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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

Continued battleground mentality, ergo

• permalink

I imagined something like this scenario as likely, some days ago.

1. *I am closing this without action at this time, given that I am the only admin that considers this actionable. Nonetheless, I will consider imposing a block or an indefinite topic ban, with or without any prior discussion, in the event of continued battleground-like conduct by Nishidani in this topic area

That will be, inadvertently, read as an open invitation from today to persist in making frivolous reports against me, a pattern that has repeatedly disrupted my contributions to articles for 12 years, in order to get me blocked or indeffed, even without prior discussion. One I/P editor can make 23 controversial reverts in a single day without talk page warrant, and it is not actionable. I can call a racist statement of ethnic superiority 'moronic' and have that judged as warranting a drastic indefinite suspension on the bizarre grounds that I display a battleground behavioural tic despite this this, and this. and not, as I presume to believe, an extraordinary patience with needless disputatiousness, esp. in an area that is notorious for poor, or indifferent belligerently nationalistic editing and reverting, as witness my tedious commitment to extensive talk page discussion of even querulously nugatory objections. I unwittingly exceeded the 500 limit in my defense, but the subsequent administrative excision,while rule-compliant, quashed my response to what I consider to be a minority-of-one administrative misreading of the diff used against me, a point noted by another admin who rarely if ever allows affective considerations to disturb his judgement. Evidently, I am not trusted to work here without having a sword of Damocles hanging over my head, with someone monitoring anyone's exclamations of ostensible 'discomfort' in my regard whatever the exasperation I, for one, may be driven to by reverters. So I have little option but to withdraw, yes, in protest. Writing this kind of rubbish bored me, so I'll close with a few actually interesting things which entertained my thoughts as I finalized this drudgery of trying pointlessly to justify to recalcitrant sceptics here that this is evidence, not of a battleground mentality, but a passion for pure, neutral encyclopedic work.

(a)Was Henker! freilich Händ und Füße
Und Kopf und Hintern, die sind dein
Goethe Faust - der Tragiöde erster und zweiter Teil, Urfaust Teil l.1820 ed.Erich Trunz Verlag C. H. Beck 1972 p.60

(b)Er giorno che impiccorno Gammardella
io m’ero propio allora accresimato.
Me pare mó, ch’er zàntolo a mmercato
me pagò un zartapicchio e ’na sciammella.

Mi’ padre pijjò ppoi la carrettella,
ma pprima vorze gode l’impiccato:
e mme tieneva in arto inarberato
discenno: «Va’ la forca cuant’è bbella!»

Tutt’a un tempo ar paziente Mastro Titta
j’appoggiò un carcio in culo, e Ttata a mmene
un schiaffone a la guancia de mandritta.

«Pijja», me disse, «e aricordete bbene
che sta fine medema sce sta scritta
pe mmill’antri che ssò mmejjo de tene».
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli tutti i sonetti romaneschi, ed. Bruno Cagli Newton Compton Publishers 1980, 5 vols. vol.1 p.167

(c)τοῦτο μὲν οὖν οὐδαμῶς ἀναθετέον, ᾧ δ᾽ ἐξέστω καὶ μὴ δέ, τοῦτο νομοθετησώμεθα. ποιητῇ δὴ κωμῳδίας ἤ τινος ἰάμβων ἢ μουσῶν μελῳδίας μὴ ἐξέστω μήτε λόγῳ μήτε εἰκόνι, μήτε θυμῷ μήτε ἄνευ θυμοῦ, μηδαμῶς μηδένα τῶν πολιτῶν κωμῳδεῖν: ἐὰν δέ τις ἀπειθῇ, τοὺς ἀθλοθέτας ἐξείργειν ἐκ τῆς χώρας τὸ παράπαν αὐθημερόν, Plato, The Laws 935e Platonis Opera, ed. Iohannes Burnet, Oxford University Press (1907) 1914 Tome 5 pp.394-395

(d)此去經年
應是良辰好景虛設
便縱有千種風情
更與何人說
Liu Yong (柳永) in Wai-lim Yip (ed.) Chinese Poetry, Duke University Press 1997 p.316

