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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 Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages, 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.

1. T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
2. Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
3. For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
4. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
5. George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
6. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
7. Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
8. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
9. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
10. Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
11. Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
12. M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
13. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
14. ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
15. John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
16. Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
17. Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
18. Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
19. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
20. Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
21. Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
22. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
23. Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
24. Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
25. ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
26. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
27. cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
28. Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
29. Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
30. Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
31. 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
32. Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
33. Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
34. Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
35. 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
36. 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
37. 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
38. Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
39. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
40. William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
41. William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
42. Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
43. Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
44. James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
45. Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
46. See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
47. Numbers, 32:18
48. David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
49. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
50. Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
51. Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
52. Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
53. Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
54. Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
55. John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
56. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13

Further reading:-

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

Things to be done/Notes to self (or what pieces are left of that hypothetical entity)

• Huldra trans Talk:Bardala‎
• Huldra trans Talk:Nisf Jubeil
• Sabah as per promise to Doug Weller
• Abu Iyad as per promise to Al Ameer
• The Ashkenazi Jews/Khazarian origins theory
• Werner Muensterberger
• 中里介山 and also his 大菩薩峠, which have no wiki article. ('to call him Dickensian would be utterly inadequate, to call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be to flatter him greatly' William E. Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 p.4.) Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

(2)'To call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be an over-statement of his considerable gift for for creating memorable characters, while to call Kaizan "Dickensian" would be a seriously misleading understatement. This richness became all the more impressive when set against the national drive towards human standardization.' ibid. p.430

To be kept close to the bottom of this page because I forget the agenda as time scurries on Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

• • e.g.<ref="Horowitz" /> Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Note

Yonatan Mendel, Diary, London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 6 -19 March, 6 March 2015.

Palestinian population statistics Pro memoria

here,

Notice of Admin noticeboard discussion

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Yo Ho Ho

Doug Weller talk is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}} to your friends' talk pages.

Nomination of Meir Ettinger for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Meir Ettinger is suitable for inclusion in Misplaced Pages according to Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

WP:AE

Please be aware that I reported your edit warring and inferior editing at WP:AE. Debresser (talk) 17:05, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Well, have a nice day.Nishidani (talk) 17:09, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Citations needed

I appreciate that you are trying to add information about traditional owners of Australian places, but could you please include a citation. You must be getting the information from somewhere; please tell us where. Kerry (talk) 00:48, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

And why in this edit did you delete the citation I added for the Kangulu people? I added it precisely because you didn't provide a source for the information. If that's not your source, then by all means replace it with your source, but don't just delete my source. Kerry (talk) 00:55, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry if that edit was misunderstood. Since two tribes were involved, and since the link you provided sent the reader only to one of the two tribes, I provided a textual citation to the precise page in Tindale's 1974 magnus opus where both tribes, the Kangulu and the Kanolu, are mentioned. I therefore didn't delete your source, but simply gave the page number, which is lacking on the SA museum site. I intended providing a link to the downloadable copy of the whole of Tindale's book which is accessible in the ANU open research resources, but it was late. I'll add that now.Nishidani (talk) 11:31, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Koa people

Hi, why do you keep reverting my edit?

Firstly, references go under the heading "References", not "Citations" or "Sources". This is a Misplaced Pages standard.

Secondly, your "Social organization and practices" section says absolutely nothing about social organisation or practices. Moreover, there must be infinitely many things that Koa society doesn't practise. It is ridiculous to single out genital mutilation (or anything for that matter) for mention. — Smjg (talk) 18:43, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

You know nothing about the topic (b) nothing about the 400 plus articles in this series which adopt the precise template you are reverting out (c) had you understood that I construct articles sentence by sentence, section by section, i.e. had you been familiar with the process, which no one familiar with the topic area objects to, on the contrary they support it, whereby these new articles are composed, you wouldn't (I presume, but I have doubts now) that you wouldn't have jumped in to start messing up and interfering with the consecutive edits I was engaged in doing. So, you are out of your depth, and I suggest therefore that you quietly move to areas in which you have some competence. The proof (Personal attack removed) is that the primary sources on all 600+ plus Australian tribes regard the adoption or refusal to adopt circumcision and subincision as a geocultural marker of great significance, and its presence or absence is crucial to social identity. So, flick off, that's a good lad.Nishidani (talk) 19:43, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

You can't break Misplaced Pages standards on the basis that the template you're using breaks them. The template needs to be fixed. Besides, one does not need to know anything about the topic in order to fix an article to conform to Misplaced Pages standards, or to apply common sense in order to fix issues with the article. I am not out of my depth at all. Furthermore, what has constructing articles section by section to do with anything? I was not interfering with your edits - I was making constructive improvements. Once an article has been created, it is fair game to constructive improvements being made by anybody. As for the circumcision/subincision matter ... this may be true, but if the purpose of the statement is to contrast it with other indigenous Australian tribes, the section needs to indicate this (otherwise, everyone will be asking "why on earth are you mentioning that?"), and also needs to include some meaningful, on-topic content. Moreover, please try to be civil and avoid personal attacks. — Smjg (talk) 11:20, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is no such thing as a standard citation style on Misplaced Pages – see WP:CITESTYLE. Neither is there anything wrong with using "Sources" as a section heading for a list of full cite templates; "Sources" is in fact a much better description, and is slowly becoming more widely used on Misplaced Pages, rightly so. Pinging J. Johnson (JJ) who I'm sure will be happy to explain to you why (JJ - on Smjg's talk page, please, not here, we don't want to interrupt Nishidani any more on this topic). Please use some common sense here, and take the time to examine the work of the editor you're interrupting. Is it really too much to ask, that when someone is actively editing an article, that you wait until he or she is finished? Now, please heed Nishidani's request, and stay off his talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 13:11, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

