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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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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
• Donor Class vs. the First Amendment with John Mearsheimer.
• Philip Weiss. Weekly Briefing: Biden is risking reelection over Gaza to please donors, the mainstream media reports, Mondoweiss 19 May 2024 on how finally even the mainstream press is now documenting the huge role pro-Israeli Jewish donors in the US are using their billionares' heft to constrain universities to clamp down on dissentient views on campus.Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

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

It's reported than despite the vast IDF bulldozing and uprooting of Gazan agriculture, a patch of strawberries was found by a group of invasive settlers, so the compromised land of the Philistines can once more offer fertile prospects as a promised land for settlers Nishidani (talk) 06:01, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

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 terrorism 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)

• More on moral cowardice: Saudis Attempt To Normalize Ties With Israel By Air-Striking Gaza (11 August 2023). By the writers of The Onion.

• Yet more on moral cowardice: ‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (13 October 2023). By the Editorial Board of The Onion. "Some may call us cowards for our decision. To this, we can only say the following: If a coward is a person [IT: or a government] who avoids taking a difficult stance on topics for personal expediency, then “coward” is a badge this editorial board will gladly wear, again and again and again." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• NY Times October 7 hoax exposed (30 December 2023). By Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, who "meticulously debunk a New York Times article purporting to demonstrate that Hamas carried out a policy of sexual assault against Israelis on October 7, and demonstrate that the Times' Jeffrey Gettleman is guilty of journalistic malpractice and serving as a willing tool for the serially mendacious Israeli government." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:33, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

That the NYTs article is a pretentious exercise in pseudo-journalism is self-evident, but I don't think Max B is at his best there. That challenge is not meticulous but somewhat offhandish. MB was showing signs of fatigue. Does an amputated breast maintain its shape so that it can be thrown around and juggled like a ball, as was claimed? That is now a meme, and I've yet to see anyone stop to think about it. Only in Picasso's imagination, one would think. I made the 850 mile train trip to Madrid in late 1981 just to catch the inaugural showing in that country of Guernica. There has been a Guernica every day since 7 Oct. The past has no more resonance.Nishidani (talk) 04:40, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

• Chris Hedges: Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (31 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:39, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• The only thing to note is that the relevant provisions of international law can never, in all probability, be interpreted in a way to hinder Zionism's historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine. The present ethnocide will simply lead to a surge in industrial and industrious scholarship that, while confirming the obvious, will inflect neither Israeli opinion, world opinion nor international concepts of justice. The only thing that interests me at this point is to observe to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people. In any case, rather than Hedges, see the ever-lucid A. Dirk Moses, More than Genocide: The law occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense The Boston Review 14 November 2023Nishidani (talk) 12:30, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.

• Mearsheimer today, on his substack: Genocide in Gaza 4 January 2024. Finally he's come round to regarding it as a genocide. He's only saying, more politely, what the ranting Cornishman said days ago. --NSH001 (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, N. I noted in particular

the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.

Application Instituting Proceedings regarding Israel's genocide lodged by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. pp.59-67 provide clear verbal evidence of genocidal intent by Israel's leaders.Nishidani (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• The best overview I am familiar with now is Seth Ackerman, There was an Iron Wall in Gaza Jacobin

This explained the anomalies in the attacks that I noted within the first two days, if the hypothesis of a rift within Hamas between the political and military wings, which led to a radical change in the battle orders by Sinyar et al., in the last three hours to include attacks on civilians, proves to be correct. Note that the rape, mutilation etc charges that were used to orchestrate Israel's case for retributive genocide against this collective of 'animals' are eerily reminiscent of, almost a replica of the testimonies about the Israeli assault on Palestinians at the Massacre of Deir Yassin in 48. Nishidani (talk) 01:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• How Israel's war on Gaza exposed Zionism as a genocidal cult (11 January 2024). By Joseph Massad in Middle East Eye. "The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fit this description." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• Gaza and New York (Nov/Dec 2023). By Alexander Zevin in New Left Review. "America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?" Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• ‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (13 January 2024). By Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem, for The Guardian. "Meir Baruchin, who was fired and jailed for criticising the military, says that many who agree with him are afraid to go public." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:38, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• A Critical Look at The New York Times' Weaponization of Rape in Service of Israeli Propaganda (14 January 2024). By Randa Abdel-Fattah in the Institute for Palestine Studies. "The fact is that Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.   This is the sobering reality Palestinians face. The racism that animates hyper-attention over crimes imagined to have been committed against Israelis is the same racism that desensitizes people to crimes actually committed against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• Several recent reports by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate:

• Traumatizing the public into compliance w/official Israeli, US lies
• NYT atrocity propaganda continues to collapse
• Blockbuster Israeli report exposes Oct 7 friendly fire orders
• Max Blumenthal confronts State Dept on genocide support
• Life in Jerusalem under Israel's military dictatorship
• Israeli victims' families denounce NY Times 'Hamas rape' report

Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:06, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

• Jewish Scholars vs. Jewish Donors on Antisemitism (22 January 2024). By Peter Beinart for The Beinart Notebook. "... But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out."

• A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name (22 Jan 2024). By Brad Pierce for The Wayward Rabbler. "The IDF is Accused of Causing Mass Civilian Casualties on 10/7." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:37, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

• Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity (29 January 2024), The New York Times. By Balakrishnan Rajagopal, with photos and accompanying text by Yaqeen Baker. Dr. Rajagopal is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Ms. Baker’s home was destroyed in the war in Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

• Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role? (31 January 2024). By Aaron Rabinowitz for Haaretz. "The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

• Thomas Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda (6 February 2024). Jim Naureckas for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Well if Friedman and his likes are now going mainstream with vermin tropes for the adversarial 'Other' (Theodor Adorno has a good early analysis of insect metaphors for despised ethnic groups, in The Authoritarian Personality (1951) - it was a serious element in antisemitic caricatures, vide Kafka for the most egregious example) I guess I'd better make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians.Nishidani (talk) 01:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Good idea. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

• AIPAC of Lies (6 February 2024). By Arvin Alaigh for The Baffler. "The pro-Israel lobby brooks no dissent on Capitol Hill ... The Israeli government is losing the battle of public opinion across the world, and increasingly, in the United States ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

• Energy firms face legal threat over Israeli licences to drill for gas off Gaza (15 Feb 2024). By Dania Akkad for Middle East Eye. "Rights groups say exploration licences handed to companies in first weeks of war encroach on Palestinian waters and may amount to the war crime of pillaging." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:24, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Not quite news to me. An insider privy to these things told me a good while back that the Gazan fields' resources were already being pilfered from by some lateral intrusions. Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

• Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation (16 Feb. 2024). Irfan Galaria, The Los Angeles Times.

• IDF Sent in Handcuffed Prisoner to Evacuate Hospital, Then Killed Him When He Left (14 Feb 2024). Kavita Chekuru, The Intercept. "The young man, bound by zip-tie cuffs, delivered his Israeli captors’ message but was shot as he tried to walk out of the hospital gate."

With regard to this item, scruple demands that I ask myself whether or not this young man might have been murdered by a Palestinian militant, in retaliation for acting as an Israeli messenger. Unlikely, but one never knows. All one has learnt from this war is that Israeli culture has never absorbed any moral lesson from the holocaust, except that moral sentiments are trash, a dangerous weakness in one's chutzpah armour or amour-propre. The real sum of the Palestinian dead has now reached roughly 38,000. Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli soldiers post distressing content out of Gaza (22 Feb 2024). CNN. "Israeli soldiers are taking to platforms like TikTok to document their destruction of infrastructure in Gaza -- with many adding what they consider as a comedic twist to their content." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine (Received 30 December 2023, Accepted 2 January 2024). Layth Hanbali, Edwin Jit Leung Kwong, Amy Neilson, James Smith, Sali Hafez, Rasha Khoury. BMJ Global Health, a prestigious peer reviewed academic journal. This particular paper is probably more of an editorial, it was not commissioned for external review but was internally peer reviewed. Some key sections:

"The horrific scale of Israel’s latest attacks validates the concerns and calls raised in our editorial: namely that Israel’s ongoing military violence in Gaza is an extension of the longstanding, systemic violence intrinsic to the Israeli state’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine. Connections can be clearly traced between the exploitation and dispossession of people, land and resources that defined European colonial violence, ongoing neocolonial exploitation worldwide, and every aspect of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine today. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to actions that expose and challenge sites of exploitative and extractive power and violence. People’s health, lives and freedoms are at risk…

"Attempts to dehistoricise and decontextualise the present encourage us to ignore the many ways in which the Israeli state dictates both life and death for the Palestinian people, either through the fast violence of aerial bombardments, or what Berlant referred to as ‘slow death’: visible in the progressive dispossession of Palestinians who are crammed into ever-shrinking spaces, the denial of life-sustaining necessities and services, the destruction of livelihoods, repeated physical assaults and disablement, mass incarceration, extensive restrictions on movement (including to seek healthcare), and now ethnic cleansing in Gaza executed by mustering Palestinians through a dystopian grid of ever-shifting, supposedly ‘safe zones…

"The recognition of the systematic nature of this violence, and the pervasiveness of Israeli state control over almost every aspect of the everyday lives of Palestinians, made the philosopher Achille Mbembé declare that: ‘The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’. It is the power to dictate the terms of life and death, and ultimately who lives and who dies. Repeatedly framing Palestinian violence as a provocation and Israeli violence as a response is a product of ignorance to the necropower exercised by the Israeli state. Necropower and necropolitics are enabled in places that Achille Mbembé termed ‘death-worlds’, where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ that enable a precarious form of survival in perpetual proximity to death. Within this world, there is gross indifference to Palestinian suffering and extreme obfuscation of the horrors of Israeli necropolitics.

• Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections, Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024 (19 Feb 2024). Zeina Jamaluddine, Zhixi Chen, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Shatha Elnakib, Gregory Barnsley, Fiona Majorin, Hannah Tong, Tak Igusa, Oona MR Campbell, Paul B. Spiegel, Francesco Checchi and the Gaza Health Impact Projections Working Group. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"Executive Summary

"Overall

"The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has heavily affected civilians in both the Gaza Strip and Israel. Residents of Gaza are now mostly displaced from their homes and living in overcrowded conditions with insufficient access to water, sanitation and food, and health services have been considerably disrupted. So, to inform humanitarian and other decision-makers working on the Gaza crisis, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University have initiated a project to estimate the potential public health impact of the crisis under different future trajectories of its evolution. The first set of projections covers a six-month period from 7 February to 6 August 2024. The projections will be periodically updated until May 2024. The projections are not predictions of what will happen in Gaza but provide a range of projections of what could happen under three distinct scenarios: 1) an immediate permanent ceasefire; 2) status quo (a continuation of conditions experienced from October 2023 till mid-January); and 3) a further escalation of the conflict.

"The projections are based on a range of publicly available data from the current and past Gaza crises, data from similar crises, and peer-reviewed published research into excess death estimates and take into account the limitations and biases of different data sources. Where data is limited or unavailable, the projections draw on consultations with experts. These projections are designed to help humanitarian organisations, governments, and other actors plan their response to the crisis and take sound, evidence-based decisions. Ultimately, the hope is that they will make some contribution to saving lives.

"Over the next six months we project that, in the absence of epidemics, 6,550 excess deaths would occur under the ceasefire scenario, climbing to 58,260 under the status quo scenario and 74,290 under the escalation scenario. Over the same period and with the occurrence of epidemics, our projections rise to 11,580, 66,720, and 85,750, respectively. All projections feature 95% uncertainty intervals as shown in the Summary Table below.

"Under the ceasefire scenario, the projections suggest that infectious diseases would be the main cause of excess deaths, with 1,520 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 6,550 including epidemics. Traumatic injuries followed by infectious diseases would be the main causes of excess deaths in both the status quo (53,450 traumatic injuries; 2,120 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 10,590 including epidemics) and escalation scenarios (68,650 traumatic injuries; 2,720 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 14,180 including epidemics).

"Our projections indicate that even in the best-case ceasefire scenario, thousands of excess deaths would continue to occur, mainly due to the time it would take to improve water, sanitation and shelter conditions, reduce malnutrition, and restore functioning healthcare services in Gaza. While the total number of estimated excess deaths from maternal and neonatal causes are relatively small (100-330 excess deaths), every loss of a mother has severe consequences for family health and wellbeing. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) were the primary cause of death in Gaza in 2022, and the conflict has aggravated these conditions (1,680-2,680 excess deaths) via heavily disrupted specialised health services and impeded access to treatment and medications.

• thanks. I wouldn't have otherwise caught that, which is clinically scientific and ventures rational scenarios, all of which translate into a statement that Israeli and American decision-makers are now familiar with the likely lethal consequences of the three options available. Sara Roy, with Jean-Pierre Filiu and Finkelstein the 3 world authorities on the Strip, spoke a year ago, before oCT 7 of Israel's longterm planned catastrophe'.Nishidani (talk) 23:33, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

• 'Shocking, unsustainable and desperate' conditions across Gaza, Security Council hears (22 Feb 2024). UN News. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

• Shielding (the) US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 (23 February 2024). Bryce Greene, in Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. "... Indeed, IDF responsibility for Israeli deaths has been a repeated topic of discussion in the Israeli press, accompanied by demands for investigations. But the most US readers have gotten from their own press about the issue is a dismissive piece from the Washington Post about October 7 “truthers.” ... How many Israeli civilians were actually killed by Hamas, and how many by Israel? Was the Al Aqsa Flood a terrorist attack designed to kill as many civilians as possible? These are important questions that have yet to be conclusively and independently answered, but the Washington Post seems to want to dissuade people from even asking them. In evoking the specter of Holocaust denial, Dwoskin and the Post are not defending the truth, but attempting to protect readers from it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:38, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Were the four main Hamas leaders in Gaza endowed with an intelligent grasp of the wider forces of the modern international order, they would offer to place themselves in the hands of the ICJ to be put on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity, a position Hamas outlined some years ago as their readiness to be prosecuted abroad were such a trial to allow similar measures against Israeli leaders. Since the measure they took in attacking Israel foreseeably enabled the genocide of their own people underway, a cost they must have calculated, they should in theory accept that this kind of personal commitment to their own symbolic 'martyrdom' in a court of law is the one step that could sway world opinion to insist that Israel stop the war. Unfortunately, this won't happen. Nishidani (talk) 00:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I read quite a few years ago that 15% of American kids go to bed feeling hungry, something that I recall to mind while reading Israeli debates on whether or not children under 4 (but not over that age limit) should be provided with food currently. Ralph Nadar has now made the point more cogently.

Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. Ralph Nader, What the Mass Media Needs to Cover Re: Israel/Gaza Conflict CounterPunch 26 February 2024

Yes, Hunger in the United States is a serious problem. Other major socio-economic problems include (but are not limited to) Homelessness in the United States, serious Crime in the United States (including gun violence), the largest known prison population in the world, the fact that annually tens of thousands of families declare bankruptcy because they are unable to pay their exorbitant medical bills, a relatively weak social safety net, a government with legislative and executive branches that for many decades have been to a very large extent captured by wealthy special interests/ Inverted totalitarianism, as well as other serious socio-economic ills.

Thanks for the article by Ralph Nader, it is informative and thought-provoking. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• Extraordinary charges of bias emerge against NYTimes reporter Anat Schwartz (25 Feb. 2024). By James North for Mondoweiss. "New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed racist and violent rhetoric toward Palestinians."

Like Chalmers Johnson - one of the most thoughtful and insightful thinkers on US imperialism - said many years ago (slightly paraphrasing from my rusty memory): Don't read the New York Times to find out the truth, read the New York Times to find out the lies. (I don't think this is invariably true, but it is frequently true.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• As Journalists Are Murdered in Gaza Their Counterparts Lose Jobs in America (27 February 2024). Steven Thrasher for Literary Hub. "Steven W. Thrasher Wonders Who’s Left to “Afflict the Comfortable”." Ijon Tichy (talk) 09:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

• Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation (15 March 2024). Long-form article by Arun Gupta, Counterpunch. " ... But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:59, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I've already read both. I said from the outset that the horrendous massacre of several hundred civilians in one day would be spun in spectacularly lurid terms, when the mere facts were sufficient to freeze one's blood. Some years down the line, the actual facts and statistics, and contexts of each tragedy or act of violence will finally emerge. But the template of cooked babies, stabbed children, bayoneted vaginas, slashed-off breasts etc.etc.etc., has predictably won the day and will remain functional for the time frame that is important, the war, both on the ground, and in the media. The 130 odd hostages are prime time news: the 7000 Palestinians who languish in prisons, 3,000 alone seized from their families after 7 Oct as bartering material in future negotations, -tortured and uncharged, are in Palestinian terms, hostages, seized predominantly for political reasons, but the semantic distinction between 'hostage' and 'arrested suspect' means there too, the battle of misrepresentation has been won. All of these reports and counter-reports conjure up for me an image of a frigate armed with 40 36-pounder long guns engaging with a dhow defending itself with a handful of jezails. Nishidani (talk) 19:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

• War on Gaza: Torture, executions, babies left to die, sexual abuse ... These are Israel’s crimes (15 March 2024). Jonathan Cook for the Middle East Eye. "Why is the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?"

• Israel detains 20 more Palestinians in West Bank, bringing total arrests since 7 Oct to 7,605 (16 March 2024). Middle East Monitor.

• UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links (8 March 2024). The Times of Israel, article by Reuters and TOI staff. "The UN agency for Palestinian refugees says some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October 7 attacks." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

• What Israeli soldiers' display of Palestinian women's lingerie reveals about the Zionist psyche (14 March 2024). Shereen Hindawi-Wyatt, Middle East Eye. "Israeli soldiers' brazen intrusion into displaced or murdered Palestinians' romantic and sexual lives is a terrifying indication of the occupiers' capacity to violate with impunity." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:59, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• Censorship is a crucial complement of genocide (20 March 2024). Somdeep Sen, Al Jazeera.

• What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (19 March 2024). Noah Lanard in Mother Jones. "A former Israeli peace negotiator says the president’s response has “failed to meet even the lowest of low expectations.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:48, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

• Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges (21 March 2024). Lara-Nour Walton, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law."

• Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’ -— Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine (22 March 2024). Robin Andersen, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.     Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• Chris Hedges, A Genocide Foretold, 30 March 2024. A pretty comprehensive survey of the horror. --NSH001 (talk) 06:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

That's better than a lot of the things that he's written in the past (not citable because it is self-published), and quite powerful, simply because he sticks to the factual details, which being appalling, are worth more than a lot of emotional outbursts. Another item today illustrates the point.

The number of trucks crossing into Gaza rose slightly to about 190 a day – less than half the peacetime daily total. Israeli inspectors were still turning back 20 to 25 each day, NBC News reported, citing an Egyptian aid official, on grounds as arbitrary as the wooden pallets bearing the food not being exactly the right dimensions. Israel has banned Unrwa, the main UN relief agency in the region, from using the crossing.' Julian Borger, Toby Helm, Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum Israel alone? Allies’ fears grow over conduct – and legality – of war in Gaza The Guardian 31 March 2024

Banning UNWRA as well, which has the only large organization on the ground with a proven distribution network, has suicidal consequences, just as the emergence of clan gangs taking over the control of the little food airdropped because Israel shoots to kill the local police who traditionally maintained order on the grounds that they are employed by Hamas and therefore terrorists (not in international law) is a recipé for even more violence, inside the world of the starving survivors itself. Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud (25 March 2024). The Grayzone.   "Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Israeli lawyer at the center of the campaign accusing Hamas of systematic sexual violence on October 7, now stands accused by Israeli media of scamming donors and spreading misinformation. The allegations appeared just days after Elkayam-Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize."

• UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want (4 April 2024). Dave Lindorff, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).   "The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.   Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.   It was “nonbinding,” they said.   The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’” —- and let no one contradict her.   That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision."

• Israel's toxic legacy: White phosphorus bombs on south Lebanon (25 March 2024). Justin Salhani for Al Jazeera.   " ... Driving out civilians, burning down their agricultural lands, poisoning their soil and water, destroying their homes, dropping cluster munitions, and paralysing the local economy are part of what they say are efforts to make south Lebanon uninhabitable today, tomorrow and long into the future.   “The target is to create a wasteland in the south,” Baalbaki said.   “It’s to break the link between the people and their ties to the ground, their nature, their trees. The target is to tell them that this is an inhospitable area and to leave it.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:31, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

• Hostages are having their legs amputated from being zip-tied by all 4 limbs for months; they're being forced to defecate in diapers & fed through straws (4 April 2024). "Those are Gazan hostages at Israel's Sde Teiman "concentration camp" ..." A series of 7 tweets, based on investigative reports in Haaretz. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Alas, this (nothing new in terms of prisoner treatment) is only the tip of the iceberg. I can't and wouldn't read tweets on principle. Here, there is nothing 'chirpy' to be tweeted about.Nishidani (talk) 13:19, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I respect your decision to refrain from reading tweets on principle. Would you care to share which principle you are alluding to? In the past, I have seen some people objecting to the format/ style of tweets because of the 280 character limitation on the length of each individual tweet. But this limitation has been increased last year to 4,000 characters. Many world-class scholars and investigative reporters tweet extensively and frequently including essay-length tweets, e.g. Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Jonathan Cook, and thousands of others in many important topics/ subjects (including but certainly not limited to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

For example, here is a recent insightful essay by Norman Finkelstein, posted on twitter (last I checked, this essay was unavailable on Finkelstein's personal blog on Substack): ISRAEL’S MORAL DILEMMA (April 5, 2024). Regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Okay, one more proof I'm an ignarunt effwit. For years the computer I worked on could never visualise any link to a twitter site, and I was amazed on clicking on the link in this revarnished computer, that I could access NF's post there. But the principle will still obtain. I've never had a smartphone, nor a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account because my observation on those who do is that, generally, they spend an inordinate amount of time on browsing those media, and, at this burntout end of a smokey life, I value time: every day must be free, unconstrained by disturbances or distractions, of being sucked up into the blogosphere. Working wikipedia for a few hours is trying enough. I find even simple sentences, my own included (when, rarely, they emerge as just simple statements) question-begging so I prefer to spend my time foraging in books or jstor article on any number of topics. That said, I'm glad to have read NK's note there: I think those of us who have closely followed the several wars, know that the Kitchen Car incident was old hat, unique only in that it drew exclamations and outrage, whereas scores of such incidents of the type (a) a misile collapses an apartment block (b) survivors, with neighbours' help, emerge dazed and (c) ambulances arrive and (d) the ambulances are shot up, are so commonplace (as he illustrates from 2014 - I still recall those two) that it is only remarkable that (other than Finkelstein's 2017 book) there seems to be no scholarly interest in connecting the dots, and writing a comprehensive analysis of such 'incidents' over the last 18 years to elicit the military logic behind it. Certainly this war abounds in such cases. Hegel wrote that 'die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug'. The owl in this case probably flies no more, exhausted by the futility of causing a late flap after each war, only to see the identical tragedy and the identical abuses, identical bullshitting memes of self-exculpation, renew themselves regardless Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Taxing Israeli Palestinians to pay for the genocide of their kin.

