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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

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.84.1.2 (talk)

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.

Advice

I do not think getting in an edit war with others over the op-eds is worth it. One of the editors--and I'm sure you know who--exists primarily to make blanket reverts and mindlessly agree with the usual entourage so there is a good chance they can outlast you on this issue. Perhaps go at this way: drop the op-ed. There are plenty of secondary sources like The New York Times, Miami Herald, Aljazeera that describe the double standard you are trying to convey in the article.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 12:53, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Neither do I. This is not an oped issue. Minder editors, those who do nothing but sit back and revert-assist the 'team' should have zero tolerance, esp. since the edit summaries used are invariably specious. In my talk page edit which has disappeared through some glitch on the page as it appears somehow confused the point I was making with your own and which I tried to fix several times without success, I write:-

Shrike strikes again with a blind revert without examining the evidence

This cannot but go back in, because, while citing Beaumont, I knew that it was not Beaumont’s personal oped opinion, but a general view in several sources.

To make that clear, I’ll rephrase it so the objection drops.

Hanan Ashrawi, Ammar Dweik, director of the The Independent Commission for Human Rights,Peter Beaumont and social media, contrasted the length of the sentence Tamimi received for slapping a soldier with that of an Israeli border guard who was sentenced to nine months for shooting dead an unarmed Palestinian demonstrator, and with the case of another Israeli soldier, Elor Azaria, who eventually received a sentence roughly of the same length as Tamimi’s after he executed a wounded Palestinian militant while the latter lay on a road.

1. Peter Beaumont, 'Soldiers good, Palestinians bad: Israel's double standards on justice,' The Guardian 2 May 2018.
2. 'Israeli policeman gets 9 months for killing Palestinian teen,' AFP,Washington Post 25 April 2018
3. Isabel Kershner, 'Israeli Who Shot Palestinian Teenager Is Sentenced to 9 Months in Prison,' New York Times 25 April 2018.
4. David M. Halbfinger, 'Ahed Tamimi, Palestinian Teen, Gets 8 Months in Prison for Slapping Israeli Soldier,' New York Times 21 March 2018.
5. 'Double standards': Israel soldier gets 9 months for killing teen,' Al Jazeera 25 April 2018.

A nanosecond's googling would have told you, Shrike, or Icewhiz or anyone else, that this is not reducible to a journalistic oped, but formed part of the media reportage of the Tamimi verdiot, unlike the smear op-ed removed with Beaumont earlier. Anyone, feel free to restore this. Nishidani (talk) 09:22, 8 May 2018 (UTC) Here I showed that Beaumont's piece, though technically an oped, merely reflected the impression widely voiced by social media and identifiable figures prominent in that area, as anyone wbo, when tempted to revert, should have checked before pressing tbe nuke button. The sources you refer me to confirm this. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:59, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Can AE or ANI evaluate that kind of behavior? I know it doesn't violate ARBPIA per se, but it certainly violates the spirit of it. And as you said, it certainly borders on "team" editing. The whole point of 1RR was to have editors discuss more on the talk page, not to disagree without any reason other than personal preference. If a case can be made, I'll gather diffs to construct a timeline of long-term disruptive behavior.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:07, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

No, neither can handle it. One observes numerous patterns of collective gaming in this area, but there's no instrument at arbitration to handle it since even there you get crowding and the temptation of arbs is to say 'content dispute'. Mind you, the teamsters here are convinced that the other side does exactly what they do, exchange emails, alert each other, etc. That's nonsense, and the essence of it is that one party is committed to defending a national interest, whereas the other is a disaggregated number of editors from all sorts of backgrounds who tend to see the complexities, and above all, are thoroughly familiar with the topic, which can't be said for the nationalist POV push. There are no Palestinian editors here, and it lies just on the shoulders of other editors to see that one underrepresented part of the conflict gets fair and equal attention to its claims and interpretations, something that, in terms of sourcing, is assisted by the enormous dedication of, esp. Israeli and Jewish scholars to setting the record straight. What they know to their fingertips in the history and sociology departments of places like TAU is unknown to the gamers, who think anyone who cites this material is anti-Semitic or anti-Israel and therefore a danger to anyone whose knowledge of that country is limited to fluency in the language, drill in the IDF and a daily reading of Israel Hayom, The Times of Israel or Jerusalem Post. Well, whatever, editing here is good moral training - one learns the virtues of forbearance, detachment and informed judgement under trying circumstances, what the Palestinians call sumud. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 18:53, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

The teaming is real. See what happens when you create an article not about a Palestinian terrorist incident. I think I understand exactly what you are saying, especially now.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 19:34, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

User:TheGracefulSlick, oh boy, I see you have gotten yourself a following. I have been living with that for 12+ years now. Actually, I mostly dont mind that: if they follow me around, at least they learn some Palestinian history! Though, I would appreciate them making some rudimentary check of the facts at times.... See this, eg, (←I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry..) Huldra (talk) 20:49, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes Huldra I have learned my lesson! They have already taken out the words "terrorist/terrorism" entirely from the article. By the time they are finished it will be an article on a revolutionary statement by true patriots. But, as you said, hopefully they learned something beforehand.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 21:22, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