(e)Doch des Wegs herangetrottelt
Kommt ein schlottrig alter Mensch,
Fingert in der Luft, wie rechnend,
Näselnd singt er vor sich hin.
Also fragen wir beständig,
Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll
Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler
Aber ist das eine Antwort?
S.S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, Oxford University Press 1983 pp.542,706 Nishidani (talk) 19:52, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Nish, if I might, you are taking that way too seriously. Every other admin agreed that such a sanction was widely out of order. I was curious as to if he actually would impose such a ban, as in my view Sandstein's primary objective in imposing some action is that it is not overturned. And given the unanimity in opposition to any sanction, much less one as drastic as an indef topic-ban, had he imposed that sanction I would have gone straight to WP:AN to request that it be overturned, and I feel pretty confident it would have been in short order. I will say this though, there are users, you know their names, that will take any opportunity to remove you from Misplaced Pages. They do this because they recognize they can not "win" on the sources and policies. They know you know this topic better than they do, and it frustrates them. So they nitpick, get you to say "shit" and then run to an admin. You, for all your virtues, have yet to accept that this tactic can be effective against you, given your errr proclivity to deconstruct bullshit in great depth. So, if I might ask, put that semi back on top, try not to allow the usual nonsense to ruffle your feathers, and just keep going about what you have been. I understand if not, this shit is tiring. But please, dont have Sandsteins idiosyncratic views on applying sanctions push you into anything. That man can impose whatever he wants, every other admin can call it bullshit and rescind it. nableezy - 20:59, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

(case in point) nableezy - 21:02, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

What Nableezy said.

I just seems too stupid if you "were taken out", so to speak, by a silly thing like impolite language...but you know as well as I do: some people would use any means to make sure some facts are not published. So don't give them the weapons they need! Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:47, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Admins, who don't interact with you on articles and their talkpages, don't really understand what is clear to simple editors like me and Vanamonde, Jonney2000, Icewhiz and E.M.Gregory, who simply call you and aggressive and unpleasant editor. I have seen you retire from this project many times in the past, only to continue your offensive and disruptive behavior after a while. It is not, as some have incorrectly stated, that I'd like to see you go. Your many contributions have great value, and we have interacted productively in the past. It is just that I don't want to meet unpleasant posts like yours when editing here, because for me, editing should be fun, and being called an ignoramus in explicit language is not my idea of fun. And yes, that is being disruptive, and any community would consider such behavior disruptive. If you can't get along with other members of the community, as you obviously can't, then that disrupts the fabric of the whole community, and such members will invariably be removed from the community, even if they otherwise make valuable contributions to it. I shall only be happy if you take my words to heart, and remembering Ethics of the Fathers 3:13, will mend your ways and continue to edit this project in a more pleasant way. Debresser (talk) 23:01, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

lol. One of your diffs says But this is far from the level of incivility necessary to trigger an arbitration enforcement sanction, and I see no reason to take action here. Nobody gives a shit if explicit language is not your idea of fun. It isnt my idea of fun dealing with people who want to erase an entire people and their history from an encyclopedia, yet I do it often enough that one might suppose otherwise. What is being disruptive, as in disrupts the purpose of Misplaced Pages, are things like inserting material that you acknowledge has no source. That is what is disruptive, not him calling a moronic sentence in an article a moronic sentence. nableezy - 00:58, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Nableezy has said it better than I could. Nishidani has a strong sense of fairness and justice, and I still remain astonished at how many people simply don't get it. Over the past 18 months or so, Nishidani has created and written nearly 700 articles on the Aboriginal nations and peoples of Australia (with a little help from me, but 99% of the drive and effort behind these articles has been Nishidani). That documents a set of peoples who have suffered genocidal extermination or near-extermination as a result of British settler colonization. All with no disruption at all, since nobody is trying to justify that genocidal extermination. The contrast with the Palestinians is obvious, and I would love to see the result on Israel/Palestine articles if Nishidani were allowed to get on with them in the same way, with none of this constant, time-consuming, energy-draining hassle, petty niggling and blatant bad-faith disruption. --NSH001 (talk) 06:37, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Samesies. nableezy - 15:51, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I hope you will reconsider your retirement, but I cannot share the faith in the administrative corps that my Egyptian friend has expressed. Everybody knows Sandstein is an incompetent and corrupt piece of shit, but nobody is willing to do anything about it. — Malik Shabazz /_Stalk 02:30, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Honestly I wasnt really around when a lot of things happened, though I have tried to go back through them as best I could, and I get your beef with him, but I wouldnt go so far to say either incompetent or corrupt, and corrupt in a Misplaced Pages sense would be to me an admin with fealty to a "side" in a dispute and administrates in that way (WGFinley would be my only real example of an admin I felt that way about). My honest impression of Sandstein is that he is singularly focused on things that can be expressed as bright lines, even if those lines shouldnt really be that bright, and he is, and he thinks this a good thing, entirely unwilling to examine any context. He sees reverts putting in bullshit sourced to bullshit as the same as reverts removing it, because saying some source is bullshit is "content". So whenever he looks at an AfD or RFC it will inevitably turn out as no consensus if it requires actually examining the quality of peoples arguments. And then there is the need to not have his decisions overturned. A while back he made some AE block and that block was reversed by an admin without his consent (discussed here), after which Sandstein requested an ArbCom case (last diff I cared to look for on it). When the admin who reversed his block did not lose his bit over that, Sandstein stopped participating at AE. Until the first of the year, with the expectation that the new ArbCom would be less lenient on those who would reverse his actions. And that has proven the case, an absolute consensus is needed to overturn an AE action. The new, more troubling in my view, thing is his seeming willingness to impose AE sanctions without discussion in the first place. Nobody opened an enforcement request over the AFD he topic-banned you over. He went out of his way to do that, and further to mark at as an AE action. That is without any discussion he imposes a ban that requires discussion and consensus to overturn. That is also how I read his closing remark here. It read to me as I wish I could indef ban him now but there is already a consensus against that action, so if given the opportunity to do so I will before any such consensus can be established as there wont be a discussion on it. That I think is an actual issue, though it seems to be in his power to do so. But, all in all, I wouldnt call him corrupt or incompetent. nableezy - 15:49, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I too would not describe Sandstein as corrupt. But I do believe him to be petty-minded and vindictive - a view I have held since this discussion several years ago. RolandR (talk) 19:05, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