I fully concur with NSH001: "Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is no such thing as a standard citation style on Misplaced Pages". Smjg, you are laboring under several misapprehensions, including (a widely shared one) of just what a "reference" is. Also, just because a lot of editors do something one way does not make that a standard that all must follow. Most certainly do read WP:CITEVAR.

If I can squeeze this in I will try to explain some details for you. (Perhaps tomorrow?) But, as NSH001 suggests, let's do it on your Talk page. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:16, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Smjg. By all means use this page if you want to thrash out your objections. I don't scour wiki or track people, and therefore seeing what regards my editing explained here is no problem. Just another point. Most Australian tribes were devastated within a few decades of settlement, and compared to what we might know of each had they and their cultures survived into modernity, which adopted techniques of anthropological and linguistic analysis adequate to integral ethnographic description, for large stretches we know close to zero. Take by comparison the Amazonian Barasana, another article I did from the bottom up. We have two masterly monographs of over 500 pages detailing the outlines of their world. Logically, for any Australian tribe one would like to have the standard 500 pages, plus a 300 page dictionary and a 200-400 page grammar, together with numerous specialist articles dealing in greater detail with their lives, thinking, ecology, and history. What you get generally, to the contrary, thanks to the genocide and indifference of settlers, are a few scrawny notes by pastoralists or missionaries or travelers, listing one or two facts, and a paragraph or so of a generic description (they go naked, eat people, kill kangaroos, and brandish woomeras and spears, etc). So that when I draw up an article on such a scarcely documented tribe, I can't go beyond that paucity of data to satisfy (see your implied requests) the curious reader. If the only thing stated is: 'they did not practice circumcision or subincision', that's all the article will have. A second point is that while trying as hard as I can to provide the reader with linked references to all and any relevant material (this is noted in bibliographies, but rarely cited in extenso) bearing on each tribe, I can't do anything definitive. I construct the basic page structure and fill in what I can dredge up, even if it is sparse, leaving it to future editors luckier in their searches than I (I can't go to a public library in Australia) to fill in or expand. Your criticisms reflect a dissatisfaction with the void of information accessible, which is, for the moment, unavoidable, rather than a criticism of what I am doing, and this is understandable because you are, I think, unfamiliar with the state of knowledge in this field. An immense amount of relevant information is in many archives, but has yet to be harvested simply because there are still far too few scholars working on it, and,much of that material is under a ban against publication in order not to offend the sensibilities about tribal secrets confided to some earlier generations of ethnographers. The aim is, simply, to set up a basic encyclopedic outlines of the total field, unified by format and approach, so that for once Misplaced Pages can provide the world with an integrated model for one area of ethnography.Nishidani (talk) 09:23, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

@Nishidani: This is not a dissatisfaction with the void of information accessible. It's a dissatisfaction with the way in which the information is structured and the apparent total arbitrariness of what is mentioned. I repeat: if the purpose of the statement is to contrast it with other indigenous Australian tribes, the section needs to indicate this (otherwise, everyone will be asking "why on earth are you mentioning that?"). — Smjg (talk) 11:42, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

if the purpose of the statement is to contrast it with other indigenous Australian tribes, the section needs to indicate this (otherwise, everyone will be asking "why on earth are you mentioning that?").

Again, you are unfamiliar with the relevant Misplaced Pages protocols, because what you are asking me to do is to engage in WP:OR. No source I am familiar with refers to circumcision and subincision among the Koa within the wider framework of that general practice among Australian aborigines. What I stated is what the source, laconically, notes.Nishidani (talk) 12:04, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

@NSH001 and J. Johnson: OK, I think I'd assumed the heading 'References' is a WP standard because it's what every WP article I'd seen (besides unreferenced ones) uses. Furthermore, the sections you've referred me to appear to be about how the references themselves are formatted, rather than than what heading they are placed under. But what do you mean about misapprehensions of 'just what a "reference" is'??? We can continue this discussion on my talk page you suggest.

Moreover, how was I meant to know that it was still being actively edited? At no point was there a notice there like {{under construction}} or {{in use}}, and this cleanup attempt was nearly an hour after the last edit; come this instance there had been no further additions in nearly four hours, so in my mind it doesn't really constitute being actively edited.