• The government is also attempting to cut the very budgets dedicated to the development of Palestinian citizens. The war is estimated to have cost Israel nearly $60 billion in the first three months — an expense so extreme that the Moody’s rating agency recently downgraded Israel’s credit rating.In an effort to minimize further economic damage, Israel has increased its deficit and is pushing major budget cuts through parliament. These include cuts across the board, but the board isn’t flat. Reductions to funding directed to Palestinian citizens are slated to be three times higher than the rest — 15 percent compared with 5 percent. Through these budget cuts the Palestinians in Israel are effectively paying a disproportionate cost of the war against fellow Palestinians. Raghad Jaraisy and Ofer Dagan, A Special Anguish Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel New York Times 23 February 2024

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)

• Why the US is the Warring State in Israel (8 February 2024). by Stephen Reyna for Counterpunch. "The point at issue here is a general one. The are many states that participate in wars -provide troops or supply weapons and funding. Currently, Israel is one; Ukraine another. But they are not warring states useless they supply the sufficient conditions for the violence to occur. Rather, they are useful idiots in another state’s designs; in this case, US global supremacy. The importance of this position is twofold ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

• Imperialism, Lenin, and US Wars Abroad (3 Feb 2024). By Rob Urie for The Journal of Belligerent Pontification. "Liberals, the American left, and yours truly, perceive current US actions with respect to the Israelis in Gaza to be ‘fascist,’ in the sense of committing a racist genocide against the Palestinians. However, the Israelis plan an economic benefit from exiling Palestinians from Israel. They want the land for additional Israeli settlements, and possibly oil and gas extraction from the sea just off the coast of Gaza. The Americans want business for the MIC, a place to land and refuel fighter jets, control of the wider Middle East, and continued American domination of the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:14, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

I enjoy reading about your travel and outdoor experiences as well as your various interactions with domestic and wild animals. And thanks for your reference to the beautiful, moving Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Moreover, my cat sends a big thank-you to his beloved granpa Nishidani for all the pets and caresses you sent him, he enjoyed them. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

• Our (the U.S.'s) Real National Security Budget -- $2 Trillion, Here We Come (14 March 2024). Andrew Cockburn, Spoils of War. Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:18, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• Notes from the Editors (2 April 2024). Monthly Review. A discussion of the extremely belligerent, war-mongering, dangerous views of Richard N. Haass.   "On the Chinese front, the United States, Haass insisted, must declare that it is willing, ready, able, and committed to go to war with China over Taiwan (Haass, “A World in Disarray?”; Richard Haass, “What Friends Owe Friends,” Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2023)."     "Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza, Haass explained to the Wall Street Journal, is a major foreign policy disaster for the United States, but one in which Washington simply has no choice but to back “Netanyahu and his colleagues” at all costs, supporting Israel’s “one-state nonsolution” with its no-holds-barred war on Hamas and the continued movement of settlers into the West Bank. “They [the Israeli forces] are causing an awful lot of civilian casualties and deaths in the process,” Haass acknowledged, while indicating that this “is a separate conversation,” one with which he has no intention of engaging. After Hamas is “degraded” — it cannot, he said, be destroyed — Gaza will have to be ruled by Israel directly with continued U.S. backing. There is no viable regime change strategy, no real endgame, only the sheer exercise of force, viewed as necessary to maintain Israel as a “democratic Jewish state.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Well, after his first meeting with Netanyahu, Bill Clinton laughed to his advisors that it would appear Netanyahu, even nearly 30 years ago, though that his country, Israel was the 'superpower' not the US, and Haass more or less states that the U.S. dog has no option other than to yield and be wagged by its tail. I 'like' Haass's aside that genocide is 'another conversation' (as we approach 40,000 dead and 75,000 wounded). In any case, I like the sobriety of Patrick Wintour. See for example,

When Biden assumed the US presidency he recruited a team of prodigious foreign policy talent, perhaps the most venerated ensemble of such experts in modern US history. They were given a clear mission: to rebuild US alliances, repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and prepare for the challenge in the South China Sea. The Palestinian issue had not been a White House priority but at best something to be managed. . .Biden misread how Israeli society had changed over the last two decades, and consequently how best to influence Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attacks. Biden “lives with an Israel in his head which probably never existed and certainly doesn’t exist today,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator in peace talks with Palestinian leaders. Patrick Wintour, The new world disorder: how the Gaza war disrupted international relations The Guardian 6 April 2024

So like the 1960s, with Robert McNamara's 'best and brightest', we drift into war, under the flag of outstanding 'intelligence'.

My own quote for the day is the following, after the total material and physical structure of Gaza's most sophisticated hospital, al-Shifa, was gutted, with all of its medical technology destroyed. The oversdeer of the two-week long raid stated that it killed 200 Hamas militants, without a single civilian casualty and that this kind of 'surgical' (as opposed to medical) operation will be

'one that ‘will be studied at top military academies like West Point in the U.S. and Sandhurst in the U.K. as the "gold standard for urban warfare". (Aya Batrawy, Omar El Qattaa, Here's what we found after Israel's raid on Al-Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital NPR 6 April 2024)

I.e.while obliterating a structure with 800 beds serving 250,000 patients, and 17,000 surgical operations conducted every year, shooting up all of its computers, and scanners, generators and operating equipment and spaces, had no civilian casualty though 21 patients alone died, along with the chief engineer of the maintenance department, the head of pharmaceuticals and a reconstructive surgeon (killed with his mother (also a doctor)). Nishidani (talk) 16:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be some sort of competition out there from within the highest echelons of the Ministry of Silly Talks. Rear Admiral John Kirby when asked, after the Kitchen Workers massacre, whether the U.S. should organize a protective force for aid workers, replied that there was no need for that because already “Israeli Defense Forces were providing that protection.” He's only 61 so the sort of condition that might afflict someone of my age can't explain it.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

• US Economic Decline and Rise of Greater Eurasia (30 March 2024). Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen. "MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, just to comment on what you just said, that there’s a new Cold War underway, and the United States has started it against China, and again, because it’s against China, it’s against Russia, and because it’s against Russia, it’s against Europe. So there has to be a recognition that does Europe really want to be a part of this new Cold War, or does it want to have a different direction? That’s really what we’re talking about." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:53, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I've been a long-time admirer of Hudson's work, particularly on finance and the history of money. But this is a gross simplification of a very complex multipolar world. and despite the palmary role the U.S. has played in undermining the very principles of democracy it formerly appealed to in exercising its postwar imperial role, the other two empires have and will arrogate to themselves the right to do whatever they think necessary to consolidate their own neo-imperial ambitions, which in their case happen to coincide with a decided ethnocentric tradition.Nishidani (talk) 13:16, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Your kind of read

This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for that excellent essay link,Iskander. I speedread it given circs butwill have to eventually print it out to make a more comprehensive study of it.CheersNishidani (talk) 02:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I've often mentioned over the years the sense of deja vu this particular conflict invariably induces in someone like myself,coming from an Irish background. I now see Mark Levene has set forth the striking analogies in his'Words matter, lives matter more' in Journal of Genocide Research. Sorry I can't provide you with a link from this laptop which does not seem to allow me to copy and paste. It's not coincidental that the Irgun learnt from the IRA, the only difference being the Irgun were the colonial invaders whereas the IRA, like Hamas, were indigenousNishidani (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC).

Didier Fassin,The Rhetoric of Denial: Contribution to an Archive of the Debate about Mass Violence in Gaza, Journal of Genocide Research, (5 February 2024) referring to the German genocide of the Herero, analyses its three stages, and argues for a similar three phases in the Israeli genocide/ethnocide of the Palestinian people.Nishidani (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Despite the shared diasporic experience, there was one important difference. The Jews developed their communal life around the synagogue, and the attendant privileging of abstemious scholarship as the primrose path to survival in partibus infidelium. The Irish expatriate communities pinioned their fellowship around the institution of the pub where mastery in yarning and inventing improbable stories, given that no on felt there was much point in remembering the grief of dispossession, helped one's rise on the social ladder,(until one felloff it, pissed as a newt).Nishidani (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Despite trying desperately hard to retire, much like Finkelstein, you've been dragged back into the fray haven't you? Part inability to keep one's eyes off the news with all the historical echoes bouncing around the brain, and part, presumably, that slightly addictive element that Wikipedia has to it for certain personalities when they espy errancy. Iskandar323 (talk) 13:57, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Mentioning some minor kibitzer like me in the same breath as Finkelstein only diminishes the latter while grotesquely inflating myself. I don't actually follow the 'news' since there is little that is new in the recurring recitation of the same memes about this conflict - it is newsworthy if an Israeli is taken hostage or killed, and each gets massive personalised coverage: it is not newsworthy if day after day children and youths, so far 116 individual cases, are shot dead by Israeli snipers from a safe distance in the West Bank. Apparently the several thousand WB Palestinians whose families have seen the disappearance into the holding pens of the IDF's carceral system of administrative detention, don't experience the kind of noteworthy grief the families of those taken hostage in Gaza undergo, though in essence we are dealing with the same issue - holding a people hostage. Fortunately, the net does allow one to go beyond this skewing travesty with all its racist assumptions about significant human beings, versus those troublesome others. That is why students, who have no yet been socialized into the cognitivce status quo because they are adept at exploring topic far more broadly that their parents who just absorb mainstreamlined news, are one of the few bodies exhibiting residual signs of life in a deadening and deadly, lethally deadly world. And, in its own distinctive manner, wikipedia's design, and its, until now at least, relative immunity to lobbied or sentimental selectiveness of the facts, has a role of honour, and if helping it is taxing, it is a tithing of our increasingly short time well worth paying-Nishidani (talk) 08:21, 2 May 2024 (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.

Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024. "A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine." --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, in 1948 the sacking of West Jerusalem enabled notable collections of books and manuscripts on Palestine to be plundered as war booty and shifted to the emergent libraries of Israel. That has continued sequentially in 1967, in 1982-5 (Palestine Research Center) etc., and now most thoroughly in the meticulous bombing of everything in the Gaza Strip smacking of higher learning institutions from Universities down, to the core archives, now scattered to the wind and little better than toilet paper for those having to keep clean in the midst of the estimated 50,000 tons of shit now flooding the streets.Nishidani (talk) 01:10, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

• Israel's Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza's Heritage Sites (8 February 2024). By Hesper Cane for Sidewalls magazine. "Once a testament to a rich cultural history, Gaza now lays in ruin, rubble, and debris, with more than 200 heritage sites damaged and destroyed." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:01, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
• The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems (8 Feb 2024). By Chandni Desai for The Conversation. "Scholars say Israel is intentionally destroying education and cultural institutions in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Most of these sources (including several further above added recently) appear in 'marginal' sources and therefore, whatever their cogency, 'fly under the radar,' and, if mentioned more broadly at all, can be dismissed as just catering to a cantankerous fringe. As my father once said to me, as a realist with a deep understanding of how things get done outside the hefty world of voluminous theories, 'It's not what you know that counts, but who you know.' In the lazily contrafactual world of the mainstream 'commonsensical' representation of geopolitics, even the turbulent impetus of the obvious barely stirs more than a rapid ripple on the serene surfaces of our acclimatised complacencies. For at least a century it has been understood,'in the proper quarters', that under the institutional arrangements of democracy, that the classical three estates can be suborned by the fourth Estate, with its massive powers of persuasion, be that a matter of a totalitarian 'engineering of souls' or the 'democratic' manufacturing of consensus as theorised by Lippmann (and quickly picked up by Bernays). Zionism won through with its febrile, to me hysterical, vision of a solution to the non-issue of the so-called 'Jewish Question' by mass expatriation to an Arab country, by an intense reticular working at every venue, at any opportunity, of Jewish communities to win them over to the 1dea of a distinctive 'Jewish' politics, corresponding to the antisemitic politics of their adversaries. Despite understanding the reverence, infle tdx by the retrospective' post-holocaust assessment of Herzl as a profoundly, uncannily percipient 'realist', a reading of his biographies and the extraordinary figure that emerges from his diaries, has never altered my earlier view that he was cast in the Elmer Gantry mode, a snake oil chandler. Time and again in entry after entry recounting meetings and sketching politics of networking, I at least see his figure pacing feverishly up and down his rooms, just a few steps from his near neighbour Freud's home, as, well, Chaplinesque, twirling and retwirling the ball of his thoughts to spin a yarn that would globalise his own narcissistic self-inflation and allow him to have the secular Jewish world at his messianic fingertips. Oops, I meant to respond simply by suggesting you follow recent contributions to the Journal of Genocide Research where the majority of people who actually know their history have now no hesitation in calling a spade a fucking shovel. I must rush. My siblings sill be back from their walk and if they find me out of bed, ignoring my Covid exhaustions, they'll go ballistic which, contextually, means refusing to serve me any more of my daily ration of dim simsNishidani (talk) 04:47, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Wishing you a quick and full recovery from your Covid exhaustions, and hoping you will continue to enjoy plenty of dim sim. Regretfully I have not yet had a chance to enjoy dim sim, looks like they are delicious based on articles and videos online. In the past I enjoyed a variety of tasty dim sum from various restaurants in California, including in lovely Chinatown, San Francisco. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

It was a lapse into the most complacent narcissistic vulgarity to even allude to the minor discomfort of Covid, a trivial sense of slight fatigue every time I'd read any of 50 pages of the many engrossing books I am reading through during this idle sojourn in a Lucky Country. I thought as much catching sight of a brilliant cartoon in today's Age picturing a mass of people huddled in a tight corner of a barb-wire-topped, walled in area, otherwise in its length and breadth stacked with smoking rubble. Emblazoned on the walls were signs reading'No Exit', while a megaphone sited on a corner above blared:'In our efforts to minimize civilian casualties, would 1.4 million of you please move to a safe zone.(The Age 14 February 2024 p.25)

That kind of image cannot but remind one of Raphael Eitan's now eerily prophetic remark back in April 1983:

'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scuttle around like cockroaches in a bottle.'

That image, I then recalled, reemerged in October 2023 as the Israeli counter invasion got underway, in cartoons like this.('Palestinians as cockroaches' cartoon should prompt boycott of antisemitism conference' CJPME 16 October 2023)

Checking Norman Finkelstein's website later, I noted a recent blog on the incipient invasion of Rafah, a scenario alluded to in the Age's cartoon. He writes:

'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'

(By way of balance the Age also carried a half-page reflection by Ramona Koval, former host of the ABC's Book Show, whingeing/complaining of how deeply uncomfortable Australian Jews now feel, in the midst of 'overbearing cultural enforcers' and pro-Palestinian activists). I shook my head, realising how, like myself mentioning my bout with Covid, a sense of shame should cut in and tell us at least to shut up, rather than indulge, as there, in the obscenity, contextually, of likening one's suburban anxieties about status-harm through association with an eternally victimized Israel and identitarian discomfort to what a German Jew would have felt reading Der Sturmer in the 1930s. Nishidani (talk) 07:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I see that Israel's Kan TV channel is reporting an interview with a functionary of Mossad's assassination bureau, in which he states only Gazan children under 4 have a right to be fed, since everyone over that age is guilty of supporting Hamas.Nishidani (talk) 08:33, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

• Smoke and Mirrors: How Israeli Agitprop Lies Become Fact (15 March 2024). Daniel Beaumont, Counterpunch. "That coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the US mass media is distorted by a bias in favor of Israel is hardly news to people more or less in command of their faculties. But events since October 7 have brought to light examples that go well beyond the usual daily distortions to outright lying—lies that rival those of the WMD fabrications used to justify the US invasion of Iraq." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:35, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

• The United Kingdom: Zionism's covert nerve center (5 March 2024). Kit Klarenberg, The Cradle. "Britain's century-long commitment to Zionism and collaboration with Israel today plays a frequently overlooked role in perpetuating the oppression and genocide against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:12, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

• Words Besides ‘Genocide’ U.S. News Outlets Use To Describe Genocide (7 March 2024). The Onion. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:25, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

These three sources would be unacceptable in wiki terms, however interesting or even compelling. It is of course obvious to anyone who analyses these things with detachment but rigour, that Israel is intentionally engaged in a programme of what we would normally call genocide. But what counts is the judgment of an international court of law - as Israel knows- and proving intent there remains difficult for the technical reasons outlined by A. Dirk Moses, Norman Finkelstein and many others, given the leeway for ambiguity created by the adoption of Lemkin's published definition (as opposed to his posthumous reasoning in his Nachlass (1959)).

This however is no longer the case with the induced famine Israel is carefully engineering, as was pointed out in the Guardian yesterday. The mounting factual evidence for deliberate starvation of the whole population to achieve its ends is so cogent, and the fact that Israel has formally underwritten the legal protocols that determine starvation as an instrument of war is a war crime, that, were this to come to a trial in an international court, the possibility of a not-guilty verdict for Israel is highly improbable. That is the Achilles heel, for while 'genocide' can be equivocated, the consensus of the best scientific work from such neutral bodies as World Health Organization, Insecurity Insight and so many other authoritative bodies is that 100% of the population is starving, in territory occupied and controlled by Israel. Rather than make gestures towards ameliorating the access to food, even if only to keep Gazans on the famous 1,600 calory per diem 'formaldehydization' formula set forth after 2007, Israel's response is to persist with its restrictions while mustering a formidible team of specialists in international law specifically to counter that eventual accusation. In the meantime, 21% of households are carrying someone who has been historically disabled by this decades-long regime of occupational control, and half the children there have bodies eating their own residual bodyfat and muscle protein to eke by day by day. It took two years to convince Western leaders that the Nazis were engaged in a Holocaust, and the same lag in the face of diffidence will apply here.Nishidani (talk) 09:32, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

But in the meantime let us rejoice:

• (1)Amichai Friedman, the chief rabbi of the IDF’s Nahal Brigade base. In a video from early November, Friedman proclaimed that the month since the October 7 massacre had been “the happiest month of my life since I was born. The people of Israel rise in stature, rise in rank, we finally find out who we are … We are telling the world what good, and justice, and morality, and values are, and therefore we will shut down evil, and eradicate Hamas, and eradicate the enemies, and destroy everyone.”
• (2) And Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf proclaimed that the events following on 7 October testified to: “A holy nation, the virtue of nations, the lion cub of Judah, awakened from his long slumber to claim his inheritance.” Meron Rapoport, The Israeli public is dispirited. So why is the right euphoric? +972 magazine 20 March 2024

Hamas has sure made a lot of Israeli religious people exultantly happy. Rapoport gives several other examples of this messianic exhilaration at the spectacle of genocide. Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems the designated role of these particular religious figures in Israeli society is to communicate the daily Two Minutes Hate. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:15, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• The War Biosphere: A Lecture by Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah (23 March 2024). Posted by Internationalist 360°. By Ghassan Abu-Sittah.   "... One of the most significant phenomena that alters the war biosphere is the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which Israeli hospitals are complaining about when treating Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza. One of the causes for the bacteria to transform from antibiotic-susceptible to antibiotic-resistant is the heavy metals present in weapons, like cobalt, selenium, and tungsten. The external coating of artillery shells contains these heavy metals. When these shells explode, they release these metals into the environment which induces genetic changes in bacteria leading them to evolve into antibiotic-resistant strains. Effective antibiotics for common bacterial infections cost around $5 per bottle. However, treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria requires specialized medications, with a single dose costing $300." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:19, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanksindeed. I have been thinking much of Raul Hilberg recently. At this point, the only focus must be on getting the dry (if bloody) facts rights - the numbers killed, the technology of their deaths, the way the machinery works, the hard science of genocide.This kind of thing as well. Les Roberts,The Science Is Clear. Over 30,000 People Have Died in Gaza,' Time Magazine 15 March 2024Nishidani (talk) 23:08, 5 April 2024 (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. Drsmoo (talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Just as a matter of curiosity, what are you thanking me for?Nishidani (talk) 01:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Just for reference, the "Thank you" is baked into Template:AE-notice as well as all the other standard noticeboard "required notification" templates. Personally I think it comes off a little condescending, but it's been that way since 2007. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 01:35, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Now that could be a new tagline: Wikipedia: a little condescending since 2007. Levivich (talk) 20:05, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I guess, whatever the outcome over there, that I owe it, at least to myself, to spend some time writing up why these misprisions occur.I.e, how someone in good faith can see something and find it repugnant while others, equally in good faith, have no such impression. Nishidani (talk)

When I read over a half century ago what Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia, with trenchant pithiness, something to the effect that 'to say we when one means I is one of the most recondite of insults,' I took the apophthegm to heart as a ruling guideline in life. Distracted at one point into the massive literature on ethnic identity, it assumed even greater cogency. What was nationalism, not only in its formal ideology but in the public language shaped under its muscled authority, if not a discursive mode where this core distinction was utterly lost, as its spokesmen made the most varied claims about what being part of an ethnic, cultural or political community entailed, for everyone captured up into its defining set. The 'we-ness' component trumped any trace of individualism. Before being oneself, one was one of us, and owed obeisance to the communal substrates' definition of who anyone in their ranks was,basically.Being some-one meant being primarily a member of a someone-else-ish national or ethnic group. One was defined by groupthink before one could even learn to find and articulate one's own voice.

Adorno's point held particular force for me because, reading widely in modern European history, and especially after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre's classic postwar text, Reflexions sur la question juive,the 'Jews' emerged as the outstanding example of what can happen when Others presume to define a minority community in their midst, otherwise as thoroughly acculturated as anyone else in a country, and by dominating as a we what they supposedly were, lay the bedrock for their eventual extermination, through sheer discursive carelessness over the longue durée.