One of our (wiki) problems is that we cover not only contemporary and recent history, but also episodes decades back, using sources contemporary with the event, or RS that uses newspaper reports contemporary with the events. The historian knew that only after 3 or 4 decades, when archives were opened, would something more proximate to the complex forces at play start to shape up. All of our Gaza articles for example are sheer rubbish, 'balancing' with POV proportionality ostensibly the western-israeli spin machine's churning reportage with bulletins from the other front. If only 50% of Norman Finkelstein's forensic deconstruction of the hasbara tsunami washing over reportage from the New York Times down were correct, it would be bad enough. But he's far too meticulous to get that low grade. Wew are reporting spin, not facts most of the time. It's true even of the distant past you touched on in that British Embassy article. Just slowly following up the implications of an article like this, or Ronen Bergman's book, for the 1980s would mean months of work. But, life's short, quality is the thing, and the motto for editing here is festina lente. It's pleasurable in the end if one masters a topic sufficiently to make it so that compulsive reverters can only ruin it at their risk. One learns a lot here, not only about history: one of my pursuits is analysing antipathy or cold insouciance to shame and pity. Ah well, beddy-byes!Nishidani (talk) 22:20, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Another close call as a Hamas terrorist intent on destroying Israel, Alaa Asawafiri (26), is stopped dead in their tracks

Declan Walsh,'At the Gaza-Israel Fence: Raw Nerves and Shots Fired,' New York Times 13 May 2018

and no amount of antisemitic reportage can spin and challenge its veracity, it is an eyewitness account.Nishidani (talk) 20:58, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

New image of deadly Hamas rocket attack, courtesy NF.Nishidani (talk) 19:20, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

An Exchange

Just saying from the 2018 Gaza Border Incidents page

In the Infobox, the Israel Fire and Rescue Services are listed under Parties to the civil conflict. The Red Crescent isn't. Shouldn't both be mentioned, or neither? Moriori (talk) 03:44, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Red Crescent is a counterpart to Magen David Adom, which is not mentioned. There were no widespread fire-kite terrorism burning fields inside Gaza, so whatever firefighters inside Gaza are called they were not involved. “WarKosign” 04:01, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Kite- fires are terrorism (and not vandalism?). I presume you mean that if Israeli fields are burnt by Palestinian fire-kites that is terrorism, whereas the hundreds of incidents of settlers burning Palestinian fields in the West Bank are just routine 'weed' control. No source I know of speaks of the routine firing of Palestinian fields as terrorism, nor does the Israeli spraying of herbicide toxins on Gazan crop land qualify as terrorism, nor does the systematic destruction of scarce farmland by Israeli bulldozers, or military onslaughts. So kindly take a little more care in the way you phrase these things, for, on the principle of 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander' you are unwittingly suggesting that thousands of Israeli actions on Palestinian land are terrorism, a position you no doubt would deny.Nishidani (talk) 12:23, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Since no sources call these incidents terrorism, they are not terrorism. “WarKosign” 12:27, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

I'll put that in my favourite wiki quotes section. Israel defines anything the people it occupies do in resistance as terrorism. Whoever controls the discourse, gets to define evil as doing what we do, but unacceptably because opposed to us. Orwellian. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 12:54, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Looks like you need a reminder: WP:NOTTRUTH. Misplaced Pages goes by what the sources say, not by what you believe in. “WarKosign” 13:08, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Of course, our aim is untruth in this area, as per most pages. But notwithstanding that result, editors are advised that perhaps the most fundamental rule they must subscribe to and abide by is WP:NPOV, and are cautioned against WP:Systemic bias. If someone really believes, after considering the apt congruency of events reported of one people with those of another, both in conflict, it doesn't matter that one is described as terrorist behavior (in Israeli sources basically), and the other not. Per our policies, and WP:Terrorist, commonsense demands that one lay off opportunistic harvesting of the bias in order to assert and insert a POV one sympathizes with, and simply describe what happens without partisan adjectival ornamentation. This stands out like dogs' knackers.Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

ANI

There is currently a discussion at regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Drsmoo (talk) 14:08, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

As this is a DS violation and just plain disruptive, I'm inclined to block you and close the thread. You might want to respond to the ANI thread.-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 14:44, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

That seems a bit rash. What exactly is the violation and what exactly is disruptive? nableezy - 16:54, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

apology

No I'm sorry for taking the OP's word before all the facts were in.-- Dlohcierekim (talk) 17:56, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Some grownup links to useful I/P sources for contemporary events

• Sir Stephen Sedley, 'Short Cuts,' London Review of Books vol 40 No 9, 10 May 2018.
• Henry Siegman, 'The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy,' vol. 40 No. 10, 24 May 2018 pp.17-18
• Stanley L. Cohen, 'Broken Dreams and Lost Lives: Israel, Gaza and the Hamas Card,' CounterPunch 22 May 2018.
• Mario Vargas Llosa, 'La caja de los truenos,' El Pais 20 May 2019.

