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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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Notes, comments and suggestions for my reflections from fellow wikipedians

Heh, I knew that link would get you going :) Good stuff. Selfstudier (talk) 10:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I've been a longtime supporter of dividing Wikipedia articles according to the topic rather than the name (what they are called) I think you are right that "Holocaust" has multiple meanings which each deserve their own article (personally I would divide into 1) persecution and murder of Jews from 1933 to 1945 and 2) mass killings perpetrated by Nazi Germany from 1939-1945). For better or worse, the more commonplace usage of "Holocaust" in high-quality reliable sources is the former, so IMO the best solution is to write article #2 and put a hatnote to it on the Holocaust article. (t · c) buidhe 10:04, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

1. 1 would be shoah, as defined above. I dislike it because history cannot be done in terms of a single ethnic victim or party, and shoah thus defined is somewhat weird in using that arc of time as if it were a self-contained unit for analysis (How would one fit into that narrative the split between Zionist accommodations to the New Order and the diasporic communities' abhorrence of any compromise, etc. Getting Jews out of Europe was one thing both Zionists and Nazis agreed on). I just take the articles as they are, since I know any serious attempt to put them on a rational scholarly footing will just end up in a bunfight of editwarring, and in the circs, the best one can do is add gradually enough cogent factual details that somewhere down the line a tipping point will be met demanding a rewrite of the articles.Nishidani (talk) 22:32, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

(a)Basically my purpose here is to clarify important meta-discursive contexts and elements that are not well-known generally on wikipedia, but which should be taken into consideration, - something like Michael Polyani’s tacit knowledge- in addressing the issues Arbcom is faced with. Since I consider that the restrictive scope of their enquiry is methodologically flawed, since by excluding a range of potential evidence (the competence of G&K’s paper as an authoritative source for the state of research in the given scholarly field), it will tend to preempt equally viable alternative conclusions. If, for example, it can be shown that on several occasions G&K have skewed the evidence ( elicited to buttress their claims and inferences about the motives of real people identified as editing wiki), either regarding the standing as reliable or unreliable, of RS, or have caricatured by selective simplifications the very complex positions adopted over numerous articles by the editors they indict, then they would emerge as not per se reliable. For if the gravamen of their paper is that editors distort the evidence, and it turns out, in rebuttals, that they too distort evidence, they would be hoisted with their own petard. The way the scope is defined gives them immunity from cross-examination while retaining them as witnesses, when they themselves are responsible for producing the putative evidence of fraudulent abuse of Wikipedia. That is precisely why I thought the only unselfcompromising way out of the predicament caused by the publication of this ‘research’ was to hire two ranking scholars to write their versions of the core disputed articles, according to the best and most recent scholarly research and consensus, and then have our best FA craftsmen merge them.

Regarding your essays

Perhaps they'd be better of copied to a dedicated subpage? I did this for mine a while back (now at User:Piotrus/Morsels_of_wikiwisdom). Then you can also tag them with Category:User essays. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

While reorganizing files regarding this topic, I came across a note I jotted in response to this suggestion, written on the same day as your remark. Like much else I draft re wiki offline, I either forgot to use it, or perhaps thought it a waste of breath. In any case, this is what I wrote on 6 March.

Arbs have an unenviable job. If they come out in favour of any of G&K’s polemical conclusions (which I think is probable because the scope dictates some accommodation to the charges made), a ruckus will ensue as many wikipedians will challenge the precedent set - which implies outside pressure, even if through an academic venue, can succeed in challenging the internal self-regulating mechanisms we have and in imposing an interventionist authority to strengthen surveillance of our work here. If they decide that G&K’s essay, its wild hypothesis of a coordinated nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy to manipulate article is unfounded, then reporting media that endorse the globally banned and ever-hyperactive IW’s spin of wikiworkings will be tempted to up the ante, and spin the outcome by pitching it as proof Arbcom cannot cope with antisemitism. I admire, privately, the canny tactical move-heads I win, tails you lose- in this perduring grandmaster’s chess game of disrupting our anarchic world – it looks like a vindictive attempt to right a perceived wrong by pulling Samsonically the pillars down on the wiki philistines, in forcing a defensive move from Arbcom (our reputation is at stake!) that technically favours, either way the dice fall, more chaos, if not a checkmate. One never knows. Perhaps a Capablanca, someone up there who takes the trouble (reading it should be obligatory for Arbcomers) to read Antony Lerman’s 2022 book, may pop up with a dazzling counterintuitive endgame to stop the rot. But I doubt that.

As one should always do when shirtfronted by complex challenges to someone’s bona fides, I began looking at how I arrived at my way of reading these things, so, as one can see from the bibliography, I will review the early postwar masterpieces which were formative for my own understanding of these issues. To tell the truth, after a relatively youthful acquaintance with Reitlinger, Hilberg,Toynbee etc. and dozens of eyewitness accounts (Primo Levi etc.,) I’ve never come across, to the degree I manage to follow the massive industrial output on the Holocaust in the last few decades, anything that has given me grounds for revising those early impressions, informed as they were by reading The Melian dialogue. The infinite tragic details require insistent documentation, but they only reinforce what was available decades ago by multiplication. They form a massive quantitative base, but don’t in my view alter the conceptual framework set out in grinding detail by Hilberg’s oeuvre, which surely ranks among the great works of the historian’s art in the millennial records of that discipline. What we need is a theoretical framework for how, for example, 11 million people could be swept up into an industrial slaughterhouse, and, to work towards that, one must dispose of evocations of a unique ethnic event in favour of a comparative historiography and sociology of genocides throughout all human history.

What embarrasses me in closely reading tirades and diatribes like this 'stuff' - esp. with its curious mélange of Holmesian pertinacity in manically hunting the spoors of an assumed crime scene while writing up the results in quarter-based tabloid speculations- is a personal malaise of profound distaste, regret at the way in which Holocaust discourse, and the correlated matter of antisemitism, now lend themselves to true-believers' ethnic and political grievances, cynical manipulation and nagging intimidation by a kind of tragedy-hogging, narrative clichéfying, semantic confusion of analytic categories and coercive browbeating that tries, with a restless spinning of minutiae to thresh out proofs of conspiracy via a pure and trivializing reductionism, to link these issues, overtly or subtextually, to Israel, or far more dangerously to the Jewish world at large which that country persistently makes out it represents. I regard the intense nationalist attempt in Israel to conflate what it may be with a perceived quintessence of the Jewish world at large, within Israel and the diaspora, 3,000 years of (pre-)history, most of it diasporic by preference, which cannot be shoehorned into a narrowminded experiment in nationalist self-assertion. It is a disaster not only to scholarship, or wikipedia's coverage of it, but to our public perceptions. No one can exercise a monopoly on the tragic without reducing the grief of all others to the banality of a minor footnote.Nishidani (talk) 08:13, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Since I was pinged here to a user talk page, I guess I'll comment. I agree with you that the USHMM as an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests. That's precisely why we should seek to include them in our processes. I wouldn't want to give them a controlling or privileged role relative to other community members, but your casual dismissal of the proposal as being manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists is contradictory to your characterization of the USHMM as being heavily influenced by Israeli nationalism vis-à-vis the ideal Popperian state of the topic area.

