User talk:Nishidani

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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and 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 resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global 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 where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

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

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

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

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

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

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:-

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

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Glad to see you around

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

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

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

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

Well, "stay in there". Maybe extrapolating too far from there, but I appreciated the sentiment regardless.

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

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

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

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

Funny, I got my first tattoo—the litany against fear in 16-point Courier—while working at a middle school. A few friends asked if it would be an issue to have that on my forearm, and I explained that I was still one of the least tattooed people who worked there. How times (and cultures) change. Getting my third tattoo in an hour and a half, actually! A khamsa on my back, because if there's one thing Wikipedia's convinced me of, it's the existence of the ayin hara.

I do agree (generally, not necessarily about the specific case you have in mind) that everyone ought to try writing a (non-cookie-cutter) article before sitting in judgment of other ones. And even with that experience, ought to familiarize themselves with the strengths and weaknesses of the sources cited in an article, and of those not cited, before demanding radical change. I come at this from the perspective of being a rare RfA pass at 0 GAs, and having since written a few of those. Someone said to me at RfA or around that time that the main issue with admins who don't do much content is that they don't have a sense of how it feels to have written an article and see it come (as it feels subjectively) under attack. I do get that feeling now, and it definitely helps me be a better admin. But not always perfectly (as you've seen firsthand).

Anyways, off to get stabbed a few thousand times by someone I barely know.^{[worrywarts, please click link]} I'll refrain from comparing or contrasting several hours of sharp pain along my spine to any things I could be doing on-wiki. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 16:03, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Glad

September songs

my story today

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

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

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

For your lib

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

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

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

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

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

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

Condolences

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

The world's foremost authority on Gaza

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nakba denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Mr. Saleh forgot his phone.

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

thought you should see this

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

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

Hi Nishidani

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

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

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

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

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

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on the other hand

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

Personal Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a request

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

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

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

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

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

help

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

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

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

Sderot

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

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

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

Some reflections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More remarkable statements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(As a Jewish Israeli-American who has many good [as well as some bad] childhood memories of growing up in Israel and still has a small number of dear family and friends in beautiful Israel, I personally found the part about the increasingly insane, increasingly ethnocidal/ genocidal indoctrination and incitement inside Israeli Jewish society to be particularly disturbing. But this is not surprising, in light of the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, a settler-colonial state.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

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

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

Nishidani (talk)

• Jonathan Ofir, Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in Gaza,' 20 November Mondoweiss 2023

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)

• Israel allegedly enforces 'Hannibal Protocol' on Oct. 7, killing festival-goers to prevent their captivity. "'What we’ve seen here is mass Hannibal,' [Israeli] Lt. Col. Nof Erez says on [Israel's] military response to surprise attack at festival, where 364 people were killed." Published by Anadolu Agency, a Turkish news agency.
• Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees, by the Yale Review of International Studies.
• Fool Me Twice. "The tried-and-tested tropes of the post-9/11 and Iraq War eras have been deployed for Israel's war in Gaza. The returns are diminishing."
• Israel's fears, its delusions and its future. Conversation with Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator and analyst who now heads the US-Middle East Project. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
• Philip Oltermann, Israel-Hamas war opens up German debate over meaning of ‘Never again’ The Guardian 22 November 2023

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)

• Likewise,Apparently, right under our smog-insensitivized noses, US universities have been hijacked by a phenomenon even more terrifying than Hamas. They form a “woke mind virus factory,” Jack D The outsized place of the U.S. university in the current struggle, Mondoweiss 22 November 2023

• Basic Principles of Humanity, New York Review of Books (18 Nov. 2023). An interview with Human rights expert Sari Bashi, who lives in the West Bank and is the program director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she leads the organization’s research. “Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.” Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yoav Haifawi, How Israel undermined the prisoner exchange by widening the definition of ‘security prisoners’ Mondoweiss 7 December 2023

Breaking News Scoop

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

Cutting off foreskins as a military tactic

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))

