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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

Shake-cock

I think I read somewhere that the common reading of Shake-spear is something like someone dangerous not to be trifled with, like if you trespass on a farmer's land and he jabs/shakes his spear at you. But it could, and funny-man Shakespeare knew this, be used for someone exposing himself, like metafurically. In which case the Shakespeare coat of arms has been waving its cod-dangle in our faces for a few centuries. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:56, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

There's no doubt that huffy keep-off-our-effin turf exists, with its highbrow sneer of killing with silence comments by non-anglos who don't fear to tread there. I've broken another wiki rule by tickling your excellent note, if only to avoid the preening orthographic orthodoxy for writing 'metaphor' slightly more 'correctly' by the equally solecystic metafurically. You'll remember that fur in Latin as in our 'furtive' evokes theft. At that one could (cod) add that our wagging Will was a case of a cock-robben/rubbin), or better still, as the effects of coffee in the local bar suggest in the interim, a Willy wagtail, a bird I think of as a breakfast familiar, since downunder, the species would always turn up to pick the kitchen window clean as one pulled the nosebag on to browse on a dish of eggs and bacon.:) Best Nishidani (talk) 08:26, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the literal lol, I guess it is unlikely Shakespeare manscaped. Reminds me of Cinderella's pantoufle de vair which has been suggested to have an adult-humor meaning. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:15, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that too. Fairy tales, or as the Romans called them, anilia, remain among the greatest products of the human imagination. It's very difficult for the individual writer to top the laconic distillations of 10,000 years of folk-reworkings of any one of the five basic story plots we have as a species-gift. Shakespeare managed it, nonetheless. Children's literature is, rightly read, strictly for adults.Nishidani (talk) 09:45, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Here's a great sketch on the meaning of words:. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:23, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Ping @Xover, incase you want to add to this particular salon. It was spun off from Talk:Shakespeare_authorship_question#Safa_Khulusi_and_the_Arab_Shakespeare/Shaykh_Zubayr. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:44, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Manscaping before the advent of safety razors was an activity reserved strictly for the manliest of men, after which the assertive gyrations of one's staffe may justly be said to be sans droict no matter how argent its steel once was. But, yes, the surname is certainly suggestive in its myriad variants. For example, perhaps "Shag-sper" was a mere base Freudian slip despite all the "orthography was not yet fixed"-protestations of the really rather prudish intelligentsia? Has MacDonald P. Jackson really done enough work on identifying cryptic abbreviations in the works? The internal evidence is rather overwhelmingly in favour of our boy Will being quite the playah. Of course, one may also reasonably question who was shaking who in the relationship. (thank you, thank you. I'll be here all day) Xover (talk) 12:43, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, Xover, that tops the calembourcake we’ve dished up here, and the cherry of cheer madcapping it refreshed a broiling afternoon by inadvertently turning my day into another of those delightful cases of coincidence I can’t seem to shake off, having just finished last night at 2.30, as the melatonin failed to kick in, John Banville's Snow, which has his anti-archetypical ‘dick’ St John Strafford tackle a case of a pedophile priest whose murder was rounded off by castration. Thanks indeed for the reminder about the Bobbit tale/tail. In late adolescence, I invented a family game called spotting the fati nomen (nomen est omen), to mark examples of people in the news whose name predicts their eventual profession or values (Daisy Green as an ecologist, Woody Fender as a bushfire fighter etc.etc.). When the Bobbit news broke, it was added to the list, because of course his fate was inscribed in his family name, bob’s rarer meaning being of course to ‘dock’, cut short. Richard Cock, I recall, is a common name some who wear it find a tedious invitation to the obvious lame joke about Dick Cocks. One RC, apocryphallically, was so upset he had his name changed to Roger Cock, a hasty, unwitting move that only led to more merciless boutades. Shagspère couldn’t have been missed by our Will, who anticipated in aural practice Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by 4 centuries. When once sledged with the usual witlessly abusive phrase ‘get a life’ by the kind of youngsters who manage their thinking with about 500 words, my first instinct was to reply: 'I have. I’ve read Shakespeare.' Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

To quote a related sitcom, "Buggery is a crime where the prosecutor doesn't have to produce witnesses, there seldom being any except for the perpetrators. And one of them is looking the wrong way." WP has an article about Dick's cock, btw. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:34, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

You may like this article: WHOSE DICK IS THAT ON THE WIKIPEDIA ‘PENIS’ PAGE? Discussed at User_talk:Gråbergs_Gråa_Sång/Archive_7#Interesting_WP(P)_archeology. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:10, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

I tend to get bored with what I have, as opposed to what I lack. That is why I admire Constance Quéniaux's snatch, or let's rather borrow a Narnia term from C. S. Lewis, her twat, or even more nicely in Ozslang 'Tassie'.Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Gaza Strip

Hi Nishidani; been a while. I was reading Gaza Strip and made the mistake of reading Talk:Gaza Strip. I'm asking you remove the part of your comment from earlier this week where you referred to Gaza as "a concentration camp of Israel's making" so that it is not stored in the archives forever. Aside from forum/soapbox, etc., it might cause some readers to question the neutrality of the editors editing the article. Probably some of the insults of WINEP should be removed, too, but I'd be happy with just removing the part about Israel making a concentration camp. Thanks, Levivich 04:34, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Virtually all editors, esp. in conflict articles, have strong personal takes. That goes for me, as it does for you. No amount of shuffling equivocation should disguise this obvious fact. Indeed, I think it important to occasionally show what is hidden, so that editors/readers know where one is coming from, rather than play the game of pretend. And like you I am well aware that in article composition, this must be suspended as one seeks to clew to neutral language. The POV still subsists of course, in the choice of RS, quite often. A good editor’s neutrality is secured by his retention of well-sourced material that contrasts with his own POV, and indeed, by erasing on sight, as I did yesterday, material by people who rant or post poor material from dumb sources to vent their rage, in that case, against Israel. Or, as I have often had to do, edit in material that is highly critical of some Palestinian movement because I happen to note it, accept the source is of high quality, and the fact or opinion important enough to be mentioned. I did this in revising the Hamas article. I regard Matthew Levitt’s 2006 as utterly skewedby a distortive agenda for a decided political purpose. But his credentials are impeccable, he is reliably published, and an undisputably key source. So I used his data even though it sounds very rubbery at times because that is our obligation. I have yet to see any editor, in 16 years, with a POV opposed to mine, treat articles with the same sedulous care for quality sources whose POV they would privately disdain.

