User talk:Nishidani

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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

(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

Links for troublemakers like you

Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat

Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing

Tom Reedy (talk) 21:54, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

The second's irrelevant and impertinent. I am an uncivil POV pusher, you yankee fascist.Nishidani (talk) 11:38, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

ps. I se Brian Boyd got p***sed off over the film at the Nabokov L-serve, just for the record.Nishidani (talk) 12:14, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Email disabled

Well in coincidence with the discussion on Judea & Samaria my email system is being bombarded with threatening and violent messages, so I've had to disenable it. Rejoice, o messiahs of settlement, that this small victory has been won.Nishidani (talk) 08:18, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Messiahs? Can there be more than one? Really? --MichaelNetzer (talk) 07:41, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Diff confusion

I watch the Arbcom pages but generally ignore them. For some reason I just looked at the current activity and noticed your statement. I know nothing about the disagreement or the topic, but I thought I would click a couple of links to get a taste of the issue. Anyway, I suspect your first two diffs are wrong. Did you mean these:

• Alon Shvut became the prototype for the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria
• in the West Bank, a geographical district known in Israel by the biblical term Judea and Samaria

I hope this doesn't make me a party! Johnuniq (talk) 10:39, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I had a page with several, and got confused. Thank **** for guardian angels. I hate arguing from diffs, the prospect of synthesizing an argument through decontextualized snippets is about the only thing that makes my stomach churn. Yeah, keep right out of it - this is one of the great nuisance burdens of any external editor's life, to get things rightly balanced in the I/P area, where one side has failed to show up. Thanks pal. The old are incontinent, and do appreciate the kind passerby who is furnished with dunny paper, and not reluctant to clean up.Nishidani (talk) 10:51, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

At the risk of getting further involved (and without expressing any opinion on the content!), you might like to consider wikitext like the following:

*X did this:
*:[http://www.example.com this is dummy text]
*:Note. Here is a note.
*X then did this:
*:[http://www.example.com more dummy text]
*:Note. Here is another note.
*Y then did this:
*:[http://www.example.com yet more dummy text]

Note that there are no blank lines. If wanted, the "notes" could use two colons instead of one, for extra indent. The above wikitext looks like this:

• X did this:

  this is dummy text

  Note. Here is a note.

• X then did this:

  more dummy text

  Note. Here is another note.

• Y then did this:

  yet more dummy text

Inserting a blank line does insert a pleasing amount of vertical space, but it breaks what is supposed to be a single list into multiple lists (and it destroys the use of *: which provides the appropriate indent for a bulleted list). Johnuniq (talk) 11:08, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure I screwed up somewhere again. But it looks slightly better. Remember to read the top of this page, where 'semi-retired' in the code comes out as 'semi-retarded'!, which is a generous euphemism for the state of my mind these days.:) Nishidani (talk) 11:41, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Looks good! I will reply at my talk re your stunted state. Here is another possible tweak (author on a separate line):

To provide arbitrators with a thumbnail quote from one of the world's leading authorities on this subject:

'Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for the general areas south and north of Jerusalem (respectively). Historically, they include substantial portions of pre-1967 Israel, but not the Jordan Valley or the Benyamin district (both within the West Bank). For political purposes, and despite the geographical imprecision involved, the annexationalist camp in Israel prefers to refer to the area between the green line and the Jordan River not as the West Bank, but as Judea and Samaria.

— Ian Lustick, For the land and the Lord: Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, 1988 (1994) p.205 n.4.

Johnuniq (talk) 22:44, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Hadr out of place?

This was probably not intentional, but you have changed a header line from "{{pp-semi-indef}}{{pp-move-indef}}" to "{{pp-semi-indef}}{{pp-move-indef}}Hadr" in this diff. AgadaUrbanit (talk) 20:10, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Jerusalem: Abode of Peace

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is "Jerusalem: Abode of Peace". Thank you.

1 the futility of trying to discuss this courteously and respectfully in the face of the rudeness both these editors display has convinced me to withdraw from this issue

2 I'm done with you and with Zero as I find no virtue can be had for improving an encyclopedia by interacting with either of you.

Those are your stated views, Michael. You withdrew and gave us the go-ahead. Of the 768 people who have bookmarked and watched that page, only 4 thought the issue important, and three found a compromise and resolution to the issue. You don't accept that.

Since we are considered rude, disparaging, and prone to attacking you personally even where our language dwells on the sheer technicalities of semitic philology, your invitation to reopen a closed discussion is pointless, for you don't trust our bona fides.