Holocaust denial and other bizarrities

I've had the displeasure of knowing two Holocaust deniers fairly well, which was enough to alert me to the perils of making blanket assertions about such people. HD#1 fit the mould of your description pretty well: his denial was part and parcel of his antisemitism. HD#1 would dismiss my suggested reading material on such grounds as "the author is a Jew so what do you expect?". On the other hand, HD#2 is one of those people who can't resist a conspiracy theory, and the bigger the conspiracy the more attractive it is. So HD#2 also believes the moon landings were staged, that the WTC was brought down by explosives (he is adamant that there were no planes), and so on. I sometimes think he is incapable of hearing a conspiracy theory without believing in it. However, I have never heard him attribute these conspiracies to Jews as would someone who had a basically antisemitic world view. It is always some CIA shadow government or similar that is responsible. My point is that HD comes in different flavors and we shouldn't assume otherwise. Zero 12:36, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Point well-taken, and particularly appreciated because, in this area, the rhetorical deployment of anti-Semite/Holocaust denier accusations (along with the extremely devious pressure to legislate into law the idea that opposition to Zionism, i.e. anti-Zionism is evidence of antisemitism) has proved to have great attritional value in wearing down to a tired blur our innate capacities to 'always distinguish'. People whose antennae still quiver differently according to the subtly diverse valencies of the messages in what, to the less sensitive, looks like a uniform field of unisonal signals, are increasingly rare. The point was put with great lucidity by Sir Stephen Sedley in the brilliant essay I cite just above this:

the ubiquity of insult and calumny in the everyday vocabulary of social media plays a not insignificant part in the foul-mouthed verbal assaults described by Jewish MPs in the recent Commons debate. This said, most Jews do understand the risk of hypersensitivity. There is the story about Goldbloom, doing well in the rag trade in Stepney, who has to make a dash for Euston to sort out a problem with his supplier in Glasgow. As the night sleeper pulls out, he realises he has left his overnight bag behind. Luckily the man occupying the other berth in the sleeper compartment has a spare pair of pyjamas, which he lends Goldbloom, and tells Goldbloom he can use his razor in the morning. But when Goldbloom asks if he can also borrow his toothbrush, he politely declines. The next evening, when he returns from Glasgow, Goldbloom’s wife asks him how the journey went. ‘Not bad,’ says Goldbloom, ‘but did I meet an anti-Semite!’

That said, the profile of the person on the page in question left little doubt in my mind that she is anti-Semitic in the HD#1 sense, but, as you remind me, this is, in legal (as opposed to psychoanalytic) terms, still opinionable, much as is my sense that a numerous people I have had to deal with show a callous contempt for anyone beyond the pale of their ingrown provincial prejudices, which are ethnic supremacist to the bootstraps - and mirror the pathology of anti-Semitism which is far more palpably detectable also because the latter attracts more attention and concern, and is treated like a language isolate, as a unique category of its own, and not just the most visibly toxic expression of a generalized 'human' condition - of nonchalant disdain for, or malicious joy over, the suffering of fellow human beings. Nishidani (talk) 15:27, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

My first impression of England as a boy was observing how a Pakistani conductor on a double decker bus, noticing a somewhat elderly gentleman, dressed to the pins like a bureaucrat, with bowler and a walking stick, limply stepping slowly onto the bus steps, reached out to lend him a hand, gently grasping him under the elbow to assist his entry. The small man's face changed instantly from the dull public mask it wore into a picture of sheer Kurtzian horror, glossed with a raging outburst along the lines:' Get your filthy paws off me, you fucking Paki swine!' I've witnessed things like that (particularly against Arabs and Africans) far more often than I have anti-Semitism, though once, lecturing in Canberra, I did observe a brilliant English academic whose company I had hitherto enjoyed, suddenly transform himself into a Fagin-like figure as he caricatured another scholar there as a Jew. Rub up otherwise numerous people the wrong way and the basic impression of decency can drop in an instant and reveal a spluttering bigot, and this goes for any community. It's not peculiar to anti-Semites, and you can find it just as often in vocational raucous anti anti-Semites.Nishidani (talk) 15:47, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Problem with Katzman

The issue is that the authority cited is a book published by a firm that has a history of not fact-checking, and the author is essentially unknown, so even though Katzman is probably an acceptable authority, the only way we know he said this is via an unknown author and a publisher with a bad record - in other words we don't actually know that he said it at all. I don't mind if that editor wants tot rack down the original Katzman source, but this one is not on. Guy (Help!) 16:32, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