Also, you have no right to tell anybody to stay off anybody's talk page. — Smjg (talk) 11:42, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Smjg: I strongly suggest that you "cool your jets", and refrain from further comments, because you are just digging yourself into a hole. One which you apparently do not even see. Furthermore, after looking at some of your edits and discussions at other pages it appears you are headed towards a confrontation at ANI, and even a block. Therefore I also suggest: if you want to continue as a Misplaced Pages editor it would be wise to stand-down from all editing until some matters are clarified.

For now let's consider your edits at Koa people. As I said before, you are laboring under several misapprehensions. First is your assertion that "references go under the heading "References", not "Citations" or "Sources". This is a Misplaced Pages standard." That is most assuredly FALSE. I direct your attention specifically to MOS#Notes and references (under "Standard appendices and footers"), which says (in part):

Title: Editors may use any section title that they choose. The most frequent choice is "References" .... Several alternate titles ("Sources", "Citations", "Bibliography") may also be used, ....

So you "assumed the heading 'References' is a WP standard because it's what every WP article I'd seen ... uses"? Well, you were wrong to make that assumption, because WP does, in fact, have codified standards, such as MOS, WP:CITEVAR, and others. I find it quite amazing that someone who has been editing since 2004 does not know this.

NSH001 and I previously directed you to WP:CITEVAR because that covers changing an article's "citation style". It is not about formatting details, it is about all aspects of citation "style" taken broadly, and it is a basic standard with which we reckon all non-newbies have some familiarity. Please study it.

You should note particularly that CITEVAR says "it is normal practice to defer to the style used by the first major contributor". In the case of Koa people the first major contributor is Nishidani, and you should defer to his/her arrangements.

You just asked: "how was I meant to know that it was still being actively edited?". Well, "actively" isn't limited to just the few minutes an edit window is open, it can encompass a scope of hours and even days as an editor works on an article. In the case at hand, Nishidani created the article at 13:09 4 January, and made five more edits before you made your edit at 13:40 where you removed the empty sections (only, they were not empty), and commented that "the standard heading is 'References'". Nishidani made another ten edits before you came back at 14:14 to restore your edits that Nishidani had reverted. More edits by Nishidani, and then from 15:51 to 18:43 you are edit-warring with Nishidani. To not know the article was being actively edited when you were interacting with that editing is just uncredible. And where you just said that (relative to "this edit" at 18:43) "there had been no further additions in nearly four hours": not true. Nishidani had added (restored) the material you were edit-warring over at 17:37 (just 66 minutes earlier).

Speaking of WP:edit warring, please note the "three-revert rule" WP:3RR): "there is a bright-line rule called the three-revert rule (3RR), the violation of which often leads to a block.". You have already violated that rule, and any continuation will likely get you blocked.

Another standard you really should know (how many years have you been editing?) is good old WP:BRD: the "BOLD, revert, discuss cycle." If your edit gets reverted do not revert again. Instead, discuss on the article's Talk page. That is what it is there for! However, the discussion should be started after the first reversion, not the third.

There is much more that could be said, but I am out of time. I will note that your last "you have no right ..." comment is misplaced, and down right uncivil; I suggest you strike it. Also: don't give me any flack or argument about any of this. You have been acting like an idiot newbie, and I am trying to help you to not do that. If you don't accept that, just go away. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 06:12, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Huldra's shining example

Morning, Nishidani! I recommend you follow Huldra's excellent example and put the list of Aussie cites in a sub-page of your user space, perhaps with a link from your user page. That will make it easier for people to refer to. Not the sort of thing that really belongs on a talk page. And if you don't, sooner or later the bot is going to come along and archive it again anyway. Cheers! NSH001 (talk) 08:30, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Top a the mornen to you too, N. I'd do that, but I don't know how to create subpages. Everytime I did so, it wiped out the sandbox page I have on water and the Middle East. I'm a befuddled fuckwit in these matters.Nishidani (talk) 11:15, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

You make a link like so:]. Then you click on that link and edit it as per usual. Or you could get fancy and put it as a sub-page of your sandbox, like so: ] (but I usually just put it under my user page). If you like, you should feel free to crib code from my sandbox page. I've set it up so I have a couple of numbered sandbox pages ("sandbox 1", "sandbox 2", etc. These use technical mumbo-jumbo for excessive fanciness that you probably shouldn't bother replicating) that I use as general scratchpads, and then named sandbox pages for articles I'm drafting (like User:Xover/sandbox/Hamlet (2004)) or other more concrete stuff. And on my main sandbox page I use a {{List subpages|Xover|User}} template to show me all the subpages I have so I don't have to keep remembering where I stashed something. Feel free to ping me if there's anything I can help with there. --Xover (talk) 11:29, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Another way is to search for it, for example search for "User:Nishdani/BloodyHell". When the results come up, near the top of the list will be a clearly labelled link for creating it. Zero 11:33, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Xover was first in, so I gratefully adopted the first method offered, and fucked it up of course. Realizing the error, which I can't cancel, I corrected my mistake producing the bibliography under 'list of Aussie cities' and made the correct move, getting finally one on aborigines (].). Dunno how to undo the first mess, which has to be deleted. Well, I was told how to by N, but can't remember the delete template. Whatever, thanks for the geriatric care. The more I age, the more I remember my primary school teacher's advice to my mother, at the end of year 1. 'Nish is a nice little chappy, but he has absolutely no awareness of his teachers, and you'd do well to have him repeat his first year in bubs.' Nishidani (talk) 13:05, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

