was that the state ended up with 78% of the land and declared all property owned by refugees fleeing the havoc and uncertainty of war as 'enemy property' effectively with a stroke of the pen appropriating 200,000 lots of land, housing and property. After 1967, the West Bank was seized without any real resistance, and most of the area declared '(Israeli) state land', with the result that, without any transfer of money or compensation to those who owned or worked the land, Israel effectively took control of the real estate of 93% of the original country, and the Palestinians exercise legal control over about 7%, exactly the figure for Jewish land purchase down to 1948. This may be all accidental, but Herzl's population, many of whom once enjoyed the modern villas and conveniences of West Jerusalem, found themselves indeed penniless, as he hoped, if not yet 'spirited' across the borders. Nishidani ( talk) 14:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
The user wrote blatantly inflammatory comments here, for example calling Israeli media outlets: “militant mouth organ-grinders or trumpeting blowhards for a constituency of religio-fascist landgrabbers”. Israel Hayom is Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, while Arutz 7 has the third-largest weekend circulation in the country. Again this is from my talk page.
- I did not speak of Israeli media outlets (generic, and nothing implied of Haaretz, Times of Israel, Ynet or Jerusalem Post etc.). I named two minor league papers, Arutz 7 and Israel Hayom.
- The former caters (notable for always pushing the meme that Barak Obama is a secret Muslim) to a constituency of settlers and has consistently written in defense of the most violent among them, Hilltop youth, which our article describes as “hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who establish outposts without an Israeli legal basis in the West Bank’. [1]
- ^ (in their defense to cite two of dozens: Jonathan Pollard, Vigilante actions are a result of absence of government counter terror policy in Arutz Sheva 2 July 2023. What is remarkable about such articles ( for Israel Hayom see David M. Weinberg, The myth of escalating settler violence,' Israel Hayom 12 October 2023) is that they try to rebut (as merely a myth concocted of ‘fake news’ in the ‘fog of war’) the US State Department's remark about a settler rampage after Oct.7 to seize more property on the West Bank. The USSD claimed there was an uptick, and "unprecedented levels of violence by Israeli extremist settlers targeting Palestinians and their property, displacing entire communities.’ Pollard And Weinberg look at Shin Bet statistics of violence against WB Palestinians and say:'untrue'. In 2022 1,000 such incidents occurred and that figure has been stable with only 1,000 acts of violence against Palestinians and their property in 2023. The writers assume, we are left to suppose, that three assaults a week on Palestinians in 'normal' (in those statistics no consideration is taken of the several raids per week IDF forces conduct after midnight into Palestinian homes, a terrifying normality).
- True, my language is harsh but it is directed not against Jews, but against settlers who either engage in or support these violent expropriations, or if they murmur, do nothing to stop it and continue reading papers that endorse the violence. 15% of West Bank settlers -60,000 Americans - come from solid family homes in the United States and they are at the forefront of settler violence. So they must be perfectly culturally familiar with the Lockean compact - a core element of democracy -that property is sacred and transferred only by a negotiated sale between the parties. This awareness is congealed by the 'religious' pretext that the land is all Jewish since the year dot, and Palestinians who have dwelt there for millenia have no title, even if they do possess one under Israeli law and may be dispossessed. Very convenient if you live in Brooklyn and find buying a house too expensive in the US, as opposed to settling with a government subsidy on some WB village's lands).
- David Dean Shulman, describing in detail his first hand observations of what settlers do to the poorest of Palestinian goatherds (poisoning their grazing land etc) in his classic Dark Hope (2007) called it 'absolute evil'.
- Eva Illouz an Israel-French sociologist writing for Le Monde, analysing the rise to political power of the leader of Religious Zionism Itamar Ben-Gvir, who now has considerable say in West Bank settlement policy, argued that ‘(h)e represents what we must reluctantly call "Jewish fascism".' 'The third political force in Israel represents what we must reluctantly call Jewish fascism Le Monde 16 November 2022.
- So, however harsh my language (and I must, to keep abreast, read articles in the Israeli press that give weekly accounts of this violence) my target was the two Israeli popular newspapers who consistently find reason to defend examples of what everyone knows is unprovoked violence) it corresponds to a documented reality, that, aside from exceptions like eminently admirable settlers like the late lamented rabbi Menachem Froman, violent landgrabbers exist, are tolerated, and never punished. In any case, I'll meet you on a compromise, by agreeing that here, and only here, I let my personal feelings get the upper hand over detached analysis on my talk page. Nishidani ( talk) 13:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- Nishidani edited large portions and added much content to an article titled: Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, while violating one of the main “pillars” of Wikipedia; NPOV and at times also being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews. This was after he wrote on his talk page that he will "make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians". In his first edit he writes that both Palestinians and Israelis tend to refer to each other by the usage of animal stereotypes, yet the title of the article and the rest of it, solely accuses the Israeli-Jewish side of this mutual practice. </ref>
- So what? Where ‘at times was I ‘being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews?’ There are a very large number of articles on Palestinian rocket attacks and terrorism on wiki (look at Palestinian political violence), on none of which have I insisted that, to NPOV balance, we must add a balancing section in each outlining Jewish terrorism or the continual Israeli missile and artillery assaults on the Gaza Strip. I haven’t argued that editors who make these pages are disrespectful and uncivil to Palestinians.