If third parties wish to understand the issue at that dispute page, link them to this, and ask them for an independent opinion after a close and precise reading. I won't interfere. There has been no animus or politics on my part in all this. I simply trust scholars more than editors, and am passionate about making the formers' presence in articles dominant, and the latters' invisible. Regards Nishidani (talk) 22:46, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Semi-retired?

Hi. Is this current? Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 12:19, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

G'day Boris, nice to hear from you. 'Retired' was altered to 'semi-retarded' by some joker fiddling with the template, and I really enjoyed this, which is a more precise description of my activities here. Unfortunately, political correctness and regard for the proprieties led to a restoration of the old template, and condemns me to semi-retired. I now take this to mean that my bull(shit)-dozing semi has only been partially re-tired after all the heavy wear of earlier trafficking around wikipedia, and whatever I do therefore lacks much traction, and I tend to slip into neutral as age creeps up on me.I should really extract the digit and take you and several other exemplary toilers in the field for a model - infrequent appearances, a quiet voice, and always impeccably to the point, and laconically incisive. It's just that to do this would require me to concentrate far more than I am presently capable of, and bad habits are hard to fix.Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:59, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that's flattering but hardly deserving. Anyway, I have always been a sporadic contributor, and I thought it was a bit odd that someone is obviously contributing a lot more while calling oneself semi-retired. But it is all relative, of course. BTW I prefer to always keep a dialog in one place. Isn't it a default? Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 13:23, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

In one place. Will mentally bookmark, which means I'll forget to apply the rule. I'll copy this and above to my page, and you can, if you wish, tidy up, and delete this original 'copy'. I too prefer to keep to one page, but at one point got guilty feelings that always replying on my page might look narcissistic. Too much Freud in my tender years. Best. Nishidani (talk) 14:06, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Such a thought did cross my mind, but everyone replied there, so I convinced myself that that's ok. Some people explicitly state such a rule on the top of their talk page, but I hope I can avoid this grandstanding. Cheers. - BorisG (talk) 14:11, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Replied

Please see my response to one of your comments at User talk:Nableezy#Nazareth.Thank you, EdJohnston (talk) 18:43, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Christmas-New Year

It's premature but to all those who follow this page I'd like to pass on a little known song that is one of the jewels of music. If I wait for year's end, I'll probably forget to post it. It's a poem in the Sardinian language, which I heard a week ago at my nephew's wedding - we have strong links with Sardinia. So here it is. There is also a fine rendition by Achinoam Nini. Best wishes to all for the new year.Nishidani (talk) 17:56, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Notes

• ego

I'm a pagan, so I have no horse in the race. I dislike or rather have deep suspicions about feelings of nationalism, esp. collective, that rise above the love of a landscape, food, and language. These are the prejudices I bring to edits.

Intended meaning. I am prejudiced against expressions of nationalism when I edit.

Implicit policy ref. WP:NPOV

• alter

Interpretation by the interlocutor. 'Wikipedia is not to be shaped by such a pretentious ideology that would erase most knowledge of a civilization entrenched in collective nationalism. That you admit your disdain motivates your editing is outrageous.'

The interlocutor takes my deep suspicion about nationalistic edits to be an admission that I am driven ideologically to expunge from the record one '(a) civilization entrenched in collective nationalism.'

He takes as a personal affront to his own cultural world, which he defines as 'entrenched in collective nationalism' a confession that I am wary of nationalism, esp. as a collective phenomenon.

• ego

Reply. Bewilderment. 'entrenchment in a collective nationalism' is one of the reasons that led Germany to WW2 and to the policies that executed a holocaust. The statement suggests its author edits from a perspective 'entrenched in collective nationalism', which is against policy. Worse. My dislike of collective nationalism, and suspicions about its manifestations, is evidence for him that I should not be editing this encyclopedia, for scepticism about collective nationalism is an outrageous 'ideology'. In that twisted logic, I see much that is wrong with the I/P area. But I must admire the honesty of anyone bold enough to register the obvious in such explicit terms. Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