I don't know the common practice in Gaza, but most Muslim men are circumcised though it isn't compulsory. Zero^talk 12:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I was going to say ... pretty empty, if fucked-up threat ... Iskandar323 (talk) 13:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, of course, we all should know Muslims generally undergo circumcision. That was the point of citing this trash - the unbelievable obtusity of the ignorant who have a voice in shaping perceptions of this war. The 'Philistine' of the 'piece' is the fool who wrote that. See below for another bite from the tsunami of appalling crassness flooding the airwaves.Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

• Apparently some editorsin here are engaged in a new crime; the keyboard terrorismn of documenting suffering that is not IsraeliNishidani (talk) 16:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Forget Sumud. It's been trumped by 'Zionist stoicism'

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 )

It is natural that in a tragedy we connect and respond more instinctively to the fate of those whom we (may) know. Yaffa Adar was originally reported to be from Kfar Aza, where I once worked. I wondered whether I had known her during my stay, while deeply moved by the photo of her in a Hamas jeep being carted off to Gaza as a hostage. The photo of her resigned, apparent ease (almost 'well, I'd better get used to this new episode in my life') will figure as one of the iconic snapshots of the Israeli side of this war. I was really chuffed up to see her safe and sound, while naturally thinking that 10,000 plus 'sub-human' Gaza women and children would not survive to tell their side of the story. Hence the obscenity of the remark above. There are few things, readingwise, more nauseating that reading the infantile outpourings of an extremely jejune nationalism.Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

• Zionism – An Ideology for the Self-Loathing (27 October 2023). by Roger Harris for CounterPunch. "Yet growing numbers of us [American Jews] still embrace our ancestral identity and, especially in light of current events, wholly renounce its self-loathing antithesis of Zionism. What the Nazis failed to achieve – the obliteration of European Jewish culture – the Zionists are carrying forward. We have a word for that in Yiddish. It’s a shanda, a scandalous embarrassment and shame." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis would suggest we shouldn't help 'Pally' kids

• Rhana Natour, 'These Palestinian boys received life-saving surgery in the US. An Israeli airstrike killed them in their home,' The Guardian 28 November 2023

• I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment. We’ve reached a searing milestone: In just five weeks of war, half of 1 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the share of the American population that was killed in all of World War II — over the course of four years. Nicholas Kristoff,'What We Get Wrong About Israel and Gaza,' New York Times 15 November 2023

• Most editors won't have time to read the several good book-length studies of Hamas. But an excellent early study of its dynamics is available on jstor and should be required reading, as a cautionary prophylaxis against swallowing holus-bolus the Hamas=terrorism-and-nothing-else meme that is an article of faith in mainstream reportage, and the default staple of nearly all Israeli newspapers. I refer to Menachem Klein, Hamas in Power, Middle East Journal , Summer 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3 , pp. 442-459 Nishidani (talk) 21:20, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

• Tareq S. Hajjaj,'‘They shot her son in her arms and forced her to throw his body’: testimonies from the death march on Salah al-Din Street,' Mondoweiss 30 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)

• The Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Understanding history. "Zionists say they do not understand why Palestinians take up arms, and that their insurgency is terrorism. Let them read their own history. Where it says Ana put Jana. Where it says Jews put Palestinians, where it says Warsaw put Gaza and where it says Nazis put Zionists. Maybe then they will understand."
• The Israeli perspective–on genocide–dominates our airwaves. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

• Inside the Pro-Israel Information War. "Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices." Long-form article by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:59, 8 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)

• Israelis aren't seeing the devastating pictures Australians see from the war in Gaza. They're watching a sanitised war (9 December 2023). John Lyons in ABC News (Australia)

• ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians (8 December 2023). Gregory Shupak in FAIR. "What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:30, 10 December 2023 (UTC). --- Here are several additional thoughtful and insightful articles by Gregory Shupak on key media aspects of Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, posted over the last 3 years. He also wrote a book about this. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:54, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

• Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds (9 December 2023). Julian Borger in The Guardian. "Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than the average in all world conflicts in 20th century, data suggests." Original in Haaretz: "The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing. The IDF chief of staff recently boasted of the army's precise munitions and its ability to reduce harm to noncombatants. But the data shows that in the war on Hamas that principle has been abandoned. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