An Amen to omens

Outside, a kitten’s sprawling in the sun.
Tortoises nibble rocket in their pen.
Hoopoes, shaaring, dip across the garden.
Another Larkin day has just begun.

While sipping tea, I light a fag and think
How random things can prompt a wary mind.
A lure for tickles, the stubborn daily grind,
The toxic screech from nations at the brink

And any number of those just-so tales
A life of reading will inflect with sense
Making inert facts appear so dense
A single word invokes a dozen grails.

So Yánzhěbùzhī, Shikantaza, then.
наружный шум, безумный, светел день.
Nishidani (talk) 12:53, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I agree with the several friends above who regret your decision, and hope that you reconsider. Your contributions to Misplaced Pages are invaluable. You read texts closely and make solid and well-reasoned edits; and you appear to be one of the few editors, particularly in the fraught Israel/Palestinian area, who actually reads books. Your retirement would achieve exactly what your attackers have been unsuccessful in doing despite a relentless campaign against you, and it would be a shame (however understandable) if you were to reward them in this way. And I share views above about Sandstein. Any admin who threatens that he will impose sanctions even if every other admin disagrees with him is a disgrace and a net negative to Misplaced Pages, and I suspect that if he acted in this way he would not long remain an admin. Please take a couple of days off, enjoy some good wine and music, take a long walk somewhere calming and inspiring, and then return here reinvigorated, and knowing that many of us will cover your back.RolandR (talk) 14:12, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I saw the links added. Let me be as emphatic as I can be. It doesnt fucking matter what some random person on the internet says. Who the fuck is SportingFlyer and why the fuck do you care what he says? Some person on ANI put in an edit comment "no" as a response to me. You know what I did? I laughed out loud. Legit, I laughed out loud, heartily even. Replied to the comment and added a "yes" as the edit comment. Because that random person on the internet doesnt matter, he doesnt decide anything, and the importance that he attempted to project with typing forcefully on Misplaced Pages simply doesnt mean a god damn thing to me. Some random person wants to "warn" you, fine, who the fuck cares. Its some random person whose goal is to become a Misplaced Pages admin, so they feel the need to tell people how to behave. Fuck em, who cares, continue about your day giving the consideration such a comment merits. Literally none. nableezy - 17:12, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