In the slumbering toils of this late bespoke Woke world, itself the retarded offspring of an era of codifying politically correctness, the vast plain of the sayable is increasingly hemmed in, allotments staked out, taboo lines of no trespass roped off, by constituencies sharing little more than a common grievance over the way the parliament of language misrepresents them.Any discussion or remarks touching on the Jewish world furnishes no exception, and indeed perhaps presents an extreme instance of the pathologies one discerns more generally in identitarian debates, for which it provides, moreover a template for ethnic grievance strategies in recent decades. Perhaps arbitrarily I'd take 1967-1969 as marking a dividing line, when sensitivities underwent a radical shift. The former date refers to the fear and subsequent triumphant euphoria widespread in the diaspora at the outcome of the Six Days War. The latter alludes to the deserved success of Philip Roth's wonderfully vulgar, inimitably comical Portnoy's Complaint.

in the postwar era down to this juncture, people in the diaspora could grow up, as witness the autobiographical remarks of people like Norton Mezvinsky, Robert Manne and Ramona Koval alluded go in a prior section, completely unaware of any social interest in let alone antipathy to, the fact that one's background was Jewish. That was a private matter, one could even frequent Christian schools, and in so far as one had a national identity it was as an American, Australian etc. An engagement with Israel, let alone the holocaust was, in these early decades, very low key. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

AE rhymes with poetry

I enjoyed reading your poem. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted your original prose comment into that infernal machine and asked it to rewrite it as a poem, and this is what it came out with (with only minor tweaks by me):

In a realm where words dance with intent,
AE ponders the stain the accusation lent.
For over a decade, this slur's been sent,
From editors, none victorious, who leave a scent,
A lingering cloud that whispers "Repent."

Chess, with a sly leap, adds a new layer,
Innuendos fly, a subtle flare.
"Perhaps not antisemitic," they dare,
"But you question identity," a wound to bear.
Provocation lingers, a silent snare.

Unproductive, they say, to respond in kind.
Yet the offense stings, a truth to find,
Repetitive whispers, a relentless grind,
Before the eyes of admins who find
A smear that echoes, leaving scars behind.

Though water off a duck's back, I claim,
The weight of repetition, a relentless game,
A subliminal poison, with a hidden aim,
To erode, to decay, to maim.
Tolerance wanes, as dignity's flame.

I like yours much better. But damn, is that good or what, from a computer? It understood what you were saying, and frankly, is capable of writing better poetry than probably like 99%+ of fluent English speakers. The computer's choice of monorhyming quintains surprised me. Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it. Levivich (talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

You should try going through some old archives to find some real gems. Can read about one of them at our electronic paper of record (the Signpost is really no competition tbh), ANI. nableezy - 20:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

So now we can say, "Back in my day, we didn't have AI to write angry ballads for us, we had to write them ourselves!" To which someone like Ben Franklin would reply, "Oh yeah? Try doing that with ink and a feather!" And I have to admit, it must have been very difficult to write an angry letter using something as delicate as a feather. I would have broken a lot of feathers. But if you wind the clock back further, I bet it was very satisfying to write out an angry letter using clay tablets and chisels. Especially when using bold for emphasis. You could probably tell a lot just by looking at how a message was chiseled, like, "Wow, he was really angry when he wrote this, look how deep the cuts are in this tablet!" Levivich (talk) 20:44, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll try to get my pedantic mania offloaded or reined in into a footnote. Our Sumerian bard working off his furor poeticus would have dashed off his melodious ire on a soft clay tablet, wielding with deft speed a reed quill (Akkadian qantuppi, or something like that. I can't open another page on this laptop to check simultaneously as I write here).Chiselling came much later (though not financially) when imperial orderx commanded monumental narratives to be inscribed on rockfaces. Does anyone write good poetry in anger? Most early ancient poetry was composed in the style still preserved in the practice of Osip Mandelshtam, as his wife Nadezhda describes it, pacing up and down or along a street, murmuring various syllable and word combinations, until line after line the poem shapes itself in memory and, only then, is it written down or, as anciently, was recited and often committed to memory on the spot by the listeners. There's not much place for useless emotions like anger in these traditional modes, as anyone who has attended extempore bardic competitions in provincial Italian villages can attsst. Two or more oral poets stand before an audience, a theme is selected by lot, one takes it up, say 'war', and slowly but fluently produces two quatrains (abab) with tercets to round it off. The next poet must reply on theme by say praising by contrast its antithesis, playing off the ideas of his earlier rival,and this seemingly effortless to and fro can go one for hours. The sheer pleasure of technical challenges, the extraordinary level of concentration required to do this doesn't leave room for silly distemper, ire or anger,even were that the topical issue, as it is in the Iliad(mËnis).

Thanks indeed for that, Lev, a fascinating experiment that sent the mind milling, and set my day's mental menu as I trekked out with my sister for a long fast midday walk through the Moonah bushland foreshore off Anglesea. Coincidentally, it picked up a thread in an ongoing argument I'd had a year or so ago, with an Italian mate, an electronic engineer who ingeniously salvaged five decades of work on file when my computer crashed. As I think you have argued around here A1 is increasingly making editing wikipedia, let alone any form of discursive work (legal,academic, political etc ) ostensibly otiose, since fluent neutral content looks like it can be generated in seconds through merely posing the right request to a machine.

My counterargument consisted in several excursuses on language at its most intense, poetry, with the suggestion that A1 can't write poetry, as opposed to reformulating a universe of topical prosaic information with formidibly correct grammar. As I walked along that foreshore,eyes half distracted by the curves of the combers and a steady glance rightwards from time to time for brownsnakes (both of us being keen observers of reptiles), three phrases in particular came to mind as I wondered whether an algorithm would ever be capable of generating their dazzling imagery with the inimitable music instinct in each:('comme à travers une fêlure dans un paroi lisse, une fine craquelure, quelque chose se glisse doucement.' Nathalie Sarraute; (para thina paraphloisboio thalassẽs(Homer evoking the sound of crashing waves along a duned beach);('là dove'l sol tace,'Dante writing of a place 'where the sun falls silent')). This by way of a prefatory context setting, but it's time for a fag...Nishidani (talk) 05:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

The A1 machine can, it seems, reconstrue prose in a rhymed format, but while quite competent, maintains its prosaic character. At least, this is my impression of what I see so far. Prose is like a school uniform, it's language dressed into a uniform communicative code. Poetry is always, in sartorial terms, harlequin. Prose strives to get a rational line of argument over, poetry's rationality is addressed not primarily to a public constituency: It is an individual's wrestling dialogue with language itself, and the terms are not pitched in terms of discursive clarity, but rather higher criteria of metaphor,analogy, musicality,in a register of resonant ambiguity that resists 'closure', i.e., discursive dumbing down to a simple straightforward statement. A1 I assume has an inbuilt mathematicized design to privilege the reduction of a vast linguistic and discursive data base to a coherent, grammatical set of clear statements. That is diametrically opposed to what poetry does. Poetry's concept of meanings is plural -the deliberative interplay of otherwise distinct planes suddenly in dialogue because of the poet's unexpected juxtaposition of things we normally do not think off as in any way related. A very large volume of the greatest poetry is intertextual, yielding up its subtle semantic secrets only as one twigs to some implicit allusion to some other poem. A minimal reading of the games alive in Robert Frost's otherwise straightforward,'The road not taken' would take at least 20 pages of close annotation and construal. Dinner.Nishidani (talk) 09:30, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

To illustrate using bathos, by some of the jokes in my doggerel. (antisemitic) 'innuendoes' is written with an approximation to an old vernaculsr's phonetics, inyourendoes (the smear is like someone shoving it one's a***), or rumourous(guff) comes out as rumerus, because we thus become the noisy targets of 'rumour',who we are is effectively what we are rumoured to be. Perhaps I should cut to the chase and outline why 'dumbgoyim' came to my mind, out of Roth, not Hitler, as far as I can reconstruct my memories. By the way, the Wiki article on the WW2 soldiers' song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball is incomplete, also metrically weak. As recited by our father when we were kids, and he was there, the first line ran: 'Hitler has only one brass ball, ' and Goebbels was distorted to Joeballs. The quatrain was capped with a closing 'Pass the pisspot, Jerry/Mary!'Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

When the 'animalistic' atrocities' by terrorists broke out on October 7, it didn't take more than a few minutes to imagine what would occur. A total and utter devastation of the Gaza Strip, massive civilian casualties, and a war to take control and command of the terms of tbe ensuing narrative of the conflict. When Yoav Gallant, was it, spoke of all Palestinians being 'animals' and zoomorphic imagery flooded Israel dehumanizing them, I recalled a list I had drawn up over a decade ago systematically documenting all the terms used by prominent Israelis referring to Palestinians as, when not a subspecies, a kind of two legged animal, or vermin, lice, etc. But I refrained from making n article on this, until some weeks ago when the situation became unambiguously genocidal. So much information about stereotypes reiterated in the Israeli press or social conversation were never covered and should be known. I happened to see the discussion about Bret Stephens while working on this animal imagery. He was being adduced as an RS on Hamas, widely reviled as 'animals' or 'vermin'. He was on record as defining Ashkenazi, a group to which he belongs, as showing superior intelligence or superior thinking abilities compared to non-Ashkenazim (goyim), He was known to strongly resent (and justifiably) once being called a 'bedbug', a vile analogy that, in dismissing him as an insect, smacked of the Nazi rhetoric of 'infestation'. He was arguing that the lifeline of UNWRA, without whose aid 80% of Gaza's Palestinians would face famine, instead of chronic stunting anaemia, should be cut. If he couldn't connect the obvious dots here, his resentment at being called derisorily a 'bedbug' and the widespread use in Israeli of similar terms for the Palestinians, asserting the superiority of Ashkenazim while calling for a systemic measure that would foreseeably reduce another people to famine, that he was incoherently treating his non-Jewish readership as 'dumb', ergo, when edit conflicts failed to get my more articulated argument about his dubiousness as an RS on Palestinians, the laconic 'dumb goyim', more Philip Roth given my reading interests,than Hitler. And certainly a phrasing, as Zero's link, incisively showed, quite at home in certain quarters of Israeli conversation. If one finds, and absorbs an abiding lesson from, the Nazi rhetoric of animals and insect infestation as applied to Jews, the lesson should be applied to all such reevocative analogies, regardless of ethnicity. This is just for the record and can I hope be dropped.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

In any case any one word, esp.from the primary emotions, like 'anger,' 'jealousy' is just the tip of a semantic and subsemantic affective iceberg. I was reminded of this rereading Patrick O'Brien's Post Captain yesterday. Stephen Maturin is being described as lost in thought.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashes into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols (cymbals,N?) inadequate. Because common to disparate situations-admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.p.470

But I'd prefer to examine further the issue of A1 and whether or not its remarkable success with prose could ever be extended to the qualitatively difference medium of poetry. Goodnight, Lev, and thanks for a trenchant prompt that made me day, and will continue to do so in the following weeks as I reflect on it.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

On viewing people as animals, I can't help recalling a brilliant sonnet by Belli, a little of which I struggled to get over into my own dialect. Dialect cannot be euphemised,it can only be rendered by a dialect with a parallel status No 1394

Long before Adam, there ain't a shadda ra dout,

The clarse of anamuls, way oudduv'a gum'ment's reach,

Lived the life a Riley,n' getting by wuz a peach

With no bosses ta work ya like a fucken rouseabout.

There woddn't no coachies or hun'ers way back then,

No butchers,no bashens, or hangen round f'ra feed . . .

An, as fa speaken, the lodduv'em, evri last breed,

Spoke like boffins do now, jus' like learnéd men.

But then Adam bowled up and took over the reins,

An muskets an' wips turned up oudda the blu,

Along with coachies n' cudgels fa spadderen brayns.

An that was the very furst accayshun whereby man

Robbed anamuls a their speech, and then used it to screw

'Em with the power of reasun, as only speech can.Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

I did 2279 of thosesonnets too fast for revision, so every time I pick one up it screams for improving tweaks. I.e. Rob is also 'knock off'/or 'nick which picks up the bashings/knocks and blows,'spattering brains' handed out to animals earlier. 'chew the cud' ruminate/think' (so animals readjusted to animulls, where 'mulls'( an anima which thinks) is audibly tacit)

An that wuz the very first time whereby man

Nocked words owda anamulls, so he alone cud chew

The cud, n' pud'em all down with tha voice a reason.Nishidani (talk) 03:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

which reminds me,

Had I but world enough and time,

I'd pull my finger out and write

A piece on the Jewish art of rhyme

In the dialect of Rome, to cure the blight

Of neglect that topic suffers here:

More ignorance than prejudice explains the lack

In coverage. We'd do well to lend an ear

To the verse of Crescenzo Del Monte, a crack

Acolyte of Belli's native tongue, who sought

To versify the Jewish world of Rome

In his shrewd ghettoed idiom and caught

So much that Belli missed or left alone

For very few have roots so deep, if fraught,

Than Roman Jews to call that city home.Nishidani (talk) 04:01, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for those translations! Are these the world's first Romanesco-to-Brogue translations? :-) It works wonderfully, though, for conveying the vernacular. I am in awe of people like Belli who can write thousands of sonnets.

Unfortunately so far I haven't come across a reliable source for the "brass balls" variation though it's all over the internet in non-RS sources, but nothing suitable for adding to the Wikipedia article that I've been able to find. "Joe Balls" was easier to source (and is mentioned in the Wikipedia article).

I'd never really thought about this before, but did, e.g. Allen Ginsburg write "Howl" in anger, or is it just about anger? I imagine the latter. Does it count if the first draft was written in anger? You've got me thinking of poets who might have written in anger, and Dylan comes to mind, but perhaps songs written in anger are different than poems written in anger. Still, I'd guess even angry songs are written calmly even if performed angrily. I would certainly count "Masters of War" as an "angry poem." It's angry when read (Google has the lyrics), and angry when performed--you can hear the anger when Dylan sings it (1963 example). Eddie Vedder hadn't been born yet in '63, but you can hear the anger when Vedder sang it almost 30 years later in '92. Still angry a couple of months ago when Patti Smith sang it while commenting that it was more relevant today than ever. But I think you're right, Dylan was probably calm when he composed it. He's still around, maybe I should write him an email and ask. Anybody got Dylan's email address? Levivich (talk) 07:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for these stimulating reflections, Lev.I must confess that when Ginsburg recited his work at the Melbourne Town Hall back in March '72 or thereabouts, l walked out half way through, though the tickets were hard to come by. I'd been annoyed at the ruckus caused by protests at the presence of Andrei Voznesensky, simply because he happened to be a citizen of the Soviet Union. Fortunately Voznesensky managed to fit in a recitation for students of Russian at the University, and I thrilled to his performance, the music and technical formalism of his work.

I and my mate walked out I guess as cultural snobs at that time (but we were serious drinkers back then and the long evening drawl was threatening our boozing schedule). We were both specializing in classical Greek and intoxicated by the extremities of technical bravura in Pindar's unbelievably complex verbal orchestration of image after image of recondite allusion, and Ginsburg's yawl seemed prosaic. My measure of quality was, if I can imagine myself doing that (in any creative medium) then I'm not impressed. It didn't help that the throng was highly political, longhaired dope-sucking hippies there because G was an icon of resistance,nothing to do with poetry -very few campus poets of that decade, to gather from a Time poll, could recite a poem, even their named favourite, from memory and Joseph Brodsky turned away droves from his classes unless they had several hundred lines off by heart. I was a radical, but never found myself comfortable in a crowd of the like-minded, and, damn it, poetry was an intensely private thing, requiring years of 'disciplined' listening to words, and the memorized tradition of its masters. As Auden once wrote, a great poet will write several hundred pages, much of it excellent, but only a baker's dozen will pass muster as the stuff of genius,enduring in time because the words make those who chance to hear or read them bristle with a physical thrill that makes the lines and images sear themselves into the thews of one's feeling and thinking. Must watch an evening flick with my sister, but I'll think about and eventually get back to, your remarks on anger: If only because it challenges Wordsworth tired but interesting (ultimately autobiographical) that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Could bychance that infernal A1 machine you hang out with write a wikitype stub or article,trawling the net for stuff kn Crescenzo Del Monte? I guess most of it would be in Italian however Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Read 'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. No one could read that near frantically suicidal pressure of abandoned hope and fraught existential plight without grasping the lived sincerity of the angst it describes. But that order of technical bravura though written out of that paralysing experience, probably wasn't drafted under its immediate impress. The 'composure' demanded by that order of control over the wording stands aside from the stuttered silent wroughtness such an emotion would have induced. Homer dedicates considerable space to the sledging vituperation Achilles spat out towards his lord Agamemnon, but not for tbat would Homer have necessarily had to draw on some memory of his own rage. When Shakespeare has Macbeth utter the words, as he girds himself for battle

I have supp'd full of horrors

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts

Cannot once start me.

Can we infer that (biographical fallacy) Will is writing directly out of his personal experience, rather than just suiting words to the dramatic context and the fictive type his imagination has conjured up, also to fit a theatrical bill and its deadline? No, poetry is chameleonic, and enters like a quick-change artist into the spirit of the words that the experience latched upon for a theme suggests as most consonant with the mood of the poem. Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

I shouldn't abuse wikispace by personal divagations, though indirectly such a conversation does trawl up possible projects, like the one I mentioned re Del Monte that demand some effort to create articles here. But your inquiry about anger discernibly present in what I wrote, from scruple, has had me thumbing back through the pages of memory to test the strength of such an impression. The first sonnet I wrote, in mid adolescence, in response to a demand for something imaginative as homework from our teacher in composition, led to my writing 14 taut rhymed lines from inside Oswald's mind as he lined up a shot through his sniper's telescope to blow Kennedy's brains out in Dallas.It received a good mark but the teacher handed it back to me with a troubled frown,which I took to mean that he was plying the worry beads as to whether or not the quiet, unengaged student, one of a pair, the other of whom was considered to be wild and uncontrollable, also had a hidden streak of violence. Well, we all do, at least in my ex-Catholic book, but that wasn't written in white heat. It responded to the shock of good men being slain - an emerging feature of world politics at the time Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjöld as well. I was soon seriously drawn to Buddhism, even entertaining the idea of training as a Tibetan monk, -it was godless which suited my native pagan insouciance to the spiritual -because it promised total detachment from evil(as well as a massive abundance of heroic poetry), but eventually was won over to the 'melancholy science' practiced by Theodor Adorno,whose otherwise intense patrician engagement with the problem of systemic evil, is always compellingly trenchant yet detached. I don't think, despite that lifetime focus on the devastating brutality of our world order, that he wrote from an agitated desk. He did, ironically, die, reportedly from an emotional incident - girls of a Marcusan persuasion stripped and flashed their breasts at him to mock his dry Marxist metaphysics, inducing his fatal heart attack. The old teaching the young find themselves, as George Steiner once remarked, embarrassed by an awareness of lineaments of an erotic undertow in the transmission of otherwise austere ideas, but letting it all hang out is lethal. Poetry, philosophy best works under the compressions of self-restraint: there's little room for allowing primary affects like anger to get the upper hand. Like the rare Sumatran tiger I had a chance to sit and study the other day at Ballarat (an opportunity to re-experience Rilke's amazing poem as well), such practices work by persistent restless but quiet padding along the confines of one's cage.Nishidani (talk) 00:29, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I can't disagree: composition is too much of a science to do while angry, even the composition of anger.

To answer your question: no, the fancy spellchecker cannot write a stub about Crescenzo Del Monte. I asked it to, and it wrote a stub that began "Crescenzo Del Monte (born June 12, 1985) is an Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist known for his contributions to the technology sector and charitable endeavors" and went from there. To say the machine "hallucinates" is unfair to the machine: it doesn't hallucinate so much as it simply isn't programmed to know or care about truth. It doesn't write an article, it writes what looks like an article, by reading a lot of other articles and imitating them.

And that's also how it writes a poem: it doesn't so much write a poem as write something that looks like a poem. It isn't really capable of true creativity. It can generate text that is new, but not truly creative. For example, the line "To erode, to decay, to maim," which I quite like, appears to be genuinely new in the sense that this particular string of text does not appear anywhere on the internet according to Google. But the construction isn't terribly creative. "To X, to Y, to Z" is not particularly a new pattern or idea ("to die, to sleep / to sleep, perchance to dream" was written like 400 years ago and I'm sure there are older examples in older languages). The machine read lots of poems that used that construction, and it replaced the X/Y/Z with new words.

Which is why I don't think it will be replacing human authors anytime soon. But it is pretty good at transforming text from one form to another, e.g. prose to poetry, or ask it to explain something complicated to you as if you were X years old, and it'll write age-appropriate text, which I find a useful tool when I am having trouble explaining complicated things to morons others. Levivich (talk) 04:02, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

If it can downdumb things for morons, then it's just the thing I need to save face in some technical areas, where I'm way out lf my depth, or rather my shallows:) My dearest niece and her companion, editors/translators, find it a very useful ancillary or handknave in their work.I tend to be sceptical of claims that technology cannot replicate, indeed wholly substitute with competitive success, the creativity of man, because a friend wrote a work demonstrating the limits of A1some decades ago, onky to see the strictures undermined within a decade or so. But that will constitute a different order of 'being', with its distinctive 'culture', to historic man under conditions of natural evolution.

My little sister just brought a cup of tea to my desk, catching me as I wiped my nostril with a tissue, and asked:'What's causing that, 'Nish'?, and of course I shot back,'Who knows!!' If A1 learns to be sufficiently sensitive to language to make even bad puns like that, it will prove to be a wonderful companion for future generations, Given the general decay in conversation. Speaking of which, 'to erode, decay, to maim' slips up in sandwiching 'decay', an intransitive verb, between two transitives, 'erode' and 'maim' (and following up the end rhyme, 'maim' with wanes' too quickly, internal rhyme, in the following halfline) Perhaps its scouring of the lexicon fished this obsolete use of 'decay' transitively from Shakespeare, but that insensitivity to the temporal resonance of words somewhat jars the otherwise impressive effect.

I'm afraid I'm drawing rather exhaustingly on your own personal time and should draw this thread to a close. A final dose of Belli, to thank you should do the trick, since you have graciously allowed that there is some merit in my experiments with that untranslatable genius (Italian scholarship places him on a par with Dante, while recognizing he will always remain the preserve of just a small coterie of specialists and amateur enthusiasts)

It's jus' past sparrah-fart, tha Pope's sed mass.

Full uz a bull's bum with brekkie, mumblen a prayer,

His Holy Paunch, in slippers an a tatty dress

Waddles outside f'ra breather of fine air.

In 'is garden, there's this ugly bird a prey

A nasty sunuvabitch tied up to a chain.

An' nearby'im, in a copper cage, they say,

Are a baker's duz of duvlets fed on grain.

So, wodduz 'is 'ighness do? He plunges 'is paws

Insid'a that cage, n' grabs a bird, n' chucklen, puts

The chick plum down in'a that mungrel's claws.