1. "the prejudices I bring to the edits" is enough to block users from editing areas relating to their prejudice. You are required to leave prejudices out of your edit works. No feigning of neutrality as you are now attempting can undo this remark.
2. It is not my world, "his own cultural world". It is a definition of the reality of the world we live in and as such we are expected to keep our prejudice against it outside of the editing work. If you are interested in what my cultural world is about, we can discuss it sometime but I have not put it on the table for you to make assumptions about.
3. One can argue that the common excuse given for world conflicts being nationalism is a shallow ideology meant to mask deeper and more insidious motives rooted in more basic flaws of the human spirit. A lust for dominance, wealth and might are not confined to nationalistic tendencies. An ideology that singles out nationalism is what has allowed global capitalism to drive humanity into near slavery. Your confession of prejudice towards nationalism, applied to your editing here, has yielded twisted logic, tendentious distortions and combative manipulations that violate the very definition of a collaborative encyclopedia.
4. The twisted logic I've seen in our exchanges is rooted in the extraneous runaround you've dragged us into. Arguments sugar coated with scholarly intentions while concealing prejudices that make it impossible to discuss anything with any measure of reason or logic. I am certainly not impressed with a pretension of humanism that makes assumptions based on nationalistic intimations as a basis for imaginary conflicts between editors. If you've noticed, I've had no trouble making edits that conflict with the motives you erroneously construe of me.
5. Neutrality is not construed by shallow self-declarations of ideological piety. Your collective body of edits and argumentation reveals biases that motivate your every word, and speaks for itself. Much better is expected of an editor taking such a high moral ground in these environs.--MichaelNetzer (talk) 01:42, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

   Presumably the above nonsense has been posted here to extract some sanctionable response. Editors are expected to be reasonably adept at English usage, and if anyone can fail to understand Nishidani's "These are the prejudices I bring to edits", they should not be active at Wikipedia. Nishidani of course is saying he has no prejudices other than that NPOV should be observed. Johnuniq (talk) 03:03, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Your presumptions are mistaken and inflammatory. I have no intention of "extract[ing] some sanctionable response" against anyone and have said so often in discussions. If you have reason to believe I should not be active here, then by all means do try to extract such a sanction yourself. I am pointing to the severity of the editor feigning neutrality under false pretexes, e.g.:

1. "I'm a pagan, so I have no horse in the race" means the editor has a "pagan horse" in the race. No pretense of neutrality can mask this proclamation.
2. "Intended meaning. I am prejudiced against expressions of nationalism when I edit." [and] "Implicit poliy ref. WP:NPOV" cannot go together when editing an encyclopedia. If as an example, a French editor who has nothing particular against the Kurds, but dislikes nationalism, is editing an article about the Kurdish struggle for nationalistic autonomy, and dismisses content representing their position, based on his own prejudice against nationalism, the editor cannot be considered reasonably neutral to make such edits.
3. Nishidani has engaged in extensive discussions with me and dismisses scholarly sources based on his personal dislike for nationalism (and in this case only a particular one of several). The pretense of neutrality fails all measure of reason.

--MichaelNetzer (talk) 05:14, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

No, the editor does not mean what you claim he means, kindly stop distorting what others have said. You have repeatedly ignored what Nishidani has wrote, and you turn around the opposition to your clearly nationalistically driven attempt to include folklore as fact in encyclopedia articles that is being opposed because the most qualified sources on the topic disagree with your notion as being what cannot be considered reasonably neutral. At the very least, if you are going to continue insisting in distorting the record, at least do it somewhere other than here. nableezy - 05:52, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

It seems perfectly reasonable to respond here when what I've said has been quoted, misrepresented and distorted. As to the actual content of the dispute, this particular "folklore" as you call it, has been recognized in scholarly linguistic definitions. It has become embedded in academic recognition and widely acknowledged in scholarly sources. It is more pertinent to an article's lede than etymology or linguistic overkill: Encyclopedia articles should begin with a good definition and description of one topic (or a few largely or completely synonymous or otherwise highly related topics), but the article should provide other types of information about that topic as well. An encyclopedic definition is more concerned with encyclopedic knowledge (facts) rather than linguistic concerns. How often do I have to refute such obvious disregard for policy? --MichaelNetzer (talk) 06:16, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for once again demonstrating that you are willing to twist any strand of a policy that you think can be distorted into supporting your position. The Jerusalem article is about the city of Jerusalem, and the article covers more than the meaning of the word. But when discussing the meaning of the word, an encyclopedia is concerned with linguistics and history, not folklore. NOTDICT does not mean that we throw away linguistic concerns as though they were not encyclopedic knowledge. By placing Abode of peace as the English meaning of the Hebrew you are not defining a topic, you are, poorly, defining a word, a definition that most qualified sources says is not accurate. You are, intentionally, attempting to place errors of fact due to a purely nationalistic motive. That you think that those that oppose your attempt to degrade the accuracy of some of our most viewed articles is a Bad Thing™ done by a Bad Man™ is not all that important. What is important is that you think you are entitled to hold the article hostage as you distort not just the policies and guidelines but also the writings of the other editors in the discussion. How many times do you have to refute a disregard for policy? Once, but it is difficult to demonstrate that while distorting that policy and violating several others. nableezy - 13:49, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