- While I read I write notes topically collated, and 10 years ago I had enough on animal metaphors for an article. (I might note that there is a splendid work of great erudition by Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews, Fordham University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-823-27560-1 which influenced my article, and would well deserve an article on its own.) When Yoav Gallant on 7 October called all Gazans ‘animals’, I voiced the idea that it might be time to write up those notes for an article. But I didn’t. Then some months later, another editor tried to do so with a poorly formatted stub, and alerted me. The stub was rejected, but I took it in hand and produced the article you see, which diligently has a prefatory remark that both sides indulge in this, but addresses the far less familiar terrain of Israeli political caricatures of Palestinians. As I said on the talk page, any one is free to write a corresponding page on Palestinian stereotypes of Israelis, but they will have difficulty getting that depth of coverage of statements from senior and influential Palestinian figures, and I certainly am far too busy in real life to do everyone’s work. I write up what I know of relatively comprehensively. Nishidani ( talk) 14:20, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem, created by Selfstudier, and Nishidani (who joined 40 minutes after the article was created), presents contested claims in WP:VOICE. Source [a], for example, is from al-Haq, a Palestinian group. Stating opinions and contested assertions as facts, rises to violation of Wikimedia’s policy of writing from a NPOV. Similar concerns arise with the Palestinian enclaves article, which seems to endorse a biased perspective and presents one-sided viewpoints in violation of WP:NPOV guidelines. The first paragraph immediately draws comparisons to the Apartheid, and then cherry-picks a quote from Amira Hass, a journalist known in Israel for her radical left opinions. Despite these issues, it is classified as a good article. Nishidani, a significant contributor to this article, has strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias, as can be seen here, also adding personal attacks, violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of UCOC.
- So I edited a newly created article - Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem - and violated NPOV by adding a material from, al-Haq, and citing Amira Hass. The former is a Palestinian source, and the latter is (here we go) a cherry-picked ref for a journalist known for her ‘radical left opinions’. Citing a Palestinian Human Rights source, high respected abroad, and an Israeli journalist who rather than being the daughter of Holocaust survivors and a recipient of multiple awards internationally for her defense of Palestinian human rights, is a ‘radical leftist’. It’s pointless responding, except to note that the I/P area is about two national subjects, Israel and Palestine, and to assume that the narrative should exclude Palestinian sources is bizarre for any wikipedian who know what NPOV requires.
- Finally, my 'strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias'. The article (another one, not the one on Palestinian displacements in East Jerusalem' from which this is taken) refers to my dismissal of an anachronistic tagging by Tombah of Palestinian enclaves. Now I think it fair to state that everyone interacting with Tombah knew for a year or so he was a sockpuppet. Mostly, given there was no checkuser case, one responded pretending he was a serious contributor. Shortly after that tagging, the proof was finally forthcoming. But the point is, a very substantial amount of effort and time earlier had thoroughly addressed concerns raised by several editors, Tombah included, and in that note, Tombah alone remained unsatisfied, without giving any serious evidence for a reasonable 'concern'. So I dismissed it, as did others. Nishidani ( talk) 14:25, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- The user labelled an NYT article on sexual violence during the October 7 attacks "pseudo-journalism".
- The article is Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7 New York Times 28 December 2023. A wiki article was written up precisely on this piece, Screams Without Words. Read it. It was controversial from day 1. There are several competent critics, among them Ben Smith, who challenged the claim it was way below the quality to be expected from the venue in which it was published. The data weren't collected and written by competent or experienced journalists. In any case, what is wrong with expressing one's view that something written about this topic, and appearing in a mainstream source, is 'pseudo-journalism'. The NYTs published Judith Miller who extraordinary disinformation helped gain consensus for the war on Iraq, though, and I remember it well, her articles were contradicted by evidence readily available. Nishidani ( talk) 14:45, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- The user presents themselves, and another user he frequently collaborated with, User:Nableezy, as I/P specialists. When users approach them asking to pay attention for their conduct, they responded aggressively. In one example, they told one user to "stop shitstirring", to refrain from editing certain pages, and blaming them for "appalling ignorance", violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of wikimedia's UCOC.