This is too silly to reply to here. Editors of general books do not check the facts of scholars/researchers (Katzman is on the staff of the Congressional Research Service, for fuck's sake: you get fired if you screw up consistently there, and what he states in any case is a truism) who have competence in their own fields. Anyone who has published academically knows that: one is invited to add a paper to a volume on the basis of one's particular expertise, and editors can't be expected to check your facts. That is for peer-reviewers examining the book on publication. It is totally irrelevant who the editor is. This is so elementary . . . Nishidani (talk) 19:04, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

ARBPIA violation

Per third ARBPIA bullet: "If an edit is reverted by another editor, its original author may not restore it within 24 hours of the first revert made to their edit." Meaning, you should have waited at least 24 hours after MY EDIT before reinserting your disputed content.--יניב הורון (talk) 00:06, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, and I appreciate the courtesy. You are correct. The content is not disputed. You just reverted with a false edit summary, without talk page argument. Nishidani (talk) 09:56, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

spi

no need for any comments there, the diffs are listed. This is a technical question, dont want an invitation to uninformed comments like what followed. that happens nobody will look at it.. nableezy - 18:10, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree. but checking the material, I'm either tired or saw a reduplication of diffs. You nhasve 3 not four, by my account. The time factor (two years) is, at least for this detective, a fundamental clue. Still, the principle is, don't interfere with other people's work. Apologies.Nishidani (talk) 19:55, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Its not that, its that when people see others commenting they feel obliged to chime in with some irrelevant crap. And then nobody looks at it cus its a clusterfuck. Would like this the to be done with the least amount of fuss possible. nableezy - 21:44, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

There's an ethical point here. Because a lot of editwarriors cram in to vote on whatever page one comments these days, must one desist from noting a relevant point on those pages for fear of 'baiting' them. I noted as technical correction (right or wrong) and made an observation on time differences, it was purely technical. That the usual Shrike feels obliged to make his necessary opinion/'vote' whenever I or someone else shows up is beside the point, surely. One can't be conditioned by the foolish behavior of other editors. As it is, I don't comment on most pages precisely because I don't want to appear to imitate the herd practices of the usual swarming team, but there's a limit. Still point taken. Nishidani (talk) 08:24, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

rant and rave

by the bone - email somewhere there JarrahTree 15:03, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

J'impose silence à mon Méphistophélès. Ce diable allait tout dire! Mais, tout diable qu'il est, il n'eût certainement pas pu vous dire l'avenir. L'avenir est comme le reste : il n'est plus ce qu'il était. J'entends par là que nous ne savons plus penser à lui avec quelque confiance dans nos inductions. Nous avons perdu nos moyens traditionnels d'y penser et de prévoir : c'est le pathétique de notre état.' (Paul Valéry 17 February 1937) Best regards Nishidani (talk) 15:27, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

yeah alliance francaise in perth once had the bumper sticker 'monolingualism can be cured' JarrahTree 15:34, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Meaning to get two yodeling tongues on a single fanny require medical advice? Nishidani (talk) 15:37, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Please use Edit summaries

I just noticed your edits overnight to Aboriginal Tasmanians, and had a bit of a look at them because this article has been a target for vandalism in the past. My job was made harder (and you edits looked more suspicious) because you used very few Edit summaries. Can you please try to use them more in future? HiLo48 (talk) 00:16, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

New article

I recently created an article: March 1947 martial law in Mandatory Palestine. I left room for expansion, and I recall your ability to find new sources at 1946 British Embassy bombing. If you have time, I would appreciate anything you can contribute to the article.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 21:26, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes this is good work - what editors should be doing, rather than editwarring over snippets, i.e. building the encyclopedia constructively. I've bookmarked it, and will see what I can do when time allows. The attention to neat formatting and citational templates is also appreciated. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:57, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

AE

--Shrike (talk) 20:26, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Out of curiosity

Did you pick the Toynbee/Ikeda reference (rather than any of the other possible allusions you could have made) as a pointed in-joke for my benefit? I'm not sure if you noticed, but not only has <satire> my disruptive history of promoting the Soka Gakkai on Misplaced Pages </satire> and the ArbCom case that <satire> spun out of it </satire> been mentioned on ANI but the editor who would write that unironically has apparently been actively evading his site ban in the last few days.

Funny coincidence, if you weren't aware of them.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:14, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

No, I don't follow other editors and had no way of knowing you had worked on Soka Gakkai, a page I can't remember editing. Polymath +outsider working on Japan just spontaneously stirred memories of Toynbee's misadventures with Ikeda.Nishidani (talk) 09:36, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

I'm actually relieved to know you don't remember that the Arbitration case (on which you commented a few times) that led to my being TBANned for a couple of years was technically (at least according to ArbCom's findings of fact) about 20th-century Nichiren Buddhist lay groups ("lay groups" was not in there but the articles in question were all related to either the Kokuchukai or the Soka Gakkai). That said, my Soka Gakkai edits were mostly reactive (I saw an editor adding content and attributing it to sources that, when I checked them, said nothing of the source), so I wouldn't say I was "working on" them. It's a funny coincidence, then. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:25, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