To delete something under your user page, put {{db-u1}} on the page (at the top, typically). An admin will be along fairly shortly to take care of it. It's actually a part of the general process for deleting stuff on Misplaced Pages (like mainspace articles): there's Articles for Deletion for a full discussion and review; Proposed Deletion for proposing deleting something that you think is uncontroversial to delete, but which doesn't meet the criteria for "speedy deletion"; and then there's Speedy Deletion, which has a set of specific and narrow criteria for what can be deleted that way. The template above refers to criteria U1: a user request to delete something in their user space. Unless exceptional circumstance obtains, all self-requests to delete a page in your own user space are generally assumed to be valid and acted on without further discussion. For deleting stuff in user space, my experience is that someone takes care of it in hours, at most. PS. You can also move pages to a new name: so if you'd miscreated "User:Nishidani/List of Aussie cites", you could have simply moved it to "User:Nishidani/Bibliography on aborigines" (and unchecked the box to leave behind a redirect at the old name). Important to remember the "User:Nishidani/…" stuff, by the way: I've moved stuff from user space into mainspace by mistake before (and once in mainspace you need admin help to fix it). --Xover (talk) 13:38, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Done! In the best tradition of Costard's costive diction, Digitus extrahendus extractus est.Nishidani (talk) 13:48, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

One problem remains. How do I find User:Nishidani/Bibliography on aborigines? I mean, it disappears from my watchlist after a few days, and I can't google it up under that name. Often I don't touch that page for weeks. W hat button do I press on the bar to be able to consult it rapidly?Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

There's no really good way to do this, but if you take a look at User:Xover/sandbox#Subpages you'll see the best workaround I've found. You could put the equivalent template on your main sandbox: {{List subpages|Nishidani|User}}. It would generate a list like this:

Pages with the prefix 'Nishidani' in the 'User' and 'User talk' namespaces:

• Nishidani/Bibliography on aborigines
• Nishidani/Birkat HaMinim draft
• Nishidani/Birkat haMinim draft
• Nishidani/JS
• Nishidani/Mohammad Amin al-Husayni's ties with the Axis Powers durging World War II
• Nishidani/Mohammad Amin al-Husayni's ties with the Axis Powers during World War II
• Nishidani/archive indexing format
• Nishidani/draft
• Nishidani/sandbox
• Nishidani/vector.js

• Nishidani/Archive 1
• Nishidani/Archive 10
• Nishidani/Archive 11
• Nishidani/Archive 12
• Nishidani/Archive 13
• Nishidani/Archive 14
• Nishidani/Archive 15
• Nishidani/Archive 16
• Nishidani/Archive 17
• Nishidani/Archive 18
• Nishidani/Archive 19
• Nishidani/Archive 2
• Nishidani/Archive 20
• Nishidani/Archive 21
• Nishidani/Archive 22
• Nishidani/Archive 23
• Nishidani/Archive 24
• Nishidani/Archive 25
• Nishidani/Archive 26
• Nishidani/Archive 27
• Nishidani/Archive 28
• Nishidani/Archive 29
• Nishidani/Archive 3
• Nishidani/Archive 30
• Nishidani/Archive 31
• Nishidani/Archive 32
• Nishidani/Archive 33
• Nishidani/Archive 34
• Nishidani/Archive 4
• Nishidani/Archive 5
• Nishidani/Archive 6
• Nishidani/Archive 7
• Nishidani/Archive 8
• Nishidani/Archive 9
• Nishidani/Archives/2006
• Nishidani/Archives/December 2007 - July 2008
• Nishidani/Archives/May-September 2007
• Nishidani/Archives/October-December 2007
• Nishidani/Birkat haMinim draft
• Nishidani/Index
• Nishidani/Reading and listening list
• Nishidani/Reading and listening list on the July-August 2014 Gaza assault
• Nishidani/Reading and listening list on the July–August 2014 Gaza assault
• Nishidani/To-do list

The alternative is the advanced search page where you can choose a namespace and prefix to search for, in order to replicate the above list using the search, but I don't think I've ever used that for this for reasons of lazyness. --Xover (talk) 17:51, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Brilliant. The first suggestion worked poifectly. I guess in thanks I should augur you a happy and productive year undisturbed by timewasters (this timewaster, methinks, hath need of a wallop on his back!) and technical troublemakers like my cognitively otiose self. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 18:03, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Alternatively (and the way I usually do it) is bring up the list of your contributions, then at the bottom you'll see, 2nd from the left, a link "Subpages" - click on that and you'll get a list of all your user subpages, the Aboriginies list is the very first one. If you select, in the drop-down box, "User talk", you'll get all the subpages of your talk page. And for fun, you can try clicking on all the other links there (at the bottom of your contributions list) and see what you get! --NSH001 (talk) 20:40, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, the way I find my sub pages is to look at my contributions, then look at that second button at the bottom: subpages. Though Zero0000 has a subpage under his talk page, User talk:Zero0000/Buraq, which I always struggle to find... Huldra (talk) 22:51, 7 January 2018 (UTC) (PS: I once started a Huldra/Morris-list...when Hulder was called Huldra. Much confusion......)

