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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.

• An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.

• The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.

• The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.

(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.

'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'

Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:

‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”

Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’

The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.”

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’, 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’

Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora , the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands.

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.

(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Wikipedia itself.

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.

Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” <

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.

Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,

’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’

and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache). In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued.

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.'

The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'

A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’

Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’.

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area..

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), , thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.

'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo). According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'

After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8

We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh

The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.

Further reading:-

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

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Some reflections

• Stephen F. Eisenman 'A Small Boy and Israel, Counterpunch 10 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• Yuval Abraham, 'Gazans worked in Israeli kibbutzim for decades. Then came Oct. 7,' +972 magazine 6 November 2023
• Anna Morrow, 'Israel’s war is the biggest threat to Jewish peoplehood,' The Forward 8 November 2023
• Erika Solomon, 'Germany’s Stifling of Pro-Palestinian Voices Pits Historical Guilt Against Free Speech,' New York Times 10 November 2023
• Tareq S. Haijaj The stories we don’t know how to tell Mondoweiss 10 November 2023 (Issam Ileywa RIP)
• Linda Dayan, 'Ahmed Wanted Israelis to Listen to Gazans. Then 23 of His Family Members Were Killed,' On the Facebook page 'Across the Wall,' Israelis read personal stories by Gazans in Hebrew, until the last update came in: 'The entire family of this page’s founder has been bombed to death.' The Israeli co-founder of the page now says: 'I don’t know if we’ll be able to build that bridge again Haaretz 2 November 2023
• Raja Shehadeh, 'Israel has long wanted Palestinians out of Gaza – my father saw it firsthand,' The Guardian 20 November 2023

Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.

This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

• Raji Sourani, 'I Live in Gaza. Israel’s Horrific Bombing Campaign Is Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen Before,' Jacobin 7 November 2023

We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.

If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.

• Alison Avigayil Ramer, 'Bassem and Ahed Tamimi are in Israeli prison because they stand for Palestinian freedom,' 19 November 2023.

This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration.Nishidani (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'

• 'Israel/OPT: ‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’: Unlawful Israeli strikes illustrate callous disregard for Palestinian lives,' Amnesty International 20 November 2023

In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped.Nishidani (talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Your list provides informative and thoughtful insights. BTW, did you get a chance to read the article from Oct. 27 by Max Blumenthal, saying there is high probability that many (perhaps even most) of the Israeli civilians (as well as Israeli soldiers) killed on October 7 were killed by so-called 'friendly' fire? It is not my intention to minimize, belittle or trivialize the proven fact that Palestinians killed many Israeli civilians on October 7, but it appears likely the Israeli military has also killed many Israeli civilians (and soldiers) on that day. Your thoughts? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

What is remarkable about all these articles (only 1 is RS)

• David Sheen, Ali Abunimah, 'Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says,' Electronic Intifada 16 October 2023.
• Max Blumenthal, 'October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles,' The Greyzone 27 October 2023
• 'A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,'Mondoweiss 22 October 2023
• Ali Abunimah,“Shoot at everything”: How Israeli pilots killed their own civilians,'Electronic Intifada 11 November 2023

is that they (a) draw directly on numerous reports in the Israeli press that however (b) like these articles themselves, are ignored by the Western mainstream press. So you have a paradox: Israel's press is 'freer' than its Western counterparts in reporting on the conflict, but its political elites (including the IDF) allow themselves a far more restricted set of options than would normally be the case in deliberations on critical situations in Western countries.

Why destroy an entire landscape when the enemy is underground? There is a very simple technological weakness in Hamas's tunnel-system. It needs large numbers of audible generators, detectable by sensors, to induct and circulate fresh air. Any network could be 'neutralized' by destroying the generators, giving those inside the option of surrender or asphixiation.(Trying to think in strictly military terms, as though I were an IDF commander) Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

More remarkable statements

• Jonathan Ofir, Israeli rabbis tell Netanyahu that Israel has a right to bomb Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza,' Mondoweiss 31 October 2023
• Tali Shapiro Jonathan Ofir, Israeli doctors urge the bombing of Gaza hospitals, Mondoweiss 5 November 2023

Nishidani (talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023

Honourable men (once upon a time)

After the war, we heard that the first target usually seen by the pilots in the enclosed waterway was the Canberra. By chance, she was painted white, which was taken by the attackers to mean that she was a hospital ship. Without exception, the Argentinian pilots were honourable men, and not one attacked what they thought was a sanctuary for the injured.' Sharkey Ward,Sea Harrier over the Falklands, Cassell (1992) 2000 p.273.

Et cetera

• Elliot Colla, On the History, Meaning, and Power of 'From the River to the Sea,' Mondoweiss 16 November 2023

Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party.Nishidani (talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Interview with Max Blumenthal, posted on 17 Nov 2023. He summarizes his article above, and provides additional insights and analysis, not only on the events of Oct. 7-8 but also on more recent military, political, social and cultural trends in Gaza, Israel, the US and Western Europe.