Our Lord gets a buzz frum gloaten, as its guts

get torn by that buzzard's beak, an' he's all applorze

As its heart's pecked out, quiveren at the cuts.

'sparrows' fart' = dawn;'duvlets' = fledgling doves

Thanks again, Lev, and best regardsNishidani (talk) 06:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Nish I enjoyed it! (And that Pope reminds me a bit of Wikipedia...) Levivich (talk) 14:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Unconstructive and unnecessarily inflammatory commentary

I'm sure you read the AE filing so I won't get too into the weeds, but try and keep commentary on point without rhetorical flourishes that can be misunderstood. There are a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds with a lot of views who've been exposed to a lot of information and have a lot of different take-aways on that information. Using phrases like "dumb goyim," regardless of your intent, is likely to turn into a big waste of time for everyone involved rather than moving the discussion forward. Please keep that in mind. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough. I did learn something, that a commonplace phrase for a genre of jokes in Israeli usage is considered inflammatory if alluded by someone outside the fold, as it can be resented in that changed context as suggesting hostility to Jews. I'm not in the habit of repeating one-off clichés, because that smacks of dull-minded harping and were I to do so it would certainly be an instance of stirring provocation, 'inflammatory' at least on Wikipedia for some users. As often, I come away from such unfortunate misprisions thinking, why did the plaintiff not raise his sensitivities on my page, where I would have taken them into consideration and reasoned through with them about a usage like that, which apparently is beloved by the fuckwits who pullulate in the lunatic fringes of antisemitic websites. I would have even cited an example from Belli, no.1373 (Er fagotto pe l'ebbreo) which mocks a dumb Christian for his fatuous ignorance of Jewish custom.Being asked to deliver some goods to the Jewish ghetto, a lad complains that it wasn't his fault for putting the package in the wrong hands there, because his employer had simply told him to deliver it to a certain Aron, providing his 'baptismal' name (I.e. his first name) and not the consignee's family name. To think that a Jew's first name is one he receives at baptism shows his Christian obtusity. Ah, much adieu with nothing gained. Regards Nishidani (talk) 13:03, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

dunam by dunam

Finally found a source in my random reading to undergird my understanding of the cognitive puzzle I find in the inability to grasp the repetitious obviousness of the tragedy unfolding since 1967 (coming from the theory of остранение in one vein of modern aesthetic theory). Its neurological basis. Analogy with Nazism is not the point, that is only the authors' most dramatic instancing of this everyday scotoma via habituation that afflicts us all as a natural consequence of the the normative economy of evolutionary adaptations to our perception of the world.

For Milton Mayer’s staggering book about the rise of Nazism, for example, a man who lived in Germany at the time described the regime to the author: “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.” He added: “If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.” Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them,' The New York Times 26 February 2024 Nishidani (talk) 00:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

• In May 2023, a clear template to destroy a national group was proposed by Jeffrey Camras in an article in the Times of Israel. Camras proposed that “in order to right a wrong, in order to make peace and move forward, Palestine must be obliterated.” “It is an afront to society, morality, humanity,” he continued. “It represents lies and antisemitism, oppression and terror. Nothing more.” Camras also insisted that “the Palestinians need to be reeducated,” and that if Palestinians would like to enjoy rights, they must give up their nationhood, which constitutes “a lie.”Raz Segal, Luigi Daniele, Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change Journal of Genocide Research 5 May 2024

The whole article, premised on the view that, if what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, holocaust exceptionalism will implode, is worth reading.Nishidani (talk) 15:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

• Nicholas Kristof, ‘People Are Hoping That Israel Nukes Us So We Get Rid of This Pain,’ New York Times 9 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 12:21, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the calculus of how many hundreds of thousands of people are being starved deliberately to death, like the young PhD candiddate and his family here, makes the outcry over 130 hostages inaudible because the high pitch of sensitivity over the latter comes with a thudding silence re the former, and the only difference is ethnic.Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

• Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of the Hesder Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa said in a yeshiva conference on Thursday that the entire population in the Gaza Strip should be killed. Head of Jaffa yeshiva says all Gazans should be killed Haaretz 9 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

• Programmatic genocide. How it's done. Philippe Lazzarini, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) chief, stated that Israeli forces had turned back a truck loaded with aid to northern Gaza “because it had scissors used in children’s medical kits.” “Medical scissors are now added to a long list of banned items the Israeli Authorities classify as ‘for dual use’,” he wrote on X. “The list includes basic and lifesaving items: from anesthetics, solar lights, oxygen cylinders and ventilators, to water cleaning tablets, cancer medicines and maternity kits,” the UNRWA chief said. Last week, Israel also denied the entry of 1,350 U.K.-funded water filters to Gaza, considering them “a threat.” Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Israel blocks aid to Gaza because of ‘medical scissors’ Mondoweiss 12 March 2024Nishidani (talk) 10:29, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
• Harvard University is awash with anti-Semitism, of course, like every other institute of higher learning. (Rene Marsh, Matt Egan, 'Facing unprecedented subpoena, Harvard submits more documents to Congress in antisemitism probe,' CNN 5 March 2024)

• However, Jared Kushner’s talk there in February aroused no antisemitic incidents, apparently. He said that Gaza had lots of “very valuable” waterfront property, presumably speaking of the flattened landscape to the north of the Strip now under Israeli occupation.and that 1.4 million in the South could be shifted out into the Negev or Egypt ‘to shield them’ from Israel. (Of course, and thereby double the perceived real estate value of the territory) Peter Bergen, ' What world is Jared Kushner living in?,' CNN 21March 2024

The question in the title is rhetorical. Kushner dwells in the real world, unlike the fanners of the new witchhunting wave of antisemitism claimants, now at pandemic or tidal proportions.Nishidani (talk) 11:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Notes for

Re Media coverage of the Israel–Hamas war. This article so far is totally inadequate, given the serious overviews correlating thematic emphases with specific changes in the war. Such issues cannot be adequately covered by episodic tidbits. The following provide useful guidelines to the topic. Any additions that consist of links to studies on the coverage blackout of the realities of the conflict in the Israeli media in particular would be appreciated.

• Eyal Lurie-Pardes Journalism out, hasbara in: How Israeli TV news joined the Gaza war effort, +972 magazine 6 March 2024
• Ryan Grim, "WCNSF: The Most Haunting Acronym t he World Has Produced", The Intercept 2 March 2024.

Nishidani (talk) 07:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

New article

Negative Terms for Palestinians in Israeli discourseCrampcomes (talk) 07:35, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I haven't been able to address this due to being bedridden with back problems, perhaps due to some hours practising to see if my golf swing was intact (oddly enough it is) after never having touched an iron for 30 years, and this a day before a 24 hour flight had me squeezed into an uncomfortable seat. All being well, I'll rewrite it in the next day or two.Nishidani (talk) 08:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

It's fine if you rewrite it, the article in its current state is pretty much non-encyclopedic (and has been WP:BLAR), but the history is still there if you wish to use the sources to rewrite it in a more encyclopedic way. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 09:38, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I've already written the article, over a decade ago. I just don't rush any work dealing with delicate issues to make some urgent point, unlike so many editors in this area. The stub would have been totally rewritten according to the most rigorous wiki standards in a very short time had some patience been exercised.Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm a little confused. You're saying you wrote the article more than a decade ago and yet it was published by another editor today? Also if an article is not suitable for mainspace it can be edited in draftspace prior to publication. If that had been done maybe an article of such poor quality would not have caused concern to many editors. AusLondonder (talk) 09:56, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I make notes as I read, and, over a decade of reading about the I/P conflict, my file on animal metaphors grew substantially, indicating it was a significant theme. So I wrote up my notes, listing what RS addressing this usage state. That was 10 years ago. I'm not a tearaway POV pushing editor. I take my time, and had noted on some talk page three months into the present war that, given the explosion of contemptuous dismissal for Palestinians as subhuman in senior Israeli discourse (documented also by the recent SAfrican case before the ICJ), it was perhaps time for me to re-organize my material for a wiki article. I was away from my computer for 3 months, and now I see Crampcomes has apparently taken a leaf out of my earlier suggestion and sketched out a stub, hoping I might wikify it and add my material. My impression is that the extreme haste in TNTing the article reflects a total unfamiliarity with how deep and widespread this kind of terminology is in Israeli discourse, coming from very authoritative quarters. That is comprehensible, since, unlike anything negative associated with Palestinians, this kind of material is underreported in the news, though well-known to specialists. That is why wikipedia needs an article on it, which I will presently supply. Nishidani (talk) 11:02, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Feel free to write a comprehensive article if you want. TNTing wasn't to prevent anyone from writing the article, or even because the stub wasn't complete or extensive enough, it was because a lot of the things written on it were dubious and needlessly inflammatory. If you want to write about the (well-documented) Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians, there is certainly a lot of material to use, but many of the article's sources simply did not verify the (very strong) claims made there. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

You still have time to rewrite the stub if you want. The current version of the article (obviously inappropriate) doesn't show in mainspace anymore, but that doesn't prevent you from working on rewriting the article. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:02, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Nishidani, I hope you feel better soon. 30 years is a very long time but I guess once a pro, always a pro.Crampcomes (talk) Crampcomes (talk) 11:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. The proper title would be Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse which I cannot now work on because it just supplies a redirect to another general article. If someone could do me the courtesy of annuling the redirect, so that my proposed title becomes redlinked, I will start writing the article under that rubric.Nishidani (talk) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

You can still work on it at the noredirect version of the page. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:07, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm also not opposed to a properly-sourced article that's not original research and not a list of individual offensive things people said (and didn't say, as I kept finding for many of the claims I tried to verify). That wasn't what was created and it shouldn't have been in mainspace. I don't edit particularly frequently in this topic area, I saw the page at NPP. But an article like that must have perfect sourcing or it'll just cause conflict. Have you considered working on it as Draft:Your title? AusLondonder (talk) 11:21, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I have begun transferring my material into mainspace. All of the terms referred to in the original stubs reflect usage commonplace in Israel, and it is not original research to list the varieties of stereotypical insults duly reported in reliable sources. As noted in my recent edit summary, it would be appreciated if editors exercised a little patience as the article is written up.Nishidani (talk) 11:55, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

The article as it currently stand consists of two sentences. [1] The first sentence cites a source showing that Israelis and Palestinians have long been using similar dehumanising terms about each other. The second provides a single instance of this, regarding the use by Israelis of such terms during the current ongoing conflict. Can I ask what the reasoning is for singling this instance out, rather than covering the broader topic as laid out in the first sentence? Wouldn't it be more appropriate, and a lot easier to avoid accusations of partisanship, if instead the discourse of all involved was discussed, leaving it to sources we cite (I'm sure there must be plenty of academic work at least touching on it) to present examples, and to offer commentary on any asymmetry etc they may perceive. Or do we have to have a mirror-image Negative Terms for Israelis in Palestinian discourse to cover the entire topic? I'd have to suggest that the latter approach was not only unnecessary forking of what is academically a single topic (and part of a much broader one), but more or less guaranteed to lead to the endless bickering that blights this topic area. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:11, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure why you weren't willing to start this work in draftspace, now we have an article that's already got quite a few issues back in mainspace. It's also got back the quote taking the Defence minister's comments about "cannibals" out of context, with the way its worded implying that Hamas are "their...(Palestinians) leaders" which is itself controversial. AusLondonder (talk) 12:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I give the quote, the leaders of the Gazans are members of Hamas, and the quote is appropriate. This is pointless niggling. Allow me to work.Nishidani (talk) 13:08, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

What appears to you to be "pointless" is important when discussing such a controversial topic. And, while Hamas effectively controls the Gaza strip, this is not recognized internationally, and your formulation implies that members of Hamas are leaders of the Gazans/Palestinians as a people, which many would disagree with. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Please. The administrative power in Gaza for the last 18 years has been Hamas. It runs everything. As such, whether you or l like it or not (I don't), the Hamas governorate leads those people under its administration.Nishidani (talk) 13:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

While we've all agreed this broad topic may be notable, I increasingly have the feeling it won't be with this article and it won't be by you. It seems like you just don't understand collaborative editing, unfortunately. AusLondonder (talk) 13:41, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Is there a reason you cant use a talk page to discuss article content? Your feelings arent something that you need to share with Nishidani. nableezy - 13:44, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for that input. AusLondonder (talk) 13:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Doggerel for Zero on Noah's Ark

Re

I cut up a length of cardboard into a square
Running a yard or so along each side,
And piled on blobs of plasticine here and there
To tizzy the flat with hills, and when it dried

I filled a pot with water and began to pour
A flood of H₂O swimmingly over the map.
Most of the wash though leaked onto the floor
As I kept on filling the pot from the kitchen tap

And splashing the model to submerge it under the drink.
"Bugger those edges and corners", I swore. "They drain
All of the water away",and as I began to think
That yarn the nuns spun at bubs was bloody inane

A scream broke up my experiment. It was my mum
Weeping a flood of tears, a deluge of woe
As, slipping on her kitchen floor, she kicked my bum,
Saying, "it’s even filthier here than what you leave in the po."

I was only five years old, and wet behind the ears.
But it taught me a lesson: the bible’s bullshit for one,
And as for my prospects in science, my mother’s jeers
Meant, like my religious teachers, that I had none.
Nishidani (talk) 10:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Very good, old chap. But enough of yer doggerel, how about a real poem?

Su Hui's Xuanji Tu palindrome poem in simplified characters (left) and in the original traditional characters (Sorry for editing your file. I can't stand the sight of simplified Chinese characters, which destroy the aesthetics and ideogrammatic games in the traditional script)

琴清流楚激弦商秦曲發聲悲摧藏音和詠思惟空堂心憂增慕懷慘傷仁

芳廊東步階西遊王姿淑窕窈伯邵南周風興自后妃荒經離所懷歎嗟智

蘭休桃林陰翳桑懷歸思廣河女衛鄭楚樊厲節中闈淫遐曠路傷中情懷

凋翔飛燕巢雙鳩土迤逶路遐志詠歌長歎不能奮飛妄清幃房君無家德

茂流泉情水激揚眷頎其人碩興齊商雙發歌我袞衣想華飾容朗鏡明聖

熙長君思悲好仇舊蕤葳粲翠榮曜流華觀冶容為誰感英曜珠光紛葩虞

陽愁歎發容摧傷鄉悲情我感傷情徵宮羽同聲相追所多思感誰為榮唐

春方殊離仁君榮身苦惟艱生患多殷憂纏情將如何欽蒼穹誓終篤志貞

牆禽心濱均深身加懷憂是嬰藻文繁虎龍寧自感思岑形熒城榮明庭妙

面伯改漢物日我兼思何漫漫榮曜華雕旂孜孜傷情幽未猶傾苟難闈顯

殊在者之品潤乎愁苦艱是丁麗壯觀飾容側君在時巖在炎在不受亂華

意誠惑步育浸集悴我生何冤充顏曜繡衣夢想勞形峻慎盛戒義消作重

感故昵飄施愆殃少章時桑詩端無終始詩仁顏貞寒嵯深興后姬源人榮

故遺親飄生思愆精徽盛翳風比平始璇情賢喪物歲峨慮漸孽班禍讒章

新舊聞離天罪辜神恨昭感興作蘇心璣明別改知識深微至嬖女因奸臣

霜廢遠微地積何遐微業孟鹿麗氏詩圖顯行華終凋淵察大趙婕所佞賢

冰故離隔德怨因幽元傾宣鳴辭理興義怨士容始松重遠伐氏妤恃凶惟

齊君殊喬貴其備曠悼思傷懷日往感年衰念是舊愆涯禍用飛辭恣害聖

潔子我木平根嘗遠歎永感悲思憂遠勞情誰為獨居經在昭燕輦極我配

志惟同誰均難苦離戚戚情哀慕歲殊歎時賤女懷歎網防青實漢驕忠英

清新衾陰勻尋辛鳳知我者誰世異浮奇傾鄙賤何如羅萌青生成盈貞皇

純貞志一專所當麟沙流頹逝異浮沉華英翳曜潛陽林西昭景薄榆桑倫

望微精感通明神龍馳若然倏逝惟時年殊白日西移光滋愚讒漫頑凶匹

誰雲浮寄身輕飛昭虧不盈無倏必盛有衰無日不陂流蒙謙退休孝慈離

思輝光飭粲殊文德離忠體一違心意志殊憤激何施電疑危遠家和雍飄

想群離散妾孤遺懷儀容仰俯榮華麗飾身將與誰為逝容節敦貞淑思浮

懷悲哀聲殊乖分聖貲何情憂感惟哀志節上通神祗推持所貞記自恭江

所春傷應翔雁歸皇辭成者作體下遺葑菲採者無差生從是敬孝為基湘

親剛柔有女為賤人房幽處己憫微身長路悲曠感生民梁山殊塞隔河津

--NSH001 (talk) 11:20, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks N also for endlessly mopping up after me on articles. I think I first encountered Su Hui's extraordinary poem in 1972-3, finding a copy of it in, I think it was, Hockett's The State of the Art in the Chinese faculty library. Poems can, if they are great, be read, as Empson outlined in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, several ways. Su Hui's lends itself to several thousand construals, which takes the cake.

Since I'm in your debt, I guess I'll have to pay out your request. Perhaps this, written in a train in 1968, while coming home, and occasioned by (a) having read Ezra Pound on the haiku verse form in class that morning, to stave off the boredom of being forced to study English and (b) watching a hippie in a whinge-binge mouthing off to everyone in the compartment, between disgruntled lapses into silence, while they diligently buried their heads in their newspapers.

Suburban Antichrist

He lounges by the train door -

Arms slung on opposite baggage-racks

A figure of indifferent crucifixion.

I don't write poetry, or rather when I am prompted to try to, the result fails my sense of elementary criteria for that vein of composition. So just occasional verse when I get tired of prose, which is often. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:21, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

One shouldn't put down verse, the fun and reflexive side of the same instinct that stumbles up the foothills of Helicon. The point also is that versifying helps you get a minimum of a poem into another language- Poems can't be translated, but a rhymed gloss at least carries more of their jouncy thrust than paraphrase. Here's Catullus 5, which perhaps you read in school in Latin, and which I was reminded of while looking up the file of juvenilia for the haiku above.

Viuamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum seueriorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt:

nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum

Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Lesbia sweet, let the life of our love

Put no reserve-price when desire calls.

Pennycheap's the rumour-mongering of

Oldtimers, bankrupted of sex by aged balls.

Dawns rise, dusks fall, and the light

In those hours that scurry inbetween

Is all too brief, before that big night

We all must sleep through shuts us in the obscene

Dreamlessness of eternity. Kiss me once more!

Kiss me, kiss me, again and again.

Count all our kisses, multiplied by a score,

Then kiss me the total in multiples of ten.

And when our bill's run up a hefty sum

Let's bungle the figures nicely just

To flummox the fiscal eyes of the dumb

Oglers who tax bigspenders with their lust.
Nishidani (talk) 14:29, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Finally, verse is an amiable way to respond heuristically to real poetry, the thoughts and experience behind it. Take Philip Larkin's powerful This Be The Verse.

Reading that once spurred a reflective chime.

Perhaps they fuck you up: who knows?

For victimhood prefers to rate

Especial value to what shows

Some foreignness in our self-hate.

That they were fucked up in your case

Is possible: I know that most

Are hardly saints - they have to face

Each day the dangers of that coast

No one prepared them for, or taught

What sudden tides await them there,

Whèn love dives, wild, into the fraught

And deeper waters of despair.

The misery's passed on. Each child

Shies at the sea beyond his shore.

Most learn to trust, plunge into the wild

Surges of doubt, survive, and ask for more.

Because, perhaps, they find at last

The strength to venture on their own,

Beyond the footholds of the past,

The tender-treacherous shallows of home.

I don't think this can quite allow me to it call quits for the debt I've incurred with your constant help over the years with my wikiwork, but . . Best regards Nishidani (talk) 15:08, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Ps. How does one put a space between two quatrains. Those above are too distant?Nishidani (talk) 16:06, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

An eerie email from the afterworld wafted in mocking my verse reply to Larkin's poem. Honesty demands that I add the put-me-down from the ouija-like spirit who signed off as PLarkin-

They fuck you up, oh yes, they do!

Though the evidence would hardly sway

A half-baked littératurd like you

Dead-eared to rhyme and tragedy.

They may not mean it, but their love

Works on margins, on life's brink.

You say the child must leap. A shove

Was all I got, and 'swim or sink!'

My life lay inland, no one taught

Me how to chance my timid arm.

And when I glanced back all I caught

Was hatred's laughter at the harm

A father's worship of pure force

Bequeathed his son, a life of blight.

Luck chose your's differently, of course,

But then again, you cannot write.
Nishidani (talk) 08:45, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Wow, I thought that would get you going! Very impressive.

On Latin, I've forgotten almost everything I learned at school – which was only a 2-year introduction course. Basically rote learning of endless declensions and conjugations, and that was about it. Not the way to learn a language properly. Our Latin teacher spent a lot of his lessons moaning about his having to do National Service. His was the last year group to be required to do NS before it was abolished, which really annoyed him. Moaned a lot about the pointlessness of army life and the incompetence of the officers. He did say that he much preferred classical Greek to Latin. As you know I was forced to drop Latin in order to do German along with the science course, though I would have preferred to continue Latin. The head of the classics department was the only woman head of department (other than "domestic science"), and the only teacher at the school to hold a PhD. Everybody held her in very high regard.

No need to apologise for anything, little Asha just loves to tidy up after her beloved "Onki Nishi", and she saves me a lot of time. Did you know that while you were away she was put in prison for 30 days by Microsoft because (a) I changed something I shouldn't have done, and Microsoft didn't like it (b) I had stupidly neglected to set up a proper backup system (c) Microsoft is able lock you out of YOUR OWN COMPUTER (so after you've set up a new computer, switch from using a Microsoft Account, to using a local one) I'm a terrorist, apparently (= I hate the genocide being perpetrated by Israel)? Only kidding, but I think you'll get the point. Lesson: when and if you get a new computer to replace your dinky one, I recommend setting it up to use a local account. Probably best to allow it to set itself up using the defaults (which means using a Microsoft A/c), but then get someone who knows what they're doing to set you up with a local a/c ASAP.

"How does one put a space between two quatrains. Those above are too distant?" comme ci:

Perhaps they fuck you up: who knows?
For victimhood prefers to rate
Especial value to what shows
Some foreignness in our self-hate.