As to my remark, everything I wrote there was written with several sources in mind that state these things as facts, or as widely shared interpretations/opinions by authoritative witnesses, specifically in that case the Vatican’s then top diplomat Cardinal Renato Martino’ s assertion back in 2012 that it was a concentration camp.

Other terms are available, David Cameron, who has partial Jewish roots, thought ‘prison camp’ was ‘warranted’ as a precise descriptor, back in 2010. Human Rights Watch’s regional expert defined it as an ‘open-air prison’ as recently as June 2022. Amnesty International also called recently it the World's Largest Open-Air Prison’]. So why neutral observers readily recognize the obvious that it is a prison camp, you don’t challenge that, but my preference for the equally objective term ‘concentration camp’, i.e. a place where people are penned up and in by a foreign power and whose basic human rights are thereby suspended. ‘Concentration camp’ is not Holocaust abuse, as I think you take it. It dates back to the 1870s for Spanish use of them in Cuba, through the the US adoption of that technique in the Philippines, and the Engtlish herding of Boers in the early 20th century. It is still alive and up in China, Burma, northern India and in the Gaza Strip. As our article on the topic writes:

The term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law

So of the several descriptions of what being in Gaza amounts to, you don’t deny that they drink toxic water (because of the blockade and systematic bombing damage) or have 10% of their children, of the 86% whose families can’t find sufficient nourishment for them, stunted, or that those whose cancer is life-threatening regularly undergo interrogations by the Shin Bet to get them to reveal details about their neighbours for Israel’s data base, in exchange for the hospital cure Israel, as an occupying power, is formally obligated to provide. No, that is all meticulously documented. You just dislike my choice of a term which, historically, has been widely used for such conditions, but which also recurs in WW2 documentation of what Nazis also did with so many of their captive populations. I can’t see the point of this niggling desire to erase from the record, simply because 'Israel' is included.

I happened to write in response to a suggestion we cite an invidious POLL published by the hyper pro-Israeli The Washington Institute for Near East Policy which says that people inside that cramped and starved prison/concentration camp would prefer to live in Israel. Of course they would prefer the freedom of their wellfed prison guards’ private lives across the border - kibbutz swimming pools are visible from water-starved Gaza's delapidated high-rise apartment blocks - when off duty to languishing in crushed famine. The pointy results of that poll struck me as obscene in their obtusity, and a note to that effect did no harm, I suggest, to the editor who somewhat lamely took that partisan nonsense seriously. There is noi soapboxing there, but a synthesis of several facts and opinions that are universally recognizable as part of the I/P discursive world which all aspiring editors should be familiar with. I will continue to consider Israel as not 'exceptional' to the normal run of history. Sensitivity to language, and insensitivity to what language denotes, the reality out there, strikes me as peculiar. Nishidani (talk) 11:43, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

I've posted at WP:ANI. Levivich 12:09, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

And you were answered there. I've exercised restraint - it could easily have degenerated in a recriminative counterclaim, easy to substantiate, but I at least am determined to persist in my policy of refusing to use ANI/AE or any other venue as a means of compromising the wiki careers of those whose views I disagree with, particularly when the editors in question have undoubted merits. Please reflect a little on these occasional forays against Shabazz, Huldra, ZScarpia and myself within their respective page contexts. Thank you.Nishidani (talk) 11:50, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, I found the indignation to be dumbfounding. Same with the well I actually think Israel is an apartheid state bit. Given the previously stated view that it is POV pushing to say as much in article space. But as Ive told you before, when you say something that some random admin passerby, who may or may not be completely aware of all the sources that invariable back up what you write, might take as inflammatory you give the people who have for over a decade now tried to boot you from this website an opportunity to do so. I think this was one of the weaker attempts, given how widely Gaza has been compared to a concentration camp, but I can understand an admin taking a report and thinking "concentration camp -> Nazis -> Nishidani's block log -> bye bye". Obviously that chain is faulty from the start (like how has nobody ever heard of Xinjiang internment camps being described as concentration camps to think this is a word specific to the Nazis?), but it makes sense in the moment. Sort of like way back in the day with Ashley and pulling the finger out. That made sense in the moment too, even if it was obviously a faulty set of assumptions that got an admin to make that block. There are editors that cannot fuck with you on the content. So the only way they get their way in removing what you document is by removing you. Please, stop giving them even the hint of an opportunity. nableezy - 16:25, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your advice on this, now as in the past. The problem is, my mind doesn't work like that, in the sense that I find it very trying to knuckle my thought processes down to the style recommended by wiki to avoid the appearance of partisanship. If I write thinking of predators in the wings ready to snap at this or that phrasing, and drill myself to the eminently respectable wikibureaucratese so many others master like an additional foreign language, I find the result both tedious and personally nocuous - I stop thinking of a dozen pertinent things read and retained in my memory while addressing a problem, and dwell on the hundred-headed Cerberus spectres looking opportunistically over my shoulder for a chance to bite, and start chucking dull words as soporific cakes to ease my transit through a hellish article. Since I'm in my seventies, all inimical spirits need do is exercise some patience and nature will take the place of AE, with no fuss, and one can finally pop that champagne cork gathering dust in the cellars of animosity these 16 years. After all, though I have never look at my log record, most incidents relate to the toxic times 2006-2017, and most were dismissed (An exasperated 'oh, for fuck's sake!' was damning evidence then. To judge from the report just ended, one can tell someone to fuck off with impunity at ANI these days, and perhaps that is a move in the right direction). Since then such contretemps have been very rare, and this is unrelated to any lexical self-castration or stylistic self-reinvention on my part. And if, somewhere down the line, some malevolence out there manages to convince third parties that one talk page remark or phrase warrants putting an otherwise innocuous content-editor against the wall for summary execution for putative damage to the 'community', stiff cheddar. It may be salutary. I could read even more without that sense that some of what I learn is worth sharing, something that at times takes up more time than seems worthwhile. If that kind of massively trivial imbalance in judgment were to come to roost round here, I wouldn't care to waste what time I have in rebooting a still promiscuously alert mind so that it paid sedulous lip-service to a anally puritanical culture that established in its core rulebook a version of Bentham's panopticon where those who fail the minutely calibrated politics of etiquette correctness are corralled for an incarcerated silence. What would be the point, or net gain? My ear and eye, perhaps I deceive myself, but nonetheless, twig or sense a lot of implicit violence even in the most innocuously cleansed, vacuumed voices (as I can overhear a subtle tenor of good will in hostile remarks that escape an interlocutor who might challenge me). The whole history of literature is premised on precisely becoming sensitive to this: the resonance of 'attitude', 'sniffiness', 'putdowns' and the like in the most polite forms of customary address. Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