- I have edited in the I/P area for 16 years, Nableezy slightly less. It is reasonable to note that we have some topic familiarity, indeed specialize in that area. The diff you cite referring to this heading and discussion on my talk page above does not refer to the I/P area, but to an article regarding Japan. I won't go into the details, but I read it as an attempt, in my view malicious, to out my identity, in revenge for a near block (I think he failed to get me sanctioned) and an interaction ban he had just copped, and I noted this to an administrator, giving the details in an email. Had I addressed the merits with a formal complaint, the editor in question would almost certainly have been permabanned. I preferred telling him he was a 'shit-stirrer' and not complaining, because of the principle enunciated above, that I don't use ANI or AE to conduct vendettas or 'get at' editors I disagree with. Nishidani ( talk) 14:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
* On August 29th 2018 at 16:41, administrator named Sandstein wrote: “I will consider imposing a block or an indefinite topic ban, with or without any prior discussion, in the event of continued battleground-like conduct by Nishidani in this topic area”. A few hours later, at 20:12 the user stated he retired. Despite that, and putting a retired tag on his page, he is clearly still active.
- I persist in maintaining a very high regard for Sandstein, notwithstanding that remark which I considered injurious and more a matter of impatience than the cool judgment I have long admired in him. Others of course are welcome to see it differently. In any case, he left me the possibility of appealing his decision, which, on principle, I declined. I have said: if an arbitration decision goes against me, I take it on the chin - I was brought up to regard whingeing as poor form -and sit out the consequences. For the record, my reasoning on his decision is here. Nishidani ( talk) 15:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
:oh and by the way, you missed citing the evidence that I viciously attacked Nableezy (actually it was an injoke exchange on our user pages someone eavesdropped on) just after the Sandstein incident. I even used shit-stirrer there. Nishidani ( talk) 15:38, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
- All of MSchwartz's points basically express a deep distaste for my views (which are basically those I drew from reading Israeli and diasporic scholarship), and have little to do with a case for my putative repeated infraction of wikipedia protocols. I understand the distaste, but all I can see here is unfamiliarity with the way actually editing wikipedia works. Nishidani ( talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
I am not averse to trying to adjust the "dreaming" text, what would you suggest though? Selfstudier ( talk) 15:00, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- It's taken me, still without success because I simply cannot research contributions through technical ineptitude, and perhaps age: 1 hr 45 minutes to try to find just one diff that would refer to something I remember doing around 2015, consulting the No Original Research Noticeboard about precisely this lead formulation. I really have to push myself to ferret and burrow into the tedious reconstruction of my wiki past. If it were a book-related issue, I'd swim through a library like a dolphin around a prow. So, really, just replying to that silly screed above is going to exhaust me spare time to the point that I lose interest in editing. Thank goodness I have a novel to read every day after the noisomeness of this kind of disruptive intrusion. Cheers and good luck with it. Nishidani ( talk) 15:21, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
This? Selfstudier ( talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, indeed, and my heartful thanks for finding it. I could remember the discussion (independent editors confirmed the phrasing was a synth violation, while the I/P editors merely yakked. I must apologize also if it took what looked like 40 minutes out of your time. Best regards. Nishidani ( talk) 20:56, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- Np ) it didn't take but a few minutes, given your NOR 2015 cue, splash of Israelites, and up she came. Selfstudier ( talk) 21:02, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
- That's the sort of thing I am absolutely dumb at. And why when things come to arbitration, I always flounder when obliged to dredge up diffs to establish the whole picture distorted by the diffs someone complaining about me amasses with, apparently, effortless facility. For me, that just means afternoons burnt up in a trivial pursuit not reading something interesting . So I prefer just to allow any sentence to pass, and wear the penalty whatever it may be. It means my productive working day remains safe and pleasurable. Thanks pal. Nishidani ( talk) 21:11, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
Leaked Documents Expose how Israeli war Ministers Created IDF Policy of Mass Killing With US Support Selfstudier ( talk) 14:42, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
- Unusable of course. It's not new that the mass killing of civilians is part of IDF theory and practice, and that we do not need wikileaks to tell us that, since it has been reported openly in the New York Times. The author could have cited Ethan Bronner's article from 2010 part of which runs:
The caution is at least in part because Hamas wants to keep ruling in Gaza, not return to its previous role as a pure resistance movement. Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.
“Hamas is the dominant organization in Gaza,” a top military official said in a briefing last week that was given on condition of anonymity. “They are the regime and feel very connected to the people. They do not want to lose that connection to the people.”