(As a Jewish Israeli-American who has many good [as well as some bad] childhood memories of growing up in Israel and still has a small number of dear family and friends in beautiful Israel, I personally found the part about the increasingly insane, increasingly ethnocidal/ genocidal indoctrination and incitement inside Israeli Jewish society to be particularly disturbing. But this is not surprising, in light of the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, a settler-colonial state.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I have many wonderful memories of my time in Israel, and also of the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When enjoying a day off (I chose to work three shifts, from 3.30 am to 7 pm), I hitchhiked and invariably was picked up and given a free ride by taxi-drivers from Gaza, which I visited after talking my way past border guards who insisted I'd risk being murdered by terrorists. My father had been stationed in Gaza in WW2, and left a letter describing his pleasant evenings there).

Over the last few decades, I've come to the conclusion that Israel is caught up in an historical and structural logic, following on from the racial premises of Zionism, which militates against any resolution of its internal contradictions. Forget (in the sense of thinking they are part of the problem) about Palestinians: history has long wiped its arse on them. The problem is essentially what the internal, downspiralling dynamics of its limited options creates for the 'diaspora'. Zionism arose as an aggressive challenge to Jewish diaspora civilization. It took several decades of colonial accomplishments and intensive diplomatic and emotional pressuring to get Jewish communities throughout the world to anneal their vision of Jewishness, in all of its varieties, with the model Israel produced, a muscular, nationalist concept of the 'new Jew'. For readers of Josephus, all this is not 'new'. Rabbinical wisdom drew a lesson from the latter, which has now been forgotten in the tragic euphoria of successive, superficially successful wars. This latest episode, in a world where the mainstream media narrative no longer holds water because everyone, esp. the young, can access alternative media or the work of people like Blumenthal, will tend to give rise to exasperations which Israel and its commentariat will exploit to spin as a 'new' new antisemitism. No doubt antisemitism will indeed be strengthened - most cannot distinguish 'Jews' from Israel precisely because Zionism has insisted on their interchangeability. One can read Zionism, like Christianity, as a 'Jewish' heresy. The latter generated antisemitism, and Zionism itself may paradoxically, in one of those deep ironies beloved of history, produce a similar result for different reasons. But that will not relieve Jews in the diaspora of the difficult choices it must now make - retention of its assimilative humanism which has been the glory of its haskalah heritage, or endorsement, no ifs or buts, of a fierce ethnonationalism as the logic of history drives Israel even further down the path of maximalism. Best wishes 21:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani (talk)

• Jonathan Ofir, Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in Gaza,' 20 November Mondoweiss 2023

Retired Major-General Giora Eiland:

The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.

The whole article is worth reading for a clue as to the kind of mentality that one often notes among the upper echelons of the IDF.Nishidani (talk) 17:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be.

That is almost identical in tone and content to the drift of Himmler's speech addressing troops who had just mown down about 150 Jews near Minsk in 1941.Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

• Israel allegedly enforces 'Hannibal Protocol' on Oct. 7, killing festival-goers to prevent their captivity. "'What we’ve seen here is mass Hannibal,' [Israeli] Lt. Col. Nof Erez says on [Israel's] military response to surprise attack at festival, where 364 people were killed." Published by Anadolu Agency, a Turkish news agency.
• Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees, by the Yale Review of International Studies.
• Fool Me Twice. "The tried-and-tested tropes of the post-9/11 and Iraq War eras have been deployed for Israel's war in Gaza. The returns are diminishing."
• Israel's fears, its delusions and its future. Conversation with Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator and analyst who now heads the US-Middle East Project. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
• Philip Oltermann, Israel-Hamas war opens up German debate over meaning of ‘Never again’ The Guardian 22 November 2023

In Berlin, the city senate is considering pulling funding for the Oyun cultural centre in the German capital’s Neukölln district, after the centre’s directors reportedly refused to cancel a peace vigil by a leftwing Jewish group.

I.e.German hypervigilance against a recrudescence of antisemitism as part of its programmatic if clichéd Vergangenheitsbewältigung has now ironically morphed into a vigilante punishing of Jews who are critical of Israel.Nishidani (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

• Likewise,Apparently, right under our smog-insensitivized noses, US universities have been hijacked by a phenomenon even more terrifying than Hamas. They form a “woke mind virus factory,” Jack D The outsized place of the U.S. university in the current struggle, Mondoweiss 22 November 2023

• Basic Principles of Humanity, New York Review of Books (18 Nov. 2023). An interview with Human rights expert Sari Bashi, who lives in the West Bank and is the program director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she leads the organization’s research. “Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.” Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
• Yoav Haifawi, How Israel undermined the prisoner exchange by widening the definition of ‘security prisoners’ Mondoweiss 7 December 2023
• Donor Class vs. the First Amendment with John Mearsheimer.
• Philip Weiss. Weekly Briefing: Biden is risking reelection over Gaza to please donors, the mainstream media reports, Mondoweiss 19 May 2024 on how finally even the mainstream press is now documenting the huge role pro-Israeli Jewish donors in the US are using their billionares' heft to constrain universities to clamp down on dissentient views on campus.Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Breaking News Scoop

Hamas operatives are also trained to fire on IDF soldiers when they see them' Yaakov Lappin, 'Some 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions ‘significantly damaged’,' Jewish News Syndicate 20 November 2023

It's reported than despite the vast IDF bulldozing and uprooting of Gazan agriculture, a patch of strawberries was found by a group of invasive settlers, so the compromised land of the Philistines can once more offer fertile prospects as a promised land for settlers Nishidani (talk) 06:01, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Cutting off foreskins as a military tactic