• Death and Destruction in Gaza (11 December 2023). By John Mearsheimer. "As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?" ["... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"] Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:31, 12 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)

There are several reasons for the moral cowardice of the wealthy western nations (especially the US, Western Europe, Canada, Australia etc). At least two reasons come to mind: (a) The tremendous power of the pro-Israel lobbies in these countries, and (b) There are very large fossil fuel reserves near the coast of Gaza, and the US strongly prefers that these reserves would be under Israeli control and not under Palestinian control, because if they're in Palestinian hands the Palestinians then could sell (most of) the fossil fuels to China, whereas if these resources are in Israeli hands, the US government could exert enormously powerful pressure on the Israeli gov't to refrain from selling them to China.

Over the last 15 years or so, the US has been gradually shifting its foreign policy (for the US, its 'foreign' policy has always been practically indistinguishable from being a key component of its overall long-horizon economic policy) to focusing on trying to 'compete' with China i.e. to weaken/ hurt/ cripple the Chinese economy as much as possible. This is true for all US administrations regardless of political party affiliation, including both Democunt as well as Republicunt, starting in the last couple of years of the Bush Jr administration and continuing with the administrations of Obama, Trump and now Biden. The numbers don't lie, and the economic numbers are basically almost all that has ever mattered to US (and Chinese, Western European, etc) decision makers. Up until recent years, US GDP was by far the largest on the planet, but in the last few decades China's GDP has been growing faster than the US's and has recently surpassed the US: today China's GDP (PPP) is roughly about $33 Trillion, while US GDP (PPP) is about $27 trillion. That is, from the POV of US decision makers, their top priority, by far, is how to slow - and preferably reverse - the fact that the US has in recent years lost its undisputed global economic dominance to China.

See this, among several other articles and books published in recent years about the geopolitical implications of the vast oil and natural gas reserves near the Gaza shoreline. Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:23, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

• The Death of Israel (17 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception."

Well, I think that is a piece of wishful thinking. It is simply wrong-headed to assert that 'Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception'. The 'new' world is dominated by successful settler colonial states that have withstood the usury of time, and indeed thrived, and Israel will be no exception. Of course this latest triumph of Zionism rubbishes the moral force of both the haskalah tradition and the Holocaust, but they too are past their use-by date.Nishidani (talk) 01:18, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

• What is wrong with Israelis? (27 December 2023). "Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 10:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

None of which is reported abroad. That Gaza is one huge whore, deserving of genocidal rape by missiles carrying the signatures of young Israeli women, is all over Israeli social media, as are euphoric chants by children, rabbinical students and entertainers in army camps mocking the destruction of Palestinian women and children. It's all there, and invisible to readers. Words fail one.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Israeli sources on friendly fire 7-8 October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One may add this to the RS.

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

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

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

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

Missed that, thanks. I.e.'Israel implemented 'mass Hannibal' directive on 7 October: Israeli pilot Col. Nof Erez says the Israeli military likely killed its own civilians in multiple instances on 7 Octob,' The Cradle 20 November

This is not an RS source but it cites the Haaretz original in Hebrew with a link that qualifies. The source is also cited by the Turkish news agency cited above. And that along with the several sources above, means this aspect of 7 October is now acceptably referenced. I would still prefer to wait until however we get the mainstream English sources to cover the issue. Perhaps they will, after the conflict has ended and the simplistic unilinear narrative has served its function of securing consensus for whatever final disaster ensues.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

• Analysis: Why is Israel’s military killing so many of its own? (21 December 2023). "The perils of urban warfare, coupled with operational issues within the army, appear to be hobbling Israel’s advance." By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera.
• Analysis: As Israel escalates Gaza war, its ‘kill-rate’ claims don’t add up (9 December 2023). "The claims, aimed at fending off criticism over civilian casualties paint a picture of the war that makes no sense. By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:53, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Consensus note regarding Israeli settlements