I agree that there's a vigorous interplay between different factions in the area, but I disagree that the topic area is an eminently internal democratic experiment that has constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge. In reality, the vigorous interplay has led to domination by editors from a certain nationalistic viewpoint. Adding the USHMM as a faction would positively influence the state of the topic area. They might not always be right, but your criticisms that research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia belies that the current state of the topic area is any better. Right now, we allow and encourage editors who are likely biased to edit on Wikipedia with edit-a-thons at liberal arts universities or WikiEd in certain opinionated courses. The USHMM would be a good place to find editors that are willing to read through obscure documents, often in foreign languages, and provide cogent analyses of such to prevent source manipulation. Potential bias is not ipso facto an argument against their participation if you can't mechanize how that'll lead to violations of WP:NPOV. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 16:32, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I've shifted your comment here. I don't know how you were pinged. In any case, no. Scholars who work on behalf an institution which has a known agenda, and coordinates with a government, toe a very fine line, which USHMM has crossed often. In the last instance, 560 academic specialists, many of whom work using the resources made available by USHMM, severely criticized its ideological rejection of holocaust analogies. Editors taught to edit wiki by any institution or faction are a pest. And have nothing to offer but their brand of factionalism to challenge what they perceive as another form of factionalism, No one with an average intelligence requires more than a week to pick up the technical knowledge of how to do that. It's very simple: read widely in a topic area, learn how to format a page, negotiate contested proposals. One doesn't need some institutional faction breathing down your neck or looking over your shoulder to see whether or not you are toeing the prorer institutional guidelines and content priorities. In one wiked course, students had to read 40 pages over a few weeks. Good luck with that. Most serious editing requires one to familiarize oneself with at least several books acknowledged to be fundamental to a given field. We all have biases; scholarship has its paradigmnatic biases. One learns to be sensitive to these things. But institutional bias is on a completely different level. There influence-peddling, political sensitivities, power-broking, money etc weigh heavily. I have personal knowledge of those shenanigans in another field where a leading scholar in his area (and Jewish to boot) told me of several attempts to buy influence at his prestigious university, things he fought hard to fend off. That was 40 years ago. Nowadays this abuse is quite normal. I stick by the principles I was taught to honour long ago. Follow the paper trail wherever it leads, whatever the consequences.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

French?

I am working (on and off) on an article about "Perhaps the finest and best preserved of the ruined monasteries in Palestine" (according to SWP), see User:Huldra/Deir Qal’a.Alas, when it comes to Victor Guérin, the English presently in the article is a

translate.bing.com-version of his French. Would you care to check that the English-version isn't too far from the French original? Thanks, Huldra (talk) 22:57, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Whoops, I completely missed this, having all sorts of 'distractions' on my greedy plate. I have some more work this afternoon, but if you don't find I have done the trans by tomorrow ping me again, at decibel level.Nishidani (talk) 12:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Do you know what ""pas de large sur" mean? The translate.bing.com gives "No wide on" ...which doesn't make much senSe to me, Huldra (talk) 23:49, 13 April 2023 (UTC) PS: sorry about the egg; that's "egg on my face", I suppose..🫤

'large' in those contexts just refers to width, as opposed to (sur) length (i.e. the chapel measures 8 by 32. Why is the 2 after 3 miniscule?) I swear I'll get to it all within the day! For the last several weeks, as my main computer is being reengineered by a very busy friend, I've been constrained to access and read the internet on a borrowed minicomputer with a two inch high window for any text, which has meant usually I throw up my hands after reading a few emails and just succumb to the strong temptations to chuck it all in and plough on with a heavy reading load instead. That explains my endless delays - operations on this petit laptop with its nervous cursor jumping all over the place as I type and splicing in words above, not consecutively after, the text I am writing, so it takes a half an hour sometimes to write a few lines. Frustrating. I don't even have access to tilde signing, so have to copy them from a special word page where the signature is conserved, and the laptop slows down drammatically if I have open more than two windows. Jayzus Nishidani (talk) 08:06, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Don't worry, I don't have a deadline :/ I just saw some photos over at commons for Deir Qal’a and for Deir Sam'an, also saw there were articles in several other wikis, and that there were plenty of references in "older" sources (Guerin, SWP, etc). That of course tempted me! Alas, I'm dreadful in that I start these draft-articles .....but never finish them. Oh well, I can always hope that someone else finish the job.. (like Tiamut and Al Ameer son did for Aqil Agha, and Onceinawhile did for Jisr el-Majami)) cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:57, 14 April 2023 (UTC) PS: and I don't envy you your computer problems...

I'm writing from myt local bar. I've lost my computer connection. I was due to have a new modem delivered within the week by the firm which runs the server, free of charge and optic fibre connection - I said no but they gave me no choice. The loss of connection arose when, notwithstanding the failure of the courier to find me home when, unannounced, they decided to deliver the new modem, they switched over to the new system which requires it. Italy! I should be able to tackle it within the week.Nishidani (talk) 10:28, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

No, I haven't forgotten. I just have one more test on the main computer tomorrow before, if all goes well, I can get back to my normal workmode. Using this nanolaptop led to eyestrain, and I found myself for the first time squinting,and so, prophylactically, drastically reduced accessing the laptop, though of course it could just be age kicking in, demanding that like everyone else I get a pair of specs after . several lucky decades of perfect vision. As soon as I have a large functional screen to work from, I'll check the translation as first priority. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

The Guerin at the Ein Samiya-article needs checking, and is presumably a bit more urgent, as that article is already "live", so to speak, Huldra (talk) 23:55, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

(random French-speaking passerby) in case you still need this, the translation there is good. I have a couple of quibbles, which I don't think require quarreling with a published translation, but fyi here they are. # Remarquer means "to notice" not "to remark", so this is a false friend, but not a very egregious one. "On remarque" x, as it is phrased here actually means "x can be seen", as "on" is an indefinite third person. As in "people say"="on dit" #Tronçon to me denotes a tree stump. I would have to think about how to convey that in English, but I think "fragment" may make the pieces of the columns sound smaller than they were.

Feel free to ask me about French if you encounter it elsewhere. I also have at least a couple of French-speaking talk page stalkers. Elinruby (talk) 22:56, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Just emailed you

And when I came here, noticed your post above. Good response and I've learned from it. Doug Weller talk 08:24, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Offline coordination can assume a wiki-sponsored form?