An Interesting Article in the New York Review of Books

This Land Is Our Land.

The article's author, Raja Shehadeh, is a book author and the founder of the human rights group Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.
 Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:05, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, IT. My copies of the NYRB arrive several months late, courtesy of a mate still working in academia, who passes me that, and several other journals on regularly.I have been thinking of you and the pups desultorily and thought of smirching your page with auguries for a prosperous and productive New Year, but like much else I should have done, the edit got forgotten under the onus of other work. Your exchanges have made this dull page sparkle.

I've corresponded with Raja Shehadeh, that deeply gentle and erudite fellow, and will now download the article and read it after dinner. It seems the only function of Palestine is to warrant documentation on its disappearance. It's not that I get bored with the area: au contraire, but as User:Kingsindian, and several others here agreed yonks ago, it has long been an illusion to think one can ever go beyond reading about it, or, if you are Palestinian, getting shot, or jailed, or living under apartheid. As I read thousands of pages of early Australian occupation by settlers about the 'natives', the language of dispossession, and the reasons for it, are exactly those we encounter over the decades in this domain, predictably of course, since Zionism, despite the claim to some uniqueness, is a standard colonial project empowered by self-deception, ideology, mercenary territorial designs and ethnocentric contempt, its sole point of interest being the discursive blarney of the unique predicaments of 'Jewish' identity and its corresponding historical necessity for reworking the American concept of 'manifest destiny' that over time, by dribs and drabs has blindsided the world, the diaspora, and the Jewish-Israeli community within Israel itself, to the bleak obviousness of their role in creating what, for the autochthones, is an ineludible tragedy. I once heard an impressive Australian doctor of Jewish origins, who does magnificent work with aboriginal health in the outback, sigh wryly that his humble emarginalized and broken patients know more about Palestinians that he does. Best regards, and two pats for the pups. (My 20 year old cat got killed off by a car late December).Nishidani (talk) 18:31, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

The book reviewed, if its thesis is to argue that what happened in Palestine recapitulates the practice of Enclosures in England (or for that matter the world around) is not saying anything new. It is how economics functions, well summed up in the old rhyme:

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

The point was first made, by the pseudonymous Dionides, a pirate, in conversation with Alexander the Great. I've always assumed that your average Zionist papers over any twinges by some 'ends justifies the means' argument of the kind you get in, Niall Ferguson, spokesman for the wheeler-dealers of modern finance. I.e. sure, empires are based on sheer massive theft, but whatever the transitory violence, everyone comes out the better once the robber barons settle down and translate their gains into investments, backed by laws on their privat(ized) property, that eventually improve the general commonwealth. This was impressed on me by reading Barrington Moore Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, soon after it came out. Modern ideological conservatism was born out of English reactions to the horror of hung aristocrats or land holders in the French Revolution- two and a half thousand victims of the terror in Paris alone. If I recall correctly, Barrington Moore drily noted that, until these notables were murdered, no one thought it anomalous that the land tenure system for a century saw an average of 40,000 peasants dying of starvation annually. Modern news reports of the 'terror' threat to our comfortable (e)states have the same fundamental disequilibrium of blindsided focus.Nishidani (talk) 14:05, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Future reference

On WP:Silence, as a corrective to the frequent misinterpretation of WP:consensus. Nishidani (talk) 19:47, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

acknowledgement

just like the buddhas in the berndt collection there comes a time to measure time and numbers, congrats on clearing the 64k edits, couldnt happen to a nicer oldie (sic) JarrahTree 09:18, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Effmedead, I think you've got my number, no. I think 64k leaves me feeling number. By impromptu crystal-ball gazing (which sounds like an allusion to frozen knackers) and computation, I think I'll be ready to toss in the towel around the 70k mark, piss-ant stuff compared to your 153,000 edits, a contribution that leaves me doffing the hat, and exposing the other bald-headed gentleman to the gelid airs of mid-winter! Thanks, though. Best regards. Nishidani (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

At a pre-christmas social event I had a retired native title judge critique your edits sight unseen - he was concerned that your main ref preocupation might leave us in contradiction of prevalent recent refs cf'ed to the subject - pity we cannot have a beer down at the local to work on that one - I have returned from enforced absence from the play pit, and the sand is still in my eyes - once the saline solution has kicked in and the innocuous fractiousness of the horrible weather here in marvellous metropolitan perth has lessened in its pretence of tropical outpust of lunatics - maybe a conversation is needed further JarrahTree 09:36, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Yep. There are a lot of problems that follow from using Tindale as the basic template, but you can't get around that because it's the only available source covering briefly the whole set. So, one puts in the data from T (while jotting down desultorily on the N Tindale page criticisms of his approach so that referred readers can see what is wrong - his tribe/dialect/territory triad has been challenged since Hiatt (1964) Sutton (1979) and many others started reanalyzing specific cases to show a much more complex picture of patrilineal moieties, totem/land links, inter-clan/tribal exchange marriage complications etc. I'm aware of all that.