Taking a leaf out of battle descriptions of the Israelites against the Philistines in the Bible, the Israeli minister for Telecommunications Shlomo Karhi has apparently called for the circumcision of captured Hamas fighters.(Oren Ziv , Yotam Ronen, Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace, +972 magazine 22 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC))

I don't know the common practice in Gaza, but most Muslim men are circumcised though it isn't compulsory. Zero^talk 12:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I was going to say ... pretty empty, if fucked-up threat ... Iskandar323 (talk) 13:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, of course, we all should know Muslims generally undergo circumcision. That was the point of citing this trash - the unbelievable obtusity of the ignorant who have a voice in shaping perceptions of this war. The 'Philistine' of the 'piece' is the fool who wrote that. See below for another bite from the tsunami of appalling crassness flooding the airwaves.Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

• Apparently some editorsin here are engaged in a new crime; the keyboard terrorism of documenting suffering that is not IsraeliNishidani (talk) 16:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Forget Sumud. It's been trumped by 'Zionist stoicism'

Yafa Adar is home.The sub-humans around her are already lying deep underground, their house has probably been turned into rubble by the army of the state of Israel. That’s Jewish, Israeli power.(Yosef Israeli a reporter for Channel 13 cited Canaan Yidor, Israelis celebrate the return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ‘embodies Zionism’, The Times of Israel 25 November 2023 )

It is natural that in a tragedy we connect and respond more instinctively to the fate of those whom we (may) know. Yaffa Adar was originally reported to be from Kfar Aza, where I once worked. I wondered whether I had known her during my stay, while deeply moved by the photo of her in a Hamas jeep being carted off to Gaza as a hostage. The photo of her resigned, apparent ease (almost 'well, I'd better get used to this new episode in my life') will figure as one of the iconic snapshots of the Israeli side of this war. I was really chuffed up to see her safe and sound, while naturally thinking that 10,000 plus 'sub-human' Gaza women and children would not survive to tell their side of the story. Hence the obscenity of the remark above. There are few things, readingwise, more nauseating that reading the infantile outpourings of an extremely jejune nationalism.Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

• Zionism – An Ideology for the Self-Loathing (27 October 2023). by Roger Harris for CounterPunch. "Yet growing numbers of us [American Jews] still embrace our ancestral identity and, especially in light of current events, wholly renounce its self-loathing antithesis of Zionism. What the Nazis failed to achieve – the obliteration of European Jewish culture – the Zionists are carrying forward. We have a word for that in Yiddish. It’s a shanda, a scandalous embarrassment and shame." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis would suggest we shouldn't help 'Pally' kids

• Rhana Natour, 'These Palestinian boys received life-saving surgery in the US. An Israeli airstrike killed them in their home,' The Guardian 28 November 2023

• I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment. We’ve reached a searing milestone: In just five weeks of war, half of 1 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the share of the American population that was killed in all of World War II — over the course of four years. Nicholas Kristoff,'What We Get Wrong About Israel and Gaza,' New York Times 15 November 2023

• Most editors won't have time to read the several good book-length studies of Hamas. But an excellent early study of its dynamics is available on jstor and should be required reading, as a cautionary prophylaxis against swallowing holus-bolus the Hamas=terrorism-and-nothing-else meme that is an article of faith in mainstream reportage, and the default staple of nearly all Israeli newspapers. I refer to Menachem Klein, Hamas in Power, Middle East Journal , Summer 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3 , pp. 442-459 Nishidani (talk) 21:20, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

• Tareq S. Hajjaj,'‘They shot her son in her arms and forced her to throw his body’: testimonies from the death march on Salah al-Din Street,' Mondoweiss 30 November 2023

The Salah al-Din Trail of Tears or something like that will probably be written some years down the track, when testimonies from masses of survivors of the trek involving over a million individuals are cross-checked. The killing of several dozen local reporters has made the collection of evidence extremely difficult, the systemic bias of giving intense coverage to Jewish victims of Hamas's outrage while only referring to the obvious death march in generic allusions to an abstract mass's plight in a line or two. Some of Hajjaj's material consists of rumours, but the hallucinating experiences of people like the lad with the smashed leg look typical and not unlikely for at least several thousands.Nishidani (talk) 07:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

• The Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Understanding history. "Zionists say they do not understand why Palestinians take up arms, and that their insurgency is terrorism. Let them read their own history. Where it says Ana put Jana. Where it says Jews put Palestinians, where it says Warsaw put Gaza and where it says Nazis put Zionists. Maybe then they will understand."
• The Israeli perspective–on genocide–dominates our airwaves. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

• Inside the Pro-Israel Information War. "Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices." Long-form article by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the saying, 'scum always rises to the surface' is invariably true, but the bags here do appear to follow the rule. Thanks. Nishidani (talk) 06:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

• Israelis aren't seeing the devastating pictures Australians see from the war in Gaza. They're watching a sanitised war (9 December 2023). John Lyons in ABC News (Australia)

• ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians (8 December 2023). Gregory Shupak in FAIR. "What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:30, 10 December 2023 (UTC). --- Here are several additional thoughtful and insightful articles by Gregory Shupak on key media aspects of Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, posted over the last 3 years. He also wrote a book about this. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:54, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

• Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds (9 December 2023). Julian Borger in The Guardian. "Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than the average in all world conflicts in 20th century, data suggests." Original in Haaretz: "The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing. The IDF chief of staff recently boasted of the army's precise munitions and its ability to reduce harm to noncombatants. But the data shows that in the war on Hamas that principle has been abandoned. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

• Death and Destruction in Gaza (11 December 2023). By John Mearsheimer. "As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?" ["... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"] Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:31, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.” Jonathan Ofir, 'I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer,' Mondoweiss 8 December 2023

Nothing of this surprises me. What does is the moral cowardice of the communities who stand by. Nishidani (talk) 00:13, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

There are several reasons for the moral cowardice of the wealthy western nations (especially the US, Western Europe, Canada, Australia etc). At least two reasons come to mind: (a) The tremendous power of the pro-Israel lobbies in these countries, and (b) There are very large fossil fuel reserves near the coast of Gaza, and the US strongly prefers that these reserves would be under Israeli control and not under Palestinian control, because if they're in Palestinian hands the Palestinians then could sell (most of) the fossil fuels to China, whereas if these resources are in Israeli hands, the US government could exert enormously powerful pressure on the Israeli gov't to refrain from selling them to China.

Over the last 15 years or so, the US has been gradually shifting its foreign policy (for the US, its 'foreign' policy has always been practically indistinguishable from being a key component of its overall long-horizon economic policy) to focusing on trying to 'compete' with China i.e. to weaken/ hurt/ cripple the Chinese economy as much as possible. This is true for all US administrations regardless of political party affiliation, including both Democunt as well as Republicunt, starting in the last couple of years of the Bush Jr administration and continuing with the administrations of Obama, Trump and now Biden. The numbers don't lie, and the economic numbers are basically almost all that has ever mattered to US (and Chinese, Western European, etc) decision makers. Up until recent years, US GDP was by far the largest on the planet, but in the last few decades China's GDP has been growing faster than the US's and has recently surpassed the US: today China's GDP (PPP) is roughly about $33 Trillion, while US GDP (PPP) is about $27 trillion. That is, from the POV of US decision makers, their top priority, by far, is how to slow - and preferably reverse - the fact that the US has in recent years lost its undisputed global economic dominance to China.

See this, among several other articles and books published in recent years about the geopolitical implications of the vast oil and natural gas reserves near the Gaza shoreline. Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:23, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

• The Death of Israel (17 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception."

Well, I think that is a piece of wishful thinking. It is simply wrong-headed to assert that 'Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception'. The 'new' world is dominated by successful settler colonial states that have withstood the usury of time, and indeed thrived, and Israel will be no exception. Of course this latest triumph of Zionism rubbishes the moral force of both the haskalah tradition and the Holocaust, but they too are past their use-by date.Nishidani (talk) 01:18, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

• What is wrong with Israelis? (27 December 2023). "Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 10:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

None of which is reported abroad. That Gaza is one huge whore, deserving of genocidal rape by missiles carrying the signatures of young Israeli women, is all over Israeli social media, as are euphoric chants by children, rabbinical students and entertainers in army camps mocking the destruction of Palestinian women and children. It's all there, and invisible to readers. Words fail one.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• More on moral cowardice: Saudis Attempt To Normalize Ties With Israel By Air-Striking Gaza (11 August 2023). By the writers of The Onion.

• Yet more on moral cowardice: ‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (13 October 2023). By the Editorial Board of The Onion. "Some may call us cowards for our decision. To this, we can only say the following: If a coward is a person [IT: or a government] who avoids taking a difficult stance on topics for personal expediency, then “coward” is a badge this editorial board will gladly wear, again and again and again." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

• NY Times October 7 hoax exposed (30 December 2023). By Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, who "meticulously debunk a New York Times article purporting to demonstrate that Hamas carried out a policy of sexual assault against Israelis on October 7, and demonstrate that the Times' Jeffrey Gettleman is guilty of journalistic malpractice and serving as a willing tool for the serially mendacious Israeli government." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:33, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

That the NYTs article is a pretentious exercise in pseudo-journalism is self-evident, but I don't think Max B is at his best there. That challenge is not meticulous but somewhat offhandish. MB was showing signs of fatigue. Does an amputated breast maintain its shape so that it can be thrown around and juggled like a ball, as was claimed? That is now a meme, and I've yet to see anyone stop to think about it. Only in Picasso's imagination, one would think. I made the 850 mile train trip to Madrid in late 1981 just to catch the inaugural showing in that country of Guernica. There has been a Guernica every day since 7 Oct. The past has no more resonance.Nishidani (talk) 04:40, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

• Chris Hedges: Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (31 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:39, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
• The only thing to note is that the relevant provisions of international law can never, in all probability, be interpreted in a way to hinder Zionism's historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine. The present ethnocide will simply lead to a surge in industrial and industrious scholarship that, while confirming the obvious, will inflect neither Israeli opinion, world opinion nor international concepts of justice. The only thing that interests me at this point is to observe to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people. In any case, rather than Hedges, see the ever-lucid A. Dirk Moses, More than Genocide: The law occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense The Boston Review 14 November 2023Nishidani (talk) 12:30, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.

• Mearsheimer today, on his substack: Genocide in Gaza 4 January 2024. Finally he's come round to regarding it as a genocide. He's only saying, more politely, what the ranting Cornishman said days ago. --NSH001 (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, N. I noted in particular

the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.