And of course, that's not a bid for tolerance of my breaching the standards. No. As I told Dennis, if I get a sanction, I don't challenge it. And feel no umbrage against any administrator who might think I required one. That's the way the cookie might crumble, and I take it on the chin, and do the time in wiki ' porridge' others think my due. I don't need Misplaced Pages to get through the day.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I knew you wouldnt challenge it, thats why I did it for you. You may not need Misplaced Pages, but Misplaced Pages certainly needs you. nableezy - 17:29, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

And I thank you, and in your debt, for that, recently and in the past. However, on reflection, my failure to fit in does, if rarely, still cause other editors to waste their in valuable time (Neil is another) cleaning up after me, and in that sense, my attitude above is unconscionable. If it happens again, there's no need to run to my defense. Sometimes, one should just let things take their course, if only out of experimental curiosity. Keep that in mind. Best Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh youve wasted far more of Neil's time than you have ever done with mine. But we got a solid citation style in use in a number of articles out of it so not a total waste. nableezy - 17:42, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Nah, Nishi doesn't waste any of my time, quite the opposite. I hate getting time-sucked by long arguments, so most of the time it's a great relief just to leave it to our host. He's much better at it than I am. Plus I have a beautiful little girl who is well trained in cleaning up messes. --NSH001 (talk) 06:55, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

"And of course, that's not a bid for tolerance of my breaching the standards." It's best that any standards being set aren't double ones. I doubt I'm the only editor relieved to see an attempt to impose a partisan interpretation of what's acceptable failing.     ←   ZScarpia   16:20, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

It was him, no it was him, it wasn't me :)

Embarrassing for someone, not entirely clear who, though. Trump peace plan - The Trump administration clarified that no such green light for annexation had been given; Trump later explained that "I got angry and I stopped it because that was really going too far". Probably more to do with Kushner's new book if I know anything. Selfstudier (talk) 12:36, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

1. Yossi Verter, "How Trump's "Deal of the Century' Became the Joke of the Century" Archived February 1, 2020, at the Wayback Machine Haaretz January 31, 2020
2. Barak Ravid, Dec 13, 2021 Trump says Netanyahu "never wanted peace" with the Palestinians, Axios

As the review states:'just 493 pages of pure boredom.' Dwight Garner in the NYTs likewise writes that:'Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.' What else would you expect from someone who was admitted to Harvard only after his daddy pledged $2.5 million to the college.' History is often made by such dickheads, but is written by people who generally have interesting minds. He's a powerful nobody, and I don't know why anyone would shovel through that gunk when one could hear three operas in the time it takes to do so.Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Typo in After Saturday comes Sunday: Difference between revisions

FYI, as I am not allowed to make the edit. In the change you made to After Saturday comes Sunday: the word extermination is spelt incorrectly. Regards Pngeditor (talk) 12:43, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that courteous note. Fixed. Nishidani (talk) 12:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

A question

I was reading this edit, https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Samaritans&oldid=1104723594 and wondered if in the explanation you meant to say should NOT dominate, rather than should dominate. I was interested in the advice and wanted to make sure I had understood it. Are you saying that modern genetic studies are to be preferred as sources? Regards

(→‎Origins: As with most genetic articles on wiki, old papers 2002,2004,2008 though prominent, should dominate. They have historical value but results at the cutting edge are constantly refining, changing and revising early and partial (sometimes) partisan conclusions. There are many methodological flaws also in the early 'stuff' which is prominent here in the genetics section, where Oefner et al are not mentioned) Pngeditor (talk) 15:06, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Genetic papers are not a reliable source for history. But since we have genetics sections, we summarize what they state regarding correlations or dissonances between their results and those of historical accounts. The use of genetics to underpin, or corroborate traditional identity narratives is an abiding flaw in Misplaced Pages articles that harvest them. They are generally a complete mess, an incoherent compost heap that either summarizes year in year out relevant genetic papers partially, simplifying them, or string them haplessly as editors drop 'stuff in'. At Samaritans the latest (2013) paper is ignored though it challenges the results of earlier research which is paraphrased in detail (I assume because it lends support for the biblical/Talmudic story).