I?ve seen Soka Gakkai missionaries behaving no different from tekiya in harassing decent folks in my area. Ergo . . .:) Having linked to tekiya I see that it doesn't give sufficient weight to those of them who bash up customers, the gangster kind.Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Well don't count on me to improve en.wiki's coverage of any modern Japanese stuff for a few months. Once the current ANI drahma is solved I'm going back up my Man'yoshu hole. Honestly said solving should it should have been over with the minute an admin issued the final warning I requested, less than 24 hours after the discussion was opened; the problem is that the warning was acknowledged and then promptly violated, but some folks are still calling BLOCKNOTPUNITIVE, including the aforementioned Andrew, apparently in order to repay the debt that the warnee left him with when he showed up on AN and said my complaint about Andrew was groundless. It's amazing that people can accuse me, you and this guy of being members of the same clique when "the pack defends its members" stuff as blatant as this is going on under their noses. Even still, there's no way I'll still be dealing with it longer than a few more days, so hopefully my vacation will begin sooner and end sooner. Still not sure if I'd wanna write about either tekiya or SG, though. ;-) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:17, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

I didn't mean it in that sense (do some work). I would advise, as usual, that you forget the past incidents. I simply wastes too much time. One should, as far as possible, restrict one's attention to building articles, and walk past the vexatious attrition of POV battles. If they arise, bide your time, and then go one editing. No matter how hard one works here, it is policy to give due hearing to frivololus pseuds and to people with a substantial record of article improvement. That's the way it is, so one must develop strategies to prioritize whatever is personally and encyclopedically useful, esp. since most of the arb disputes are so arcane almost no one understands them, or remembers them (except for attack purposes). Don't get sucked into that. Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

By the way, Hijiri. If you ever come across an internet copy of Hiraga Gennai (平賀源内)'s treatise on farting (放屁論), I'd much appreciate a link, since I'0ve always promised myself I'd read it (the final Greek class I attended before graduating was a brilliantly funny, very erudite survey of malodorous crepitation and halitosis in ancient literature). I was reminded of it by reflecting today on Misplaced Pages and flatulence.Nishidani (talk) 17:11, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

List of reverts

The AE case alluded to above flopped on the 20th June. Since it dealt with abusive editing, on closure I am listing any example where reverts, partial or otherwise, take place that have no adequate policy grounds, in my view, starting immediately with this one.

• 20 June 2018.at Ahed Tamimi, by Shrike with a false edit summary. See also here.Nishidani (talk) 19:38, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
• 23 June 2018 at Blockade of the Gaza Strip, with a meaninglessly opinionated edit summary, by Yaniv.Nishidani (talk) 20:46, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
• 23 June 2018 at Gaza War (2008) eliding 'alleged' (as in source) on the grounds it is already stated, which it isn't, that a Hamas tunnel, asserted to be a casus belli, was being directly prepared for an operation to kidnap Israeli soldiers despite a truce, which Hamas was scrupulously observing. By TheTimesAreAChangingNishidani (talk) 06:55, 24 June 2018 (UTC)
• 7 July 2018 nationality and holding a passport are separate issues at Palestinian Authority passport by User:Enthusiast01

Numerous sources state such people as Daniel Barenboim had citizenship and a Palestinian passport conferred on them simultaneously. One implies the right to the other. It takes 10 seconds to verify that, 10 seconds if one is slow.Nishidani (talk) 13:28, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

On linguistic brainwashing

on May 14, "Black Monday", 63 unarmed demonstrators were shot dead and over 1500 wounded by live fire. Every Israeli knows that this was necessary because the demonstrators stormed the fence and were about to swarm into Israel. Nobody paid attention to the simple fact that there was not a single photo showing such an occurrence. Not even one. In spite of the fact that on both sides of the fence there were hundreds of photographers, including Israeli army photographers, who filmed every single detail. Tens of thousands stormed, and not a single picture?One should notice the use of the word "terror". It has turned into an adjective attached to everything. There are not just tunnels – they are all always "terror-tunnels". There are "terror-activists". There is "the Hamas terror-regime" and there are "terror-bases". Now there are "terror-kites".The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are "terrorists". (In Hebrew, a special term has been invented: "Mekhablim"). The use of these terms, hundreds of times every day, clearly constitute brainwashing, without the citizens noticing it. They are getting used to the fact that all Gazans are terrorists, mekhablim. This is a process of dehumanization, the creation of Untermenschen in the Nazi lexicon. Their killing is allowed, even desirable. . .WHAT CAN be done to counter such brainwashing? Not much. Uri Avnery, Are YOU Brainwashed? Gush Shalom 9 June 2018.