I will say one thing though, and Sandstein brought it up as did Drmies. Your biggest problem at AE is how you respond. You expect people to read carefully, and on a talk page discussing a source that is one thing. But at AE it is an unreasonable expectation. You would be able to provide a much more meaningful defense if you simply responded to the accusations concisely. I can about guarantee you that most of the admins at AE, Sandstein especially, will not read through your responses. And they feel justified in saying TLDR. So, if I may offer one bit of advice, be to the point at AE, and the only point is responding to a complaint, not educating the admins about the topic or the history of the content-dispute. nableezy - 17:32, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

exceptio probat regulam. I'll respond to that. I read professionally, and I am certainly no exception surely, from 100-200 pages a day at least, aside from the endless bullshit one had to read on talk pages (which I am now relieved of) -and here that preparation was required often just to get a series of small edits correct. If someone goes for my jugular with a piddling blunt razor wielded by a wanking hand, as has happened dozens of times these last years, (not counting endless reverts of my work), I expected that admins never burdened with article creation and the exertions it demands, would have dropped whatever they are doing for the couple of minutes it requires to read three or four paragraphs, the precise evaluation of which might determine the wiki life or death of a dedicated editor or, in the analogous case, a brilliantly neutral non-nonsense former admin like Malik. I'm in good company. Thanks to all for these kind words. My best wishes to all here, and more broadly, all those whose paths I've crossed in intelligent companionship to the end of informed encyclopedic construction. Nishidani (talk) 19:17, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Im sorry, but you are far too smart to actually believe that most admins (and it only takes one at AE) would actually have dropped whatever they are doing for the couple minutes it requires to read three or four paragraphs. And if you do believe that then you, sir, are insane in the classic meaning of the word. Because you have seen, repeatedly, that they do not spend the couple of minutes reading those paragraphs. nableezy - 19:30, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

dubia in meliorem partem interpretari debent.Nishidani (talk) 19:39, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Well, if Sandstein actually did what he threatened to do, under the same circumstances (ie he being the only admin advocating sanctions)..then I would go straight to arb.com to argue his demopping. That is a promise. Huldra (talk) 22:58, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Not likely, because he issued a warning, a recent warning, and that means that if Nishidani does it again, he'll draw the short end. Debresser (talk) 17:06, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Wait and see. There is a limit to how many times anyone can act against consensus, Huldra (talk) 20:09, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm late to the party, here, but it is truly a shame to see you go. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 16:45, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Intended deception

Sorry Nishidani, but the warning at the top of my talk page means what it says, and I am therefore publishing the whole of your email (minus signature, as I don't want to "dox" you).

I was happy, in one of your previous "retirement"s, to tweak the archiving box on your talk page in response to your email request. That was OK, as it's your page, and it's reasonable to halt the archiving bot while you're away, something I might have done myself anyway. My edit summary stated that it was at your (email) request, so there was no deception involved.

By contrast, on this occasion, you are asking me to pass off somebody else's work (in this case, yours) as if it were my own. That is something I won't do under any circumstances, even for you. That is a general principle, and therefore would apply even without the warning on my talk page. Now I could get round that objection by stating in an edit summary that it is copied from an email sent by Nishidani, but in that case you might as well just do it yourself. Sorry, Nishidani, but you can't have it both ways. If you want to make changes such as these, you will have to come back and do them yourself.

Regards,

--NSH001 (talk) 08:54, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:19:36 +0000

Dear Neil,

While clicking through the series, something I've never done, I realized I might have left some things in disorder, not even correcting some of your red links.

For example at Djaui Ongkarango (red) should be blue-linked to Unggarranggu, and Warwa idem to Warrwa.

Since I am firm in my commitment to keep my word about not returning (many think this is just a staged thing I do from time to time and then backtrack), I wondered if I might prevail upon your courtesy, on occasion, to retouch something in the series we did together (for which I am eternally grateful by the way). I don't think this can be classified as meatpuppetry, and as co-author (no I/P editor I think tracks you) you should be able to tweak things without arousing any such suspicion.

Here's one adjustment that might be added, if you do not consider my request objectionable (which of course might well be a reasonable reaction, in which case, no worries):

At https://en.wikipedia.org/Wurla Wurla

Add

==Language==
The Wurla spoke ''Waladjangarri'' one of the ].  ] classified it more specifically as  as a North Kimberley ], forming part of the  ].{{sfn|Capell|1940|p=244}} 
And add to the bibliography
*{{Cite  journal | title = The Classification of Languages in North and North-West Australia
| last = Capell | first = Arthur
 | author-link =  Arthur Capell
 | publisher=  ]
 | volume=  10
 | issue= 3
 | date =May 1940
 | pages = 241-272
 | jstor= 40327769 
 | year =  1939
 | ref = harv
}}
*{{Cite  book | title =: Aboriginal woman sacred and profane.
 | last = Kaberry | first = Phyllis M.
 | author-link = Phyllis Kaberry
 | publisher= Blakiston Co.,
 | location= Philadelphia   
 | year =  1939
 | ref = harv
}}

Whatever you decide, best wishes and thanks for your kind words.