Thirdly, population genetics is a fast developing field, with differing results, in nuance or basics, over the last 20 years. At a theoretical level, serious challenges are made to some of its hitherto leading assumptions, which generate the often uniform results we have. Many cite dated books on the history of this or that ethnos for 'facts' which, in terms of historiography, are actually theories. So we have to handle them very, very, carefully. Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Governorates

How do you mean exactly, the governorates with the settlement council jurisdiction overlaid? Selfstudier (talk) 22:26, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

The jurisdiction is a bit tricky since Israel pays little attention to their own rules (which I roughly translate as grab whatever you can whenever you can and however you can and even if you can't, grab it anyway). You could read https://peacenow.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/Jurisdiction2007.pdf, its a little old but the game is the same. Selfstudier (talk) 22:40, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the link.It's past the witching hour, so I'll read it tomorrow, on the assumption I will wake up:) Rafferty's rules come to mind. I was just thinking graphics are needed now that no one reads anything more than Twitter soundbites, and I see ADS everywhere I turn (almost. A new barmaid the other day asked me what I was reading, and I said 'Rilke', and she said she loved the poetry of Paul Celan. 'That's rewarding,' I thought, unlike working one's arse off for 4 euros an hour). A coincidence again, since I had John Felstiner's book open on my kitchen table for two days.Nishidani (talk) 22:50, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

FYI

Palestinian NGOs outlawed by Israel Selfstudier (talk) 13:50, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Fanks! That saves me 10 minutes plastering the CIA report (Isaac Scher, 'CIA unable to corroborate Israel’s ‘terror’ label for Palestinian rights groups,' The Guardian 22 August 2022) on a dozen articles, a report which in layman's terms obviously means that they consider this McCarthyist nonsense coming out of Israel the usual bullshit (which never hits the fan). Everyone in the know knows it is a frame-up. but you can't touch the sacred heifer except on the Temple Mount, as I was reminded the other day when some Democratic Party candidate, a young woman, happened to note on her Twitter account Israel's problems with apartheid, raucous calls were made for cancelling her from the electoral list, and a dozen newspapers splattered shouting headlines about anti-Semitism in the left communist world putatively existing in the Italian Democratic Party, a centrist right party like its US model. The funny thing is this is coming from people with a fascist background. Back to the Samaritans, some of whom, by some vague repute, happened to be humane to their enemies.Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

WB

.) Selfstudier (talk) 13:24, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Hit by Covid while travelling around Neolithic sites, and of course pubcrawling at night, in Ireland. Guinness is the best medicine. It dragged on until a stay in Normandy, so the last week in Versailles had me quaffing to keep up with the family standards.Nishidani (talk) 14:14, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

occupation article

It appears that your work has formed the basis of both the Arabic and the Hebrew entries. Hebrew actually rejected deletion, but renamed it to Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria. But your work, at least in large part, all the same. nableezy - 23:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Shouldn't the Hebrew article be entitled, neutrally, 'Israeli misrule in the West Bank /Judea and Samaria'? I think it's about time I or someone converted the essay I wrote for Arbcom on the top of this page be wikified for an article:The renaming of the West Bank as Judea and Samaria.Nishidani (talk) 08:31, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Anti-Zionism

Hi Nishidani. You added a reference to Penkower 1985 to Anti-Zionism, but no such work is defined in the article. Could you let me know what work this is and I'll create a cite for it. Also have you thought about turn on no target errors? You can see the details here Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 17:52, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm already causing you particularly, and some many others historically, much bother in my slipshod drafting, for which, my apologies. I've been repeatedly tutored on how to pull my finger out on things like no target errors. I dutifully read these things, retain them for a few seconds, and then, after reading an article or book, can't remember the technical stuff, even if I retain the scholarly material fresh in my mind. Dunno why. I must be a cognitive racist, dumping anything into the short memory bin while suckling tenderly at the mammary bosom of dryasdust scholarship. I really appreciate this kind of care for the proprieties of minutiae. Keep up the great work. Time to hit the fartsack Nishidani (talk) 22:09, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Never a problem, as I've said to others Misplaced Pages has a lot of wikignomes to correct these things. People who can write actual articles are in shorter supply. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:50, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Same for "Jacobson 2013". Going to ping @NSH001: as well, since I don't know who added this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd take Neil to AE and try to get him permabanned, except for the fact that (a) I'm so disreputable there, being permabanned by Sandstein from ever again venturing a statement there, that I'd probably get a WP:Boomerang flying my way, and no amount of bullroarer-waving à la Crocodile Dundee could ward off my subsequent rapture ex ufficio into the wrong end of the wiki afterwhirled and (b) he'd get off the rap by arguing that not he, but his wee gofer sheila, which the rest of us call a bot, is responsible, and cannot be hung drawn and quartered at arbitration for guilt by association.