Editing Wikipedia, even more than critiquing it, helps students realize why they should not trust Wikipedia. The strongest moment of realization takes place when students make worthy changes to an article, only to see those changes deleted, sometimes within minutes, by one of Wikipedia’s many anonymous editors, who evidently lack the expertise to recognize the value of the students’ new contributions.

A second benefit of Wikipedia editing lies in its impact. Unlike virtually any other assignment, students can educate the global community while enhancing their own knowledge, a form of service learning. Students, with their instructors’ guidance, have a tangible contribution to make to Wikipedia’s often faulty articles on Israel. Shira Klein, 'Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses,' Chapman University Digital, 3-1-2018

I.e.. there are courses to (a) help students grasp that wikipedia is unreliable; (b) anonymous students, who by definition, lack expertise, can find their 'worthy' changes reverted by anonymous editors who 'evidently' lack the expertise to evaluate positively what students add.(Contradicting a student's edit only proves the reverters themselves are incompetent, while exacerbating the student's sense of grievance.) (c) Instructors (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) at this point can assist their students in 'educating the global community' about nations to which they are attached, Israel, for example, which, viewed from a nationalistic perspective, suffers from image-distortion. Instructors know articles on Israel (that holds for articles on most countries) are at fault, and teach their students to get the 'right' image constructed on any country's page. That is structured, programmatic coordination offline via proxies to further a national perspective in my book. Nishidani (talk) 12:10, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Just such an initiative, which was roundly deplored on wikipedia, was sponsored by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, after an earlier bid by CAMERA was nipped in the buddy-grouping.

One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."Rachel Shabi Jemima Kiss, 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups,'The Guardian 18 August 2010

Now, arguably, the war’s no longer under one's nose but in one's face and acceptable because the venue is ‘academic’. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.Nishidani (talk) 13:06, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I mean, there are a lot of topics on Wikipedia that can suffer from bias but starting Wikipedia trainings aimed at people with a particular viewpoint is not the way to fix the problem. (t · c) buidhe 01:09, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I once knocked back an offer to have my expenses paid to attend a study group on I/P wikiediting for precisely that reason. Whatever the formal aim, the idea lent itself to the possibility of coordinating approaches to editing.

In any case, for me the real problem here is a failure to recognize that the RS 'reliable'/'unreliable' criteria for source selection, important as it is, overlooks the need for editors to be more aware of the metacritical issues in RS (G&K are prepossessed by arguable flaws in 'Polish' scholarship, and utterly silent about the glaring assumptions of Western approaches, which is why that screed is worthless). By that I mean, that in any field, there are historic trends, where intepretative paradigms emerge, gain traction, become standardized viewpoints, and inevitably, succumb slowly or rapidly to challenges as their weaknesses are noted, and alternative perspectives, each vying for discursive ascendency, emerge to fix the paradigmatic shortcomings.

Awareness of this slippage in RS emphasis is fundamental to assessing how articles should be written. To just take the Holocaust/Generalplan Ost case we are examining. Helmut Heiber once dismissed the Generalplan Ost as just a patchwork of bureaucratic desksitters' daydreaming. This represented what Transatlantic Western scholarship thought at the time, before the fall of the Soviet Union. It just so happened that when he made the crack, scholars in the East happened to start focusing intensely on it, work which culminated in Ludwig Nestler, Wolfgang Schumann (eds.), Europa unterm Hakenkreuz : die Okkupationspolitik des deutschen Faschismus (1938 - 1945), which ran to 8 volumes by 1991 (No, I haven't read it), by which time the Wall had fallen. This then sparked off several lines of enquiry, one of which elected to redefine Nazi Germany in terms of the praxis of racialism, i.e. in terms of the way ideology inflected Germany's indiscriminate massacre policies. That in turn is under challenge (Gerhard Wolf, Ideology and the Rationality of Domination:Nazi Germanization Policies in Poland, Indiana University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-253-04808-0. He makes the point re Heiber/Nestler and Schumann on p.19, n.46).

Wolf instances the work of Götz Aly in this regard (Aly conducted a memorable interview with another of my heroes, Raul Hilberg, back in 2002). Well, one would think with this innovative background, someone like Aly would be insulated against ethnocentric crassness. Nope. While innovative, he utterly underwrites the Holocaust uniqueness narrative, to the point of being blindsided by the obvious. As I wrote higher up on this page in my reflections, most recognize the Herero massacres as a genocide. But Aly says (per a critique A. Dirk Moses made some years ago), that since the Holocaust uniquely killed Jews because they were Jews,-that is the distinctive feature of intention- the German genocide against the Herero can't be parented to the holocaust, or even to genocide because it was a Gegenwehr or defensive war where an exterminatory 'intention' (which makes the holocaust putatively unique) was missing. Germany was just engaging in a war to fend off the indigenous response of 'aggression' to the colonial German state being created there. Sheesh! I mean, fuck, how dumb can you get? How obtuse can one be to dismiss the recorded fact that thousands upon thousands of innocent Herero were driven out into the waterless deserts to die there (a practice the Nazis themselves used by driving people into zones where food was unavailable). One sees this cognitive blindness in specialists who ethnicize WW2 thematics over and over again. The paradigm must wilter, but I won't be round to see that. I only see significant dissonance emerging quite regularly since the mid 1990s.

I probably don't need to impress you with the obvious, i.e. that knowledge is always embedded in a current, that alternates between periods of calm flow, stagnation, and swirling. And the to me highly political definition of the Holocaust which has put discussion of genocide in the iron grip of extra-scholarly interests (there are several books and articles on this) creates a perpetual stasis, because its definition as 'unique' denies historiography its proper instruments of comparativism (yes Toynbee's 12 volumes developed my convictions on this at an impressionable age). if that is the benchmark, whatever the reasons for insisting on its sui generis nature (and these change constantly) then analysis is departmentalized, analogies stymied, and history is no longer a broad field of interacting transnational ideologies, economic interests, clashing nationalisms with numerous actors where every region's history is enmeshed in broad global forcefields, but us, in our unique experience, and the rest of humanity. It's ethnocentric, profoundly (west)eurocentric, and wildly un historical because a concept of 'uniqueness' sweeps away 'causality' from history, meaning the art of history itself is, for this lone topic, impracticable. I admit, nonetheless, that this highly pointed definition still holds the podium, creating the difficulties we experience here in writing articles, and the incoherencies one notes in far too many books on the topic area.