No one is throwing out linguistic concerns and you have no idea what you're talking about. Check the facts and take off your battle gear if you want to discuss this with me. If you're looking for a fight, go somewhere else. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 16:27, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

giggle. nableezy - 16:30, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Please reconsider: I am not an opponent of whatever side you are on. All I have done is look at the parts of the discussion at DRN that led to the above comments, and the interpretations of what Nishidani said are simply not correct. All is fair in love and war, but misinterpreting "I'm a pagan, so I have no horse in the race" as above is not going to work with intelligent readers. Also, the view that disliking nationalism is a violation of NPOV is upside down (you did read the "that rise above the love of a landscape, food, and language" qualifier?). Johnuniq (talk) 06:45, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

If the comparison is between nationalism and pagananism, as Nish said, then a pagan horse is a horse, of course of course. I never said disliking nationalism is an NPOV violation. I said that saying "These are the prejudices I bring to edits" indicates a violation. Prejudices are to be kept out, regardless of what the are. One cannot claim a higher moral ground for their peculiar prejudices and use that to slant content by later claiming their prejudices are somehow miraculously neutral. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 07:20, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

If we asked, Nishidani could probably provide the correct name for the expression of English where one says something like "I have nothing to fear but fear itself", or "I am not prejudiced, except against prejudice". When someone says they dislike nationalism (that rises above the love of a landscape, food, and language), and that is their prejudice, they are skilfully using English to assert that nationalist editing (that rises above the love of a landscape, food, and language) is not generally desirable. It is highly likely that a discussion at any noticeboard would support that assertion. Johnuniq (talk) 07:46, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

You may be right as I have a fair impression of how such discussions can go. But I would still insist on how problematic Nish's wording is, especially in the overall context, which I'll try to explain. If it is such a skillful turn of a phrase to indicate what's now being claimed, then it fails, in its sophistication, to communicate clearly. Perhaps Nishidani can consider writing plainly what he means the first time, instead of needing to interpret it afterwards with convoluted reasoning. The statement made a primary allusion that Nishidani holds to a pious morality of individualism over national intimation and allows this prejudice to affect his editing. There was no indication that he intended "nationalistic editing" by other editors. He only said "nationalism". In his explanation, as if to say that Nishidani is prejudiced against my reasoning for keeping 'abode of peace' in the lead, alluding that my editing is nationalistically motivated, I am doubly astonished in that I have never made such arguments but have rather posted reliable scholarly sources in support of my position. I have further been an editor who makes edits in favor of the "other side" to help dissipate tensions, as Nish acknowledges in a recent edit on Golan Heights. On the other hand, Nishidani's attempt to remove content based on his dislike for "holy writ" of one nationality is peculiar when he takes no such position on the "holy writ" of another, such as 'Shalim' or 'Al-Quds', used in the same context. All in all, I am either left with the impression that Nishidani's communication skills are faltering, or that he is trying to mask a prejudice in his editing with "after the fact" convolutions. I would like to be more kind about this but I've found every effort to do so with Nishidani is answered with even fiercer ostracism, as the discussions show. I know this kind of thing is understandable with "old geezers", as I consider myself one also, despite Nish's flattering psuedo-fatherly portrayal. Perhaps he needs to lay down the boxing gloves already and get to work on collaborating a little more harmoniously. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 08:48, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your helpful response (although I do not totally embrace your conclusion). I have no background suitable for commenting on the meaning of "Jerusalem", but from what I have seen of Nishidani in completely unrelated topic areas, he would like to focus on scholarly sources and what they say, and if Nishidani says that certain wording is inappropriate, his reasoning warrants careful examination. If you really have a reliable academic source to contradict one of his assertions, please just ask for an explanation of why he maintains that view despite the source. You are not under an obligation to accept his response, but I guarantee that such an exchange would produce interesting information. Johnuniq (talk) 09:49, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the considerate answer. Partly embracing my conclusion is perhaps slightly better than total disagreement. At the top of the DR request is a link to a section on the Jerusalem talk page where all this began. Nishidani and I have discussed the sources extensively. His reasons for dismissing them are somewhat irrational. Some of them are in the Etymolgy section of the article already. I have tried every reasonable way to explain reservations about removing the meanings and have found little to no consideration for anything I've said. Nish's arguments have been evasive of my position and focus on slanted linguistic considerations while ignoring others that are more relevant to the opening in the lede. His arguments often turn into personal jabs stressing his superior knowledge, while also revealing an underlying discomfort with Hebrew language associations for the name. I believe his prejudice against nationalism has spilled over into this area and is being applied out of context. I don't think it's good enough to say that because Nishidani may have been right in other areas that he's right also in this one. He will need to do better than that, namely to adhere to neutrality and other guidelines, in order to gain a consensus for making a change. But if that happens, he might realize that the change he wants is a mistake that compromises the article. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 10:47, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Why don't we conduct an experiment? Try asking Nishidani why he believes X when source Y says Z. I'm sure there would be some debate about whether the words you use to describe X are agreed, and then there would be a need to verify what Y actually says. After all that is settled, we could evaluate Nishidani's reasons. Johnuniq (talk) 11:05, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Alright. Let's do these one at a time. Here's the first source. [1] Nishidani can explain why he dismisses this source and we'll pick it up from there. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 16:27, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Already exhaustively explained, with Zero's support, here. though I omitted adding the obvious, that a blog fails WP:RS. No need to pick it up again. Since the arguments have been exhausted.Nishidani (talk) 23:12, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Nishidani's answer underscores his astonishing and unfounded disregard for a first degree reliable scholarly source. Let us first review the organization behind the blog:

• The Center for Conflict Studies is an academic organization of peer-reviewed scholarly research and dissemination of knowledge: "Our task is to create the space and the resources for knowledge acquisition."
• CCS is adopted and recognized by the George Mason University, The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Commonwealth Center for Excellence. The university also profiles CCS founder with due academic recognition and regard.
• CCS founder, assistant professor Pushpa Iyer, heads the program within the framework of the Monterey Institue for International Studies and is lauded there for her academic achievements.
• CCS publishes its peer-reviewed journals in a primary venue magazine featured on its website, Reflections, a peer-reviewed platform for dissemination of knowledge and research on conflict studies, likewise recognized by the George Mason University, The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Commonwealth Center for Excellence. It also publishes Wandering Thoughts blog, "an online forum that provides the opportunity to share and discuss opinions on current conflict issues and events.'
• As such, the CCS blog, Wandering Thoughts qualifies as a Magazine Blog, under the qualification "These are acceptable as sources if the writers are professionals and the blog is subject to the newspaper's [or Magazine's as in title of guideline] full editorial control. The blog clearly meets these qualifications and is thus considered a reliable source for this purpose.
• Nishidani and Zero's primary reason for rejecting this source, and their "exhaustive" explanation, raises further astonishment in light of Nishidani's penchant for linguistics. The sentence in question in the relevant cited source reads as follows: "Translated from Hebrew, ‘Jerusalem’ means ‘Abode of Peace’, while in Arabic it means ‘The Holy Sanctuary’." Nishidani and Zero take offense at the wording as if to say that Denise DeGarmo, "a professor of international relations at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville." cannot distinguish between Arabic and Hebrew or has worded her statement carelessly, thus disqualifying the source.
• The professor's concise wording cannot be construed as a mistake by someone like Nisidani, who has repeatedly expressed his admiration for linguistic innovation. There can be no doubt that the professor crafted her sentence to do away with unnecessary words in order to make her point clear. There can be no doubt that her sentence, when expanded to illustrate what it clearly says: "Translated from Hebrew, ‘Jerusalem’ means ‘Abode of Peace’, while in Arabic [Al-Quds] it means ‘The Holy Sanctuary’." is a well crafted statement that concisely reflects academic recognition for both meanings that now appear in the lede of the article.
• In light of all this, I invite everyone to revisit Nishidani and Zero's rejection of this source and ask them to explain whether they are truly serious about it. If needed, this source will be taken to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard to clarify this careless and astonishing disregard for a reliable source of the first degree.

--MichaelNetzer (talk) 04:15, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

‘unfounded disregard’; ‘take offense’; ‘his admiration for linguistic innovation’(?); ‘careless disregard’, etc. As Johnuniq correctly suggested, you should have taken this to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard long, long ago. If you do now, please provide better arguments, because nothing above supports your contention that one poorly phrased, indeed in terms of grammar, absurd remark in a blog conveying a casual impression of a trip to Jerusalem made by a Professor of International Relations proves that 'Abode of peace' is the default meaning of Yerushalayim. Good luck Nishidani (talk) 11:43, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Please pay attention Nishidani because you persist on making one mistake after the other. That was my suggestion to go to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, not Johnuiq's. I've tried everything possible to discuss and explain my reservation about your opinion and I've resisted seeking outside intervention in hopes we could work it out. I'm the one who suggested it because your response leaves no door open for considering anything I say. You ridicule a professor who understands what they're saying about the words they use, as if they're incompetent to acknowledge the common meaning of an name repeated in many scholarly sources and you expect me not to explain how flawed that is? Sorry. No one said "proves" anything. It's one of many sources and a fine supporting one at that. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 13:38, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh, at last a triumphal vindication of your thesis that Nishidani misreads and makes world-shaking mistakes!