Hmnm. Six am here, in the dazed aftermath of 5 hours with my mind spent wrapt and webbed in the languourous toils of dreamshot snoozing means I can't get my thoughts into the natural order of vertical reflection. So I'll have to deconstruct the above. My complaint at AE would have been that the velocipede efficiency of Neil's bot has eroded my earlier sense of pernickety responsibility for checking what I edit in. As I wade through upwards of 1,500 pages, and digest the tohu bohu of substance to form that neat stool of content I aspire to 'deposit' on a page as an edit, I have been lulled by the fussy clean-up nurselet that is N's bot, into not inspecting the result (this anal-ogy with traditional toilet-training will be grasped only by people raised 70 years ago). 'I gotta keep reading. N's sheila will clean up, and wipe the messy minutiae of my orthographical or mark-up flaws clean'. N's bottish reliability, quasi infallibility, has wrought a devastating blow to my, what would Heidegger have called it? Ah, yes, to my sensitivities re Sorge, care. It's made me careless - that old teutonic waffler would have murmured sorgenlos. It's all his fault if in editing à toutes jambes, like, Headbomb, miswriting 'Jacoibson' for the lectio recta (phew!) 'Jacobson', I didn't stop to check the page for orthographical fidelity, trusting complacently in N's Sheila, hovering in the wings of that virtuous world out there, that she would bussle in forthwith with her nerdy broom and virtual vacuum to sweep away such errata. Bref, it's N's fault for not ushering in his digital gofer within seconds of each edit I make to scour and scrub and make the resultant edit so spick and span that other attentive editors like yourselves wouldn't notice the, um, fuck-ups and save yourselves the onerous trouble of sadsacking my negligences. Jeezus, 'bout time I showered, shaved, etc., and had a morning walk, to get what's left of this senile mind of mine back to functioning in the real world.Nishidani (talk) 06:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Headbomb, that was an easy one to fix (merely had to check that the source had "Jacobson" and not (a typo) "Jacobsoin"). AD is right, Nishi's work is very valuable; I and my mythical little girl look after the technical stuff so that Nishi can concentrate on what he's good at (writing articles). My little girl is sometimes, if there's no possible ambiguity, capable of fixing no-target errors automatically, if not she'll mark the offending short cite with a red question mark, or I will do it myself if it's easy. So any reader can easily see it without having to install one of the scripts mentioned in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. There isn't the remotest chance that Nishi can be persuaded to obey the instructions in the category's page at that link. --NSH001 (talk) 05:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Bejayzus, what are you doing, getting up so early, at this ungodly hour? Don't reply. A vague reminiscence of a tag from the latinate theology drummed in before I gained a foothold into the age of reason reminds me of the quality of ubiquitas that defines the deity.Nishidani (talk) 06:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Drat, edit conflict, I'd written a long response re name sorting (de Jong) and stupidly forgot to save it before trying to post it. All lost, well it'll have to wait. I'll save the gruesome details of why I'm up so early for my talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 07:03, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Argh, sorry to hear or rather imagine, that, N. Do n't waste your valuable time writing out the details I've why I'm wrong re de Jong, at least wikiwise. I defer to experts, and you are no doubt right. Hang on. I don't quite defer to experts generally, outside of Misplaced Pages. In the present article, reading so much conceptually bungled garbage in what, even from experts, looks to me like a slanging match, or shadow boxing with ham-fisted gloves, I keep murmuring to myself. These people have never taken on board Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, a sine qua non if one hopes to grapple with things like anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, let alone our present world, whose basso ostinato of structural violence she so presciently anticipated near 60 years ago, while writing in the comfortable/complacent milieu of a thriving post-war America. So don't waste time. Look after yourself. Now for that long-delayed trot abroad. Best Nishidani (talk) 07:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I'll accept the backhander. Mea culpa, mea culpa, me a Mexican cowboy. I just can't stiffen my will, grit my teeth, to give the flick pass (rhyming slang) to books and articles, so I might spend 30 seconds on 'technical stuff' (what's a category's page?). The sin of recalcitrant obduracy, or is that a pleonasm? Better hit the street (and never come back no more, no more, no more, Nish, I know what people are thinking when they read this). Somewhere some kms off, there's a bar that serves Vesuvian-hot cappuccinos that scalds/scolds my tolutiloquent fixations on the thetorics of aristophantasizing (Νεφελοκοκκυγία/cloudcuckooland and thereby jolts me back onto my mental feet, firm on textual terra firma.Nishidani (talk) 06:58, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

olive trees in the conflict article

Think that merits a page start to add to your list tbh. nableezy - 17:43, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

I know I've mentioned that at the IOWB article and on West Bank Springs, but what's the give? A stand-alone article on Olive Trees in the I/P conflict? It's too painful at the mo', all the olive trees around me, mine included, have been got at by the musca oleae fruit fly. Ah, time to soak my sorrows in a late sundowner pint at the pub.Nishidani (talk) 17:52, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

As a sub-article to the settler violence one. Would have a ton to work from, background in Olive production in Palestine, to the attacks on both the trees and the farmers, and now on the European observers. The justifications for ignoring the religious prohibitions. Just a thought. nableezy - 17:57, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Ir's a good idea, but I have to weigh up priorities. Writing for wiki means hours, sometimes days or weeks, off seriously interesting things. Most of this I/P stuff is boringly obvious - the interest lies in the fact that the massively attested truths of history in all its complexities, shouted out by the huckstering liars or philosophically witless penpushers who fudge up the just-so stories that inform our mainstream sources, somehow can get a murmur in this place. Were it not for that, the sheer tedium of suspending say, the reading of a serious book, to get the job done wouldn't be worth the candle, in personal terms. If you stretch every statement made on the rack of propositional analysis, little passes muster as worthy of attention.Nishidani (talk) 21:48, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

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You wrote...

the panicky reactions to any mention of the topic, with their fall-back shouting about 'anti-semitism' and 'anti-Israeli-ism' are just political bullshit, when not, perhaps more insidiously, an abuse of science that approaches the material with ideological, and often racial, preconceptions about what constitutes 'Jewishness'. .... Puerile, read the article's history of the concept. Anyone can prove anything by sweeping fringe lunatic sites from Telegraph and Twitter playing to minor constituencies (10,000 more or less) of paranoid conspiracy theorists Are you referring to the ADL as a sweeping lunatic fringe site? Andre🚐 21:26, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

If that is an example of how you read (already evidenced in the thread you cite that from) it is pointless answering, because had you read what I wrote carefully, you would have never even posed such a hairbrained query.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I must confess there is quite a copious amount of WP:TEXTWALLing so it's a difficult conversation to follow. I withdraw the question. Andre🚐 22:05, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