RE comment

RE -this comment - I give little weight to the Israeli, Polish, or any other government view on history. I will also note, that in relation to WWII I have been trying to stick to high-quality (academic books by scholars in the field, journal articles. To a lesser extent - popular history books (only when the prior two aren't available) and mainline news outlets (mainly for contemporary coverage of investigations - not for historical fact)) - and all this in English (with minor exceptions - I have sourced to Polish and Hebrew in very limited instances). Some of the stuff I've been cleaning up is really low quality sourcing - take a look at RSN Ewa Kurek and Mark Paul. There is also a serious problem in the topic area with Polish language sources being misrepresented - I've found (and corrected - sometimes after a protracted "fight") several instances in which a Polish language source was being used to state something in an article when it did not say it all, said something different (in particular - general stmts on Jews turning into particular stmts and vice versa), and in some cases the Polish language source actually said the opposite - e.g. look at your post at RSN here.

I'd like to point out the two most egregious and obvious examples (search them up - Radziłów is fairly famous - just ignore "Mark Paul" who is a WP:QS WP:SPS (though google results are flooded with him) of outright hoaxes - Stawiski (was this) or Radziłów (was this) - both of which presented anti-Jewish pogroms by Poles as Jewish persecution of Poles, followed by a German massacre (with little or no Polish involvement) of Jews. The topic area being in a "stable" state with outright hoaxes and use of non-RS (described as myth propagating to boot) - is not a state that should remain "stable". And these are not unique, just extreme in their misrepresentation.Icewhiz (talk) 14:42, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

I may be wrong, of course, but I can't escape the impression that your position on I/P articles and on the Polish/Jewish WW2 articles represents a ethnonational POV in both cases. That is the only logical connection there. There's nothing on Misplaced Pages to deny you the right to adopt this approach. In historicist terms however it strikes me as profoundly irrational, and RS have nothing to do with the options exercised. For 6 years Nazis made a hell for Poles, Jewish or otherwise. For the last 50 years Israel has occupied a foreign country, and has blasted shit out of the lives of a few million people. I make the connection between two occupied peoples (not between the occupiers: Australian colonizers weren't Nazis, but a lot that thought and behaved like them became national heroes). What interests me is both Polish/ Jewish Polish suffering, and that is why I can understand, I believe, Palestinian suffering.You don't make the connection. Nishidani (talk) 15:00, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

For the record - Polish suffered horribly during the occupation. ~3 million non-Jewish Poles (as well as ~3 million Jews) died. That being said, there were some some rather severe anti-Jewish actions by the Poles and Polish underground - see Neighbors and Fear by Gross, or Hunt for the Jews by Grabowski. Take a peak at what was going on in Stawiski and Radziłów - which is actually what really got me involved (I did "light" editing in the topic area around the Polish law passing in Jan 2018 - but mainly on lightweight current affairs stuff which I sometimes do - e.g. Grenfell Tower fire) - but what really get me into this was seeing Stawiski presented in completely counter-historical terms.Icewhiz (talk) 15:10, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Undoubtedly. And there were some severe actions undertaken (and I am fully aware of the Zydokomuna variety of anti-Semitism) against Polish villagers by Communists who happened (for good reason contextually) to be Jewish. I get the impression you think the mere fact of Jewish ethnicity of historical actors means that the historian must assume their behaviour must be accorded special circumstances. (I grew up more or less twigging out the anti-Semitic undertones of a lot of friends whose families escaped from the Eastern European inferno. Most of them were radical anti-Communists because of personal experiences. When two families learnt I was studying Russian, they busted my burgeoning interest in their highly intelligent and winsome daughters.) That thoroughly Decent people can approve absolute evil is the lesson I learnt from those experiences, and it applies to all ethnic groups. The generalized anti-Semitism of East European Christian societies is identical to the anti-Palestinianism of Israeli society. Both are forms of anti-Semitism, with the difference that the latter is reverse anti-Semitism where the historic victim of undying prejudice escapes from the context of torment only to reproduce its logic in turn against a third party which has no connection with the original story of hatred.Nishidani (talk) 15:37, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Prizegiving

I believe you are partial to a drop of this Nish. As you were the only entrant to my what the feck has been going on on WP in the past 6 months competition, with DBX,who is of the beer, I award you your prize. Cheers! Irondome (talk) 22:09, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

• Hahaha, You Got it right bro. But Craft Beer to be precise. And White wine as well. That said, I would never say no to CR, anytime that would be blasphemy. I offer beer cuz unfortunately Wikilove only allowes to serve beer by default. cheers --DBigXray 20:19, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Nishidani means

What does it mean. I am intrigued--DBigXray 20:15, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Nishidani is an off-the-track place in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, meaning ‘western valley’, a nice place to relax from the metropolitan hustle of any of Japan’s supermodern cities. But on the other hand it could refer to a site in Shimane Prefecture noted for its rich deposits of ancient Japanese tumuli, suggesting an interest in Japanese archaeology. Depending on accent, and pronunciation and script it could also allude to the idea of a

• 西蜱 western tick, evocative of the idea of a foreign, European thug or nuisance
• 西谿 western gorge, perhaps then a hermit eking out life in a ravined landscape somewhere in the West.
• 西田 a rice paddy to the west of a hamlet, connoting someone who eats rice as a staple though living abroad, westwards of the Japanese isles.
• It could also be an abbreviation of 西田(幾多郎)に, thus 'Nishida-ni,'(In response to the writings of the foremost Japanese philosopher), Nishida Kitarō
• It could, as a polylingual pun, mean ‘occidental shithouse’ (dunny). It may bear other nuances, but the above were those uppermost in mind when I chose this handle. Nishidani (talk) 08:35, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

• Thanks for the elaborate reply. To add to your list.