So when we select from a field that has an industrial production of books a score of important books singularly focused on just the holocaust (excerpted from the larger picture), it is all too easy to gain a reasonably informed impression that where they converge, we have the key points. Such a vast field, in its crosscurrents and diverse thematic vectors will contain, if a larger sample is taken, a more complex and nuanced picture will emerge. And, at the same time, as I have written, genocide scholarship, which for stupid historical reasons runs parallel to holocaust scholarship as if the two were distinct, underwriting as it must by definition a general comparativist methodology, certainly is far less comfortable with the mysticism of incomparable uniqueness successfgully promoted by Elie Wiesel, with his notorious showmanship and holocaust lobbying, with his lucrative appearance fee of $25,000 for every one of his loquacious performances on the 'Holocaust as unspeakable ergo unique- theatrics'. Sorry, sleepless night, ergo early work start before the cogency of reason has had time to corral into decent shape the garrulousness of oneiric hours.Nishidani (talk) 04:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Public/Private

A long-retired Russian military man was discussing current events by phone with a former colleague living in Ukraine. Both resented the war between the two recently fraternal countries and expressed the hope that this madness would soon end. A few days later, representatives of the special services raided the Russian. He did not give out any military secrets, and no one accused him of this. He was charged, however, with publicly discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In turn, the former officer, who knew the laws, objected that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,” objected the intelligence officers. “After all, we heard it!” Boris Kagarlitsky. Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Poor ol' wiki

• this
• and this Nishidani (talk) 08:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Nomination of Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Walt Yoder (talk) 20:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Familiarize yourself with WP:NOTCENSORED.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Just a note for the record on these shenanigans. A newbie with 600 edits took 14 minutes, from my posting a new article (77kb) with 136 notes to refs and 50+footnotes, to find it among the 6.5 million wiki articles, read the whole text, make a complex move to erase part of the title and then mount an AfD. In a brief exchange my words were twisted as I duly replied to his criticisms, and when Nableezy, who reverted the move, posted an obligatory notice on the editor's talk page about Arbpia restrictions, accused both of us of tagteaming, and of insinuating by virtue of that notification that he was a sockpuppet. It was a 'nightmare' to work in this area. When i mildly suggested he had again misinterpreted things, I was told to fuck off. Nishidani (talk) 23:07, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

For the record:

1. The "new pages feed" is a thing. There's no mystery how I found the article. Your insinuations are hostile and inaccurate.
2. Special:Diff/1158561131 is a pretty blatant accusation.
3. I don't have time or energy for any of this. It has occurred to me that you aren't suspecting me of being an Icewhiz sock (which I didn't say as it would have been a personal attack), but someone associated with Grabowski and Klein. And ... I'm not. But I'm done with the topic area. I'm sure they will be less easy to roll over than I was. Walt Yoder (talk) 23:12, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Don't expect me to waste time reading not only your talk page but the diff record which duly shows you elided Nableezy's remark before I intervened. I have plenty of time and energy, but not for wikidramatics, or replying to bizarre conjectures about G&K, all water under the bridge too far(ce). Good grief. 'Nuf said.Nishidani (talk) 23:22, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Would suggest you return the fuck off revert in kind, but without the edit summary, fyi. nableezy - 00:50, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Off to the archives with this tripe-swiping. I'll do it as soon as the AfD is closed.Nishidani (talk) 06:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

But just for the record, I thought of writing about this in November 2022, after encountering stern opposition to my attempt to place the Anti-Zionism page on a firmer historically more rounded basis. Numerous attempts to touch on the well-documented antagonism within modern Jewish history between Zionists and anti-Zionists were reverted by what, in my view, were frivolous or POV-protectionist objections. The page is entitled Anti-Zionism so don't mention Zionism was the drumbeat of reverters. Perhaps I am wrong, but my impression was, and remains, that Herzl is the iconic object of hero-worship, and there is no room for a warts and all approach, while Zionism is the official ideology of a powerful state, whose values should not be impugned. Worst still, huge efforts have been recently invested in trying to get official global sanction for a Israelocentric proposal that would equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, a preposterous proposition given that (a) anti-Zionism is firmly rooted in Jewish intellectual life and religious tradition and (b) the scholarly record is replete with the historic ambiguities of Zionism's relation to antisemitism, to the point that Zionists often expressed as much contempt for contemporary Jewish populations as did their antisemitic adversaries, and this avowed contempt enraged many Jews, understandably. And so, I started to make notes on the foundational text for Zionist use of antisemitic stereotypes to war down opposition within the ranks of Jewry. It is a story that should be told, because so many scholars are fascinated by it, even if nary a rumour of this history seeps into the mainstream newspaper/magazine world from which 99% of the reading population get their impressionistic views.In sum, this began long before the first edition of the G&K hullabaloo (it is not prescience but mediatic logic that prescribes furthur polemical assaults on wikipedia, of which that was just a foretaste). Nishidani (talk) 11:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

At last ...

The mythical "Wee Sheila" now has a name, "Asha", after err, Asha. She is now nestling contentedly in her new mother's arms. As you know, she was very upset at the sudden death of her previous mother (my old computer). She is soon going to have two additional mothers (a backup, plus a laptop I can use away from home).

No, don't worry, you didn't cause me to lose any sleep. Asha can usually correct (most of) your little blunders, along with your minor insubordinations to the Manual of Style, very rapidly (in a fraction of a second). She absolutely loves cleaning up her "Onki Nishi". (For some strange reason she calls you "Onkel", though she doesn't have a word of German, and I keep telling her that you're really her honorary great-uncle.) She often operates in conjunction with my own manual labours, and in this case I was reluctant to lose all the detailed work I had done, so I thought it would be easier just to merge in changes as they were being made (not as hard as it sounds, as most of them were just changes that Asha would make anyway). Oh, and please don't stop making your little blunders, they're part of your charm.

The weather here has been perfect for going on long walks, sunny and dry with a cool north-easterly wind; the countryside round here is very beautiful, lush green with an amazing variety of trees and wildlife, the local council has been very good at providing footpaths and preserving local habitats for rare species. Which is where I shall be going in a few minutes, so you won't have to worry about my edits clashing. -- NSH001 (talk) 13:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

For a minute there, I thought I might step in and sue you on behalf of my niece, since 'Asha' at first glance looked like a phonetic transcription of a sneeze! Then I twigged that despite your zorrowastrian misdirection, you were actually using the phonetics as a Trojan horse to smuggle in an allusion to Japanese, i.e. 唖者, asha. The nipponic 'asha' is a mute, and thus she must have invented you to speak on her behalf. That was the true stroke of genius. What would we do without youher, uh, youse.