Michael, check the tense used in what I wrote:

As Johnuniq correctly suggested, you should have taken this to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard long, long ago.

Johnuniq wrote:

'Better would have been to ask for opinions on the issue (who cares whether a blog is a suitable source—what matters is the meaning of the term and whether it needs to be mentioned in the lead), and to ask if anyone knew a better source.' 07:46, 21 December 2011‎

Clearly he is not asking people at those discussions, but people external to them in the wider community on boards that specialize in these questions.

Both Johnuniq and I, in citing him, used a conditional past tense, i.e., we employed a modal verb in the past tense to suggest what you should have done had you disagreed with what Zero and myself wrote about your putative perfect source. Johnuniq was not explicit in citing the forum which you had already alluded to, re your intention to take it to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard 3 and a half hours earlier. In reply, Johnuniq simply suggested you should have asked around for outside opinions on this this earlier, i.e., you should have, procedurally, gone to the forum you had mentioned much earlier.

All this is intensely Horatian piddling. Go ahead, use the next forum to rehearse the case you alone are convinced of. 'Rehearse,' because the corpse of this moribund process will be hauled once more to a happy hunting ground, only to be reburied.:) (forgive the touch of sarcasm and sardonic punning, but no one should be asked to WP:AGF to the degree your quibbling longueurs require. Another half hour wasted, instead of washing the labourers' dust off my living room floor, now that the new chimney's been built.

ps. Add: 'you ridicule a professor' to the list of phrases used to 'spin' my arguments in your retelling as though they were expressions of negative emotional states.Nishidani (talk) 15:27, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I was hoping for a more meaningful question, expressed with more grace. Instead, you produced an issue that has recently and exhaustively been explained at Talk:Jerusalem#Abode of Peace (suggestion: count the number of editors who agreed with you). More disappointingly, you ask why a blog has been dismissed as a source, after the comprehensive explanation that a blog fails WP:RS, and that the careless/carefree wording showed that the source was not suitable. The attempts above to justify the blog as a reliable source completely miss the point of Wikipedia: editors should not be here to win an argument, and articles should not use a whimsical blog (regardless of the credentials of its author) to support a claim about the meaning of a term—use a scholarly source free of careless/carefree wording. If you had understood Nishidani's initial response to the wording in the blog, you could have conceded that the author was taking a liberty, but assert that the meaning could be inferred. Better would have been to ask for opinions on the issue (who cares whether a blog is a suitable source—what matters is the meaning of the term and whether it needs to be mentioned in the lead), and to ask if anyone knew a better source. No doubt you will have a long reason why my concerns should be dismissed. Please understand the purpose of Wikipedia: you do not have to have the last word, nor is there a need to win every argument—that is not why we are here. Instead, wait for a new topic and, while expressing your views, ask what dissenting editors are getting at, and engage with their responses. Johnuniq (talk) 07:45, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I must say I'm perplexed by your response. I believe what Nishidani is getting at is already well understood and I tried to answer it as gracefully as possible. You seem to believe his response is not open for debate. Fine. But that disqualifies you as a neutral arbitrator. Could it be that nothing I said above is considerable or correct? I've posted links and explanations and they mean nothing to you or Nishidani and are not open for discussion? And you make insinuations that I don't understand Nishidani and cast aversions on my efforts to explain myself as "long responses". What makes you believe what you do so absolutely? Why are you so 100% one sided for a neutral observer? Look. I'm not trying to win anything. I'm asking for some consideration other than flat out rejection of everything I say. You have not shown such a capacity and it's doubly disappointing in that you try to posture yourself as a neutral arbitrator when you've already declared agreement to most anything Nishidani says based on previous encounters with him. I'm sorry. Your position and response are very flawed. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 13:38, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I’ve thought twice about replying, Michael, because you are prolix in saying what you think you think, but, in my experience, don’t attend to what others say in reply. You are not attentive to the way language functions, and when you are taken up for loosely expressing yourself, you just keep up modulating the thought in a defensive fashion that denies you were careless, while insinuating your interlocutor misunderstood. Since we must interact, I have little option but to explain once more why you give me the impression that you read beyond, or beneath or over what is said, suspecting that I or anyone else disagreeing with you is saying more than they actually say. You by turns always assert you meant less than what you wrote. Also, you seem to be both worrying the life out of a nonsense of your own invention, on a page where I just noted something that struck me as odd, and worry others who have better things to do than defend my bona fides, however much I appreciate their remarks.