As editor I had to calculate that what makes this minimal sketch possible is a year's access to Jstor, to do 600+tribes, and that is about to expire, so I've had to rush up the bare minimum, in the hope that, once we have a comprehensive integrated mapping with a single format for the whole subject, all later editors need do is (a) read the linked sources, and add what time hasn't allowed me to put in and (b) follow up by updating and fleshening out the bare bones provided. If you googled for info re, say, the Gadubanud, you could get fuck all before the wiki article was done. By pursuing this technique I managed at last to get the minimal sketch the scarce data allows us, and make Gadubanud. It doesn't help that for some obscure glitch I have lost all ability to read Google Books, once my primary tool for writing these articles. Tell the judge, then, that he's right but in this provisory world, better something than nothing. The nothing is something that awaits folks like me, a bit further on, down the corner!Nishidani (talk) 10:04, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Hey we are at square one which is brilliant and eminent and noteworthy- and hey, your corner stop aint that soon regardless of your pre-existings - he got my card, but unlikely to hear back think his partner thought i was crazy (it always helps), nah what was wishing we were on same block somewhere - was the idea of how to move beyond the brilliant start... less on the short comings - more on the possible moves beyond the long needed and brilliant set - the fact that things are where they are is good, more a sense, regardless of oggle and jstor possible strategies to get beyond current state of things - where i sit - the west oz set is a great thing to work from - have you had any luck accessing any of the aitsis material - or is it not the right fit? JarrahTree 10:14, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

If one were in a library, this would be a pushover, of course. I look at AIATSIS, but the pages just scream at me:'Get to an Australian library', since they rarely allow one links to the material one knows exists. I have been trying to get at least the AIATSIS map on every article. It's hard to use however. I did that for the Westralian tribes mainly, but have gotten slack. What helped there is that the Western Australian government provides an excellent web map of its section of Tindale's map, which meant that an editor could add stuff like: the X tribe's neighbours, running clockwise from the north, were A,B,C,D etc'. Other states haven't done this so far, but looking at Sutton's 1979 reproduction of the Wik tribe map from Tindale last night, I can see my way to fixing them up today. There are dozens of ideas: (a) every place name linkable in the 'country' section should lead to edits on those localities, entering the tribe name in the 'History section', so that Aurukun or Weipa, for instance, should have the relevant tribes in their history, so that, corresponding to the 600 tribes map, every wiki Australian town or shire or region article mentions the prehistorical people there. (b) The history of contact can be filled out with the numerous regional or local history books and articles, by noting who first took up a selection there. Usually you get, if ever, 'aborigines', whereas we know now which aboriginal tribes were there, and can specify that. Aborigines tells you nothing. I think there's only another 100 or so to sketch out in the next 2 months, so we're pretty close to completing a first draft.Nishidani (talk) 10:40, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

That is very good - will try to uncover from the house shifting - copies of things, otherwise into the library and archive for west oz things before my absence in march (whole month offline and away from elctormagnetic things) - all sounds very do-able - if you have queries there are perths academic and much denuded public library system at my access - just 6 weeks before gone then mid april back into things JarrahTree 10:46, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

I think anyone who works with Australian uni students working in this area of study should be asked if they could prompt them, and pass the word round, to get involved in a day (even if the time stretches out over months or a year) of public work by choosing one of the tribes, and ransacking the libraries and net, in order to do that one page. Doing 600 stubs in a year and a half suggests to me that anyone, unlike me, in Australian metropolitan city, could, over an afternoon, get up enough material even on relatively obscure tribes to write an essay. It's not much to ask. Wistful/wishful thinking perhaps, since eyes and thumbs scan preferably a more engaging social reality. Still worth trying the bush telegraph as I think downunderites call it? Nishidani (talk) 18:07, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

After twisting my fucking Cromwellian bowels into alchemical knots and wrenching out clumpy whispers of hair from my despairing pate for donkey's ages, in frustration I could never get any link to the journal Science of Man, which is often cited by Tindale, I finally twittered like an Aristophanic bird εὕρηκα! on fishing up from the Stygian depths of the net this apparent link, which appears, but I only have one proof, that the whole series is digitalized. If you ever get time, it might be worth trying to independently confirm whether this is searchable. It doesn't yield further results for me, but then I have drongo DNA in the family lines. It would mean doubling or tripling the content of many pages which I have had to abandon because the Science of Man articles T. alludes to weren't traceable.Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