It may help - I like to go to bed with a good conscience - to consult an English grammar book in order to remind yourself of the functional difference in 'sweeping' between its respective uses in 'by sweeping fringe lunatic sites' (instrumental) and your rephrasing of this as 'a sweeping lunatic fringe site'(adjectival). Nishidani (talk) 22:20, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Could you please let me know which lunatic fringe sites you were talking about because I still do not understand? Andre🚐 22:21, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

You should understand, because you provided the link. Listen. Nothing personal, but you simply do not appear to weigh words carefully, or recall precisely points made by your interlocutor. (Y our latest remark still harps on an Ashkenazi-ME connection despite the fact that I spoke of an asserted Ashkenazi-Israel/Palestinian connection. You simply did not, once more, remember that I wrote three times that the Ashkenazi-ME connection, whether it be 3 or 60%) is not in question). That whole thread is a case example of persistent sidestepping and disattention, as one single theme is repeated ad nauseam by a kind of biblical reference to sacred texts that have ascertained the truth, while contradicting, or disagreeing among, themselves. Science is something under perpetual revision, particular a young science like paleo- and population genetics, and fortunately, no consensus, exists: the data are too complex, the methodologies often questionable, the political reverberations always in the wings, and the conceptual implications ignored. Let's leave it at that. Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I am happy to leave it, I will simply point out WP:RSPADL. Andre🚐 00:00, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Good grief. What on earth got it into your head to imagine that what I wrote signaled some apparent unawareness of the general RS standing of the Anti-Defamation League? Don't answer.Nishidani (talk) 17:30, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I am hereby warning you to please abide by WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL. If you are aware that the ADL is reliable, why did you call it lunatic fringe? Andre🚐 17:38, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

To repeat. Your 'reading' of my statements borders on the illiterate, based on a failure to grasp elementary English grammar, which led you to make the absurd inference above. I nowhere stated the ADL is lunatic fringe. Stop annoying this page with your own bizarre incapacity to construe or parse what an interlocutor writes. It gives the impression of someone spoiling for a fight which I am not going to sucked into.Nishidani (talk) 20:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Hereby warning him? Maybe when somebody says dont answer on their own talk page you should hereby be warned to follow WP:NOBAN which says repeatedly posting on a user's page after being asked not to, without good reason, may be seen as harassment or similar kind of disruptive behavior. Nishidani has answered your question. You disagree. Cool story. But since he asked you to move on, move on. nableezy - 18:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh, and for the record, four of the editors in the ADL RFC were socks of banned users, making that RFC decidedly shaky ground to stand on for an RSP entry. Ill bring that up elsewhere though. nableezy - 18:26, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Among other things, the ADL is a active part of the United States' Israel lobby, which deploys hasbara, and smears individuals who aren't supportive enough of Israel. Do you think that might be why the ADL was found to be "generally", rather than unconditionally, reliable? Under what circumstances do you think the conditional reliability kicks in? Given that activist organisations are not usually regarded as reliable and websites opposing Zionism have been found to be unreliable on grounds of "bias", do you think that a double standard might have been in play?     ←   ZScarpia   20:08, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Nishidani, I'd intended, but not got round to, reponding to the comment Andre left on my user talkpage. The upshot of my comment would have been to agree with your position that criticism of the Khazar Hypothesis is best centralised in the article on that topic, particularly given that the sources being used appeared not to be of great quality, the ADL ones being a blog piece and a sloppily written definition, the Haaretz article cited also being sloppily written. I've just been looking at the Shlomo Sand article. With regard to the Khazar Hypothesis, I notice that the article gives the misleading impression that Sand claims that Ashkenazi Jews are descended solely from Khazars, cited to a Haaretz article which also gives that false impression. The WP article dedicated to "The Invention of the Jewish People" book is more accurate. I was going to leave a comment on the talkpage of the Shlomo Sand article, but since it concerns the Khazar Hypothesis, which has recently been up for discussion, I thought I'd leave one here first.     ←   ZScarpia   13:11, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Khazar studies are quite intense, and updates by scholars are frequent. None of them are focused on what is obsessive in newspaper reportage, namely the Khazar-Jews+anti-Semitism stuff. We can note some of this, and have, on the Khazar page but basically episodic blips rehashing what is already documented there, be it from the ADL or anyone else, are not noteworthy, a disturbance indeed to the fascinating scholarship on that people and empire which should be the singular focus of editors. Far too many editors barge into technical articles just because they happen to read something in such passing reports or newspapers, particularly if it treats ethnic hostilities and prejudices. Scholarship gives some of us the horn, but the norm is that synaptic tumescence is imore generally triggered by the more emotive nature of scandal-mongering. Nishidani (talk) 13:33, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

Hi Nishidani. You've added "Hughes 2010", which isn't defined in the article, did you mean "Hughes 2019" (e.g. Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939)? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 16:52, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank God for people like you. I'll fix it immediately.Nishidani (talk) 16:57, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

ANI

The plaintive complainant in a plain tiff. Brilliant! Despite my exhaustion this morning, that woke me up. Thanks for the laugh.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:16, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Bbb. This compliment, coming from one of the great 'legal' line-call experts we have on wiki, made my day. I hesitated to drop that quip, but went ahead thinking I'd get a rap over the knuckles for being frivolous, but what the heck. Comic quibbling is a private antidote against bickering, when not a way of rewiring/rewriting tedious patches of conflictual arguments to stave off potential boredom and get through one's dutiful parsing. Dr Johnson lamented it as a compulsive vice in Shakespeare, and its onirically zesty omipresence in Finnegans Wake grates on many a Joycean scholar. It has a moral value as a reminder of the need for some levity when there is a risk of losing a sense of proportion, at least for oddballs like myself who bask in the light of that tradition, but can be disruptive when high stakes over reputations are in play. My best best wishes for the up-and-coming New Year.Nishidani (talk) 17:05, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Happy new era

That's stunningly cute, beautiful, Bish. And the same to you multiplied by 100 (Grumbling as he shambles off to find out if there's a pub in the village still open this eve, muttering through gritted dentures, 'Aw, fuggit, Bish would just nark away and stir the philologist nerve in me by the misspelling in the section header, which of course should be 'Happy New Error'). My very best (is that perhaps 'beast' misspelled?) as always :)Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Nishidani!