I'm glad to hear all's well, and that you can now saunter around a lush eye-caressing landscape, eyebalm for the spirit, a confidence-restorative after one spends hours examining the toxic idiocy of the human world. I was weeding one of my many garden terraces just the other day, and halted instinctively as I was about to tear out a handful of indifferent growth crowding in on a dwarf olive I had planted two years ago. Scrutinizing the bunched leafage, I realized why I'd stopped in mid snatch. Two thin strands of burnet, taxonomically known by the bloodless (to the unlatinized observer) nomenclature of Sanguisorba minor. Checking our wiki article, I was surprised to see its taste described as akin to 'mild cucumber'. The variety I have is called in dialect erba noce (walnut weed), as I found out when I discovered it on a friend's hideaway country retreat a decade ago, and culled the seed to plant it in my own patch. Its taste is a dead ringer for walnut, without the problem of dental wear and tear chewing those can cause, and is a superb condiment for salads. But like a lot of things one learns to love, it died on me some years ago. All the more my surprise in finding that somehow it had managed to live, like Asha, mutely unobtrusive in the soil, until a difference was wrought by the very unusual climatic change here, with rain so abundant, it makes the Chaucerian April's shoures soote look like an ageing God's prostatic leak by comparison, now that the period has begun to live up to its Eliotesque reputation as the 'cruellest month'. Instead of 'lilacs out of the dead land', the soaking bred back my walnut herb, no longer squat and bunched barely two or three inches above the ground, but spirally with tendrils well over a foot long, so lengthy they required a prop to avoid collapsing under their own giraffe-necked protrusiveness, and having their seeding interrupted by mouldering on the wet mushy earth. Handily, the little olive shrub served that purpose, and I strung the spiralling stems around the burgeoning olive's branchlets where they now prop, their crowns now edged with a twinkle of crimson as they thrust into flowering.

So, a half-century past my salad days, I'm promised in this late summer of life, the tang of walnut to garnish a midday brunch on tomatoes, diced shallots, chicory and wild onion, and anything else a tuckerfucker like myself whips up to intercept those incumbent stomach rumblings which at that time of day can blurt up, like an alarm clock interrupting a deeply pleasant dream, and disturb in antiphonic defiance one's silent reading and, say, the sirenic mathematical sonorities of Bach in the background.

Good grief, look what hearing your news about Asha has provoked, out of the blue. I'm ashamed of myself. Keep well, Neil and give an algorhythmic (misspelling deliberate- no need for her to clean up) tickle to Asha from the granduncle, or bland-nuncle whose knuckleheaded format-fiascos demand work from, but, indirectly, are partially responsible for her magnificent refinement as she was fine-tuned to cope. Best, N. Keep hale ol'son.Nishidani (talk) 15:53, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Asha's just got some name-competition from a big bad lobo. But it enhances the fairy tale resonances! Nishidani (talk) 08:02, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that too. I might use that pic (eventually) on her documentation page(s), since it's public domain. The two of them are both very beautiful indeed. --NSH001 (talk) 08:09, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine)

Hi, about ten years ago you added harvnb references "Adams 2009" and "Bar-Zohar and Haber 1983" to the article Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine). Unfortunately you haven't defined them, meaning the article appears in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors and nobody can look up the references. If you could fix them that would be great. DuncanHill (talk) 01:32, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Goodness me. What happened there was that I had added all that information in a rush from another page (Amin al-Husayni) I was writing up. Must have been too busy to finish the edit there (Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine)), which I'll do now. Thanks for catching that. Nishidani (talk) 08:28, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. DuncanHill (talk) 10:05, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

A word to the wise: take a look at this diff of yours. Note the "Tag: harv-error" at the top, immediately under "Nishidani". This is a very recent improvement to the wiki software, warning you that you have just added a harv/sfn no-target error. So you can fix it immediately! No need to wait for Asha to come along and either fix it, or draw it to your attention with a red q mark! Nor any more interruptions on your talk page from DuncanHill ! --NSH001 (talk) 14:35, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

I know it's no use my reciting 'Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy' and saying three penitential 'Hale Maries'. I'll come clean. I just bow my head, drink a bloody Mary and unrepetent, persist in my daze. It's a deep, uneradicable, ineludible personal defect, like reading books. I've tried to get my head wrapped round the problem, but only end up rapping my head, also with doggerel, like:-

Ar cacio je se raschia la coccia.

'Ya getten bald, ol'timer, moulten hair

shows age is creepen up, ya brainpan too,

Judgen from the way ya mess up software

Is shrinken faster'n a famished house's stew.

So get yer act tagether, pull that digit

Oudda ya ring, an fa wunce apply ya wits

Ta proven that yer ain't a mental midget

When folks spot errors ut give'em all the shits.

Spen' less time now on fags an sippen tea,

An rid ya thorts of erudite distractions,

An hour's enuf to get that mastery

Of flawless scripts preempten these infractions.'

So, stubben 'is cig, swillen the lees, he cleared

His desk a novels and monumental tomes

Wrinkles furrowed his brow as strainen, he geared

His mind into neutral, n'read what wiki gnomes

had written out - one or two simple rules

Which, memorized, would make him quite a whiz

In grasping what kiddies mug up now in schools

And prove he'd out-Jones Jones in a software quiz.

The hours ticked on, he went an took a shower

To wash away the armpit stench of sweat

Exuded as he toiled to get the power

Of mind over the scriptural matter of the net.

'If thus then sfn. Ah, right, but otherwise

It's harv or even harvnb, t'all depends

On, uh, hmm, . .ah, strewth time fa me beddibies,

A nap'll freshen me wits and make amends

For me lack of understanden. Sleep on it, ol boy,

As Poincaré sed, an when ya wake, 'Whacko'

The problems solved! The conscious mind's too coy

To twig the dope on cruxes. Off ta bed I go.'

He woke at three, from dreams of the fairer sex

With him the hero, battling to save their hide,

From the claws of a mawling Tyrannosaurus Rex,

And winning against all odds to rescue a bride.

There was an earlier dream, full of symbols and math

Glowing faintly in the ashes of recall.

But try as he might to retread that path,

A hunger for muffins forced his memory to pall.

'Aw fuggit,' he grumbled,'I've wasted me time agen

An havta get back ta catch up on readen stuff

That gives me the horn an not get stuck in the pen

A software niceties t'day. Enuf's enuf.'

An hour or two of reading gave him a hint

Of an edit or two some article might need.

Before he did it, he paused from a wiki stint

'nah dammit, I'm bound ta screw up this lead,

'Cos I still can't figure out the diff between

Sfn and harvnb, well, I can, but then forget,

An spend hours dowsing me neurons with caffeine.

Time f'ra stroll ana cappuccino. Fuck the net.'