If only your exquisite sense of scruple were normative here, we would have an encyclopedia of the highest quality. Your reasoning is flawless. My apologies for putting your ethical rigour and commitment to editorial principles of independence in judgement to the test merely to soothe my narcissistic anxieties about some residual imperfection in the quality of material I offered to our readership. Béla Grunberger once defined narcissism, its inclusive striving for perfection, as a 'quest to recapture the experience of eternity' (C.Fred Alfoldi,Narcissism, Yale University Press, 1988 p.195), which is the folly your notation of my rule infraction, itself reportable, unequivocably documents. Yet, working here is to acquiesce in the imperfections of the provisory, and I've never been comfortable in doing so, never less so than now - a sense relieved by the vaguely eudaimonic sense that Sandstein's threat has done me an inadvertent service. Misplaced Pages is not the place to cathect and displace my personal obsessions onto. Best wishes, N.Nishidani (talk) 10:20, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Khalida Jarrar

I see some sources state that Khalida Jarrar's "detention" (read: jail without judgement or sentence) has been extended once again ..but Im not sure I can find a RS for that.

There seem to be a policy just to let her rot in jail (undoubtedly due her work with Palestine's application to join the International Criminal Court).

Do you want to this to be unreported?

Come back. That's an order, Huldra (talk) 20:42, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Ah, Huldra, you forget that there is only one person from whom our old friend will take orders, and that's his wife! --NSH001 (talk) 07:58, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

You are very quiet Nish?

I trust this silence will not be prolonged..Simon Adler (talk) 16:10, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Help

Hello friend. I, with full understanding of why you choose to stay away, and despite my own views on the futility of doing anything here, still request one not so tiny favor. Id like to get a set of articles on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank going, but a. you are much smarter than me, and b. you are much less lazy than me. If you do me the favor of helping along that effort by say making some notes in User:Nableezy/SandboxWB that would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, regardless of you doing this or not, I thank you for your many years of toiling here. I learned a ton just from watching your talk page, to say nothing of the rest of Misplaced Pages. nableezy - 15:13, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

That's clever: firstly, in scrutinizing with gazelle-hunting pertinacity the fine print of my adieu to editing to find some angle to respect the decision made, and, with a casuistry worthy of the most refined Aristotelian raised on the manuscripts of Timbuktu and Graeco-Islamic logic, work up a distinction between editing wiki mainspace (forbidden) and dumping notes in a sandbox, (unclarified status), suggesting the rule does not prohibit the latter. The second element was to recast the appeal in the rhetoric of obsequious flattery, ironic in its counterfactual disavowel of the plaintiff's intelligence, and psychologically astute in playing on the zakat-tinged trope of the gift. I couldn't help think of Henri Bergson's remark about 'expressing honestly a dishonest idea', and describing it in terms of 'strict respectability' as something that assumes generally a comic aspect (Le rire 1940 p.96) that I reread two days ago, and, laughed - something which the great French thinker argued had the function of 'intimidating by humiliating' (p.151). Far be it for me, however, to humiliate even if only to preserve the integrity of taciturnity's pride. There is, shorn of all these incomprehensible elucubrations, merit in the point. I've been house-cleaning my computer files and it seems petulantly infantile to wipe out notes that others might find useful. So, yes, I'll dump a few of them in your sandbox. I doubt whether this will do wikipedia any good - contemporary newspaper spin is what is privileged in I/P article composition (most notoriously at the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict which has a massive 672 footnotes, almost all based on contemporary spin, newsfeed and agitprop by the parties- 99% of which is now ignored by historians as question-begging tripe), not the long hindsight of scholarship, which is all I have to offer, and no doubt any attempt you might make to re cast it into article form will get the collective mangling machine to gear up at high pitch, and eviscerate the hard facts. Give me a week or so, and I will see what I can do. Very clever, indeed, my compliments. Good luck. You'll need it.Nishidani (talk) 11:05, 17 November 2018 (UTC)