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noooo... I honestly think it's a decent result. I was just under the impression that we're not supposed to imply conclusions from broader statements even if the connection is obvious. For example, [1], [2], [3]. With that impression I removed this consensual statement from a settlement article I came across in proofreading the Hamas article, which Nishidani reverted me on. But if there is relative peace and quiet and people are not fussing about this "The world knows settlements in occupied territories are illegal, but Israel believes this does not apply to them," then my position is we should let well enough alone. --Orgullomoore (talk) 04:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

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

Nomination of Palestinianism for deletion

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Typo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closure of hospitals

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

Palestinian hospitals have very significant strategic value to the Israeli government's overarching goal of ethnic cleansing the Palestinians. By destroying or severely damaging hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure, and killing large numbers of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical staff, the Israeli gov't aims to significantly increase the suffering and misery of Palestinian civilians, including - but not limited to - drastically curtailing the ability of the Palestinian healthcare system to ward-off the spread of infectious diseases including pandemics, epidemics etc. The Israeli gov't is hoping that this would lead to significantly higher numbers of dead, near-dead, severely sick or permanently maimed innocent Palestinians, especially among the weaker segments of Palestinian society i.e. children, the elderly, the infirm, etc.

More generally, see this. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Some other stuff

• Masha Gessen In the Shadow of the Holocaust New Yorker
• Emma Soteriou, 'There are no Christians or churches in Gaza, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem has claimed after the Israeli army killed two women at church,' Leading Britain's Conversation 19 December 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 20 December 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)

Thanks for posting these two interesting and informative articles. The long-form essay by Masha Gessen is very good and well worth a read, but regretfully it contains several omissions and inaccuracies - for example, it neglects to mention that Stepan Bandera was directly involved in the murder of many thousands of innocent Jewish civilians, and the article also repeats the Israeli bald-faced lie that 1,200 Israelis were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7-8 when in reality the majority [probably the vast majority] of these 1,200 were killed by the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] including IOF heavy fire from attack helicopters, armed drones, tank shells, tank-mounted machine guns and armored-personnel-carrier (APC)-mounted machine guns.

However, in my view these omissions and inaccuracies do not have a significant adverse effect on the overall good quality of the essay by Gessen, and overall this appears to be a thoughtful and insightful essay. What are your thoughts and reflections on this essay? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:05, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Well it was clear from the first day the figure of 1,400 came out, that it was guesswork. Perfectly rounded figures always are. Now it is down to around 1150, from which some 400 appear to members of the IDF/border/kibbutz police in combat roles. Of the remaining 750 or so non/combatants how the figures will break down for those killed by Hamas and those killed by Israeli forces will remain unclear because of the nature of the subsequent battles to retake the area, and because the forensic neutrality of those controlling the evidence of autopsies will remain suspect. But one must refrain from assuming that, given the success of the Israeli manipulation of the core data to set the tone of the ruling narrative, the truth will be accessible by simply inverting that Israeli narrative, i.e., inferring that the massacres were largely self-inflicted. Hamas almost certainly had units trained to shock and awe by killing Israeli civilians. Most of its operatives grew up from childhood to early manhood witnessing masses of civilian corpses regularly littering their streets, and everyone in the Strip has numerous relatives murdered by 'precision' bombing, sniper or tank fire. Many irregulars also roamed about ready to revenge themselves on any Israeli they came upon. The IDF has a record going back to 1948 of deliberately murdering Palestinians in order to subjugate the population by sheer terror, and that means blowback of similar violence is inevitable. In any case. if you haven't seen it, watch the interview with Paul Rogers here. Unlike 99% of newspaper reportage, he actually understands the historical and comparative context of these events. Gaza is a rerun of Mosul, only a little more thorough as one would expect.Nishidani (talk) 12:48, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Just from a technical viewpoint, there has been since Oct 7 an enormous confusion in the statistics, mixing civilian casualties in Israel and military casualties in the Gaza Strip operation. Rogers notes now that

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

• Damien Gayle and Nina Lakhani, 'Flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater risks ‘ruining basic life in Gaza’, says expert,' The Guardian 23 December 2023
• Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza Civilians to Go (22 December 2023). A New York Times investigation used aerial imagery and artificial intelligence to detect bomb craters that showed that Israel dropped many two-ton bombs - in addition to smaller bombs - in south Gaza, in the same locations where it specifically ordered Palestinians to go when it ordered them to evacuate their homes. Video posted on the official YouTube channel of The New York Times. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