That they were fucked up in your case
Is possible: I know that most
Are hardly saints - they have to face
Each day the dangers of that coast

No one prepared them for, or taught
What sudden tides await them there,
Whèn love dives, wild, into the fraught
And deeper waters of despair.

The misery's passed on. Each child
Shies at the sea beyond his shore.
Most learn to trust, plunge into the wild
Surges of doubt, survive, and ask for more.

Because, perhaps, they find at last
The strength to venture on their own,
Beyond the footholds of the past,
The tender-treacherous shallows of home.

The trick is simply to use a pair of poem.../poem tags. Which I strongly recommend, since you then don't have to bother typing out all those ugly </br> tags at the end of every line. Not only that, it has the effect that the lines, and line spacing, appear in the rendered text the same as you typed them. Much easier, and more elegant.

--NSH001 (talk) 18:41, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks mate. I can only repay you with another variation, imagining for example how Sylvia Plath would have written a chime to concur with Philip Larkins.

I second that, Philip. Nishi is,

Like Ted my husband, somewhat prone

To see the brighter side and miss

The Nazi side of life at home.


The brutal Fascist- German who

Lurked behind my father's smile

Treated his daughter like a Jew,

With jackboot love in cosy style.


I got my own back on him, though,

And snuffed his memory out when I

Turned on the gas, and watched his slow

Tortured image fade and die.

Best regards as always Nishidani (talk) 19:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, a bit grim that one, but nothing compared to the genocide going on in Gaza, which is overwhelming me at the moment. My turn to tell you off now: ye didnae read and construe what I wrote. Perhaps we have a different sense of elegance: those </br> tags offend my sense of elegance, in addition to being redundant when you're using poem.../poem tags. Save yourself a little effort, and don't bother typing them. --NSH001 (talk) 21:21, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Grim, but obligatory, if the task is to achieve some pastiche of a tone that tries to capture something of the immense manic pain of her final great poems. Perhaps I'd better ask the Big Chief uptop, unless the tetragrammaton's got tired of competition from the Bard, what Will of Stratford, sorry, Eddie de Vere, would quip, reviewing all of the above. Tomorrow. Yes, I caught your point, and promptly forgot to stop applying the endline 'brakes'. You ought to know by now I've got a technical memory as retentive as an incontinent arsehole, um, nah, um, sieve for UCOC wokeishly gimleted eyes. CheersNishidani (talk) 23:17, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Neil. Bit late but here's the chime from Shagspere I promised, as it came through the noise disturbances of the email line from edenville. That may account for the curious running enjambment in a sonnet form:)

Desist from this miscarriage of rude minds
Dis-pairing spirits in a wasteful shame.
Parents are various as the lesser kinds
Which nature's bounty breeds. Those who complain

Perhaps have merit in their suit; yet life
Bridles at monotony, and, often will
Paint her stage outrageously, for strife
Is dramaturgic nature's way to thrill

The Lord of her creation, that sovereign king
Who, settled in eternity's chair, looks on
While art sifts man’s travails and joys to bring
Fresh entertainments from His motley throng.

Our snatch of time from eternity’s all too brief
But better than naught: live it, in grace or grief.
Shagspere aka Nishidunny~~~~

It just occurred to me while writing my latest reply to MSchwartz that this couplet could read in a variation:

We must play our puppet parts: that is the fee
For our brief purchase on eternity.~~~~

RIP

Elisha Ben Kimon, Palestinian convert to Judaism fatally shot in West Bank Ynet 21 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 13:51, 21 March 2024 (UTC) The grandfather, Eid al Zaitoun, of this Sameh Zaitoun, saved 25 Jews from the 1929 Hebron massacre. The grandson converted to Judaism, and was shot to death by IDF soldiers at a Gush Etzion busstop after a knife was found in his baggage.Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Idem for Rami Al-Halhouli. (Arwa Mahdawi, As Gaza is destroyed, Israel is killing dozens of children in the West Bank The Guardian 23 March 2024) A 12 year old, one of a 100 children (of 400 West Bank Palestinians) murdered since Oct 7. He lit some fireworks to celebrate Ramadan, and was shot dead because, the IDF state, he aimed the fireworks at them. Itamar Ben-Gvir called the officer who killed him a 'hero' for having eliminated a terrorist.

The point is, that on-the-spot judgment of intent to kill (against all the probabilities) warranting the child's murder. The ICJ is to deliberate on whether Israel has an intent to commit the genocide (or whether it is just an unintended consequence of the war) which, by any reckoning, is taking place. The massive evidence will be equivocated and pettifogged to death to deny the charge, because intent is hard to prove legally, as opposed to it being easy to establish when a child lights a firecracker in the vicinity of IDF troops.Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Idem for Tamar Pelleg-Sryck. Imad Sabi, 'In memory of an Israeli lawyer who never lost her moral purpose,' +972 magazine 22 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Probable accidental change to another editor's comment

This recent edit includes what is probably an accidental change to another editor's comment. Just letting you know, an old Mac of mine used to do this all the time - make rogue edits! Pincrete (talk) 10:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd just got up and used the dinky laptop in my kitchen which likes to wipe out posts, refuses to paste and copy and gets up to other tricks. Thanks for the heads-up-Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Heads up

Hi, you are probably aware already but if you weren’t you are probably going to have an arbitration case request filed against you. v/r - Seawolf35 ^T--C 20:28, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

That is, if they have the competence to put it in the right place. v/r - Seawolf35 ^T--C 20:52, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I yawn once or twice when I rise, and sometimes this coincides with some objective correlative. No, I'm not aware of any such AE complaint, though this year was beginning to look anomalous since so far the annual ritual of trying to have me banned there seems to be suspended.Making the like seems to function as a kind of self-barnstar in certain quarters.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

This stuff, and now the sequence) bores me intensely. It means that everyone's right to a fair and productive working day actually learning something or adding some information to pages is going to be taxed by some bureaucratic request to drop everything and address one's time to what is a non-issue, (organized harassment of both people like myself and Arbcom) that will promise to devour a huge amount of energy by many editors. Well, count me out.

Did not arbs reading that mislocated tirade look into it to examine the quality of the evidence? I mean it's so egregiously bad or silly that the editor cites as evidence of my 'antisemitism' the fact that I cited Eran Elhaik's calculation that the Middle East component of the Ashkenazi genome is roughly 3%, just slightly above the median Neantherthal component of the genome of homo sapiens sapiens (I.e. by this kind of illogic, anyone can claim that we are Neanderthals, not homo sapiens sapiens). I.e. Eran Elhaik, an expert in molecular biology must be a self-hating Jew, and I, by citing him, antisemitic. Good grief. Or stating that I offend Jews in asserting Zionism is a heresy of Judaism. All that means is that the plaintiff is totally unfamiliar with the topic: inn the 1900s Zionism was received with widespread hostility in orthodox Judaism as heretical. These are issues of (a) content (b) knowing something of the topic's scholarship. To express 'offense' on behalf of some abstract 'Jewish community' is bizarre when the scholarship of that community has no problem with these things (if restricted to books and journals apparently. Wiki's error must be that it doesn't protect itself sufficiently from scholarship that upsets communitarian clichés)

In short, an anonymous editor representing an organization which has apparently targeted me, has fudged up a j'accuse which substantially complains that for six years (why not 18?) an antisemite like myself had not been permabanned. Since the material cited has almost all been exhaustively reviewed at AE and turned down, this new case, and the exceptional license accorded this MSchwartz (I may not be too strong on wiki policy but does not editing on behalf of an organization amount to meatpuppetry?) amounts not to opening the doors to double jeopardy, but triple, quadruple jeopardy. Any group, organization or individual with zero actual contributions to wikipedia can pressure this place ad infinitum, by creating the chimaera of a public scandal unless its offline concerns are addressed, in the hope that the screws even on this democratic venue for knowledge must be tightened towards 'political correctness' (a right form of wokeism).

Seeing what is happening at Harvard and on campuses, and in Germany, with even more severe measures being taken to place increasingly formal restrictions on free speech in this area, I'm not surprised.Nishidani (talk) 16:10, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

It's like they don't see the door they are opening here. Ah well. nableezy - 16:17, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

That's where poetry helps. This was foreseen in Auden's lines ('The Door).

Out of it steps the future of the poor

Enigmas, executioners and rules,

Her Majesty in a bad temper or

A red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.Nishidani (talk) 16:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

My you are popular! You might be trying to retire, but you are still only maturing with age in terms of your ability to attract administrative scandal. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:42, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd be worried if I were ever 'popular', unless you are, as is probable using the term ironically, in the sense of 'notorious/infamous', though those two would be silly as well. If as Barkeep states, the upcoming report has been under negotiation since February, it is reasonable to assume by the coincidence of dates, that this is a second go at retrying this mid-February denunciation by Drsmoo claiming I was citing Hitler because that, like several earlier complaints since 2018, didn't achieve its aim. Indeed MSchwartz's unfocused tirade cites that directly as part of the evidence. The Israeli- (I assume) advocacy organization employing MSchwartz to channel, apparently, its discontent with my presence here, given its resources can probably draw on a substantial team of edit combers to help their case. It's all rather odd, that we can now admit people to represent a lobby and argue their case. For, if, as has been stated, MSchwartz represents an organization, the case is not that made by that editor alone, so much as the group on behalf of whom he is acting to prosecute me. In all likelihood, I'll sit the forseeable shenanigans out as a bystander, because I'm curious as to how a spokesperson can complain, while the group they admittedly represent remains invisible. Setting that precedent constitutes a genetic mutation in the way Wikipedia has traditionally operated, as a workshop of peers with everything above board, visible.Nishidani (talk) 21:14, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

If the organisation involved does not become known, Arbcom proceedings will certainly have headed in a new and rather Orwellian direction. Iskandar323 (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Some reading as you sit on the sidelines of your own show. Iskandar323 (talk) 22:58, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I'll bookmark it but yesterday I finally overcame a long-delaying resistance to reading Nonnos's Dionysiaca, and three pages into the lengthy Greek text, noted with annoyance that wikipedia's infernal bureaucratic machinery was inadvertently demanding I waste my time answering some sloppy pastiche of polemics about the evil I have been doing here for the last 6 years. The Dionysiaca is notoriously tedious, but at least it is Greek to me, whereas wikipedia, in these endless attempts via arbitration to get me to fuck off, is what Greek is to most others, with good riddance to the labour of 95,000 edits.Nishidani (talk) 23:24, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Ah, this captures the complaintiveness perfectly, barking up the wrong tree. Well done, Nonnos-

δίψιος ἀστερόεντι κύων ἐπεπάφλασε λαιμῷ

πέμπων θερμὸν ὕλαγμα,Liber 1:237-8
Nishidani (talk) 23:51, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

• One piece of advice that occurs to me, after thinking about this: You should consider the people you are most frequently in dispute in in that topic area (especially, of course, anyone who you were replying to in the presented diffs, but anyone in the topic area in general) and, if and when the case is actually filed, you should request that it be broadened in scope to examine general misconduct in that area, with those people added as parties - they will of course probably want to have people they'll add themselves, but that's for the best. Multiple people in the past have objected to the idea of ArbCom cases that name a specific individual in a controversial topic area or who has taken part in a broader dispute, since limiting the scope of a case to just that one person implicitly assumes they are at fault; and ArbCom has, in the past, been receptive to this. Additionally, insisting on broader cases avoids one of the problems people have raised about cases brought by outside groups like this - the possibility that they could result in "one-sided" scrutiny in controversial areas. Of course, anyone can request other people be added to a case (and probably will), but as the person most directly involved in the initial filing you're the logical person to bring them up and would have the most direct knowledge of who might make sense. I know that you're likely thinking mostly of defending yourself (below), as most people would if they knew an upcoming ArbCom case was likely to target them specifically; but in my experience, focusing purely on defending yourself rarely gets anywhere with ArbCom. It is more useful to broaden the scope to encompass the larger dispute so ArbCom can consider the context of the entire topic area, avoiding a situation where all the blame for every problem the topic-area faces falls on your head and every diff in your entire history is considered without that context. --Aquillion (talk) 02:56, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you indeed for that advice which as usual displays a thorough knowledge of the way things work technically here, something I lack. However, from the outset, no matter how conflictual a talk page may work out to be, or how disruptive an editor or two might strike me as being, on principle I have almost never had recourse to punitive suits against those I find myself in dispute with (I vaguely recall one recourse to AE out of sheer exasperation) I don't 'dob' them in. A 'dobber' in my formative years at school was viewed as tantamount to someone making a despicable violation of a cultural code. That was shared even by our teachers: once 6 of us were informed on for smoking. The headmaster caned each six times, and sent us off with a stern warning. He then called in the informant/delator/dobber-in and thrashed him several times. It was a very intelligent move, since (a) it affirmed the code against betrayal of a peer-group that was fundamental to that school's culture and (b) ensured that the boy who had informed was known to have been punished as well, rendering any temptation to wreak revenge on him for his disloyalty to the group pointless. I manage on wikipedia by following the codes, I believe they are grounded in commonsense and decency, I grew up under, since I cannot adapt myself to a meticulously finessed system of rules, that have technical ramifications of enormous complexity case by case, if only because I find the pages that outline these things unreadable, and my memory prefers to focus on other things, like the material I read to actually write articles. I fully expect a negative verdict, whatever I may say, in any case, and have no desire to cut a pathetic figure of a whinger desperately trying to defend my integrity in a matter that, to me, stinks of a non-wiki body weaponizing wiki rules to a political end. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:46, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

• Don’t think there’s any chance anything like what was filed gets accepted personally. At least I hope the arbs aren’t that gullible. nableezy - 04:49, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I have always defended arbitrators and Arbcom. They have an impossible task, where by the nature of the rules, any complaint, however ill-founded, must be taken as worthy of serious attention. Since they are obliged never to enter into the merits of content disputes, but simply examine claims of rule-infractions like rude or discourteous language, anyone who trains themselves to be courteous can enter a dispute, refuse to even read the books or sources, and advance a contrarian opinion at great length hoping to persuade other source-disattentive editors. The most notorious example of this was at Zionism, race and genetics which I wrote. It was apparent from the beginning that the person challenging the title as WP:Synth had not read the (several hundred pages of) books where these three terms were used conjointly. This was noted, and countered by even further sources, to be evidence of nothing other than a refusal to read the sources. In the months that followed, one or two remarks of exasperation in my otherwise tediously evidential responses were fished up to make an AE complaint, which, though frail, managed to extract a balanced 'warning' (that kind of thing means in later complaints, the plaintiff, even if his evidence is again weak, can insinuate that I have been 'warned' earlier, and we are now at the tipping edge. It is fatuously frivolous to indulge in this clever, repetitious use of pressing AE to get at someone by evidence that utterly distorts the reality - which is that, 99% of the time, an indicted editor can be reading several hours a day, and responding closely and reasonably to editors who disagree on some bit of text or another, and yet end up with the stigma of being consistently discourteous, disruptive, uncollegial and therefore long overdue for suspension. And, apart from the various motivations of those who so frequently haul one to AE (whatever they may be, POVpushing, instrumentalization of a procedure to eliminate someone whose views they dislike, or sheer personal dislike etc.,) arbitrators must simply check the bits and pieces of diffs about one person from a page where up to a dozen participate, the context of what others are doing is irrelevant. Therefore, odd but understandable decisions can easily trump commonsense, which does not have a place in wikipedia guidelines. Whatever, I don't take these things personally. I chose to work under this regimen that I find, technically, inefficient: the good work I've helped write will more or less stay up, and cannot be undone facilely even after one carks it.Nishidani (talk) 12:46, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Considering the complaint

Prefatory

When I saw the immense amount of time an excellent editor like Piotrus felt himself required to waste to clear his name of a patent smear in the preceding Arbcom case on articles dealing with Jews and Poland, an example I will studiously avoid, I nonetheless I thought I should respond at least to the defamatory claims against me made in that screed. My change of thought was generated this morning by reading Or Kashti, Gili Izikovich, 'The IDF Uses Revenge Poems to Boost Soldiers' Morale in Gaza,' Haaretz 26 March 2024, and in particular by one snippet of a 'poem' partially paraphrased there as part of an official anthology to supply troops with a sense that their combative mission was potentially redolent of lyrical possibilities (though a wider world, including that of scholarship, seriously queries whether the havoc visited on the Strip amounts to genocide, where some 13,000 children have been killed). The verses in question which caught my eye seemed to capture an underlying feeling of appalled estrangement from the way realities are experienced by others as perfectly normal, indeed culturally vindicated. The version of the Hebrew poem been read by soldiers in the field runs in a version of it I made as follows:-

It is written, every child’s skull

Shall be smashed upon a rock.

It is written, from Gaza’s Wall

Her palazzi will be struck

By prophetic fire to consume

All evils bred in its womb.

There are at least two direct Biblical allusions here. (a) The first is to Psalm 137, which begins with overpowering beauty:'By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept/when we remembered Zion . .' only to conclude:

Daughter of Babylon,

doomed to destruction,

blessed is he who repays you

as you have done to us.

Blessed is he who seizes your infants

and dashes them against the rocks.

(b) The second is to Amos chapter 1, 6-7.

(6)Thus saith the Lord; For three transgressions of Gaza, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they carried away captive the whole captivity, to deliver them up to Edom:

(7)But I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, which shall devour the palaces thereof.

What startles me as a reader evidently has no such effect on the religiously orthodox writer who penned these lines, nor on the IDF editors who selected it for their morale-boosting anthology of war poetry, and perhaps they assume the same attitude for their potential readership in Israel. So I am engaged with a world which, apparently, shares none of the shaming restraints on articulating emotions which I was raised to think 'normal' and whose observed presence in oneself demanded a penitental self-examination. To the contrary, from the other perspective, my instinctive perplexity that what struck me as obscenely inhumane, voiced lyrically, is anomalous, at least in terms of the cultural code native readers there take as acceptable, 'normal'. So I am forced to ask myself wherein lies this dissonance in expectations, a dissonance I have encountered every other day while engaged with editing the I/P area. Does, as is often asserted, -most recently in MSchwartz's horrified indictment, my attempts to document that world betray some 'antisemitic' undercurrent, a fastidious repudiation of Jews?Nishidani (talk) 13:45, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

References

Parsing the overture

This user has consistently demonstrated behaviors that appear to be in violation of Wikimedia’s Universal code of conduct and general policy, especially in the form of "Psychological manipulation" and "Hate-speech”. Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine and has expressed extreme views on Jews, Jewish heritage, and explicitly, Jewish genetics. In their editing, the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view. Furthermore it seems that this user has also violated some of Wikipedia’s’ “five pillars”, requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4) and editing from a neutral point of view (WP:NPOV). It seems that these non-neutral and sometimes offensive edits rise to harassment, therefore violating art. 3.1 of the UCOC.

Hysteron proteron. The gravamen is in the last line alluding to section 3.1 of the [Wikimedia Foundation Universal Code of Conduct]

Concretely therefore MSchwartz is claiming that my behaviour (or, as they put it ‘my behaviors’, which is an odd way of putting it. I haven’t been diagnosed for split personality disorders yet, at least to my knowledge) has been ‘consistently’ intended primarily to intimidate, outrage or upset a person,’ and that I do this consistently under any number of the indictable headings, namely Insults,Sexual harassment,Threats,Encouraging harm to others,Disclosure of personal data (Doxing),Hounding,Trolling.

Where's the evidence since 2018 (that is the date MSchwartz sets) for any of these charges? What functionally does 'psychological manipulation' mean? And whose minds have I stealthily plagiarized in Svengali fashion? The answer apparently is in UCOC 3:2:

Psychological manipulation: Maliciously causing someone to doubt their own perceptions, senses, or understanding with the objective to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want.

One must presume from this that my argumentative style on talk pages is taken here to be primarily fueled by a devious malice dryly calculated to subvert an interlocutor's identity, and coerce them thereby to become my puppets in a form of cynical gamesmanship. In Italian law down to 1981 this was a criminal offense (Plagio) until a court deemed it in violation of Italy's constitution since, 'specifically, the substance of the crime was impossible to fully assess with logical-rational criteria, creating an intolerable risk of arbitrary prosecution and conviction.' It is quite striking that this unverifiable crime, now abolished, has reared its bizarre head in the UCOC. But there it is, and if recourse to it is jumped at, expect a humongous number of inconclusive threads to follow, because the way the policy is framed, nothing of the sort can be adjudicated and verified conclusively.Nishidani (talk) 14:46, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Hate speech? What magician's hat was that smear pulled out by its rabbity ears? If you assert another editor uses hate speech, with zero evidence to that end, that is a violation of the very principles outlined in the UCOC about editorial interactions. Indeed, if one cannot prove it, it gives grounds for laying a complaint about adventitious innuendoes aimed to smear a fellow wikipedian. Nishidani (talk) 14:51, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Since at least 2018, the editor has shown a significant bias in topics related to Israel/Palestine' expressing

• extreme views on Jews
• (extreme views on) Jewish heritage
• and explicitly Jewish genetics.

Aside from that polemically beloved term extreme why 'explicitly?' Is MSchwartz not aware that in using this of the last in a series of three claims, grammatically they are suggesting that the other two claims are 'implicit'?)

Since anyone familiar with my work and these archives could readily google up strong evidence that I take extreme exception to any kind of talk, loose or otherwise, that collectivizes 'Jews' (or any other group) and that, theoretically, I have repeatedly stated that notions of collective identity (Jewish, Israeli, Chinese, Russian whoever) are dangerous, aside from being conceptually inane, if politically and rhetorically potent, I ask myself how on earth, on what evidence, does the plaintiff claim I entertain an idea that I have 'consistently' repudiated as repugnant?

Jewish heritage. What extreme take have I adopted in writing articles extensively on that infinitely complex and variegated dominion of tradition, which includes the following articles written wholly or in good part by me.? Your scurrilous caricature is a wild smear based on a studied ignorance of the record, which includes

• Franz Baermann Steiner
• The Jew Among Thorns
• Joseph's Tomb
• Nethinim
• Qos (deity)
• Birkat haMinim
• Kaifeng Jews
• Khazars
• Albert Antébi
• Michael Astour
• Pirqoi ben Baboi
• Haim Farhi
• Raul Hilberg
• Yehuda Elkana
• Bruno Hussar
• Zvi Yehuda Kook
• Ezra Nawi
• Pierre Nora
• Simon Nora
• Yoel Palgi
• Meyer Reinhold
• David Dean Shulman
• Elio Toaff
• André Ungar
• Amiel Vardi

to name just a handful? In 18 years of contributing to wikipedia, I have yet to see even one of the hundreds of editors identifiably and legitimately editing from a 'pro-Israeli' perspective who have responded positively to my suggestion that they show their neutrality by creating articles on Palestinian history, people or culture. I have stated several times that displaying an ability to write neutrally, and yet sympathetically, about the side one may less identify with in a conflict at article length should be one of the qualifications for working in this area, other than 500 edits.Nishidani (talk) 17:03, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

'Jewish genetics'. The expression means, 'genetic studies on Jews' understood here however as 'genetic studies that essay to determine the origins of the Jewish people, and the interrelations of their various groups'. Yes, I edit those articles. Is there any evidence I have tampered with them to skew their content ideologically? No. Nishidani (talk) 15:12, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

the user states seriously contested assertions as facts, uses judgmental language, and gives undue weight to a particular view- in this case, the anti-Israel view.