So there you have it. The geezer's beyond reproof

Too set in his ways to ever heed advice,

Too shameless to mend these lapses that make him goof,

And far too fuddyduddled to be precise.Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Something something about scholarship on your page

(From Talk: The Holocaust) is this in a sandbox? Interested. Holocaust in Poland has 25 or 30 citations to Gerlach, who is no doubt a fine RS, but...what you said Elinruby (talk) 23:09, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

When the JudeaSamaria/West Bank went to Arbcom, since I am uncomfortable with our normal dispute processes (well, have little faith in their outcomes, though respecting their necessity and the goodwill of those doomed to arbitrate, for technical reasons based on the AynRandian principles there which deal with behaviour not content), the only way I could reply was by analysing my own knowledge of the scholarship on the issue, to explain why I arrived at the position I would adopt were I to edit such a topic area or comment there. When I did my first thesis, I found that 95% of the scholarship over 70 years, and I read it all, recycled ideas that came from just 3 brilliant papers (Hermann Diels, 1897; Karl Meuli 1935; Walter Burkert, 1962), the scholars just taking that core of results on board without challenging them, and writing variations on a theme. And successively, I found this to be a general trend. It still worries me, this bandwagon effect- I learn most from the pioneers, and am somewhat wary of the sutler noise (precisely because as an acolyte I shuffle along in the train and tend to soak up the gossip environmentally, rather than hear directly from the pathfinders blazing the trail). A huge output is not informed by methodological anxieties, but simply runs with a given trend, and does so, yes, with scruple to throw further light on details, but the details assume interest only if one accepts the 'truthfulness' of the prevailing paradigm (Thomas Kuhn 1962). It's understandable: careers tend to demand one exploit the ostensible novelties of an emerging hermeneutic fashion.

The first essay reflecting this concern remains transcluded on the top of this page. Idem with the present dispute, when Arbcom took on the Holocaust in Poland kermesse. But in the latter, the issues were far larger and, at the same time, I didn't have much free time. So I began dropping on my page some notes to clarify for myself my orientation on the problems that arise there. Other things cropped up, so it remains only half finished. Sandbox material is wotk-in-progress for a prospective article, and since I have no intention of editing that area or the broader Holocaust, a sandbox wouldn't be the place. I do this because knowledge is provisional, reflecting, beyond what the data say, human, social and time-bound interests in the continuous evaluation of how best to interpret a phenomenon, and that metacritical reality unnerves me by what it implies. I.e. that while I may feel confident about making a judgment, based on the best sources I can find, my judgment may for all that just mediate unwittingly a systemic bias in the discipline I am familiarizing myself with, or some paradigmatic trend. So, offline or otherwise, I feel under an obligation to work out the premises that induce me, via my reading, to think this rather than that 'take' on some historical reality is, as it appears to me at least, more cogent. On wikipedia, I like these personal struggles with bias, in myself or in books, to be above board. I share the results with anyone who might happen to glance at this page, and of course, since I am only drawing on RS, anything I write up here from them is, like edits, available to anyone who might find it usable for improving articles I at least have no desire to touch.

As to Gerlach, I haven't read him. But overreliance on one source is dangerous. My bias lies with Timothy Snyder et al., who, though inside the paradigm, are quietly rattling its recent eurocentric assumptions. Ethnicity with Herder arose to challenge the eurocentric hegemony of Enlightenment reason', a just move, but got hijacked by nationalism, and has now arranged itself as a shared principle by both right and left: the right asserts the primacy of the political 'ethnic' nation, the left wooes the ethnicity or identity politics of grievance minorities, now that the reformist thrust of the 'liberal' traditions of the state have died. All this reverberates at the edges of this kind of dispute. I must shut up.Nishidani (talk) 08:46, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

requiescat

Cormac McCarthy. Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

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Dispute re:Palestine

I noticed you reverted one of my edits which removed the assertion of the existence of the State of Palestine as an absolute fact. Please go to WP:DRN so we can hear your side of the story. RomanHannibal (talk) 15:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You don't notice much apparently. I reverted your edit which removed a fact, that the largest Palestinian territory is the West Bank. Anyone can check a map comparing Gaza and the WB and see the obvious, and that the CIA source is correct. Since you expunge a reliably sourced fact - a hallmark of POV-pushing editwarriors- something moreover which no one has ever contested in the world, in sources, or on wikipedia, there is no point is engaging with you. Your dispute resolution gambit just wastes time, esp. since you make a distinction between an absolute fact and, one is forced to infer, a 'relative' fact.Nishidani (talk) 16:03, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

The Israeli right is a significant minority and has several reliable sources including the Jerusalem Post, JNS, Arutz Sheva and Israel Hayom. The significant minority established should not be rejected by the article. That’s the whole point of WP:NPOV. You are the POV-pusher for ignoring them, not me. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Thugs in Columbia are a significant minority, as is the military junta in Myanmar. Who gives a fuck for the last two rags/moronic tabloids you cite, Arutz Sheva and Israel Hayom? They are not suitable sources for anything on wikipedia, as militant mouth organ-grinders or trumpeting blowhards for a constituency of religio-fascist landgrabbers pilfering daily, when not beating the living daylights out of, or shooting, people who have the misfortune not to be 'Jewish' in what the United Nations calls The State of Palestine. So people who shit on international law are a significant minority, of racist illiterates.Nishidani (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

That’s your POV. Media Bias Fact Check gives Israel Hayom a “Mostly Factual” rating and Arutz Sheva a “Mixed” rating without labelling it questionable. You may disagree with them, but they are at least semi-reliable. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:26, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

In conclusion, these sources are numerous and credible enough to constitute a significant minority which shouldn’t be rejected. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:27, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I have a POV, and you have the facts, garnered from reading one source, whose methodology has been contested, which appears to know nothing of the politics of the rag it refers to, a freebie financed by a former casino running billionaire crony of an indicted Prime minister, whose free distribution was aimed at undermining the general israeli newspaper mainstream and contaminating the public with extremist views pitched to a grievance electorate. Your POV is self-evident: you want to legitimize news sources that like the Drudge Report and Fox News, have been consistently shown to espouse fringe lunatic conspiracy theories. Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I acknowledged their view as a minority view. I never claimed they were factual. I’m just saying their view shouldn’t be rejected because they are a significant minority. Two groups of sources have opposite POVs, one majority and one significant minority. That’s the whole purpose of NPOV.