• '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

I don't get this

Regarding this revert, I think you are saying I' a newbie? What? Also, I am engaging on the talkpage. Can you explain? ☆ Bri (talk) 15:18, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I dont get why you removed something based on it needing attribution, but you are indeed not a newbie. But you havent really engaged, you answered one of several questions and then declined so far to answer the follow up. nableezy - 15:22, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Newbie to the area, sorry. In any case, the edit summary was inept. To complain that attribution is lacking as a warrant to remove text, instead of providing attribution, is not an adequate motivation and (b) you left in the intercept while, if I recall, taking out the text sourced to it. Bad practice.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Major perils to global society associated with Washington’s New Cold War projection of military and financial power aimed at stopping China’s economic rise

• The U.S. threat of a “new Opium War against China” found in the pages of the US Air Force’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. (1 December 2023). By the editors of Monthly Review. "Fearful of losing its imperial hegemony over the world economy due to the rise of China as a major economic power, the United States is seeking to translate its military ascendancy into renewed economic domination, resulting in unparalleled dangers for humanity as a whole." Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
• Another Major War in 2024? (21 December 2023). By Michael Klare for TomDispatch. "The U.S. and China at Year’s End - Still Treading on the Precipice." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:44, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
• Contrasting Strategies of the US and China (27 December 2023). by Roger Harris in CounterPunch. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm prepared, I guess, having picked up for 3AU$ at a country recycling bookshop the other day Neville Shute's On the Beach, with Rowland's original jacket intact, in what was the third reprint, and read it yesterday.Nishidani (talk) 03:28, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Hahaha. What did you think about the book? Hope you liked it. I like the film based on the novel, I bought the DVD many ago and have been re-watching it every few years. The full film is also freely available on YouTube. Hope you will enjoy the film.

My cat and I are now fixing to go on our customary evening walk. On our walks, he freely and happily walks or runs by my side without a harness or leash. He sends his love to his Granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:37, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, having read Shute's Round the Bend a week earlier, which I really enjoyed because his flatness of style was nicely compensated for by an engineer's precision of technical detail in the description of planes, I found it a dutiful read rather than a page-turner. Naturally enough, because I saw the film 60 years ago and in so far as there was a plot, it held no surprises. And, since my purpose here is just living the landscape, I was struck by his failure to capture its beauties, or even sight them. I have delighted relatives in Europe by showing them photos of breakfast on the verandah here, where we are joined by king parrots who perch on the table and eat cashew nuts from one's hand, while magpies await their turn, and a pair of satin bowerbirds vie with currawong, topknot pigeons, butcherbirds and galahs to assert their ascendency over the backyard garden. The best Shute could do was make something of the merits of a fly over a spinner in fishing for rainbow trout on the Jamieson.

It's interesting that in a small upcountry town like this, with no more than 2,600 people, one can pick up off the shelves things like The New Yorker. I bought the October edition this morning and read something thematically linked to what is alluded to above. I.e.

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

It's great that you have a companionable walking cat. I raised mine (temperamentally I'm a dog person) as a canine, and so for 17 years it walked, ran, responded to whistles etc, as dogs would. The autistic kitten we saved several years back now responds similarly, but limits her excursions to waiting for me at dusk halfway down the bottom of the incline that leads up to my villa, and then racing me back home when I return from my evening sundowner in the local bar. Give her an avuncular caress. I don't mind the extinction of man. It will give the world time to get back on its evolutionary feet. There are 1 million invertebrates in Australia, and only about 15% have been classified till now, most of them disappearing under climate and anthropo-obscenic changes. 'Full many a March fly is born to swarm unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.'Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Notification

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Hamas

Added your material here Selfstudier (talk) 18:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

no words

Haaretz. nableezy - 14:26, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

so,how often has that article been taken up by the mainstream English press?Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Source for 3% Levantine ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews

Hi Nishidani, thank you for waging the good fight here on Wikipedia on Israel-related articles. In Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry, you reference the figure of a 3% Levantine component of Ashkenazi ancestry. I've never seen such a low figure before, do you mind citing it? I'm asking as someone inclined to agree with you on the basis of other investigations; I would appreciate being able to back up such a number. Brusquedandelion (talk) 04:46, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

says 60% fwiw. Selfstudier (talk) 11:40, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

See ELhaik and Das's 2017 paper for the 3% Levantine vs 88% Iranian component. I'd link it but for the fact i am using borrowed computers as a guest and cannot seem to copy and paste anything. Nishidani (talk) 09:33, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017 Selfstudier (talk) 10:25, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

courtesy ping

courtesy ping that another user mentioned your changes in an WP:AE, and they neglected to inform you, so I am. but don't worry. it's not really about you except incidentally. I'm just extending the courtesy of the notification since your friend forgot to. Cheers. Andre🚐 22:05, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

~~~ Merry Christmas! ~~~
Joyeux Noël! ~ Buon Natale! ~ Vrolijk Kerstfeest! ~ Frohe Weihnachten!
¡Feliz Navidad! ~ Feliz Natal! ~ Καλά Χριστούγεννα! ~ Hyvää Joulua!
God Jul! ~ Glædelig Jul! ~ Linksmų Kalėdų! ~ Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus!
Häid Jõule! ~ Wesołych Świąt! ~ Boldog Karácsonyt! ~ Veselé Vánoce!
Veselé Vianoce! ~ Crăciun Fericit! ~ Sretan Božić! ~ С Рождеством!
শুভ বড়দিন! ~ 圣诞节快乐！~ メリークリスマス！~ 메리 크리스마스!
สุขสันต์วันคริสต์มาส! ~ Selamat Hari Natal! ~ Giáng sinh an lành!
Весела Коледа! ~ Meri Kirihimete!

Hello, Nishidani! Thank you for your work to maintain and improve Wikipedia! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:35, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove and leave other users this message by adding {{subst:Multi-language Season's Greetings}}

And the very best god jul to you too, pal. I apparently got pinged here where it was said that someone put the boot into me in the 23 Dec version of the Spectator (Australia). Read the new link, and came away weeping that either my eyesight was fucked or my late bid for fame had once more been stymied, since I could see no such other mention (apparently it's in some dumbfuck link). The coincidence is that together with the New Yorker and several other quality mags, I bought a recent edition of the Spectator the other day on the strength of its former reputation for some intelligent commentary, and threw it into the dustbin after three moronic articles in succession flushed apparently from pseuds' corner. I shouldn't be surprised: flaunting one's ignorance or lazy disattention for details that disturb the music of one's paid-up chanting in the meme choir no longer stirs even the slightest wince of shame in the thriving world of hack jejeurnalism. Nishidani (talk) 14:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Fwiw, the relevant links seems to be in the "Another case is of an experienced editor quoting antisemitism denialists and going on to draw parallels between the current Israeli government and the Nazis." sentence. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:08, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I see, more or less. In short, the writer of that article appears to be illiterate, unable to construe straightforward prose, or an argument. Well, that is to put the best gloss on that kind of garbling mischief of misreportage. WOADB. Best Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

When I saw the Maori greeting for Christmas above, I was reminded of hearing the similar Polynesian term, the Hawaiian mele kalikimaka while staying over the Christmas summer break at the Moana Hotel on Waikiki beach in 1964/5. But that just brought back to mind the obscenely foul passage that led me to dump the Christmas edition of Spectator Australia

‘massacre of the innocents’ is certainly a literal and apt description of what occurred less than a hundred kilometres from Bethlehem some two thousand and twenty-three years later. Nearly fifteen hundred innocents mutilated, kidnapped, tortured, raped and /or murdered in the most grotesque and evil fashion. The ramifications and trauma have shaken to the core not only families, friends and loved ones but an entire nation and an entire diaspora scattered round the world. 'Massacre of innocence Spectator Australia 16 December 2023.

(The dunce who copypasted up that pastiche doesn't appear to understand what a pleonasm is, hence the bolded example. As if a diaspora could be other than a scattering of people around the world, the implied antithesis being a 'diaspora in Israel'. Sigh.)