• Any editor is free to express his views or opinions, esp. on talk pages. What counts is article mainspace, where I challenge you to detect edits where I might be shown to have intruded personal 'seriously contested assertions as facts, use(d) judgmental language, and give(n) undue weight to a particular view' as imputed to me here.

requiring editors on Wikipedia to treat each other with respect and civility (WP:5P4).

• Yes, in 18 years and over 95,000 edits, on a number of occasions mostly predating 2018, I allowed myself to be exasperated, was reported and duly sanctioned. In statistical terms, these outbursts were extremely rare. Wikipedia appropriately regulated my infractions with its usual methods and I accepted on each occasion the sanction, without appealing.Nishidani (talk) 17:24, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Inflammatory commentary on Jews/Judaism

The user recently used disrespectful, threatening language that borders anti-semitism. goody. I can't wait to peeve (slip =perve) on the discussion there when it gets to his beliefs about the genetic superiority of his own ethnic group. Dumb goyim beware.”
The term "dumb goyim" can be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to a narrative of a Jewish superiority over non-Jews, a theme found in antisemitic rhetoric, where Jews are sometimes falsely accused of harboring a sense of superiority towards non-Jews. This comment is uncivil and violates Art. 2.2 of Wikimedia’s UCOC. Moreover, the threatening nature of this comment’, it’s attempted “trolling”, and insulting antisemitic reference, rise to Harassment, violating article 3.1 of the UCOC. Although a complaint filed against him] for using this phrase was closed with warning, with one admin stating that “if it happened again, I would not take so charitable a view”. But this is not the first time that User:Nishidani has used this phrase.

• This is an attempt at double jeopardy. The issue was raised at AE just over a month ago (Nishidani). It was shown there that I had Philip Roth's use of the phrase in mind, and that the idea behind that phrasing is not peculiar to antisemites but refers to a genre of jokes that is rather common in Israel of non-Jews. You didn't like the outcome. It apparently jars with your conviction that only antisemites use it, despite the fact I cited it ironically in the context of a NYTs writer (and Ashkenazi), Bret Stephens, asserting his ethnic group was brighter than non-Jews. So you repeat it here. On 'inflammatory' you are raking over recent ashes and trying to restoke a fire.Nishidani (talk) 17:43, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

References

The user has also stated that the article Jews is "untouchable in its POV sacrality".

• Did you read that diff in its entirety, and did you check what I was referring to, the edit history and talk page discussions on the controversial POV-pushing incipit I alluded to? Apparently not. I'll do so for you.

This reference to the POV sacrality of the wiki page Jews occurs on the Samaritans talk page in this discussion.

An editor challenged the lead language which asserted that Samaritans ‘claim’ to be descended from the Israelites, noting that in the parallel article on Jews, the origins of Jews as descended from Israelites is not a claim but stated in wikivoice as a fact. He removed ‘claim’ to establish parity. An I/P editor stepped in (they edited for one week, with a total of 22 edits) and protested that this is taking things ‘too far’. Without asking what justified this random opinion, a compromise was reached, restoring ‘claim’ per Iskandar]] (usually identified as ‘pro-Palestinian’.)

This meant that across wiki pages, Jewish descent from the Israelites was asserted as a fact, whereas the Samaritans’ descent was described as a ‘claim’ (when historically these two groups were adversaries). To understand what was going on, one needs some degree of area competence and familiarity with the scholarship on these respective issues, something diff evaluation in arbitration does not consider important.

The POV dissonance is this. In rabbinical tradition, Samaritans (heirs of the northern kingdom) are depicted as Cuthites, not authentic Israelites but rather an imported people dumped there by Assyria to replace ‘real’ Israelites/Jews who had been expelled from Palestine. Samaritans (the dominant population in their area for a millennium until the Christian Byzantines virtually wiped them out) always rebuffed this injurious put-down. The source on the page, Peidong Shen Tal Lavi, et al., Reconstruction of Patrilineages and Matrilineages of Samaritans and Other Israeli Populations From Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Variation 2004 supported the notion that the Samaritan patrilineal line predate the Assyrian conquest, which renders the rabbinical tradition of Samaritan inferiority suspect.

At a glance therefore, it is quite apparent that in restoring the Samaritan tradition of Israelitic descent as a ‘claim’ while describing the Jewish tradition affirming Israelitic descent as a fact on the sister Jews page, Wikipedia was inadvertently endorsing a rabbinical tradition in favour of Jews over Samaritans as the direct authentic heirs to the Israelites.

This kind of deconstruction of the context in which that single diff is embedded is, of course, not taken into account in arbitration, where etiquette and rule-compliant evaluation, not familiarity with the scholarly state of the art, is the overriding concern.Nishidani (talk) 14:41, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The phrase 'untouchable in its sacrality' refers to the opening formulation on that page. Anyone can edit that article, obviously. Attempts to emend the lead sentence over the years come up against a wall of objections and reverts: The questionable 'sacred' phrasing is:

The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎, ISO 259-2: Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation: [jehuˈdim]) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites of the ancient Near East,

When I read that I recall perhaps the foremost modern historian of the history of the Jews who, writing critically of Shlomo Sand's controversial book, back in 2009, stated:

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.'Simon Schama,'The Invention of the Jewish People,' Financial Times November 13, 2009

Well for 15 years (2009-2024), most editors of the wikipedia article on Jews are 'dreaming' in their support of this view, and the passage cannot be changed. It is not offensive to suggest that this formulation, in the face of a foremost authority's dismissal of it as nonsense, has a 'sacred' quality. It is one of the many standard ideological/political POV formulations that are the curse of wiki, immovable for the number of editors who defend it whenever its crudity is questioned.

I deal in details, and when a generalization of any kind crops up, see if the statement unequivocably covers all bases. This doesn't. I raised this on the talk pages several times, notably here, with no response (see also here and here It dismissively ignores conversion to Judaism, as I noted as far back as February 2008, and further at the No Original Research page. That is a political statement, -linked to the modern doctrine of the right of Jews anywhere in the world to return to Israel as the homeland of their ancestors- not a reflection of the scholarship or of historical reality. the Inca Jews in West Bank in settlements like Elon Moreh and Alon Shvut; the Tibeto-Burman Jews in Hebron, the Ethiopian Jews, Malabar Jews are all examples of the conversion of peoples for whose descent from Israelites, for whom an 'ethnonational' identity (as opposed to a broader Semitic identity), is totally unattested and indeed defies known historical facts. Josephus himself states that 'Judaeans' refers to those who inhabit Judea, which included many other tribes and gentiles who lived there and adopted Jewish law and customs (Against Apion). In this, Jews, like any other people, emerged in formative and later periods in a culture enriched by regular intermarriage with peoples who did not descend from the biblical Israelites (links to the scholarship from Solomon Zeitlin (1953) onwards are readily available). In antiquity attachment to a Jewish lifestyle, not race or nationality, defined who was a Jew (Zeitlin). I have Goan ancesty apparently, from one great-great grandmother. This does not mean that I descend from Kokani people. Genetically, all the people in the world have a common ancestor in or around the middle of the 1st. millenium BCE. Our cultural mythologies riff endless identitarian variations on the assumption of a single ethnic origin, but historians, and more recently, geneticists, know better.

My remark, which MSchwartz considers abusive and evidence of malice, looks like that only if no one takes the trouble to examine my repeated notes on the 'Jews' talkpage about the difficulties in the WP:SYNTH argument made here. Editors won't budge on that statement. Nishidani (talk) 14:50, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

References

They also attributed the survival of Jews to what they termed "diasporic promiscuity," a phrase that reflects a deeply biased and offensive perspective on Jewish history and genetics.

• So MSchwartz personally disagrees with the massive literature on Jewish historical origins, a snippet of which I allude to just above, where conversion, intermarriage was commonplace. No evidence given. Perhaps what he defines as 'offensive' is the word 'promiscuity' in 'diasporic promiscuity'. I first began to enjoy using that term as a boy, about 15, when a religious friend took me to task for my 'intellectual promiscuity'. I read outside the narrow field of doctrinal history, written by true believers, and he found books written on his interests by non-believers offensive. In any case, the objection is religious, based on Deuteronomy 7:4. Philo of Alexandria says that the riffraff accompanying the (mythical) exodus from Egypt were the result of a 'promiscuous mixing' (in the original Greek at de Vita Mosis). The term comes from my own professional field, it being used by Sonia Ryang in her work on Koreans in Japan. There is nothing offensive in it, unless one thinks the term cannot be used metaphorically.Nishidani (talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

More on genetics, the user has written that the Middle Eastern component among Ashkenazi Jews is “estimated to range from 3% upwards”, a distortion of common scholarship that half of Ashkenazi ancestry is Middle Eastern, promoting a fringe outlier instead.

• I cited on a talk page a datum given in Das, Elhaik, Wexler,'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017

MSchwartz clearly, and/or the anonymous organization he represents, in thinking this is cogent evidence for violating UCOC, has no idea of how wikipedia works. Had they wished to make a point, examining the subject closely, they would have just pointed out that I had confused there 'Levantine' with 'Ashkenazi'. To do that in my book is reprehensible, there is no excuse for disattention here. But such lapses on a talk page have nothing reportable about them. My point was that the Southern Levant/Israel-Palestine origin of the Ashkenazi is not endorsed by modern genetics, which of course has revised its earlier Levantine argument in favour of the extremely vague term 'Middle Eastern', meaning that evidence exists for a founding population hailing from in part anywhere from Turkey to Iran, but not from the southern Israelites. And, one gathers, mentioning this is distasteful for MSchwarz. Nishidani (talk) 20:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

According to the user, “As any rabbi competent in modern historiography will confirm, Jews have their origin in Judaism, not in an ethnos”. However, Jews have always seen themselves as a people with shared ancestry.

• It should take anyone just a few minutes to ascertain at google books that, down to the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th century and well beyond, the consensus of certainly Ashkenazi rabbis emphasized Judaism, and its followers as a religion, not an 'ethnic' matter.

MSchwartz makes a generalization about Jews, that down to the last man they have always seen themselves to share the same ancestry. The fragility of that claim is easily disproved. I mentioned above that Josephus, writing in the Ist cent.CE, stated that 'Judeans' referred also to Gentiles who lived in Palestine at that time and adopted Jewish law. Obviously, their fellow Jews familiar with such Judeans would not have believed these ex-gentiles in their fold share their own ancestry, any more than the forced conversion of the tens of thousands of Edomites by John Hyrcanus over a century and a half earlier would have meant that traditional Jews would have immediately believed that they shared the same ancestry with the newcomers (to the contrary). This is the kind of historical detail that always makes confident generalizations like the one above meaningless. Nishidani (talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

The above raises serious concerns regarding genetics-related articles such as 'Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism', originally “Zionism, race and genetics”, where Nishidani has 62% authorship. The article has an essayistic tone and sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature.

• This is frankly incomprehensible in its lack of any logic. What is the asserted connection between the controversies over the genetic origins of the Ashkenazi to do with the article Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism which, yes, I wrote? The latter is a survey of modern scholarship's historical references to the way Zionism conceptualized the Jews, as a race, a radical innovation at the time (1900s) It is not, as three editors argued, an 'essay' unless any article written mostly by one editor is an 'essay'. Worse, in stating that it sparked controversy due to its synthesis of three topics that are not commonly analyzed together in existing literature. No. What happened that it was subject to a push for it to be deleted, and in the discussion, those who kept insisting that it 'synthesized three topics...not commonly analyzed together in (the existing literature' were comprehensively shown, particularly by a very neutral wikipedian, Levivich, to be unfamiliar with the existing literature, refusing to read it while making unsupported claims like the one MSchwartz exhumes.

User:Nishidani has stated that "The word 'settlement' is an Israeli/US euphemism born of the necessity to camouflage or underplay the fact that the old ideology is still kicking (out Palestinians) for lebensraum". This comment uses the term ‘lebensraum’ which is primarily associated with German nationalism and later with the territorial expansion policies of Nazi Germany

.

In my book, the notion of 'extreme' is already in the word 'bias'. MSchwartz appears to think that it may be okay to be 'biased against Israel' but deplorable to be 'extremely biased' against that country. These kinds of distinction are weird. If someone has a bias against Israel, then one might have good reason to wonder whether that person might harbour antisemitic feelings, in my understanding. If one is critical of a number of policies implemented by any state, Israel included, that is not evidence of bias if the critical content is grounded in a reasoned analysis. What is the first piece of evidence. On a talk page, nota bene, I expressed my view that Israeli settlements in the West Bank reflect a Lebensraum ideology.

Why this is classified as an 'inflammatory remark' about Jews or Judaism escapes me. MSchwarz confuses Israel with Jews/Judaism, evidently. To be critical of the former is to be prejudiced with regard to the latter.

Now in the literature on antisemitism written explicitly and often polemically in defence of Israel, it is quite true that a number of scholars have asserted that drawing of any analogy between Nazi and Israel practices is, ipso facto, antisemitic.

References

So MSchwartz's assertion here reflects a point of view entertained by some scholars. The problem is, both MSchwartz, and those scholars, ignore the fact that this analogy is widespread in critical views on or positive endorsements of, the policies implemented in the West Bank, which one encounters regularly in Israeli newspapers and Israeli and diasporic scholarship. Were the contention true, then not only am I an antisemite, but leading (Jewish and Israeli) scholars and journalists are also.

• ‘the calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs in A. D. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a lebensraum for themselves in Palestine by force of arms in that year’. Arnold Toynbee, cited Omer Bartov Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, Berghahn Books 2021 ISBN 978-1-800-73130-1 p.53
• '‘There are certain people in Israel who have hinted (that) they would like Israel to retain the West Bank for Lebensraum.' Findley Burns Jr., The American ambassador to Jordan (1966-1967) speaking to Jordan's King Hussein after the Six Days War. Cited in Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry_:Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War, ISBN 978-0-300-18353-5 Yale University Press 2012
• ‘To me, who grew up under the Nazi occupation, the determined conquest of the Palestinian patrimony echoed Germany’s Drang nach Osten to provide its Herrenvolk with greater Lebensraum.' Milan Kubic, From Prague to Jerusalem:An Uncommon Journey of a Journalist, Cornell University Press 2017 ISBN 978-1-501-75703-7 p.231 (Kubic was a Czechoslovakian-American journalist who was head of Newsweek’s Beirut office from 1967 to mid 1971)
• ‘Israel’s Quest for Lebensraum,' section heading in Shlomo Ben-Ami's Prophets Without Honor:The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-state Solution, Oxford University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-190-06047-3 p.256
• Effi Eitam, IDF brigadier general and Knesset member stated in an interview 2002 interview with the Jewish-French writer Sylvain Cypel:

"The western part of Eretz Yisrael . .from the Mediterranean to the Jordan: that’s the Jewish people’s vital space. Eitam, who apparently skipped his history classes in school, didn’t seem to know that “vital space” was at the heart of the Nazi lebensraum concept. Otherwise he might have suggested another formation. But the fact remains that the idea came to him spontaneously. And in that space, only Jews would be alliowed to rule. People who talk about “human rights” and “peace” were “psychopaths,” he added.'Sylvain Cypel,. L'Etat d'Israël contre les Juifs,' La Découverte 2020 ISBN 978-2-348-04344-4.p.95('vital space'/espace vitale is the standard French translation of Lebensraum.)

• Yossi Sarid, 'Lebensraum as a Justification for Israeli Settlements,' Haaretz 26 August 2011
• 'Quite an accomplishment, considering the Settler Einsatzgruppen stealing Lebensraum and concreting Palestinians' wells.' Gideon Levy 'Israel's Next Surprise Is Coming From the West Bank,' Haaretz 16 November 2023
• Lebensraum was used just recently by the Arab Israeli lawmaker MK Ahmad Tibi in the Knesset to describe the proposals by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to reoccupy and settle the Gaza Strip. Sam Sokol, 'Far-right ministers call to ‘resettle’ Gaza’s Palestinians, build settlements in Strip,' The Times of Israel 1 January 2024, Nishidani (talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

But, above all, if one googles Russia+Ukraine+lebensraum one obtains over 225,000 hits, the first up for me being from the German Foreign Ministry, which likened what Putin does to what its own Germany did in WW2. So it is quite acceptable to use this of a geopolitical adversary of the West like Russia, but, the assumption here is, totally unacceptable, indeed 'antisemitic' to ever use the word with regard to Israel's seizure of, and colonization of, the West Bank after 1967, though Israeli critics in Israeli sources have no problem in drawing that analogy. Nishidani (talk) 20:28, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

The user labelled Zionism "a Jewish heresy" that may generate antisemitism. He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine", wondering "to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people."

Again, the evidence cited is (a) a view I expressed on my Talk page, where I respond to editors who want me to discuss material, articles or the content of this dispute (b) has nothing to do with attacks on Jews or Judaism.

Unless, as it again appears, MSchwartz considers Zionism as interchangeable with both the Jewish people and Judaism, and therefore to be critical of the former is, ipso facto to be hostile to both the latter. It is reasonably fair to assume that the premise here is underwritten by the highly controversial definition advocated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for a Working definition of antisemitism which critics argue weaponizes antisemitism as an instrument against those who criticise Israel, viewed as a Zionist state, subjecting them to a linguistic surveillance that would restrict the exercise of free speech. Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

(1) (a) I labelled Zionism, which is, as is openly admitted, an 'ideology', a 'Jewish heresy' because (i) at the turn of the 19th-20 centuries, is was roundly and very widely condemned as such by the majority of Western orthodox rabbis, and could garner a consensus of less than 1% of the Jewish people, despite a lot of drum-beating:

Herzl’s charismatic powers had their limits. By the time of his death, less than 1 percent of world Jewry was officially affiliated with the Zionist Organization, and Herzlian Zionism provoked considerable opposition. Most Orthodox Jews dismissed it as blasphemous.Derek Penslar, Theodor Herzl:The Charismatic Leader, Yale University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-300-18040-4 p.7

'Rabbi Elmer Berger was often seen as an heretic. A graduate of the Hebrew Union College (USA) and an enthusiastic adept of Classical Reform, he opposed Zionism naturally, as did, then, most of his peers. What distinguishes him from other Reform rabbis is that he remained loyal to his beliefs throughout his life.Jack Ross, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism, Potomac Books, 2011 ISBN 978-1-597-97697-8

Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project.Michael Walzer Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism:What’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. (With a response from Joshua Leifer.) Dissent Fall 2019

(b) This is the formal theological position of an important component of Orthodox Judaism, Haredi Judaism.Giles Fraser, For Haredi Jews secular Zionism remains a religious heresy The Guardian 12 May 2016. See also Haredim and Zionism.

I.e., MSchwartz considers that my view, informed by history, and shared by the religious leaders of 1.8 million Jews, worldwide, and who make up roughly 15% of Israel's population, is, if only because I repeated it, evidence of an inflammatory statement about 'Jews/Judaism'. Go figure.Nishidani (talk) 13:45, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

2 a second reconsideration of what I briefly wrote in response to this passage below, cited earlier.

He also wrote that Zionism has a "historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine",

Again, this is taken from my talk page, a view I expressed when referred to read an article by Chris Hedges.

What is scandalous about expressing the view that Zionism has, throughout its history, persistently worked to displace and disperse (disintegrate) the autochthonous population of Palestine? That is remarked upon, let us say, argued in a great number of books, starting with Nur Masalha's Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer"in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948 Institute for Palestine Studies 1992 ISBN 0-88728-242-3. I won't make a list or give the massive details, but in synthesis

It was Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism who, in proposing massive Ashkenazi immigration into Palestine where 95% of the historic population of the time was Arab, wrote of his hope Zionism would find a way to ’spirit the penniless population across the border.’ And this was reaffirmed time and again, not least by Ben-Gurion in 1937 writing of "the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state...we have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself." Dispersal from their homes, villages and properties (730,000 in 1948, 150,000 in 1967) of Palestinians over the borders to a scattered refugee life in camps from Lebanon, Syria to Jordan, together with the bantustanization of those Palestinians who remain in their occupied lands in 165 enclaves, cut off from each other, and most recently compelling most of the 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza to flee south into provisory camps on a miniscule patch of their former territory, is part of an uncontroversial record. Perhaps what MSchwartz dislikes is the word 'mission'?, in the sense that my view presumes a design, and this recurrent pattern is just a striking coincidence of haphazard events without forethought. Well, I think I am entitled to assess the evidence otherwise, without it being taken as an indication of hostility against Jews or Judaism. In any case, it is not my unique opinion.

The fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the core method through which Israel enforces apartheid.' Richard Falk, Virginia Tilley, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, Southern Illinois University 15 March 2017 p.37 Nishidani (talk) 14:36, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I bolded 'penniless population' because from 1896 to 1948, Jewish purchases of land in Palestinian managed to accumulate 6% in title. The outcome of 1948 was that the state ended up with 78% of the land and declared all property owned by refugees fleeing the havoc and uncertainty of war as 'enemy property' effectively with a stroke of the pen appropriating 200,000 lots of land, housing and property. After 1967, the West Bank was seized without any real resistance, and most of the area declared '(Israeli) state land', with the result that, without any transfer of money or compensation to those who owned or worked the land, Israel effectively took control of the real estate of 93% of the original country, and the Palestinians exercise legal control over about 7%, exactly the figure for Jewish land purchase down to 1948. This may be all accidental, but Herzl's population, many of whom once enjoyed the modern villas and conveniences of West Jerusalem, found themselves indeed penniless, as he hoped, if not yet 'spirited' across the borders. Nishidani (talk) 14:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The user wrote blatantly inflammatory comments here, for example calling Israeli media outlets: “militant mouth organ-grinders or trumpeting blowhards for a constituency of religio-fascist landgrabbers”. Israel Hayom is Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, while Arutz 7 has the third-largest weekend circulation in the country.