• I wrote:

(A)I'm a pagan, so I have no horse in the race. I dislike or rather have deep suspicions about feelings of nationalism, esp. collective, that rise above the love of a landscape, food, and language. These are the prejudices I bring to edits.

• You interpreted this to mean:

(B)'Wikipedia is not to be shaped by such a pretentious ideology that would erase most knowledge of a civilization entrenched in collective nationalism. That you admit your disdain motivates your editing is outrageous.'

• I interpreted the gist of your remark thus:

(C) He takes as a personal affront to his own cultural world, which he defines as 'entrenched in collective nationalism' a confession that I am wary of nationalism, esp. as a collective phenomenon.

• You denied this interpretation, as is your right, with the following justification

(D)It is not my world, "his own cultural world". It is a definition of ‘the reality of the world we live in’, and as such we are expected to keep our prejudice against it outside of the editing work

In this version ‘a civilization entrenched in collective nationalism’ is a ‘definition of the reality of the world we (all of us) live in’, and absolutely not a reference to his Michael's cultural world or milieu, i.e., Judaism. I misread, you say.

But I didn’t because, in the exchange with Johnuniq, you subsequently wrote of:-

(E)Nishidani's attempt to remove content based on his dislike for "holy writ" of one nationality.'

I.e. my interpretation of your curious phrase ‘a civilization entrenched in collective nationalism.’ (a here means 'one of many', and therefore one culture not the global civilization we all live in as a shared reality) turns out to be correct, by your own admission, since in a later formulation you rephrase my ‘attack’ as a reference to the ‘holy writ of one nationality’.

And, just for the record the Bible or Tanakh is not the holy writ of one nationality. It is the universal patrimony of world civilization, and of numerous ‘nationalities’ or groups who subscribe, for example, to Christianity, which grew out of Judaism, as a dissident sect of that faith, and whose founder, and earlier apostles, were Jewish. The Bible, “holy writ” is not the exclusive possession of one nationality. It is an integral part of the authentic cultural patrimony of the Christian world, which is multinational, speaking once more, if I may, as a "prejudiced" "pagan".(Please note that there is a rhetorical device called irony, which means 'dissimulation' in classical Greek. I dissimulated what I consider a 'virtue' by mocking it by its antonym, which is a vice.)

Clarified? Please don’t turn this into an excuse for blogging on the world.Nishidani (talk) 14:16, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

For someone who's so sharp to construe what others mean, Nishidani, you certainly have missed the mark about everything I've said. I think enough peripherals have been hashed out here. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 16:27, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Sincerly, Mike, I took pleasure in the way you ended this. The choice of 'sharp to' as opposed to what a reader might expect 'sharp at' makes a world of ironical difference. Language is a wonderful thing, full of nuance, and when I see it, whatever the disagreements, I applaud the author.Nishidani (talk) 18:41, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

It is a reciprocal sentiment indeed, good sir. Thank you. --MichaelNetzer (talk) 04:15, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Give me 10 minutes please

I've lost reams of text due to edit conflicts. Tom Reedy (talk) 22:59, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

OK I'm good bro! Tom Reedy (talk) 23:06, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

MN

Stop paying attention, the user is clearly operating in bad faith with the intention of causing some reaction to his incredibly tendentious argumentation that could result in a ban. Just ignore him, consensus does not require his acceptance. nableezy - 14:13, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

You think anything should be added here? nableezy - 19:06, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I know you are a pertinacious stickler for the rules because you think only their exact application will stop this area from collapsing into utter chaos. I don't think Michael is acting in bad faith. It's something worse, he is acting as as true believer in his own POV, in disregard of sources. You can bring round to a compromise even those who act in bad faith. I know also that attrition, which is what is occurring tends to be explained mostly as a mere gaming tactic in bad faith. The argumentation is tendentious, and markedly flawed, but Michael is undoubtedly sincere in his conviction that everyone is out of step but himself.