Application Instituting Proceedings regarding Israel's genocide lodged by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. pp.59-67 provide clear verbal evidence of genocidal intent by Israel's leaders.Nishidani (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• The best overview I am familiar with now is Seth Ackerman, There was an Iron Wall in Gaza Jacobin

This explained the anomalies in the attacks that I noted within the first two days, if the hypothesis of a rift within Hamas between the political and military wings, which led to a radical change in the battle orders by Sinyar et al., in the last three hours to include attacks on civilians, proves to be correct. Note that the rape, mutilation etc charges that were used to orchestrate Israel's case for retributive genocide against this collective of 'animals' are eerily reminiscent of, almost a replica of the testimonies about the Israeli assault on Palestinians at the Massacre of Deir Yassin in 48. Nishidani (talk) 01:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• How Israel's war on Gaza exposed Zionism as a genocidal cult (11 January 2024). By Joseph Massad in Middle East Eye. "The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fit this description." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• Gaza and New York (Nov/Dec 2023). By Alexander Zevin in New Left Review. "America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?" Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• ‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (13 January 2024). By Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem, for The Guardian. "Meir Baruchin, who was fired and jailed for criticising the military, says that many who agree with him are afraid to go public." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:38, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

• A Critical Look at The New York Times' Weaponization of Rape in Service of Israeli Propaganda (14 January 2024). By Randa Abdel-Fattah in the Institute for Palestine Studies. "The fact is that Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.   This is the sobering reality Palestinians face. The racism that animates hyper-attention over crimes imagined to have been committed against Israelis is the same racism that desensitizes people to crimes actually committed against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

• Several recent reports by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate:

• Traumatizing the public into compliance w/official Israeli, US lies
• NYT atrocity propaganda continues to collapse
• Blockbuster Israeli report exposes Oct 7 friendly fire orders
• Max Blumenthal confronts State Dept on genocide support
• Life in Jerusalem under Israel's military dictatorship
• Israeli victims' families denounce NY Times 'Hamas rape' report

Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:06, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

• Jewish Scholars vs. Jewish Donors on Antisemitism (22 January 2024). By Peter Beinart for The Beinart Notebook. "... But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out."

• A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name (22 Jan 2024). By Brad Pierce for The Wayward Rabbler. "The IDF is Accused of Causing Mass Civilian Casualties on 10/7." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:37, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

• Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity (29 January 2024), The New York Times. By Balakrishnan Rajagopal, with photos and accompanying text by Yaqeen Baker. Dr. Rajagopal is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Ms. Baker’s home was destroyed in the war in Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

• Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role? (31 January 2024). By Aaron Rabinowitz for Haaretz. "The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

• Thomas Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda (6 February 2024). Jim Naureckas for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Well if Friedman and his likes are now going mainstream with vermin tropes for the adversarial 'Other' (Theodor Adorno has a good early analysis of insect metaphors for despised ethnic groups, in The Authoritarian Personality (1951) - it was a serious element in antisemitic caricatures, vide Kafka for the most egregious example) I guess I'd better make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians.Nishidani (talk) 01:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Good idea. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

• AIPAC of Lies (6 February 2024). By Arvin Alaigh for The Baffler. "The pro-Israel lobby brooks no dissent on Capitol Hill ... The Israeli government is losing the battle of public opinion across the world, and increasingly, in the United States ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

• Energy firms face legal threat over Israeli licences to drill for gas off Gaza (15 Feb 2024). By Dania Akkad for Middle East Eye. "Rights groups say exploration licences handed to companies in first weeks of war encroach on Palestinian waters and may amount to the war crime of pillaging." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:24, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Not quite news to me. An insider privy to these things told me a good while back that the Gazan fields' resources were already being pilfered from by some lateral intrusions. Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

• Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation (16 Feb. 2024). Irfan Galaria, The Los Angeles Times.

• IDF Sent in Handcuffed Prisoner to Evacuate Hospital, Then Killed Him When He Left (14 Feb 2024). Kavita Chekuru, The Intercept. "The young man, bound by zip-tie cuffs, delivered his Israeli captors’ message but was shot as he tried to walk out of the hospital gate."

With regard to this item, scruple demands that I ask myself whether or not this young man might have been murdered by a Palestinian militant, in retaliation for acting as an Israeli messenger. Unlikely, but one never knows. All one has learnt from this war is that Israeli culture has never absorbed any moral lesson from the holocaust, except that moral sentiments are trash, a dangerous weakness in one's chutzpah armour or amour-propre. The real sum of the Palestinian dead has now reached roughly 38,000. Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli soldiers post distressing content out of Gaza (22 Feb 2024). CNN. "Israeli soldiers are taking to platforms like TikTok to document their destruction of infrastructure in Gaza -- with many adding what they consider as a comedic twist to their content." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine (Received 30 December 2023, Accepted 2 January 2024). Layth Hanbali, Edwin Jit Leung Kwong, Amy Neilson, James Smith, Sali Hafez, Rasha Khoury. BMJ Global Health, a prestigious peer reviewed academic journal. This particular paper is probably more of an editorial, it was not commissioned for external review but was internally peer reviewed. Some key sections:

"The horrific scale of Israel’s latest attacks validates the concerns and calls raised in our editorial: namely that Israel’s ongoing military violence in Gaza is an extension of the longstanding, systemic violence intrinsic to the Israeli state’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine. Connections can be clearly traced between the exploitation and dispossession of people, land and resources that defined European colonial violence, ongoing neocolonial exploitation worldwide, and every aspect of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine today. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to actions that expose and challenge sites of exploitative and extractive power and violence. People’s health, lives and freedoms are at risk…

"Attempts to dehistoricise and decontextualise the present encourage us to ignore the many ways in which the Israeli state dictates both life and death for the Palestinian people, either through the fast violence of aerial bombardments, or what Berlant referred to as ‘slow death’: visible in the progressive dispossession of Palestinians who are crammed into ever-shrinking spaces, the denial of life-sustaining necessities and services, the destruction of livelihoods, repeated physical assaults and disablement, mass incarceration, extensive restrictions on movement (including to seek healthcare), and now ethnic cleansing in Gaza executed by mustering Palestinians through a dystopian grid of ever-shifting, supposedly ‘safe zones…

"The recognition of the systematic nature of this violence, and the pervasiveness of Israeli state control over almost every aspect of the everyday lives of Palestinians, made the philosopher Achille Mbembé declare that: ‘The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’. It is the power to dictate the terms of life and death, and ultimately who lives and who dies. Repeatedly framing Palestinian violence as a provocation and Israeli violence as a response is a product of ignorance to the necropower exercised by the Israeli state. Necropower and necropolitics are enabled in places that Achille Mbembé termed ‘death-worlds’, where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ that enable a precarious form of survival in perpetual proximity to death. Within this world, there is gross indifference to Palestinian suffering and extreme obfuscation of the horrors of Israeli necropolitics.

• Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections, Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024 (19 Feb 2024). Zeina Jamaluddine, Zhixi Chen, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Shatha Elnakib, Gregory Barnsley, Fiona Majorin, Hannah Tong, Tak Igusa, Oona MR Campbell, Paul B. Spiegel, Francesco Checchi and the Gaza Health Impact Projections Working Group. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"Executive Summary

"Overall

"The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has heavily affected civilians in both the Gaza Strip and Israel. Residents of Gaza are now mostly displaced from their homes and living in overcrowded conditions with insufficient access to water, sanitation and food, and health services have been considerably disrupted. So, to inform humanitarian and other decision-makers working on the Gaza crisis, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University have initiated a project to estimate the potential public health impact of the crisis under different future trajectories of its evolution. The first set of projections covers a six-month period from 7 February to 6 August 2024. The projections will be periodically updated until May 2024. The projections are not predictions of what will happen in Gaza but provide a range of projections of what could happen under three distinct scenarios: 1) an immediate permanent ceasefire; 2) status quo (a continuation of conditions experienced from October 2023 till mid-January); and 3) a further escalation of the conflict.

"The projections are based on a range of publicly available data from the current and past Gaza crises, data from similar crises, and peer-reviewed published research into excess death estimates and take into account the limitations and biases of different data sources. Where data is limited or unavailable, the projections draw on consultations with experts. These projections are designed to help humanitarian organisations, governments, and other actors plan their response to the crisis and take sound, evidence-based decisions. Ultimately, the hope is that they will make some contribution to saving lives.

"Over the next six months we project that, in the absence of epidemics, 6,550 excess deaths would occur under the ceasefire scenario, climbing to 58,260 under the status quo scenario and 74,290 under the escalation scenario. Over the same period and with the occurrence of epidemics, our projections rise to 11,580, 66,720, and 85,750, respectively. All projections feature 95% uncertainty intervals as shown in the Summary Table below.

"Under the ceasefire scenario, the projections suggest that infectious diseases would be the main cause of excess deaths, with 1,520 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 6,550 including epidemics. Traumatic injuries followed by infectious diseases would be the main causes of excess deaths in both the status quo (53,450 traumatic injuries; 2,120 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 10,590 including epidemics) and escalation scenarios (68,650 traumatic injuries; 2,720 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 14,180 including epidemics).

"Our projections indicate that even in the best-case ceasefire scenario, thousands of excess deaths would continue to occur, mainly due to the time it would take to improve water, sanitation and shelter conditions, reduce malnutrition, and restore functioning healthcare services in Gaza. While the total number of estimated excess deaths from maternal and neonatal causes are relatively small (100-330 excess deaths), every loss of a mother has severe consequences for family health and wellbeing. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) were the primary cause of death in Gaza in 2022, and the conflict has aggravated these conditions (1,680-2,680 excess deaths) via heavily disrupted specialised health services and impeded access to treatment and medications.