1948 Palestine War

I kindly ask you to revise your vote! following the different sources that I have brought on this naming issue. Pluto2012 (talk) 06:29, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I haven't voted so I can't 'revise' mine, since it does not exist. I usually defer to experts, so, while I have been out all day, I will probably back your call, particularly because it is the only one that is well documented. But I'll have to read first all of the comments. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 17:26, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

You are welcome :-)

(nb: sorry for the mistake - I copied/pasted my message several times today) Pluto2012 (talk) 18:01, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Oops

In reversing that cut-and paste move, I seem to have inadvertently dropped 2 small edits of yours. Sorry about that. Best thing is probably for you to do them again, rather than my trying to disentagle the mess. Sorry for the trouble. --NSH001 (talk) 00:20, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Absolutely no problem, and nugatory compared to my regular and serious fuckups which you keep fixing quietly without complaint.Nishidani (talk) 09:46, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

yup excellent that you have us trailing you... :). cut and paste police exist - they get rather whatever, so when the new name place starts, to ward them off at the warbuton ranges rather than somehwere in uluru, the clapped out holden ute going in reverse for 200 km on straw tyres and booze for fuel, one needs to move quick so to speak JarrahTree 11:48, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Don' faget to pack the fosters'-laden esky into that ute. The straggling alztimer with the nip monicker you may back into is hitchhiking in that part of the nevernever, an' even if not runover, will be dry as a nun's nasty or already flattened out like a thirst-slaked thorny devil.Nishidani (talk) 12:11, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

reality is much worse, we will soon be resting temporarily next to the southern ocean, the closest legal campsite to the ocean, near a former whaling site (that never got the proper archaeol dig ever I dont think when they had a chance) so it will be wet ocean salt as opposed to lake carnegie. :). JarrahTree 12:22, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Reality's just a poor fictional ersatz for dreaming. Sounds like Mineng country, so y'd better chew some pituri and have a whale of a time improvising a dithyramb in memory of Nebinyan! Have a good 'trip' even if it's only the Himalayas.Nishidani (talk) 15:13, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Janis Joplin lyrics come back as if it was last year...Richard Lester had a kooky movie which she was edited into the opening sequence - nah 2 trips, one with the better, the other into the clouds (currently 6c to 16c in the day average) nothing chewed, all added salt JarrahTree 15:18, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Tomorrow

Merge Nawagi into Nyawagyi. Same people.Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Janis Joplin indeed, maybe Belushi (on a mission from god), or even for that matter going back further William S. - its astonishing that it was the 1940s it all started, New York must have been a scary place in the meatpacking district... This is a part of a conversation I am sure I would have if we ever met in real life. But then I imagine there is quite a lot of saltwater between us. JarrahTree 15:15, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I used to visit Australia quite regularly, for three reasons: to keep in touch with the dialect, which was a marvelous one; to save heating bills over a European winter, and to see the Aussie thrash the Poms in a 5 test series (that's as far as ancestral Irish vengeance goes). My wife's illness doesn't allow travel anymore. But if you pass through Rome, I could get the time to show you its original meat-packing district, namely the Coliseum, where ancient Rome in all its g(l)ory set the civilised world on the road to Auschwitz.Nishidani (talk) 16:56, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

inneresting, ok, the offer accepted, all I gotta do is adjust reality a bit, maybe not tommorrow, maybe a little later... JarrahTree 23:34, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

More misrepresentation of sources on the Korean influence article

This guy doesn't seem to get it, and has been ignoring my ping on the talk page; worse, he's been waiting for me to revert, then quickly coming along and reverting back. My 1RR is keeping me from restoring the stable version for the time being, and honestly last time I opened an ANEW report on editor who was engaged in bad-faith edit-warring while ignoring the talk page discussion but who hadn't breached 3RR, User:EdJohnston basically responded by giving them a slap on the wrist and telling them to stop, but then when it continued immediately thereafter still didn't do anything.

Anyway, if he's not willing to use the talk page in order to get his version restored, he's definitely not going to use it while his version is already live, so would you mind taking a look and seeing if you agree with my assessment that he's misrepresenting the source? Basically I think that what the source (which is here -- despite what Koryosaram's edit summary thinks, I did read it) is talking about is the literary structure followed by the editors of the Nihongi in recording actual myths that formed part of the religious practice of the time in various parts of the archipelago having been influenced by Korean sources, not that the myths themselves are derived from earlier Korean myths. If you think their edit is fine I'll probably just drop it.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:06, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

BTW, the only reason I didn't take this to ANEW already was because they seem to require a "warning" having been issued, but chances are he's going to ignore my warning and just not do anything until he needs to revert again, which is why I can't actually do anything for the next thirteen hours or so. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:09, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