Nishidani,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Misplaced Pages.
— Moops 05:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

— Moops 05:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Happy year? More of the same

(1) On the 30th December the UN General Assembly resolved to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to render an Advisory Opinion on the legality of Israel’s 55-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. The money allocated for the ICJ Advisory Opinion was an unbudgeted $255,000, which works out as 1/12000th of its annual expenditures.

(2) 231 Palestinian ‘terrorists’ were successfully liquidated over 2022 - the best result since 2005,- thinning the demographic threat, since roughly 30% were children. A profile of their hate-filled, antisemitic individual lives is available here Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

please check email

please check email. Zero 11:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

AE

I still don't see why you can't post there but I can post something there on your behalf if you like. Mind you, they do insist on diffs there :) Selfstudier (talk) 15:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:) I can't work efficiently on this baby computer so I couldn't work up diffs, which in any case for me take hours and I hate wasting time. Nableezy, who pleaded on behalf of going easy on Tombah when he was up for a serious sanction, replied to one of Tombah's outrageously partisan suggestions on the Israel talk page recently by mimicking what would happen if one rewrote with a pronounced Palestinian POV what Tombah concocted with his inflammatory pro-Israeli POV. What we have here is a matter of a po calling Ma and Pa Kettle black because that's all they see of and in them. Tombah's suggestion, and Nableezy's reply, puts the finger on the former's total inability to see anything other than in terms of the official copyandpaste blahblah you find on government sites. This was serious because whatever the respective POVs, mopst editors were working hard on a balanced compromise. Palraz is not good at, or even interested in, I gather, defending himself. But he should grasp that in this area, there are many editors whose only interest in AE/ANI is to use the venues to get rid of discomforts they experience when they encounter editors familiar with the scholarly literature on the topic. One misstep, and you're dead. The quality of information is irrelevant. That is why nearly 99% of serious article construction in this area ends up being done by people wrongly labelled as 'pro-Palestinian', as opposed to being people who diligently study what Israeli and diaspora scholarship writes about the conflict (rather than browse newspapers). AhiméNishidani (talk) 16:49, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:) Of course with attribution. Pot and kettle seems quite appropriate here. Selfstudier (talk) 17:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm somewhat saddened by the probable effects of this utterly useless report. DP’s silence here and elsewhere only reminds me of a novel, Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. There are so many people around who can and do contribute knowledgeably to the encyclopedia but cannot quite master the standard default rules of conduct. They are not aggressive in interchanges, they perhaps don’t know how to handle them, as opposed to studying and editing from their chosen field of competence. To survive esp in a difficult area one needs a number of diplomatic gifts, without which you set yourself up as a target.

Me(Sic) and other editors have warned him about his disruptive behavior previously (for example: #1, #2, #3, and by an admin, Doug Weller, right here)

This is a complete fudge and I am sure admins will see it for what it is, a pot calling the kettle black by claiming he is not alone in seeing ‘extremely disruptive’ behavior. I.e.

• 1# is Shrike, writing back on 24 October 2021 8 months before Palraz had his first sanction;
• 2# is a content dispute over one edit at Maltese dog, where Palraz happened to be correct (after noting the disagreement on Palraz’s page I looked at the disaster he was trying to fix, and rewrote the whole article, where now it can be seen that the point of contention, in modern scholarship, favours what Palraz wrote, not what his complaining interlocutor thought.
• 3# concerns Tombah himself. So the ‘Me and other editors’ refers to Tombah and Shrike (identical POV with Tombah but far more careful an editor generally)writing briefly 15 months ago.

Tombah, by the way, doesn’t appear know much about (Jewish) history, as opposed to having at his fingertips the standard hasbara talking points of the modern nationalist Israeli way of presenting the past. At 3# he is upset that Palraz removed a mention that under direct Roman rule after 6 CE, the governor in Judea could tax and execute Jews sourced also to Josephus as a primary source. Direct rule all over the Roman empire always came with those powers, so there is zero value in citing this for an overview of Syro-Palestine. It only assumes importance if you want to suggest, as the reverted edit implied, that there was something exceptional in using those powers in an area where Jews predominated . It fits the famous ‘lachrymose’ narrative with its selective bias for the negative and its careful disattention to what, for example, the same source, Josephus states, i.e. that before the Jewish Roman War broke out 60 years later, Jerusalem enjoyed the happiest rule of all citystates in the Roman empire. (I don’t believe that either, by the way. It is a rhetoric of flattery nodding to his imperial and sanguinary Roman overlords) Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Selfstudier claims that I have strong opinions, but I don't believe that he or other editors working in the same field are opinion-free. The exact opposite. I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side, and I observe this trend every day. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions, the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth, and contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored. But again, though, I'm not criticizing Dan's beliefs; rather, I'm criticizing his disruptive methods of forcing them, bullying others to accept them.