Also, don’t pretend to be a neutral party. Your user page is full of pro-Palestinian quotes and allegations. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:43, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh yes, I'm not neutral about human rights. I've never 'pretended' to be neutral. Unlike many editors, I go to great lengths to set out the thinking that informs my reading of a conflicted area. When I edit, I edit nonetheless according to what academic sources predominantly state of a given issue, not what Arutz Sheva or Israel Hayom's hacks are paid to write. Were I a Pole in WW2 I wouldn't, judging from my character frailties, have been one of what are now lambasted as 'bystanders' as Jews were killed, anymore than I would be neutral when I see what I see in the West Bank, with its inimitable reproduction of the John Wayne reading of the Conquest of the West. In short I'm not neutral as regards the Indian Removal Act and its consequence, the Trail of Tears. I'm not neutral in thinking Zionist extremism is a threat to Judaism and, in its implicit encouragement of antisemitism, to Jews, and that in the future, it will probably lead to a new diaspora by those repelled by the 'significant minority's' espousal of appalling violence and institutional racism.Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You have a strong POV, which makes you incapable of deciding what is NPOV here. That is why we need a neutral mediator to decide who is right. I will not respond to your rationale behind your POV per WP:FORUM. I look forward to your contribution at DRN. If you choose to boycott the DRN, a compromise will still be made, but without your input. RomanHannibal (talk) 17:06, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You tedious nonsense is interrupting my viewing of Mizoguchi's 元禄忠臣蔵, so please desist. As for the rest, I'm sure you are familiar with the saying kol haposel bemumo hu posel. If you're not then read a book for a change from Israel Hayom, i.e. Reuven Agushevits's, Principles of Philosophy Goodbye.Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I am glad to desist. Have a nice day and enjoy your movie. RomanHannibal (talk) 17:15, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

June 2023

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.RomanHannibal (talk) 02:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

As was evident from the start of this user's I/P editing, RomanHannibal is a sock atque delendus est. That was what I suggested when I wrote yesterday that he was 'an apparent newbie', something made clear in the editor's sudden fishing expedition on my talk page above, inviting me to participate at DRN as an involved editor, where I don't have any notable involvement in the recently disputed articles like State of Palestine or Jordan (as opposed to a deep involvement in writing up the article on Beita, which was subject yet again to an extraordinary piece of provocative carpet-bagging by settlers trying to stabilize their outpost in Evyatar, something duly reported a week ago at length on the Italian television investigative programme Report). It was that specific incident I had in mind, together with the whole tragic history of Beita, when referring to land-grabbing above (not, as imputed, Israel or Jews). Thank goodness everyone has been saved a huge waste of time by the rapid intervention of Courcelles. Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Dispute resolution noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help this dispute come to a resolution.

Please join us to help form a consensus. Thank you!

Potatín5 (talk) 22:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

New article

Thirty-seventh government of Israel and the Palestinians Please chip in. Selfstudier (talk) 16:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

AE

Since this AE report morphed into repeated insinuations there is some antisemitic clique of anti-Israel editors, of which (I am cited in the evidence by a certain Walt Yoder as being one), and since I cannot comment there, I should just note that the big divide in this area is between those who insist on very high quality sources, on comprehensive topic reading, and on collaborative searching for materials that are difficult to access to write those articles, etc. Secondly, they prioritize Israeli and diaspora scholarship as the, by the nature of the field, default source for our best information on the I/P area, be it historical, social or otherwise. Then there are those who, in my view at least, approach the subject with a standard collection of memes that have semi-official status in Israeli discourse. I'd say rough 99% of the 100+socks who have over 15 years repeatedly tried to influence the shaping of articles share the latter viewpoint (it's a legitimate POV but not taken very seriously academically, as oopposed to newspapers). As I see it, what is spun as a conflict between two POV-pushing groups reflects simply the contrast between scholarship with its rigorous methodologies and an ideological vision of the topic. Yes, I do suffer from something of what the Japanese called a hōgan-biiki (判官贔屓) empathy in my approach to the world. It does influence what attracts my attention, meaning I sympathise with the silenced underdog in so many conflicts, be they Aboriginals or Palestinians or Tibetans. This as far as I am aware does not translate into being uncomfortable with my country of origins, or antisemitic, or hostile to Chinese. From distinct backgrounds, I gather, several editors share this interest and they tend to work well together because they subscribe to the same principles of evidence which are commended in academia as they are on wikipedia as ideals. They are consistently alluded to, for this, as a conspirational anti-Israeli or antisemitic gang, offline and, desultorily, here from time to time. I always ignore the insinuations, as off-topic baiting. What those who suscribe to this viewpoint are doing is taking, generally, their disgruntlement with the Israeli and diaspora scholarship 'we' privilege, and characterizing it as 'anti-jewish/Israeli'. It is, basically, a distaste for the intellectual and moral integrity of scholarship in the Jewish tradition because it doesn't fit easily with the politics of simplification. Now that said, back to something serious. I couldn't care less that a handful of editors here are committed Zionists. They earn one's respect because they don't drag that into the excellent contributions they make but find a common meeting ground here on the necessity for strong scholarly sources and thorough coverage, whatever the cost may be to an 'Israeli' or 'Palestinian' POV. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Have never come across you but I have followed a couple of I/P discussions from afar and this is a very fair summary. Ought to be essay-fied. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:10, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks but it would distract from important things. When A1 machines begin to replace editors and write articles, perhaps one could ask the governing algorithm to write such an essay by exhaustively picking up all cases of I/P sockpuppetry as reported in AE/ANI cases, and yield up the statistical pattern of where that toxic abuse comes from. The editors this offline conspiracy meme refer to, often repeated here, have a bit of their historic record spotted by suspensions and temporal bans, which is to be expected in a 'toxic area' where either pure farce (patiently dealing with an obvious but unproven sock for months of extenuating negotiation over this or that) or Rafferty's rules often ruled the roost (before the 500/30 ARBPIA principle thankfully came into play). I can recall two excellent editors who might be partially defined as 'pro-Palestinian' exploding in a way that earned them the ineludible ban. but this is marginal compared to the huge number of sock and meat puppets with an implicit or otherwise 'pro-Israel' stance (my ideology right or wrong would be a better description) which afflicted the editing area and contributed to its reputation as a POV-toxic area where all should be run out of town. I'm sure they run into several scores. Their only argument was that anyone outside the fold critical of Israel was, ipso facto, antisemitic, hostile to Jews themselves, by definition. That looks incredulously naive, but it it now inscribed in legislation that draws its inspiration from a frankly dictatorial and poplitical attempt to limit free speech by making any reference to that country a matter of tip-toeing through a labyrinthine set of definitions that circumscribe, rope off, render taboo zones in, discourse on these issues. I once noticed something similar underway in Japan, in a genre of policy study discussions, and sponsored by the Nakasone government, to finance a global programme of monitoring everything in the public sphere that mentioned that country, and having an organization capable of picking up the echoes out there immediately, and drawing on prepared spokesmen to rebut anything negative. So it's by no means unique to this other context. The only way such a definition could work would be to set up committees in every city, town and country where whatever one might wish to say would have to pass the scrutiny and earn the imprimature of the relevant Jewish community's representatives on the board. Pure operational lunacy, an outlandishly modern variation of the notorious Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But it has traction, and many people are raised to believe that there is some truth to these endless rumours that antisemitism is endemic, takes a million disguises, and is tacit in all talks of geopolitical or cultural discussion on the Middle East (well, I prefer 'Muddled Yeast').