• Nishidani can be considered as made up of 2 Hindi words Nisha निशा (meaning Night) and Daani/Dani दानी (doner). So your name can be loosely understood in Hindi as "Someone who donates his nights".
• Nisha is a commonly used name for Hindu Girls. --DBigXray 10:26, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

That's a relief. My inspirations were rather tediously arcane, but your suggestions add a gloss of erotic innuendo that makes the name really interesting. Being a vulgarian when not being pompous, I take 'night donor' sexually, though cod forbid the idea that intercourse is restricted to the witching hours. Perhaps, I should take night donor as a reference to wet dreams? Thanks for the Hindi words: they are fairly recognizable as euphonic scions of Sanskrit, and ultimately Indo-European. Oops, my mind's drifting. . 'donuts his tights', 'Nice boner,' etc.etc. Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

• haha :D Glad to let you know. And yes, both the words have Sanskrit origination. --DBigXray 16:07, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Stupidity

here wiki editors decide by a majority (archived at Talk:Douma chemical attack/Archive 4#RfC) that Robert Fisk is not a reliable source for events on Syria (while the text quotes numerous reports written by people with no knowledge of Arabic let alone 40+ years of covering the area, and writing extraordinary histories of that part of the world.Nishidani (talk) 19:36, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it is madness. (I mention that Fisk had been found a "fringe source" on wp for a journalist friend of mine, and he was totally gobsmacked.

In the soon 13 years I have been on WP, I haven't seen any area so censored as the present Syrian conflict zone. I'm not sure why that is, well, the British have given about 3 million pounds to "information" about "opposition groups"...I would be surprised if some of that hasn't trickled back into some Wikipediots. In addition, I see several known from the WP:EEML days...editors who don't exactly love Russia, (or always "playing fair") and seem to work under the motto of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" (even if he is a head chopper...).

Well, I remember intensely, how 15 years ago, I was hanged, drawn and quartered (al least, it felt that way)...because I wasn't convinced that Saddam Hussein had WMDs (and of course, I was a "Saddam-lover").

And while journalist like Fisk, or Seymour Hersh, are having a hard time getting heard, organisations like Bellingcat (run by former unemployed Eliot Higgins), or Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (run by a former clothing merchant) ..have no problem in securing plenty of funding...and are somehow found to be WP:RS.

And all the time: those who have financial interests in weapon producing industries are laughing all the way to the bank...Huldra (talk) 22:59, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Wow, I missed that (I'm trying to stay off Misplaced Pages as much as possible for the next few months...). Unbelievable! Reminds me of the old saying back in the day when I was working on IBM mainframes: "Garbage in, garbage out" (GIGO). The official narrative on Syria, being pushed heavily by "mainstream" media is, well, "garbage" so WP:RS requires that our articles on Syria are garbage. Having said that, there is no way that Fisk can be said to be anything other than RS, let alone "fringe". I have met both Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett (BTW, their pages are attack pages that need to be blown up), and in my opinion both of them are telling the truth, and the people smearing them are lying - as one would expect from first principles (per Lord Acton's dictum). The current ArbCom case on Philip Cross is highly relevant here. Actually, a case could be made even under current RS rules that the official narrative is bullshit, being based on intelligence sources that provide no hard evidence: the job of spies and intelligence services is to lie and deceive, in other words, they are the most unreliable sources that it's possible to get. --NSH001 (talk) 05:28, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

It's a rerun of Seferberlik. Manipulation is however rampant for any POV you can imagine. The only difference is that we have a huge amount of press focus on Russian spin, and quasi zero press coverage of consistent Western bias, deliberate distortion and government prevarication. I don't know about the Beeleys and Bartletts: I don't read must reportage on that area unless I see it signed by Fisk, Charles Glass, Patrick Cockburn and people of that tested caliber . The more pertinacious or obsessively careful one is in researching the history of the area, the more disrepute you earn (Norman Finkelstein). He lost academic tenure because, unlike his critics, he actually studied who said what about what, and on what empirical basis was the judgement formed. Nishidani (talk) 14:53, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Funnily enough a similar case is being made successfully right now at BLP/N and Talk:Skylab mutiny: where NASA's transcripts contradict what the papers say, we are apparently obliged to throw the transcripts in the trash, since NASA would have had an incentive to forge them. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 20:06, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

.....aaaaaaand we have an article named Douma chemical attack... when OPCW found no proof that chemicals were used in the attack..... Huldra (talk) 22:43, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