Given his clean sheet (my presumption, I haven't checked) any serious ban is out of the question and should not be called for. I would suggest that you offer him the option of asking for a third opinion, and/or going to WP:RS to see if he can muster any support for his extremely isolated and idiosyncratic interpretations of a very simple, straightforward issue. He certainly should not have reverted a consensus reconfirmed after almost three weeks in which he has failed to persuade anyone he has had the better in what has been an endless succession of repetitive arguments. Since you asked, in any case, I rewrote your MN sketch, to get rid of adjectives, emotions and rhetoric. These expositions should have the brevity, evidential neatness, and neutrality of a legal brief, which probably explains why I have never had recourse to A/I or A/E to make a complaint.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Happy Xmas

	Merry Christmas
	From me, a happy NSW Xmas bush Xmas from us all down here in Oz (damn, should have 5x expanded that for this Xmas...is there still time I wonder....) Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:51, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Merry Christmas Nishidani. Thanks for the note on Jebus. Hope your self imposed ban ends soon because I don't have the time to add what you are proposing as interesting as it is. Glad that Bethlehem reaches out beyond its walls to touch your celebrations ... I spent Christmas there two years ago and loved it. Its. very special and charming town, even more so than Nazareth ... kind of reminds me of how Nazareth might have been before it became a place triple its size overnight in the wake of 1948. Nazareth hasn't made the transition to city as much as it has to refugee camp ... but then Bethlehem for all its charms to those with privileged passports is in fact a ghetto for its inhabitants. Perhaps the future will bring better days or all? Tiamut^talk 18:16, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I know of that firsthand. Ask any Palestinian hotelier about how much his water bill, taken from the Palestinian hills, costs him compared to what settlements pay, etc. And what happens to the mains when it's hot, etc. One group I accompanied was so shocked by what they saw and heard there, that they organized themselves to help with funding projects on their return home. And politically, they are and remain nice, decent right-wing Christians, (unlike myself).And of course my very best to you and yours.Nishidani (talk) 18:40, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Greetings etc.

Hi Nishidani,

I'd like to add my good wishes to the others you received. Also, you might be interested in this thread on my talk page. I have nothing to add to your comment on my behalf at the article talk page.--Peter cohen (talk) 17:02, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Bit late for Hanukkah greetings, Pete, but my best wishes for a prosperous, intelligent New Year. I'd drop a note there were it not for the fact that this only seems to stoke more discussions on more pages in an endless expanding galaxy of pages where one man's view angles for the world's attention. I absolutely hate AE and A/I complaints, but I'll get round to putting one in. I'll try to restrain myself and not engage, and thereby further feed the farce.Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I quite understand. He's Vere-tably similar to another editor I can think of. Thanks for the good wishes.--Peter cohen (talk) 19:29, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Peter, could you do me a favour while I'm selfbanned to mid Jan? Just read that Elias Canetti was the model for Mischa Fox in Iris Murdoch's Flight from the Enchanter. Could you add, 'his friend Elias Canetti, was the model for Mischa Fox in the same novel' ref. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, Vintage Books, New York 1980 pp.184-185 close ref, to note ii of the Franz Baermann Steiner article? Sorry for the bother.Best Nishidani (talk) 21:08, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Done. I need some way to stop your number of edits running away from mine. Weren't you at 13000 when you tried retiring?--Peter cohen (talk) 00:07, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

BTW, I've unwatched the article. I'm wanting to reduce my watchlist to a manageable size and am pruning those articles that I don't feel worth listing on my user page as having had more than a minimal contribution. So if anyone queries this edit it's in your court.--Peter cohen (talk) 01:18, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

No problem. I have to get my number of contributions up somehow.

Processing my watchlist is actually surprising. Every now and then I find I contributed more content to an article than anyone else without realising it. (Not very big articles, mind you.)

AEs

Yo, if I could you ask you nicely, try not to get involved in the AEs in which I am subject. Thanks, nableezy - 07:40, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

And please dont take that the wrong way, I appreciate your input and advice, but I would rather you leave it at my talk page. I dont think involved users should be commenting except for presenting evidence, either for or against, that had not been presented. I object when "they" do it, so I have to also say that I would rather it not be done by people who, for whatever reason, are associated as being on "my side". nableezy - 08:53, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

That's more than fair, indeed admirable, since I broke my own rule, which is the same as the one you mention here, in dropping my notes. I'll shut up. Nishidani (talk) 09:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I broke my given word, in what I call in my own private language, the St.Peter's square obelisk syndrome. Probably, since you're more faithful to rules than I, you should revert my last comments there. I won't say 'sorry'.Nishidani (talk) 17:27, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Hello Nishidani. The level of diplomacy you have shown in disputed areas is worthy of emulation by others. Thank you, EdJohnston (talk) 17:47, 28 December 2011 (UTC)