I've reverted per plagiarism of copyright, i.e. the editor didn't paraphrase, but pretended that a direct quote from the source was in fact a paraphrase of that source. But this is just a technicality. The material cited should be in the article, like so much else that is missing, mainly because that page is or was a battle ground between Japanese and Korean source nationalisms. Como was being cited by the Korean nationalist in order to imply that Japan's foundational chronicles were of 'Korean' origin: well, much of the Yamato court ideology has deep roots in the Korean peninsular myths of regional state formation, but we are not dealing with 'Korea' and 'Japan' but with the adoption by both, the former providing the latter with the model for how this is done, of mythopoetic charters for autochonous origins which, as Como and many others show, meld a wide variety of broad continental traditions and that therefore cannot be used, as they have been, to retrospectively read back modern notions of endogenous identity. 大林太良's works, at least the several I am familiar with from the 1960s and 1970s, constantly contextualize these myths in much larger pre-national/continental stories that were floating around, as tribes moved, all over the place. Como himself is aware of that, as per his remark:'the royal cult was imbued with cultic elements with roots that stretched beyond Kyūshū and even Korea, into the distant Chinese past.' (p113)

Rather then allowing that page to stagnate by consistently stymying by reverts the Korean nationalist gambit, I think you should bear in mind a more positive approach by going to those sources and paraphrasing them to show the Korean peninsular multiethnic tribal drive towards statehood was replicated in Japan, with the former being not only a Kulturträger but a creative world, which remodulated broader continental traditions to create a warrant for tribal amalgamations there which, in turn, furnished the Yamato elites with a technique and warrant for doing the same in the rising formation of a proto-Japanese state at a time when there was no unified ethnonational identity, but merely powerful families in both crafting stories to legitimize their respective bids for ascendancy in the emerging political landscapes.Nishidani (talk) 10:28, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

To do

Merge Mingginda and Mingin.Nishidani (talk) 17:18, 11 February 2018 (UTC) and perhaps Koamu and Kooma.Nishidani (talk) 19:42, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

How do I use this source?

Jinggeri Nishidani,

I am interested in using information from a local radio show on Yugambeh language and culture, it is presented by the language officer of the Yugambeh Museum, the episodes are availabale online as well at: https://m.soundcloud.com/abc-gold-coast/sets/learn-the-lingo-yugambeh

How would I use this information? I am not going to lie, I am deeply confused. Do I quote things and say 'According to ...'? Also, there is occasional reference of written material - Should I track these down to use as a reference?

Nyanyahbu BlackfullaLinguist (talk) 04:01, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Ngata.(Jinggeri), BlackfullaLinguist.

yaan wirakanwan ('let's track down some words' in my self-taught pidgin version of Kuurn Kopan Noot)

I listened for a half hour, surprised to hear an Yugambeh speaking without an Australian accent when using English. On the technical side, you would put a source like that, formatted Learn the lingo: Yugambeh language ABC in the external references section, while actually citing material on the language from any number of printed sources, or online reprints like the following:

• Modern Yugambeh Dictionary and Language lists (PDF). Yugambeh Museum. 2013. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)

The reason is that citing a written source enables the reader/other editors to verify the content immediately with a click, whereas a radio conversation source, apart from not be very acceptable on Misplaced Pages, takes ages to check, because you must listen every time to the whole download.

So if you wanted to make the point Shaun Davies (?sp) makes re duin (fear), for example, using the citation form in the article, you would write, after it- {{sfn|Yugambeh Dictionary|2013|p=14}} :Don't worry if I am late in getting back to you. There's a 10 hour time-lag between us, so often I will be asleep when someone makes a query on this page, or vice versa.

Yiyan-yiyan(Nyanyahbu ) Nishidani (talk) 10:59, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks!

		The BLP Barnstar
		For your edits on Ahed Tamimi, Thanks! Huldra (talk) 22:09, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Barmy star

Assadist- Putinist scum, Nishidani. What a jerk. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.150.141.73 (talk) 15:41, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Easter bunny

There's a rabbit in your mailbox. Might make good felt. Zero 23:51, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Cite error

Could you fix this cite error from one of your edits? I think the material is important, but I wanted to tweak the wording so I could include information on protests and funerals that took place the following day. Thank you.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 05:12, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Wow, I hate that fancy mobile presentation! This is the diff he's referring to, in which you introduce an undefined named ref: <ref name="BaloushaHolmes" /> --NSH001 (talk) 07:57, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Citing lists

The Land Day massacre article has highlighted a problem that I've been noticing for a while on your Aboriginal Australian articles, but mostly allowed to pass, since the intention was obvious, namely that a cite appended to a list item only supports that item, not the whole list, even if the cite is appended to the last item in the list. The best course is usually to provide an introductory sentence or two, if not already present, and cite that ("Scholar X listed the following names.<cite>" or whatever). Otherwise lazy editors are likely to make claims that the list is "uncited", as you can see on the talk page.

It also matters if someone wants to alter the order of the list (e.g., to put it in alphabetical order), when there is little chance that anybody might recognise it as citing the whole list if it is no longer at the end.

Best wishes, and hope you recover speedily. --NSH001 (talk) 07:44, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

AE

You have been reported here. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 17:21, 3 April 2018 (UTC)