Again this is from my talk page.

• I did not speak of Israeli media outlets (generic, and nothing implied of Haaretz, Times of Israel, Ynet or Jerusalem Post etc.). I named two minor league papers, Arutz 7 and Israel Hayom.
• The former caters (notable for always pushing the meme that Barak Obama is a secret Muslim) to a constituency of settlers and has consistently written in defense of the most violent among them, Hilltop youth, which our article describes as “hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who establish outposts without an Israeli legal basis in the West Bank’.

References

True, my language is harsh but it is directed not against Jews, but against settlers who either engage in or support these violent expropriations, or if they murmur, do nothing to stop it and continue reading papers that endorse the violence. 15% of West Bank settlers -60,000 Americans - come from solid family homes in the United States and they are at the forefront of settler violence. So they must be perfectly culturally familiar with the Lockean compact - a core element of democracy -that property is sacred and transferred only by a negotiated sale between the parties. This awareness is congealed by the 'religious' pretext that the land is all Jewish since the year dot, and Palestinians who have dwelt there for millenia have no title, even if they do possess one under Israeli law and may be dispossessed. Very convenient if you live in Brooklyn and find buying a house too expensive in the US, as opposed to settling with a government subsidy on some WB village's lands).

David Dean Shulman, describing in detail his first hand observations of what settlers do to the poorest of Palestinian goatherds (poisoning their grazing land etc) in his classic Dark Hope (2007) called it 'absolute evil'.

Eva Illouz an Israel-French sociologist writing for Le Monde, analysing the rise to political power of the leader of Religious Zionism Itamar Ben-Gvir, who now has considerable say in West Bank settlement policy, argued that ‘(h)e represents what we must reluctantly call "Jewish fascism".' 'The third political force in Israel represents what we must reluctantly call Jewish fascism Le Monde 16 November 2022.

So, however harsh my language (and I must, to keep abreast, read articles in the Israeli press that give weekly accounts of this violence) my target was the two Israeli popular newspapers who consistently find reason to defend examples of what everyone knows is unprovoked violence) it corresponds to a documented reality, that, aside from exceptions like eminently admirable settlers like the late lamented rabbi Menachem Froman, violent landgrabbers exist, are tolerated, and never punished. In any case, I'll meet you on a compromise, by agreeing that here, and only here, I let my personal feelings get the upper hand over detached analysis on my talk page.Nishidani (talk) 13:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

• Nishidani edited large portions and added much content to an article titled: Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse, while violating one of the main “pillars” of Wikipedia; NPOV and at times also being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews. This was after he wrote on his talk page that he will "make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians". In his first edit he writes that both Palestinians and Israelis tend to refer to each other by the usage of animal stereotypes, yet the title of the article and the rest of it, solely accuses the Israeli-Jewish side of this mutual practice.

So what? Where ‘at times was I ‘being disrespectful and uncivil when referring to Israelis and Jews?’ There are a very large number of articles on Palestinian rocket attacks and terrorism on wiki (look at Palestinian political violence), on none of which have I insisted that, to NPOV balance, we must add a balancing section in each outlining Jewish terrorism or the continual Israeli missile and artillery assaults on the Gaza Strip. I haven’t argued that editors who make these pages are disrespectful and uncivil to Palestinians.

While I read I write notes topically collated, and 10 years ago I had enough on animal metaphors for an article. (I might note that there is a splendid work of great erudition by Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews, Fordham University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-823-27560-1 which influenced my article, and would well deserve an article on its own.) When Yoav Gallant on 7 October called all Gazans ‘animals’, I voiced the idea that it might be time to write up those notes for an article. But I didn’t. Then some months later, another editor tried to do so with a poorly formatted stub, and alerted me. The stub was rejected, but I took it in hand and produced the article you see, which diligently has a prefatory remark that both sides indulge in this, but addresses the far less familiar terrain of Israeli political caricatures of Palestinians. As I said on the talk page, any one is free to write a corresponding page on Palestinian stereotypes of Israelis, but they will have difficulty getting that depth of coverage of statements from senior and influential Palestinian figures, and I certainly am far too busy in real life to do everyone’s work. I write up what I know of relatively comprehensively.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

• Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem, created by Selfstudier, and Nishidani (who joined 40 minutes after the article was created), presents contested claims in WP:VOICE. Source [a], for example, is from al-Haq, a Palestinian group. Stating opinions and contested assertions as facts, rises to violation of Wikimedia’s policy of writing from a NPOV. Similar concerns arise with the Palestinian enclaves article, which seems to endorse a biased perspective and presents one-sided viewpoints in violation of WP:NPOV guidelines. The first paragraph immediately draws comparisons to the Apartheid, and then cherry-picks a quote from Amira Hass, a journalist known in Israel for her radical left opinions. Despite these issues, it is classified as a good article. Nishidani, a significant contributor to this article, has strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias, as can be seen here, also adding personal attacks, violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of UCOC.

So I edited a newly created article - Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem - and violated NPOV by adding a material from, al-Haq, and citing Amira Hass. The former is a Palestinian source, and the latter is (here we go) a cherry-picked ref for a journalist known for her ‘radical left opinions’. Citing a Palestinian Human Rights source, high respected abroad, and an Israeli journalist who rather than being the daughter of Holocaust survivors and a recipient of multiple awards internationally for her defense of Palestinian human rights, is a ‘radical leftist’. It’s pointless responding, except to note that the I/P area is about two national subjects, Israel and Palestine, and to assume that the narrative should exclude Palestinian sources is bizarre for any wikipedian who know what NPOV requires.

Finally, my 'strongly resisted efforts to address concerns regarding its bias'. The article (another one, not the one on Palestinian displacements in East Jerusalem' from which this is taken) refers to my dismissal of an anachronistic tagging by Tombah of Palestinian enclaves. Now I think it fair to state that everyone interacting with Tombah knew for a year or so he was a sockpuppet. Mostly, given there was no checkuser case, one responded pretending he was a serious contributor. Shortly after that tagging, the proof was finally forthcoming. But the point is, a very substantial amount of effort and time earlier had thoroughly addressed concerns raised by several editors, Tombah included, and in that note, Tombah alone remained unsatisfied, without giving any serious evidence for a reasonable 'concern'. So I dismissed it, as did others.Nishidani (talk) 14:25, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

• The user labelled an NYT article on sexual violence during the October 7 attacks "pseudo-journalism".

The article is Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7 New York Times 28 December 2023. A wiki article was written up precisely on this piece,Screams Without Words. Read it. It was controversial from day 1. There are several competent critics, among them Ben Smith, who challenged the claim it was way below the quality to be expected from the venue in which it was published. The data weren't collected and written by competent or experienced journalists. In any case, what is wrong with expressing one's view that something written about this topic, and appearing in a mainstream source, is 'pseudo-journalism'. The NYTs published Judith Miller who extraordinary disinformation helped gain consensus for the war on Iraq, though, and I remember it well, her articles were contradicted by evidence readily available.Nishidani (talk) 14:45, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

• The user presents themselves, and another user he frequently collaborated with, User:Nableezy, as I/P specialists. When users approach them asking to pay attention for their conduct, they responded aggressively. In one example, they told one user to "stop shitstirring", to refrain from editing certain pages, and blaming them for "appalling ignorance", violating art. 2.1 and 2.2 of wikimedia's UCOC.

I have edited in the I/P area for 16 years, Nableezy slightly less. It is reasonable to note that we have some topic familiarity, indeed specialize in that area. The diff you cite referring to this heading and discussion on my talk page above does not refer to the I/P area, but to an article regarding Japan. I won't go into the details, but I read it as an attempt, in my view malicious, to out my identity, in revenge for a near block (I think he failed to get me sanctioned) and an interaction ban he had just copped, and I noted this to an administrator, giving the details in an email. Had I addressed the merits with a formal complaint, the editor in question would almost certainly have been permabanned. I preferred telling him he was a 'shit-stirrer' and not complaining, because of the principle enunciated above, that I don't use ANI or AE to conduct vendettas or 'get at' editors I disagree with.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

* On August 29th 2018 at 16:41, administrator named Sandstein wrote: “I will consider imposing a block or an indefinite topic ban, with or without any prior discussion, in the event of continued battleground-like conduct by Nishidani in this topic area”. A few hours later, at 20:12 the user stated he retired. Despite that, and putting a retired tag on his page, he is clearly still active.

I persist in maintaining a very high regard for Sandstein, notwithstanding that remark which I considered injurious and more a matter of impatience than the cool judgment I have long admired in him. Others of course are welcome to see it differently. In any case, he left me the possibility of appealing his decision, which, on principle, I declined. I have said: if an arbitration decision goes against me, I take it on the chin - I was brought up to regard whingeing as poor form -and sit out the consequences. For the record, my reasoning on his decision is here.Nishidani (talk) 15:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

:oh and by the way, you missed citing the evidence that I viciously attacked Nableezy (actually it was an injoke exchange on our user pages someone eavesdropped on) just after the Sandstein incident. I even used shit-stirrer there.Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

• All of MSchwartz's points basically express a deep distaste for my views (which are basically those I drew from reading Israeli and diasporic scholarship), and have little to do with a case for my putative repeated infraction of wikipedia protocols. I understand the distaste, but all I can see here is unfamiliarity with the way actually editing wikipedia works.Nishidani (talk) 21:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

"Dreaming"

I am not averse to trying to adjust the "dreaming" text, what would you suggest though? Selfstudier (talk) 15:00, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

It's taken me, still without success because I simply cannot research contributions through technical ineptitude, and perhaps age: 1 hr 45 minutes to try to find just one diff that would refer to something I remember doing around 2015, consulting the No Original Research Noticeboard about precisely this lead formulation. I really have to push myself to ferret and burrow into the tedious reconstruction of my wiki past. If it were a book-related issue, I'd swim through a library like a dolphin around a prow. So, really, just replying to that silly screed above is going to exhaust me spare time to the point that I lose interest in editing. Thank goodness I have a novel to read every day after the noisomeness of this kind of disruptive intrusion. Cheers and good luck with it.Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

This? Selfstudier (talk) 16:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, indeed, and my heartful thanks for finding it. I could remember the discussion (independent editors confirmed the phrasing was a synth violation, while the I/P editors merely yakked. I must apologize also if it took what looked like 40 minutes out of your time. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Np ) it didn't take but a few minutes, given your NOR 2015 cue, splash of Israelites, and up she came. Selfstudier (talk) 21:02, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

That's the sort of thing I am absolutely dumb at. And why when things come to arbitration, I always flounder when obliged to dredge up diffs to establish the whole picture distorted by the diffs someone complaining about me amasses with, apparently, effortless facility. For me, that just means afternoons burnt up in a trivial pursuit not reading something interesting . So I prefer just to allow any sentence to pass, and wear the penalty whatever it may be. It means my productive working day remains safe and pleasurable. Thanks pal.Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

One for you

Leaked Documents Expose how Israeli war Ministers Created IDF Policy of Mass Killing With US Support Selfstudier (talk) 14:42, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Unusable of course. It's not new that the mass killing of civilians is part of IDF theory and practice, and that we do not need wikileaks to tell us that, since it has been reported openly in the New York Times. The author could have cited Ethan Bronner's article from 2010 part of which runs:

The caution is at least in part because Hamas wants to keep ruling in Gaza, not return to its previous role as a pure resistance movement. Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.

“Hamas is the dominant organization in Gaza,” a top military official said in a briefing last week that was given on condition of anonymity. “They are the regime and feel very connected to the people. They do not want to lose that connection to the people.”

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: baal habayit hishtageya, or the boss has lost it. It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

'This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza, especially because Israel’s antirocket attacks in previous years had been more measured.'Ethan Bronner, 'Parsing Gains of Gaza War,’ New York Times 18 January 2009.

That verb hishtageya comes from the same root as nishtagea ('We'll go mad') which a shocked Moshe Sharett recorded in his diaries where he confided a remark he'd heard from Pinhas Lavon back in the 50s. The point was, if Israel felt 'crossed' in any way, it should adopt a policy of, we'd say now 'shock and awe', reacting by coolly going completely off the handle, to put the wind up everyone or, as Moshe Dayan put it, act like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother. That was the thinking behind the Dahiya doctrine (1982 Lebanese invarion onwards) and the Samson Option.

It might look quite creative, a sort of apocalyptic endgame response that completely jumps the step-by-step theories of managing conflict escalation, but it has roots that go way back, not to anything 'Israeli' but to the Yishuv's adoption of the British imperial model of suppressing rebel uprisings by attacking the whole civilian society where the rebels were embedded. Yishuv militants were trained to do that in the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, under people like that nutter Orde Wingate. I noted early today that Rashid Khalidi drew the same comparison in his Guardian article today, on the historic roots of the present Israeli war on Gaza:

Another shift rooted in the military fiasco of 7 October is that it represents the temporary collapse of Israel’s security doctrine. This is often misnamed “deterrence”, but it is in fact derived from the aggressive approach first taught to the founders of Israel’s armed forces – officers such as Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Sadeh, chosen members of the Haganah and Palmach militias who were trained in the late 1930s by veteran British colonial counter-insurgency experts. 'The doctrine holds that by attacking pre-emptively or in a retaliatory fashion with overwhelming force, and by striking directly at civilian populations considered supportive of insurgents, the enemy can be decisively defeated, permanently intimidated and forced to accept the terms of the coloniser. In the past, where Gaza was concerned, this doctrine – described by Israeli analysts as “mowing the lawn” – involved periodically pounding the population and killing large numbers of them to force them to accept a status quo of siege and blockade that has lasted for 17 years.' Rashid Khalidi, ‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine,' The Guardian 11 April 2024

Of course, in all this, those who don't speedread history via snippets and newsheadlines or the obiter dicta of talking heads, will connect all this to earlier aspects of Zionism, Max Nordau's Muscular Judaism and later to Zeev Jabotinsky's seminal Iron Wall essay where he argues, with penetrating realism the necessity for Zionism, if it is to transform an overwhelmingly Arab society into Greater Israel, to override the will of the Arab majority (and he openly admitted that the Arabs had understood from the beginning that Zionism was an existential threat to their own aspirations) by facing it down with an 'iron wall of Jewish bayonets' (manu militari).

These are some of the many dots that are rarely connected in RS. I admire Jabotinsky for his intellectual honesty which dismissed all the 'vegetarian' waffle of public Zionist spokesmen with their wooing of the global public by talking about accommodations, negotiations and roadmaps to a fair settlement between equally fair claims. Unfortunately, his humanitarian instincts and concern for an eventual equality with, not dispersal of, Palestinians was ignored as fine print and only the realist violence found a receptive hearing in his heirs. History is made and remade by political actors who know nothing of history, willingly so, since they would be forced to think several times and over the long term instead of invariably blundering optimistically into the next imaginary future where all our problems will be definitively resolved- in the sense that they will remain more or less as they were, only not recognizable as such.Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Idk if you looked, there are three articles in the series, 1, 2 is the one above and here is 3. Selfstudier (talk) 17:05, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks again. I've been rather busy in RL, since it's spring, and I have to sodbust, prepare vegetable beds, cut bamboo props, mow lawns that do not consist of Gazan weeds and, just until now, conduct a substantial burnoff without burning the neighbourhood (minor collateral damage if my own home and patch remains sweet and trim?). Time to slake my thirst at the local boozer. I'll look into it tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 17:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Done my burning, not allowed past end March.Selfstudier (talk) 17:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Same here, but an all but smokeless set of small fires, lasting a half an hour each, in invisible corners of my 4 gardens, within a valley with few residents (who don't object) though siding on the village centre, at an hour when the cops go off duty, with a water pumnp nearby, and the ashes doused before evening, and, well, I succumb to a rational delinquency. Nishidani (talk) 19:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Germany's Betätigungsverbot and banning of free speech re Palestine

• The growing frequency of Germany police crackdowns on any form of manifesting solidarity for, or even publicly discussing, the issues of Israel's treatment of Palestinians suggests there might be an article covering this recent phenomenon. Slavoj Žižek described with exasperation the state of the German crackdown by saying that one is almost at risk of being arrested there if you repeat statements critical of Israeli policies made by the former heads of Shin Bet, 1.03 minutes into the youtube presentation of Deluge: Gaza and Israel From Crisis to Catastrophe'.The chapter by Colter Louwerse apparently contained a detail archival reconstruction of the diplomatic prelude to Operation Cast Lead (Hamas had in this interpretation, consistently sought a return to the status quo ante ceasefire (which Israel had broken) It should become when available a resource for the background on that article. On Dec 27, 11:30 in a fews minutes Israel dropped 100 tons of bombs on Gaza killing 300 people. He compares that to 7 October.Nishidani (talk) 16:59, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

• Yanis Varoufakis here, i.e. addio Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
• idem Ghassan Abu-SittahNishidani (talk) 08:15, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
• idem Nancy Fraser here Nishidani (talk) 08:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

• (2) The situation is even more drastic in Israel, as we learn with greater detail, thanks also to a courageous letter cowritten by our fellow wikipedian Shira Klein in Haaretz (Shira Klein and Lior Sternfeld, Students Are at the Forefront of Israeli McCarthyism (Instead of taking on the role of resistance, rebellion,and challenging conventions – as students do in other countries – in Israel, the students are leading the censorship enterprise Haaretz 17 April 2024)

The two cases, together with several notable instances of extreme pressure in the US academies to break with tradition and muzzle dissent over what is being permitted in Gaza, suggest that we need an article on the phenomenon, something along the lines of "(Neo-)McCarthyism in the Hamas Israel war", enabled I believe by the toxic influence of the soi-disant International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition (a political construct) on the political imagination these last decades in its parlous subtextual conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism/criticism of Israel's human rights record.Nishidani (talk) 15:32, 19 April 2024 (UTC) On the conflation or distinction there was an interesting clash between Paolo Mieli, one of Italy's foremost popular historians, and the art historian Tomaso Montanari on La7. Mieli could not imagine that anti-Zionism might not be antisemitic as opposed to Montanari who vigorously defended the necessity of distinguishing the two. Mieli narrowly defined anti-Zionism as a denial of the right of Jews to national self-determination, a recourse to the default language.*(note) Anti-Zionism (as opposed to anti-Israelism, which is inherently antisemitic) in the broad acceptance arguably consists in a critique of Zionism as an ideology which in practice denies the rights of Palestinians to self-determination and a state of their own.Nishidani (talk) 15:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC) *note. On this meme see Peter Beinart'a sensible deconstruction, There Is No Right to a State Jewish Currents 27 January 2021.

• The Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt Outside the Box Podcast, 18 April 2024 A critique of the lack, in their view, in the US mainstream media, esp.The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, of any information about Palestine. Surprisingly, both consider alternative media like Mondoweiss, The Greyzone, and the Electronic Intifada - consistently held hostage on wikipedia as unreliable RS, close to deprecation - as important sources of information. Nishidani (talk) 17:57, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
• Omer Bartov, Raz Segal, Jelena Subotić,'Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the Siege of Gaza,' Jewish Currents podcast A very trenchant discussion on the profound intertwining of Holocaust memory, its weaponizing and relation to Germany's crackdown on dissent, and the denial of the idea Israel might be engaged in genocide in Gaza.Nishidani (talk) 16:09, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

What is the likely international response to warrants being issued? Israel and its supporters will react furiously. Most consequentially, the US Republican party will pursue sanctions against members of the ICC. Such sanctions were imposed by the Trump administration, and a group of a dozen Republican senators wrote a letter to Khan earlier this month warning his office: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Julian Borger, 'Will the ICC approve arrest warrants for Israel and Hamas leaders?,' The Guardian 20 May 2024

Another example of the most extraordinary things being reported without an eyebrow raised, or eliciting a storm of controversy. The letter in question was apparently sent some three weeks ago without a stir, and I for one never noted any coverage, until today as his decision was rendered public. A political party is making a direct public threat to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan that he will be directly sanctioned by a state if he performs his duties as a prosecutor without fear or favour.Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

It is also expected that Israel will encourage US Republicans to reimpose sanctions on ICC officials, and urge ICC-signatory allies to pressure the court into preventing warrants from being issued.' Bethan McKernan, Israel calls on ‘civilised nations’ to boycott ICC arrest warrants against its leaders The Guardian 21 May 2024.

I.e. Another undisguised public admission, the politicization of the rule of law, that it is now legitimate to form a pressure group/lobby for the purpose of threatening or impeding one of the highest independent judicial bodies in the 'civilised' world from carrying out its functions in terms of what international law stipulates, regardless of the fallout.Nishidani (talk) 16:48, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

• Richard Luscombe, Outrage over police violence at pro-Palestine rally in Brooklyn The Guardian 20 May 2024. I.e. zero tolerance of any display of pro-Palestinian sympathies in New York, with police thrashing people already detained. Nishidani (talk) 20:02, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
• Peter Beaumont , Israeli officials seize camera from US news agency, cutting live feed of Gaza The Guardian 21 May 2024

Since revoked after wave of outrage.

The most lucid voice in the panicky shouting over the ICC's arrest warrant case for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.Kenneth Roth, 'Why is the West defending Israel after the ICC’s request for Netanyahu’s arrest warrant?,' The Guardian 21 May 2024

• So now Ilan Pappé was detained at Detroit airport, interrogated over his Muslim contacts and had the whole of his Iphone contents downloaded by Homeland Security agents. Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and “Collapse of the Zionist Project” Democracy Now 21 May 2024. Everyday since 7 October, something that sounds so 'Sovietic' to old ears, is happening in the 'civilised West'.Nishidani (talk) 21:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

See now Chip Gibbons,US surveillance of pro-Palestinian speech has a direct line to McCarthyism The Guardian 22 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 09:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Now that we have massive evidence of (a) the breaking of the First Amendment clause re free speech with (b) massive clampdowns on student protests (c) the arrest or forced resignation of academics and others in the US and Israeli for expressing their views (d) the extension of these practices to Europe (e) the close of Al Jazeera in Gaza/Israel and the seizure of Associated Press equipment allowing a glimpse of the actual war, and (e) mainstream documentation of the heavy financial threats of defunding of universities or political campaigns which express criticism of Israel an article along the lines of Censorship in the 2023-2024 Israeli-Gaza War seems almost obligatory, if it doesn't already exist. Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

• Amira Hass, Haaretz Investigation | Israeli Army's Extortion Campaign Against Gazans: 'Contact Us or We'll Say You Reported Your Neighbors to Hamas' Haaretz 22 May 2024

This does not strictly fall within the parameters of clamping down on dissent. Rather, the obverse: coopting Gazans as 'collaborators', by threatening them with certain death if they do not comply, by directly informing the Hamas authorities that they have, for whatever reason, putatively, been forced to 'spy' for Israel (you can be denied treatment for cancer etc., which often requires permission to enter Israel, unless you reply to Israeli requests for information about your neighbours etc.) Nishidani (talk) 14:03, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

• “The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation. What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence.” David Shulman, Israel: The Way Out, New York Review of Books May 9, 2024

• This however would fall within the ambit of the article suggested, i.e.