To be clear, the OCPW hasn't issued its final report yet. The interim report found no evidence of sarin, and maybe some evidence of chlorine. The latter is uncertain right now. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 09:47, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

RE Recent events

Could you take a brief (I dont want you to waste your time on this) look at the issue here - It looks like either the source article online was amended post-publication, or there is a mis-match between print and online versions. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:25, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

oh, didn't even know the article existed. Yes, if you think I might be helpful, by all means I'll have a look at it. At a glance at your summary (very good source analysis) it looks like the NYTs has had second thoughts, but the BBC has 'highly symbolic'. The word 'symbolic' here probably is one of the cover key terms given in English-language official remarks from the outset. I.e. those who passed the bill know that, in the logic of law, it will have a deep impact on legal arrangements, but wish to blur the implications by reducing the legislative measure a mere matter of symbolic self-affirmation. Whatever their intent, laws are, by definition, never 'symbolic', since by their very existence, they can be appealed to to effect changes in civil life. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:25, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Well the Israeli gov is using 'declarative' in the sense to imply that it changes nothing and is merely declaring the current situation, which is problematic by itself, since all sources analysing it say 'no this really does change quite a few things substantially'. Thanks for taking a look though. I'm dealing with more ridculouslessness regarding categories atm. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:01, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Request for help - Jews in middle ages

Hello,

I'm very new to WP and came across your name on a talk page. I recently visited History of the Jews in the Middle Ages and am pretty surprised at how terrible of an article it is. Article is ethnocentric with respect to Jews in Europe and neglects nearly all mention of Jews living elsewhere during this period of centuries. Many claims are unsourced, what is sourced appears dubious, and the general structure of the article sucks in that there's nearly zero mention of the day-to-day lives of Jews in the middle ages, e.g. their occupations, their lifestyles and customs, etc.

The entire thing reeks of nationalism. I opened a discussion in the talk page (before I made an account, so that most recent IP edit is me, FYI), and added a POV tag. If you wouldn't mind taking a look it'd be great. I don't know any other editors who may be experts in this field (I am not) who could find some better sources to create a better article and get rid of the POV issues. As it stands, it looks like it should be deleted (the only sections of the article worth keeping are cut and pasted from forked articles like History of the Jews in England), but I'm not certain it meets criteria for deletion.

Thanks in advance if you get the time to take a look or could attract other editors to the discussion. Lordbedo (talk) 17:13, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

I would certainly be happy to help out. There's one small problem. Any page of this kind I touch is immediately swarmed by edit-warriors who appear to think I am either anti-semitic, or worse still, know nothing about a topic they are usually totally unfamiliar with. It's not an area I know as well as I would like to, though I have a fair grasp of the history of Italian Jews for that period. I think the best approach would be for you to begin an overhaul, along the lines of the History of the Jews of England, using only academic books and articles as the sole criterion for suitable sources. That solves many problems raised by edit-warriors, their ignorance of the topic. I've bookmarked the page, and look forward to lending a hand. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 19:14, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Request

I kindly request that you remove the word "blind" from "This moronic statement was reinserted by Debresser in his blind revert" on Talk:Arab Jews. Before reverting, I had previously replied on the talkpage, so my edit can not qualify as a blind revert. Should you choose not to remove that personal attack, you will find yourself reported on WP:ARBPIA for personal attacks in this already sensitive area. In addition, I'd recommend you refrain from using words like "moronic" for things you disagree with, or sentences like "WTF is going on" since such is also bad tone. Your intimidating attitude will not be tolerated much longer by this project. On ann afterthought, your unproven assertion that I did not check the sources is unfounded (and as a matter of fact incorrect). Oh, and is there a reason you need to repeat the fact that I am not a native English speaker, as though that makes your arguments worth more than mine? Please remove that as well. Debresser (talk) 16:22, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

It was a blind revert because you (a) have a long history of reverting my edits without examining their sourcing (you made a completely capricious revert on the same day of another edit I made at Jerusalem, for example. It had my name attached to it, and you excised a perfectly reasonable informative addition. (b) on grounds that do not cite a relevant policy. The statement is moronic: it was not written by you, as far as I know, but, as my textual analysis shows, it used sources which do not support it, in particular by defining the subject:'the Jews in Arab lands' in terms of sources that do not make their generalizations about Jews in Arab lands' but about Jews, hence WP:SYNTH, making an inference not in the source. I have your word for it that you examined the sources? That would mean you restored a text, knowing that the sources did not support it. As to English, if you can find any literate native speaker who will contest my reading of the ethnic superiority innuendo in that phrasing on sound philological principles, fine. As it stands, you assert it does not mean what it obviously implies, and since you are not a native speaker of English, my remark was appropriate. Not an attack, but a statement to be cautious. I repeat: the revert was a blind revert, and inexplicable. Nishidani (talk) 16:41, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Since I haven't been able to convince you, I think it is best to let the community decide. Please see WP:AE. Debresser (talk) 00:36, 24 August 2018 (UTC)