I am puzzled as how anyone can write like this. Perhaps the art of parsing what is written has been lost, because that either makes no sense, or is self-defeating in its rhetoric. I'll construe it to show why arguing here is often pointless.Nishidani (talk) 09:25, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Having strong opinions is contrasted with having no opinions. Since we all have opinions, criticising someone whose opinions are forceful is hypocritical? Misdirection. If we say someone is 'opinionated', we are not denying that we ourselves have opinions. Opinions are of two types: (a) evidence-based, and, ideally, informed by careful assessment of the available facts; (b) opinions that are impermeable to reason because anchored in preconceptions that won't yield to new evidence. 'Strong opinions' belong tendentially to the latter category and those who stick to them are 'opinionated'. They only read to buttress what they already believe is the case, and read past anything that contradicts or embarrasses theirset views. Stating this is banal, of course, but an opinionated editor is not concerned with NPOV, but with proving his own is better than the other viewpoint.

I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side

I've been here 15 years and last year was no different from any other. The only observable change is a drop in sockpuppetry and IP interference, 99% of which came from a 'pro-Israeli' POV and was very intense for over a decade until the rules became draconian.

The anti-Israeli side. This is careless. Tomnbah identifies those with whom he has editing disagreements as (a) hostile to Israel (b) belonging to a clique, block or concerted group.It is an inadvertent admission that challenging his own approach to this or that edit means challenging the legitimacy of Israel - a conflation of his views with those of a government.

Note that 'Palestinians' have disappeared. Articles about the occupied Palestinian territories. where Tombah focuses much of his controversial editing, are not about 'Israel' primarily, but about Palestinians and their relations to Israeli military actions. Fpr Tombah, one is forced to assume, those territories are primarily about (Greater) Israel, and editing must not disturb concerns to protect that Israel from negative images of its behaviour as a 'belligerent' (the technical word in law) occupying power.

. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions.

The keyword is 'ethnic', the post-war euphemism for the discredited concept of 'race'. Literally hiundreds of scholarly books will tell any interested reader that ethnicizing identity is problematic, especially in nation states. Identity is fluid and often bewildering in its variegations; historic identity is marked by constantly shifts in self-definition; the Israelite prior to 722 was defined biblically and rabbinically as radically different from the Israelites after that date; the Judaeans, under Ezra and Nehemiah were divided into those, the exilic priesthood in particular, with an authentic line of descent and adherence to religious rules and prescriptions, and the Am ha'aretz, the caste of people who had stayed put and retained traditions and customs the returned sacerdotal caste found repulsive. Where is the 'Jewwish identity' binding all within Judea and elsewhere in Palestine at that period. It emerged later when in Hellenistic times an ethnos for Judea (not elsewhere) was recognized, as word Ἰουδαῖος came into currency, not to denote 'Jews' generically, but those who hailed from the specific area of Judea. It only assumes the broader meaning of 'Jews' collectively much later.

Can one convert to an ethnos? One converts to a religion, a widespread phenomenon in antiquity as Judaic practices and beliefs spread. In defining Jews, the same problem emerges that we find in any attempt to define an historic national identity. Everyone knows what Englishness consists of, though all attempts to define it fail, and the same holds for any other example. The number of indeterminate discussions among Jews as to who is a Jew underscores the point: non consensus. No consensus, that is, outside of numewrous spokesmewn who shout the sam vague definitions in their aspirations to homogenize for political ends the disturbing diversity within their 'ethnic' ranks and thereby achieve a speciously functional groupthink. Tombah's remark reflects the latter trend. Ideologically, Zionbism was an attempt to create a new 'Jewish' identity which would trump the extraordinarily rich diversity of Jewish cultures by subordinating them to a core, if invented, nationality. Race was an important ingredient in this as the work of Arthur Ruppin shows, thgough even his pseudo.empirical efforts crunbled in the face of the ethnic diversity attested by people who each had an entitlement to being 'Jews'.

That 'ethnicity' plays a role in Jewish identity is undoubted. That the definition of what that ethnicity consists of evades closure is equally obvious. When the Yemini singer sang for Einstein and Sergei Eisenstein, the former detected a distant 'Jewish' echo in the Yemeni's performance, while the latter thought it utterly alien to his sense of Jewishness. Examples could be cited ad infinitum. Yemeni Jews, 'ethnically', are wholly distinct from Ashkenazi Jews, however valiantly wiki editors on an ethnicizing mission try to assert to the contrary.

Thus, what the discussions on wikipedia do is challenge the myths surrounding assertions of some uniform Jewish ethnicity putatively forged by a chain of descent uncontamined since the early part of the first millenium BCE when Israelite and Judaean populations briefly achieved a kind of statehood in Palestine. That mischievous meme or lie is a political fiction employed to assert the authenticity of the concept of a 'return' to the land of one's ancestors. People who trend to intermarry and share a common language or culture form 'ethnic groups', but to go beyond that, and indulge in historical fictions of racial continuity is not only wrong, but parlous, as anyone who has learnt something from the first half of the 20th century should know.

the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth, and contemporary

Caricature to the point of disingenuous misrepresentation, apart from being phrased inanely.

'the well documented history of Jews in Palestine' refers to a period from the first millenium BCE down to 1948. Since the bible only refers to events before the end of the First Millenium BCE, no one on wikipedia has ever asserted that Jewish life in Palestine from 1 CE to 1948 is a 'biblical myth'. Clumsy, thoughtless, inane.

contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored

Rubbish. No article on this area where Palestinian violence is relevant and documented fails to mention those facts. It is, again, not Tombah's imaginary adversaries whop 'frequently harshly criticize Israeli actions, it is the extensive literature, much of it written by Israelis and diaspora Jews, which remarks on this.

This exercise in talking to myself, making explicit the stormwater drain of reactions that run through my head at least on reading for 10 seconds a brief screed, typical of talk pages, of the kind Tombah wrote, is TLDR of course. But, people who know little of a topic and can't express themselves except by rehearsing memes and clichés, and thinking of anyone who might contradict them as embued with an animus against, say, Israel, rather than with a sense of repugnance for self-contradictory exposrtulations that flaunt an insouciant nescience, should edit elsewhere. Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 3 February 2023 (UTC)