In 2023, the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 613 articles by media outlets in Israel, setting a new record for the period since . .2011. The censor also redacted parts of a further 2,703 articles, representing the highest figure since 2014. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of nine times a day. . . These regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact articles submitted to it, as well as those already published without its review. No other self-proclaimed “Western democracy” operates a similar institution. . . media outlets are prohibited from revealing the censor’s interference — by marking where an article has been redacted, for instance — which leaves most of its activity in the shadows.' Haggai Matar, Israeli military censor bans highest number of articles in over a decade +972 magazine 20 May 2024

• So would this, a report on the punitive self-reflection 'assignments' students at New York University are expected to do for being morally upset to the point of protest that 46,000 people have been killed (36,000+10,000 missing) and over 80,000 injured in Gaza.

The assignments include a five- to six-page “reflection paper” to be written by students in a specified font, with prompts like “what have you done or need still to do to make things right?” Students are asked to list “who was affected by the incident” that led to the disciplinary action, including “society as a whole” and “property.” Other student protesters are being required to complete modules in a 49-page "Ethos Integrity Series" that seeks to teach them about “moral reasoning” and “ethical decision-making.” They must rank a list of 42 values, including patriotism, family, and security and safety, in order of importance to them. . . Students are also directed to read the Wikipedia page for the Bible’s Ten Commandments and watch the “Lisa Gets An A” episode from “The Simpsons,” in which Lisa cheats on an exam. NYU spokesperson John Beckman did not answer specific questions about the assignments but said in a statement: “Reflecting on the consequences of your actions is a vital lesson, which is why educational assignments in student discipline cases are common throughout higher education. These kinds of sanctions, which ask students to think about the impact of the choices they're making, are often in lieu of suspension.”Matt Katz, [2] Gothamist 15 May 2024

Beckman and his ilk are too young to recall the Red Guards' 'struggle (批鬭 pīdòu ) sessions', of which this assignment remedy is a distant, individualistic descendant, where people were hauled in to engage in a public confession of their thought crimes and behavioural deviations, as expressed in dissent from Maoism. The fact that a wiki biblical article is cited as a 'must read' piece for student ethics should be mentioned in the appropriate wiki article on mentions of this encyclopedia in the news, wherever it is. Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

• (1)Ben Samuels, You Don't Stand With Israel, We'll Work to Defeat You': AIPAC and RJC Enter GOP Primaries Fray,' Haaretz 26 May 2024

I.e. if you are not loyal to Israel, you may not represent the United States, but

• (2)"Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to their interests of their own nation is listed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance as an example of contemporary antisemitism in public life.""US House of Representatives votes to condemn antisemitism after Ilhan Omar's 'Israel loyalty' remarks" The Jewish Chronicle 8 March 2019.

I.e.It is antisemitic to suggest American Jewish citizens (AIPAC members above for example) might be more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Nishidani (talk) 22:46, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

• (1)Reports of a Mossad chief's direct personal threats to the former ICC prosecutor to get her to drop investigations perhaps also enter into a future article on the silencing of protests. Fatou Bensouda, and her family was reportedly directed threatened by the then Mossad director Yossi Cohen in an attempt to dissuade her from opening war crime inquiries against Israel.

The original investigative source is Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport, Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed +972 magazine 28 May 2024

• (2) Peter Beaumont, 'Journalist threatened over reporting on spy chief and ICC, Israeli newspaper say,' The Guardian 30 May 2024
• (3) Gur Megiddo, 'How Israeli Security Nixed Haaretz's Report Into Alleged Mossad Extortion of International Court Prosecutor,' Haaretz 30 May 2024 refrerring to a censored attmpt in 2022 to publish the details of Israel's intelligence operation to block the ICC.
• (4) Kenneth Roth, 'The ICC spying revelations show the Israeli government to be a lawless regime,' The Guardian 30 May 2024

I look forward to Israel or the US Republicans having a crack at Khan under the next UK government. That will end well for everybody... Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Seven years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:31, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks dear Gerda for your companionable thoughtfulness to your fellow wikipedians. To admonish or rein in my flattered gratitude I remind myself of the secondary, more exquisitely British, meaning attached to the adjective ('precious') when used to qualify a precisian: a certain someowhat obnoxious fussiness in finessing details many others would or might dismiss as either trivial or irrelevant:/)Nishidani (talk) 09:09, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Linfield

Bit baffled by that one, I removed Linfield, another returned her, and you have now removed her? I agree with that, but you seem to have a different idea? Selfstudier (talk) 22:56, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

My apologies. It's not much of an excuse to plead that, given a wild series of unforseen problems arising as I was extending hospitality, by the loan of my Rome apartment, to some French visitors (even having to find a plumber to fix an emergency when the shower heater broke down etc., etc.,) that I wrote that having managed only several hours of sleep in two days. Linfield's remarks are those of an uninformed airhead, silly because she thinks Arabs were wrongheaded to rejet, as 66% of the population, a proposal giving 30% of the population, almost all recent immigrants, the majority of the (best)land, and of no use, and I should have said that is why they should be removed. Or perhaps it's just further evidence of dementia.Nishidani (talk) 22:41, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

So they finally begin to notice

what happens every other week, and has so for almost 4 decades. Not a 'brief massacre' but a long-term one. Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

e.g. The Western media haven't ever carried images, until today (hence the outrage over what is otherwise an absolutely facet of life there), if on maginal sites, such as this (a headless child victim of one more precision strike), which Gazans have directly witnessed over the last 18 years with hundreds of children. Nishidani (talk) 22:23, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Thrall

Well deserved Selfstudier (talk) 23:24, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

May 2024

Please do not remove content or templates from pages on Wikipedia, as you did at Animal stereotypes of Jews in Palestinian discourse, without giving a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Your content removal does not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. If you only meant to make a test edit, please use your sandbox for that. Twice you have removed sourced information with no valid reason. This can be considered disruptive in a CTopic article.  // Timothy :: talk  11:48, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Come on now. Don't be silly. My edit summary said_'See talk page' where an extended set of reasons were given for the general mess of that page and specifically the rationale for removing the nonsense I took out. per WP:Synth, a nonsense apparently in sourcing to Bernard Lewis a view he does not entertain.Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

The disruption there consists in the editor, whom you support, consistently misconstruing sources. Source distortion is a reportable offence, particularly when it appears to form a pattern.Nishidani (talk) 13:32, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

A maths teacher in Gaza

Eman Mohamed, Rafah refugees are pouring into our starving, overcrowded city – and we hope they keep coming The Guardian 14 May 2024

Among other things, he recounts that of his class of bright girl students aged 11-16, - yes, they study in Gaza - 9 have been murdered, or as he politely puts it, 'killed', under the relentless bombings. Over the border, this means nothing to most: I assume these people are insignificant compared to the history of Jewish suffering taught there. Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

ps. Apparently some kindergarten students are spewing Nazi propaganda, around 59 minutes in, but also on the death of the Gaza teacher and poet Refaat Alareer. Nishidani (talk) 23:15, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Déjà vudoo or plus ça change מה־שהיה הוא שיהיה

(All things are wearisome, more than one can describe) . .The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; (and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun).Ecclesiastes 1:8-9

Suddenly he [Biden] said: “What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated.” I was certain, recounted Begin, that this was a continuation of his attack against us, but Biden continued: “It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’” Menachem Begin referring to his encounter with Joe Biden during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which unilaterally broke with a ceasefire agreement that had held up for several months and killed 19,000 Lebanese.

Ben Burgis, In the ’80s, Joe Biden Speculated to Israel’s PM About Wiping Out Canadians, Jacobin 22 October 2023 Nishidani (talk) 08:15, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

One recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that America needs “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.” David Brooks,The Authoritarians Have the Momentum New York Times 16 May 2024

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12. “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.” Megan K. Stack, The View Within Israel Turns Bleak New York Times 16 May 2024

Comment: There is almost no non-toxic drinking water in Gaza, and bathing to clean off the dust of bombings and the sweat of fear, not to speak of toilet needs, is the only means of not surviving befouled. And one dries oneself in the sun. because salty towels - the last commodity to pack on a donkey as one is endlessly exhorted to move on -cannot be washed in clean water. if this quiet holocaust has no meaning, then why teach the Holocaust? Nishidani (talk) 08:34, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Raja Shehadeh's Occupier's Law:Israel and the West Bank, came out in 1988, and in the last 20 years a mass of books, and NGO documents have completed the picture. Now, some 36 years later, the New York Times is writing up a 'scoop' about the 'dark secrets of Israeli justice' which are 'told for the first time' there (Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel, 16 May 2024). Well, that 'told for the first time' has a rider,'(told for the first time) by Israeli officials themselves.' That's new perhaps. But any reader could have ascertained these explosive revelations by simply following the academic literature that has be published and ignored for the last three decades. In Italian one says la scoperta dell'acqua calda (discovering (the existence of) hot water', (which none of those described in the article as killing or robbing Palestinians with impunity ever get into.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

• Coral Davenport, DeSantis Signs Law Deleting Climate Change From Florida Policy The New York Times 15 May 2024
• The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost. Oliver Milman, Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report The Guardian 17 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

• And yet, lucidity does pop up. Nishidani (talk) 20:28, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
• As it does magnificently in the following:-

In April 2024, during Passover, a group of American rabbis approached a border crossing in Israel. Affiliated with Rabbis for Ceasefire, the group joined Jewish Israeli activists attempting to deliver food to Gazans. One of the American rabbis told reporters at Democracy Now! that this was the only way she could imagine marking Passover, a holiday that celebrates the story of liberation from oppression and slavery. Marching to the gates of Gaza with food for starving Palestinians was consistent with Passover’s imperative to invite the hungry to every table. Atalia Omer, Many American Jews Protesting for Palestinians, Activism is a Journey Rooted in Their Jewish Values CounterPunch 23 May 2024

Pier review

The UN, Israel and the US all agreed weeks ago that aid would need to reach prewar levels of 500 lorries a day to even start addressing the scale of need. UN figures showed that over the past 10 days, only six lorries had been able to cross.

The US has anchored a temporary floating pier to a beach in north Gaza, and the UN is finalising plans to distribute aid shipped in this way, but it is less efficient and far more expensive than delivering it with vehicles via border crossings controlled by Israel.Emma Graham-Harrison, South Africa calls on ICJ to order Israel to end Rafah offensive, The Guardian 16 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 07:47, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Camels

'A camel arrested in Jerusalem for not having a permit.' This refers to the fate of Kojak, Jerusalem's most famous camel, whose owners the Abu Hawa family, could not get past bureaucratic obstacles of a permit required to get his vaccinations. 'The Israeli policy and veterinarian services hauled him away and imprisoned him in a shack near the abandoned village of Lifta.' Penny Johnson, Companions in Conflict:Animals in Occupied Palestine, Melville House 2019 ISBN 978-1-612-19743-2 p.xiii,3-4. Nishidani (talk) 13:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Recognition by Norway, Ireland and Spain

was met by just one 'argument', showing a video of hostages:'Israel’s foreign ministry said it would reprimand the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian ambassadors and show them a video of female hostages being held in captivity by Hamas..'Rory Carroll and Sam Jones, Ireland, Spain and Norway to recognise Palestinian state The Guardian 22 May 2024-05-22

Perhaps the ambassadors should reciprocally show the Foreign Ministry the following video. Nishidani (talk) 13:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Netanyahu's criticism of the ICC was not fully translated into English, but truncated, breaking off apparently to avoid the following words, a biblical quotation which, in Jonathan Ofir's reconstruction, express a desire to exterminate the 'Amalekites/Palestinians'. Ofir may be wrong in his very close, precise construal of the censored passage and its contextual resonance, Netzah Israel lo yeshaker (נצח ישראל לא ישקר: 'the Eternal One of Israel shall not lie'.1 Samuel 15:29) of course, but the exegesis strikes this reader as cogent. See Jonathan Ofir, Netanyahu’s response to the ICC invokes another genocidal biblical reference, Mondoweiss 21 May 2024

Consensual convention for leads on settlements

Hi, can you direct me to the discussion about this convention?Eladkarmel (talk) 08:51, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Ask Nableezy. This point has been made several times over the years when that formulation has been removed, and Nableezy has the details at his fingertips, while I, at this late age, still have my fingertip elsewhere, and decaying memory hasn't the force to pull it out. Nishidani (talk) 08:54, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

@Nableezy can you please direct me? (@Nishidani I hope it's okay for me to use your talk page for this) Eladkarmel (talk) 09:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

WP:Legality of Israeli settlements. nableezy - 13:15, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for filling my memory blank.Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Religion

The wording in your edit summary was excellent. I'm adding that to my "How To Say Difficult Things" list. Joyous! Noise! 14:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. It was just an allusion to William James's view that any individual's religion is essentially private. To call someone a 'Christian', 'Jew', 'Buddhist', 'Muslim' begs too many questions to be an intelligible attribute, however much this linguistic, ergo conceptual, caution is abused in our sorry times. Regards.Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Hope you're OK.

I'm a bit worried, having just seen your edit summary. "Hospitalised"? Hope it's nothing serious. --NSH001 (talk) 17:12, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Just old age making its first knock on the door of a body that's been obscenely fit for 73 years. Vertigo. Collapsed on the kitchen floor while bending to feed my cat, and couldn't get up for a while, as I vomited. As my head spun at this new experience, I made some tests: 14x18 =252, recited a poem flawlessly, so I knew it wasn't cognitive, which was the only worry. A neighbour summoned an ambulance, and they gave me a thorough checkup, scans, blood analysis, cognitive tests, heart - and concluded it was probably either benign paroxysmal positional vertigo or labyrinthitis, to be checked out with an otolaryngologist and neurologist, which I'll do. I learnt two things: my local hospital is very efficient and thorough, and (b) back on my feet, having reengineered my instinctive body movements to a slower measure (everyone complains I walk too fast etc.) I seem to be able to do what interests me,-other than reading - household tasks, gardening, etc. In any case, something like that was long overdue, and a salutary reminder to use time well, rather than kill it. Thanks for the inquiry, mate, but, for the mo', all's well, as I hope things are your way.Nishidani (talk) 18:56, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

This happened to me about 2.5 years ago. I woke up in the morning, got out of bed and walked towards the bathroom when suddenly I collapsed on the floor (fortunately I did not vomit). I managed to crawl back to bed and proceeded to describe the symptoms to my physician over the phone. He immediately diagnosed it as BPPV and emailed to me links to YouTube videos containing exercises for BPPV (the vids are easy to find on YouTube). I did the exercises and they helped to significantly alleviate some of the worst symptoms, but did not entirely eliminate all symptoms. The problem appeared to go away on its own after about 2 days and I was completely symptom-free for about a week until the BPPV reappeared (although the symptoms were somewhat milder this time compared to the first time), again I did the exercises and this time almost all the symptoms disappeared after about only 1 day. About one week later the BPPV reared its ugly head again although this time the symptoms were even slightly less pronounced than the previous time. Fortunately this was the last time I experienced BPPV or any type of vertigo.

In my case the BPPV may have occurred due to, or was exacerbated by, my habit of laying on my back in bed and reading for many hours in a row. I think keeping my head in this position for several consecutive hours may have caused some kind of disturbance with the fluids in my ear canal.

Wishing you a quick and full recovery. My cat sends his love to his granpa Nishidani and to your cat. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:56, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks IjonT. That is both very useful and consoling. A friend in Seattle gave me similar advice. I never read for more than an hour in bed, preferring an upright chair. I'll wait for the full consultancy with the local otolaryngologist before using any of the available methods, while observing myself these next few days. I went to the pub and resumed drinking, knocking down a pint to see if grog affected my walk back. Not at all, fortunately! Cat the pat spooneristically with a frisk of a soft mitten for your purring kitten. Damn it, this last runic run suggests I may have some cognitive disturbance after all :) Nishidani (talk) 22:24, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Nishi, sounds like you need to be careful in situations where you may need to change the orientation of your head, but overall your approach seems sensible. I hope the docs will be able to give you a definite diagnosis, which will help put your mind at rest. That wasn't the case with my father's last illness, where the medics (in Scotland) were unable to come up with a convincing explanation of his symptoms, and within 4 months he was dead.

Good that you don't need to travel very far to the hospital. Here, for many years, there has been a tendency to concentrate medical facilities into a smaller number of much larger hospitals. Has the advantage of "efficiency" looking at it from the hospital's POV, but outsourcing part of the cost – in time and money – to the patients, which of course gets ignored in the official reckoning. To get to the big hospital takes between 20 mins (by taxi at 3a.m.) and 100 mins (also by taxi, but during the day with 5 sets of road works along the way, and a traffic jam at every one); the main alternative is the train, which takes about an hour, including a 20-min walk at the other end (slightly longer if you're wearing a catheter). Bus is also possible, but they're slow and I just don't like them. I've become an expert on all the different ways of getting to the hospital! Next month I have a prostate-op follow-up appointment at a nearer hospital (which used to be quite good, but most of its beds have now been transferred to the main hospital). Only a ten-minute train ride away, plus some walking. The consultant has to travel there from the main hospital, so at least they're making a token effort to help reduce the hassle for patients. There is also a small local hospital, most of its beds have also been transferred, I think the only beds left are the maternity ward. There is a nurse-led unit for treating minor injuries, they have always done a superb job whenever I've needed help there. Better than the other hospitals, despite the relative lack of resources. Very impressed by the sister who runs it, highly competent medically. I once expressed some sympathy for the nurses' demand for more pay, she seemed shocked that she should be paid more money, what she wanted was more staff and more resouces (and less bureaucracy) so that she could give a better service. --NSH001 (talk) 06:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Were your father's symptoms like those I experienced? If so, then of course, something other than the condition's names could be there, e.g. Menière's disease. I don't apply to myself the urgent inquisitiveness, however, that this or that particular problem of textual interpretation tends to stir, being somewhat detached and fatalistic about the 'end thing'. On the floor, as i underwent the first dizzy spell, the verses I recited to test if my mnemonic faculty was functioning were Hilaire Belloc's The World's a Stage:-

The world's a stage. The trifling entrance fee
Is paid (by proxy) to the registrar.
The Orchestra is very loud and free
But plays no music in particular.

They do not print a programme, that I know.
The cast is large. There isn't any plot.
The acting of the piece is far below
The very worst of modernistic rot.

The only part about it I enjoy
Is what was called in English the Foray.
There will I stand apart awhile and toy
With thought, and set my cigarette alight;
And then — without returning to the play
On with my coat and out into the night.

These verses (not quite a poem, there's too much of an tacit, perhaps inadvertent narcissistic dismissal of the wonder of life, and of the pleasure of fellowship in it to qualify as poetry, but they nonetheless) capture a strong sense of fastidious unease in the world as it is shaping up, at least for a bloke of my years. Must have breakfast, but will get back to you re hospitals (and mny best auguries for the up-and-coming surgery, pal) Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

In answer to your question about my father, no, his symtoms were nothing at all like yours. I have a suspicion they might have been connected to a recent flu jab, but there is no way of proving or disproving that hypothesis. But ever since then I have eschewed the annual offer of a flu jab, and in that time (more than 25 years) I have had only a couple of minor colds, over with in 2 or three days. The hospital appointment is only a small query arising from the routine blood tests they do every 6 months for patients on blood pressure meds. I don't think it's anything serious, but we shall see. If surgery were involved, nowadays the only place they can do it is the main hospital. --NSH001 (talk) 10:38, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

I was surprised by how the local hospital responded. The Meloni government, constituted, save for two competent technicians, by dolts, dullards and ideological dingbats, is of course a disgrace: and is adopting the Republican line that health care should be privatised in order to reduce the ballooning national debt which they are vigorously adding to (only apparently a paradox). 4 million Italians have given up trying to get medical care because of the long waiting procedures (in place to incentivize people to go to expensive private clinics), and in response, with that impeccable stupidity of the new class of incompetents running the show, have cut outlays from 6.7 to 6.1% for the next two years. As in England, the only reason why you can still get appropriate care is that health care workers are, on average, morally a big cut above everyone else in society - they really work hard, despite being grossly underpaid (whenever I see, as one can't avoid seeing, celebrity articles or flashy news about the doings or 'trials' of billionaires, I think of nurses and ward workers). With half an hour an ambulance came, I had a first examination at home, then was whisked down to the hospital a few minutes away, waited just an hour, and given a thorough check-up. They didn't even ask me for my residence permit and health card, and, diagnosis made with advice to go through my local doctor for two further examinations, I walked out without paying a brass razoo (which I'd be quite happy to do, apart from being a taxpayer in a country where fiscal evasion is massive). When I had a checkup for a smoker's cough in Australia, my own country, last summer, it cost me $400 (again, happily paid, but one notes the difference). It's not that one wants a free ride. It is simply a matter of a very obvious principle. If a society in its rhetoric talks about 'community', 'rights', 'democratic values', that is all hollow if, in this fundamental sector, whether you can get adequate treatment or not for an illness depends on your ability to pay your own way, then obviously the concept of citizenship is a mirage: your survival or death, in a 'community', is directly correlated with your wealth/poverty, class/existence itself is indexed to personal assets.* Universal health care was guaranteed when Western nations were relatively poor. The massive inflation of national wealth has seen, at the same time, the dismantlement of that basic institution of existential security. But enough of this blather. Work.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

• It is the same weird mathematics of the latest Rafah bombing. Two hamas commanders were 'taken out'. Since the death toll was 45, that means 43 - mostly the children and women in those blasted tents - were acceptable 'collateral damage'. Which means that concept of proportionality in war in Israel operational terms now defines the acceptable level of killing bystanders to hit the enemy, as 95.55%. That may explain why the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto in the present Meloni government suddenly and unexpectedly attacked the behaviour of Israel this morning as 'unacceptable', stating his impression further (a position that has always been of one my own two core concerns) that by its actions 'Israel is spreading hatred, rooting hatred that will involve their children and grandchildren', i.e. complicit in feeding antisemitism. Nishidani (talk) 09:29, 27 May 2024 (UTC)