This came with a vignette by Ben Davis who in obtuse cleverness expropriated a Christian image to further the genocidal narrative of a country where mayors in places like Nazareth Illit can still ban that ‘antisemitic’ feastday, where an Israeli sniper* can take out, first an elderly Christian mother, Nahida Khalil Anton and then her 50 year old daughter Samar as she rushed to succour her within the protective precincts of the Holy Family Church in Gaza. And where, in solidarity with Gaza, and bowing to necessity as Israel’s long stranglehold on Bethlehem makes this year’s visits to the nativity virtually impossible, authorities have cancelled the event, though the nativity scene now shows a baby buried in rubble.

In reading that callous piece of mindless trash, I couldn’t avoid yet another possible definition of a type of Zionist in abstracto.

‘A Zionist is someone who, coming unhappily across some mention that 8,000 Palestinian children have been murdered under the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, murmurs to assuage any residual twinge of unease, ‘yeah, but what about the 40+ Jewish under 18 year olds** murdered by Hamas terrorists on 7th October.’

The thought of one crushed life, if Jewish, cancels out any thought of the 200 parallel non-Jewish/Palestinian lives smashed by Israeli retaliation because, well, they're not special, like us. Judaism appears to have no answer to the abyss into which Zionism is driving its adherents, esp. since a Zionist could cite scripture in self-justification, i.e. psalm 137, l.9:'Blessed is the one who seizes and dashes your children against the rock.'

• If one has to measure reliability by the source, then I take the very diplomatically cautious Franciscan Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s word for it over whatever a spokesman for the chronically duplicitous and mendacious IDF spokespeople might say. If only also because that same day, 17 December, the lads of the world’s most moral army blew up with a tank shot the generator and fuel stocks of the convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa in the same area, rendering the 54 disabled people there homeless.
  • Casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war tells us that, according to the Times of Israel, as of 4 December, 49 Jewish/Israeli children and youths were killed: two infants; 12 children under the age of 10, and a further 36 aged 10-19. I wrote 40+ because, under Israeli secular law 18 is the legal age for the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and therefore upping that to 19, uniquely, here appears to play a numbers game. How many 18-19 year olds, adults, figure among the 36 children?

If only the 800,000 children now wintering in famine conditions in camps reeking with shit from burst sewage spills could chance to see, on at least one quiet night, after a minimal meal something as profoundly instructive as this, speaking to their fright.Nishidani (talk) 03:32, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

That may be the wrong template; do you have a connection with the topic Nihonjinron? Andre🚐 09:25, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

December 2023

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Andre🚐 09:43, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.Andre🚐 09:46, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

The question is, rather, why after being involved first with me, and now with Nableezy, two I/P specialists, in interactions that led to you nearly being topic banned in the first instance, and now topic banned with Nableezy, you straightaway went to an article totally out of your known range of interests, but which happens to be one I edited back in 2006. In my book this is not disinterested. And of course, as a former Japanologist, I know that topic. Looking at your edits it is apparent you are way, way out of your depth. So drop it, and stop shitstirring.Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Predictable. Well, I trust some admins can see what you're up to. I've wasted enough time pointlessly reasoning with your confusions. Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

i've edited on Japan for years. I created maneki-neko. Andre🚐 10:16, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Don-t edit this page. Nishidani (talk) 11:44, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

You don't WP:OWN the topic. It has tags for WP:OR and unsourced since 2015 and 2017. I was fixing them. You reverted all the templates and fixes twice. Andre🚐 11:48, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I told you to get off my page. Your appalling ignorance of that, and several other topics, can surely find some willing interlocutor elsewhere, not here.Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Your AE ban

[Bishzilla is a little miffed.] The correct way go about these things is alert Superclerk Bishzilla to them! She correct everything, never repercussions! [Smiles at thought of repercussions from tiny regular clerks. Ho ho.] bishzilla _ROARR!! pocket 09:34, 29 December 2023 (UTC).