What was striking in most cases on wikipedia was the adamant refusal to read up on the topic, the ignorance of political history, and, more disturbingly nothing but a brushing word-by-mouth glancing acquaintanceship with the great cultural history of the world they perhaps thought they were defending from an antisemitic 'gang of four'. Even in the present AfD one gets no impression that anyone objecting to it is aware of the fact that in classic Judaism, Maimonides did not think that being a Jew necessarily required one embody that identity in corporeal traits. It was a matter of devoted adherence to, and commitment to, Jewish law.Nishidani (talk) 14:53, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement 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) 02:27, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

The Socratic elenchus is a logical tool. In the Ion, Euthyphro or Gorgias for example, Socrates examines what his respective interlocutors say, eliciting the logical frailties of their opinions. However, anyone could read these exchanges for psychological undercurrents and, by ignoring the logical arguments, claim that Socrates is a bully. Is then Socrates engaged in the pursuit of logical/evidential truth or is he just showing 'aggressive disdain' for his interlocutors? If the latter, then logic and evidence are of no importance, political correctness is paramount.

I used the word ‘stonewalling’. I had in mind Drsmoo's repeating for an entire month, the same opinion, with variations, regardless of considerable efforts to disabuse him of his belief that evidence from researchers amounted to a disparaging attack on both the researchers and Israelis. He made this claim first here, then here, and here (the innuendo is that the very article is antisemitic). See also here, here,here, here, and here.

A full month later, he was still repeating it to Pharos, ignoring every disproof or request for evidence in the interim. Apparently it is I who bludgeons people. I am not Socrates, but was raised to admire the foundations of logic. I have no objections to Tamzim’s proposal, though I think the shared sanction should be motivated, depending on how the respective problematical behaviours imputed to both are interpreted. Nishidani (talk) 04:13, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Honesty compels me to add that, in a post-Freudian world, even someone who might prove to be logically correct, might still harbour morally corrupt intentions. I cannot (re)read the Ion, for instance, without feeling Socrates (Plato rather) is making easy game of a decent fellow. It's called instrumental reason by Adorno and others (the prolific Jon Elster is good on all this).Nishidani (talk) 04:46, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

The nags trot slowly down the cobbled street.

No lash is needed. They've been there before.

The coachman too, liveried up a treat,

Drowses at the reins: this part's a bore.

The passenger in portage shifts a little

To watch, now right, now left, the bustling town,

And bends at times to catch the tat-and-tittle

Of whispering folks who, staring, smile or frown.

Light spruces the way, churchbells tune the air

I've journeyed with zest, worked hard as anyone

And paid my dues, he thinks. The rest is fair.

The festive motley begins to hoot their hallo(w)s.

The tumbril halts, this last stage reached and run.

Ah! More! he chuckles, and steps up to the gallows.

The first two quatrains popped into my mind, somewhat spontaneously, as I took my midday cappuccino in a bar. I walked home and finished the sestet over lunch. But I wondered where the comic hyperbole of the analogy came from. Now I remember, after a nap. In the summer of 1970, at Perugia, I read Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939). There is a passage that must have stuck in my memory to resurface in these lines.

'This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the Womb, we emerge into solitude among our Fellows, and return again to solitude within the Grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But propinquity is never fusion. The most populous City is but an agglomeration of wildernesses. We exchange Words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. . The most intimate contact is only of Surfaces, and we couple, as I have seen the condemned Prisoners at Newgate coupling with their Trulls, between the bars of our cages.' p.174.Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

R. C. Zaehner

Thank you. Rimbaud is mentioned in the sections Sacred and Profane and Nature Mysticism. Elfelix (talk) 23:15, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

No need to thank me. Zaehner was a very very complex man, as I learnt later. But, since I had had a kind of experience not too dissimilar to what he describes, and I too had been utterly absorbed in reading Rimbaud, that when I came across his book in the late sixties, I read it with passionate interest, and kept my eye out for anything of his that came my way ever after. Cheers and best regards Nishidani (talk) 00:16, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

ARBPIA logged warning

Hi, Nishidani. As a result of a recent AE thread, I am giving you the following logged warning, in my capacity as an uninvoled administrator acting under the contentious topics procedures for the Arab-Israeli conflict:

You are warned for fostering a battleground environment at Zionism, race and genetics and and its talkpage. Further disruption on those pages, including comments on the talkpage that go against the general reminder that has been issued as a result of the same AE thread, may result in a page ban, topic ban, and/or block, at the discretion of any uninvolved administrator, without further warning.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 16:57, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

:Thanks, Tamzin. A balanced assessment, duly noted. I hope you don't take it amiss if I suggest that 'warned for fostering' would be more precise were it 'warned for having fostered'. Little things like that make me sleepless, not the sanctions themselves- Best regards Nishidani (talk) 19:29, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I spend a decent portion of my time these days speaking and thinking in a tenseless language, and it's so liberating. In terms of how enwiki sanctions are phrased, though, for whatever reason the standard is to frame the offense in the present tense, even when it's a solitary event, like "is desysopped for deleting the Main Page". I guess we get it from legal contexts, where newspapers tend to write "charged with arson", not "charged with having committed arson". That's a distinction I'll think about in the future. In this case, yes, to be clear, I am referring to your past conduct on the talkpage. Things moved in a positive direction during the AE thread, and I appreciate your having taken on the criticism you received.

Maybe next time I'll just write the warning in said tenseless language... sina utala ike is arguably more accurate than anything I could say in English: sina can be either singular or plural 'you'; utala means both 'argue' and 'battle' (or 'argued', 'battled', 'will argue', or 'will battle'); and ike means 'in a bad way' but also 'in a manner tending against peace'.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 21:16, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for wasting your time. Actually I got up from my sickbed (some odd fever that struck today, nothing related to wiki) to strike out my point, what now appears to me to be a lame smartarsed joke. You folks do a marvellous job, reading sedulously through mountains of molehill bickering. I'd have long been committed to an asylum after a week or two had I had to undertake such work. Fin est regards Nishidani (talk) 21:56, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Hoping—non-exclusively and non-demandingly—for a speedy recovery. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 00:11, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that this is a potential problem with regard to adhering to this warning. Please be aware of what I said here. I'm just pointing this out, as an expression of concern, but if this kind of thing (coming so soon after the AE discussion was closed!) happens again, I may open a new AE complaint. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh come now, dear fellow, This is extreme overreading. The rulling was neither a gag or muzzle, nor intimidatory. More concentration on the merits of edit suggestions, and less on fine reading between the lines to tease out a possible tripwire clues for further arbitration, please. Nishidani (talk) 19:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)