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: baal habayit hishtageya, or the boss has lost it. It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.
'This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.
It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.
The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza, especially because Israel’s antirocket attacks in previous years had been more measured.' Ethan Bronner, 'Parsing Gains of Gaza War,’ New York Times 18 January 2009.
- That verb hishtageya comes from the same root as nishtagea ('We'll go mad') which a shocked Moshe Sharett recorded in his diaries where he confided a remark he'd heard from Pinhas Lavon back in the 50s. The point was, if Israel felt 'crossed' in any way, it should adopt a policy of, we'd say now 'shock and awe', reacting by coolly going completely off the handle, to put the wind up everyone or, as Moshe Dayan put it, Moshe Dayan act like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother. That was the thinking behind the Dahiya doctrine (1982 Lebanese invarion onwards) and the Samson Option.
- It might look quite creative, a sort of apocalyptic endgame response that completely jumps the step-by-step theories of managing conflict escalation, but it has roots that go way back, not to anything 'Israeli' but to the Yishuv's adoption of the British imperial model of suppressing rebel uprisings by attacking the whole civilian society where the rebels were embedded. Yishuv militants were trained to do that in the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, under people like that nutter Orde Wingate. I noted early today that Rashid Khalidi drew the same comparison in his Guardian article today, on the historic roots of the present Israeli war on Gaza:
Another shift rooted in the military fiasco of 7 October is that it represents the temporary collapse of Israel’s security doctrine. This is often misnamed “deterrence”, but it is in fact derived from the aggressive approach first taught to the founders of Israel’s armed forces – officers such as Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Sadeh, chosen members of the Haganah and Palmach militias who were trained in the late 1930s by veteran British colonial counter-insurgency experts. 'The doctrine holds that by attacking pre-emptively or in a retaliatory fashion with overwhelming force, and by striking directly at civilian populations considered supportive of insurgents, the enemy can be decisively defeated, permanently intimidated and forced to accept the terms of the coloniser. In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.' Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine,' The Guardian 11 April 2024
- Of course, in all this, those who don't speedread history via snippets and newsheadlines or the obiter dicta of talking heads, will connect all this to earlier aspects of Zionism, Max Nordau's Muscular Judaism and later to Zeev Jabotinsky's seminal Iron Wall essay where he argues, with penetrating realism the necessity for Zionism, if it is to transform an overwhelmingly Arab society into Greater Israel, to override the will of the Arab majority (and he openly admitted that the Arabs had understood from the beginning that Zionism was an existential threat to their own aspirations) by facing it down with an 'iron wall of Jewish bayonets' (manu militari).
- These are some of the many dots that are rarely connected in RS. I admire Jabotinsky for his intellectual honesty which dismissed all the 'vegetarian' waffle of public Zionist spokesmen with their wooing of the global public by talking about accommodations, negotiations and roadmaps to a fair settlement between equally fair claims. Unfortunately, his humanitarian instincts and concern for an eventual equality with, not dispersal of, Palestinians was ignored as fine print and only the realist violence found a receptive hearing in his heirs. History is made and remade by political actors who know nothing of history, willingly so, since they would be forced to think several times and over the long term instead of invariably blundering optimistically into the next imaginary future where all our problems will be definitively resolved- in the sense that they will remain more or less as they were, only not recognizable as such. Nishidani ( talk) 17:12, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
Idk if you looked, there are three articles in the series, 1, 2 is the one above and here is 3. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:05, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks again. I've been rather busy in RL, since it's spring, and I have to sodbust, prepare vegetable beds, cut bamboo props, mow lawns that do not consist of Gazan weeds and, just until now, conduct a substantial burnoff without burning the neighbourhood (minor collateral damage if my own home and patch remains sweet and trim?). Time to slake my thirst at the local boozer. I'll look into it tomorrow. Nishidani ( talk) 17:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Done my burning, not allowed past end March. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- Same here, but an all but smokeless set of small fires, lasting a half an hour each, in invisible corners of my 4 gardens, within a valley with few residents (who don't object) though siding on the village centre, at an hour when the cops go off duty, with a water pumnp nearby, and the ashes doused before evening, and, well, I succumb to a rational delinquency. Nishidani ( talk) 19:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
The growing frequency of Germany police crackdowns on any form of manifesting solidarity for, or even publicly discussing, the issues of Israel's treatment of Palestinians suggests there might be an article covering this recent phenomenon.
- Yanis Varoufakis here, i.e. addio Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Nishidani ( talk) 20:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
- idem Ghassan Abu-Sittah Nishidani ( talk) 08:15, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
- idem Nancy Fraser here Nishidani ( talk) 08:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)