• thanks. I wouldn't have otherwise caught that, which is clinically scientific and ventures rational scenarios, all of which translate into a statement that Israeli and American decision-makers are now familiar with the likely lethal consequences of the three options available. Sara Roy, with Jean-Pierre Filiu and Finkelstein the 3 world authorities on the Strip, spoke a year ago, before oCT 7 of Israel's longterm planned catastrophe'.Nishidani (talk) 23:33, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

• 'Shocking, unsustainable and desperate' conditions across Gaza, Security Council hears (22 Feb 2024). UN News. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

• Shielding (the) US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 (23 February 2024). Bryce Greene, in Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. "... Indeed, IDF responsibility for Israeli deaths has been a repeated topic of discussion in the Israeli press, accompanied by demands for investigations. But the most US readers have gotten from their own press about the issue is a dismissive piece from the Washington Post about October 7 “truthers.” ... How many Israeli civilians were actually killed by Hamas, and how many by Israel? Was the Al Aqsa Flood a terrorist attack designed to kill as many civilians as possible? These are important questions that have yet to be conclusively and independently answered, but the Washington Post seems to want to dissuade people from even asking them. In evoking the specter of Holocaust denial, Dwoskin and the Post are not defending the truth, but attempting to protect readers from it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:38, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Were the four main Hamas leaders in Gaza endowed with an intelligent grasp of the wider forces of the modern international order, they would offer to place themselves in the hands of the ICJ to be put on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity, a position Hamas outlined some years ago as their readiness to be prosecuted abroad were such a trial to allow similar measures against Israeli leaders. Since the measure they took in attacking Israel foreseeably enabled the genocide of their own people underway, a cost they must have calculated, they should in theory accept that this kind of personal commitment to their own symbolic 'martyrdom' in a court of law is the one step that could sway world opinion to insist that Israel stop the war. Unfortunately, this won't happen. Nishidani (talk) 00:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I read quite a few years ago that 15% of American kids go to bed feeling hungry, something that I recall to mind while reading Israeli debates on whether or not children under 4 (but not over that age limit) should be provided with food currently. Ralph Nadar has now made the point more cogently.

Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. Ralph Nader, What the Mass Media Needs to Cover Re: Israel/Gaza Conflict CounterPunch 26 February 2024

Yes, Hunger in the United States is a serious problem. Other major socio-economic problems include (but are not limited to) Homelessness in the United States, serious Crime in the United States (including gun violence), the largest known prison population in the world, the fact that annually tens of thousands of families declare bankruptcy because they are unable to pay their exorbitant medical bills, a relatively weak social safety net, a government with legislative and executive branches that for many decades have been to a very large extent captured by wealthy special interests/ Inverted totalitarianism, as well as other serious socio-economic ills.

Thanks for the article by Ralph Nader, it is informative and thought-provoking. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• Extraordinary charges of bias emerge against NYTimes reporter Anat Schwartz (25 Feb. 2024). By James North for Mondoweiss. "New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed racist and violent rhetoric toward Palestinians."

Like Chalmers Johnson - one of the most thoughtful and insightful thinkers on US imperialism - said many years ago (slightly paraphrasing from my rusty memory): Don't read the New York Times to find out the truth, read the New York Times to find out the lies. (I don't think this is invariably true, but it is frequently true.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• As Journalists Are Murdered in Gaza Their Counterparts Lose Jobs in America (27 February 2024). Steven Thrasher for Literary Hub. "Steven W. Thrasher Wonders Who’s Left to “Afflict the Comfortable”." Ijon Tichy (talk) 09:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

• Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation (15 March 2024). Long-form article by Arun Gupta, Counterpunch. " ... But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:59, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I've already read both. I said from the outset that the horrendous massacre of several hundred civilians in one day would be spun in spectacularly lurid terms, when the mere facts were sufficient to freeze one's blood. Some years down the line, the actual facts and statistics, and contexts of each tragedy or act of violence will finally emerge. But the template of cooked babies, stabbed children, bayoneted vaginas, slashed-off breasts etc.etc.etc., has predictably won the day and will remain functional for the time frame that is important, the war, both on the ground, and in the media. The 130 odd hostages are prime time news: the 7000 Palestinians who languish in prisons, 3,000 alone seized from their families after 7 Oct as bartering material in future negotations, -tortured and uncharged, are in Palestinian terms, hostages, seized predominantly for political reasons, but the semantic distinction between 'hostage' and 'arrested suspect' means there too, the battle of misrepresentation has been won. All of these reports and counter-reports conjure up for me an image of a frigate armed with 40 36-pounder long guns engaging with a dhow defending itself with a handful of jezails. Nishidani (talk) 19:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

• War on Gaza: Torture, executions, babies left to die, sexual abuse ... These are Israel’s crimes (15 March 2024). Jonathan Cook for the Middle East Eye. "Why is the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?"

• Israel detains 20 more Palestinians in West Bank, bringing total arrests since 7 Oct to 7,605 (16 March 2024). Middle East Monitor.

• UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links (8 March 2024). The Times of Israel, article by Reuters and TOI staff. "The UN agency for Palestinian refugees says some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October 7 attacks." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

• What Israeli soldiers' display of Palestinian women's lingerie reveals about the Zionist psyche (14 March 2024). Shereen Hindawi-Wyatt, Middle East Eye. "Israeli soldiers' brazen intrusion into displaced or murdered Palestinians' romantic and sexual lives is a terrifying indication of the occupiers' capacity to violate with impunity." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:59, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

• Censorship is a crucial complement of genocide (20 March 2024). Somdeep Sen, Al Jazeera.

• What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (19 March 2024). Noah Lanard in Mother Jones. "A former Israeli peace negotiator says the president’s response has “failed to meet even the lowest of low expectations.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:48, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

• Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges (21 March 2024). Lara-Nour Walton, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law."

• Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’ -— Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine (22 March 2024). Robin Andersen, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.     Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

• Chris Hedges, A Genocide Foretold, 30 March 2024. A pretty comprehensive survey of the horror. --NSH001 (talk) 06:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

That's better than a lot of the things that he's written in the past (not citable because it is self-published), and quite powerful, simply because he sticks to the factual details, which being appalling, are worth more than a lot of emotional outbursts. Another item today illustrates the point.

The number of trucks crossing into Gaza rose slightly to about 190 a day – less than half the peacetime daily total. Israeli inspectors were still turning back 20 to 25 each day, NBC News reported, citing an Egyptian aid official, on grounds as arbitrary as the wooden pallets bearing the food not being exactly the right dimensions. Israel has banned Unrwa, the main UN relief agency in the region, from using the crossing.' Julian Borger, Toby Helm, Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum Israel alone? Allies’ fears grow over conduct – and legality – of war in Gaza The Guardian 31 March 2024

Banning UNWRA as well, which has the only large organization on the ground with a proven distribution network, has suicidal consequences, just as the emergence of clan gangs taking over the control of the little food airdropped because Israel shoots to kill the local police who traditionally maintained order on the grounds that they are employed by Hamas and therefore terrorists (not in international law) is a recipé for even more violence, inside the world of the starving survivors itself. Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

• Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud (25 March 2024). The Grayzone.   "Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Israeli lawyer at the center of the campaign accusing Hamas of systematic sexual violence on October 7, now stands accused by Israeli media of scamming donors and spreading misinformation. The allegations appeared just days after Elkayam-Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize."

• UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want (4 April 2024). Dave Lindorff, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).   "The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.   Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.   It was “nonbinding,” they said.   The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’” —- and let no one contradict her.   That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision."

• Israel's toxic legacy: White phosphorus bombs on south Lebanon (25 March 2024). Justin Salhani for Al Jazeera.   " ... Driving out civilians, burning down their agricultural lands, poisoning their soil and water, destroying their homes, dropping cluster munitions, and paralysing the local economy are part of what they say are efforts to make south Lebanon uninhabitable today, tomorrow and long into the future.   “The target is to create a wasteland in the south,” Baalbaki said.   “It’s to break the link between the people and their ties to the ground, their nature, their trees. The target is to tell them that this is an inhospitable area and to leave it.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:31, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

• Hostages are having their legs amputated from being zip-tied by all 4 limbs for months; they're being forced to defecate in diapers & fed through straws (4 April 2024). "Those are Gazan hostages at Israel's Sde Teiman "concentration camp" ..." A series of 7 tweets, based on investigative reports in Haaretz. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Alas, this (nothing new in terms of prisoner treatment) is only the tip of the iceberg. I can't and wouldn't read tweets on principle. Here, there is nothing 'chirpy' to be tweeted about.Nishidani (talk) 13:19, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I respect your decision to refrain from reading tweets on principle. Would you care to share which principle you are alluding to? In the past, I have seen some people objecting to the format/ style of tweets because of the 280 character limitation on the length of each individual tweet. But this limitation has been increased last year to 4,000 characters. Many world-class scholars and investigative reporters tweet extensively and frequently including essay-length tweets, e.g. Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Jonathan Cook, and thousands of others in many important topics/ subjects (including but certainly not limited to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

For example, here is a recent insightful essay by Norman Finkelstein, posted on twitter (last I checked, this essay was unavailable on Finkelstein's personal blog on Substack): ISRAEL’S MORAL DILEMMA (April 5, 2024). Regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Okay, one more proof I'm an ignarunt effwit. For years the computer I worked on could never visualise any link to a twitter site, and I was amazed on clicking on the link in this revarnished computer, that I could access NF's post there. But the principle will still obtain. I've never had a smartphone, nor a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account because my observation on those who do is that, generally, they spend an inordinate amount of time on browsing those media, and, at this burntout end of a smokey life, I value time: every day must be free, unconstrained by disturbances or distractions, of being sucked up into the blogosphere. Working wikipedia for a few hours is trying enough. I find even simple sentences, my own included (when, rarely, they emerge as just simple statements) question-begging so I prefer to spend my time foraging in books or jstor article on any number of topics. That said, I'm glad to have read NK's note there: I think those of us who have closely followed the several wars, know that the Kitchen Car incident was old hat, unique only in that it drew exclamations and outrage, whereas scores of such incidents of the type (a) a misile collapses an apartment block (b) survivors, with neighbours' help, emerge dazed and (c) ambulances arrive and (d) the ambulances are shot up, are so commonplace (as he illustrates from 2014 - I still recall those two) that it is only remarkable that (other than Finkelstein's 2017 book) there seems to be no scholarly interest in connecting the dots, and writing a comprehensive analysis of such 'incidents' over the last 18 years to elicit the military logic behind it. Certainly this war abounds in such cases. Hegel wrote that 'die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug'. The owl in this case probably flies no more, exhausted by the futility of causing a late flap after each war, only to see the identical tragedy and the identical abuses, identical bullshitting memes of self-exculpation, renew themselves regardless Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Taxing Israeli Palestinians to pay for the genocide of their kin.

• The government is also attempting to cut the very budgets dedicated to the development of Palestinian citizens. The war is estimated to have cost Israel nearly $60 billion in the first three months — an expense so extreme that the Moody’s rating agency recently downgraded Israel’s credit rating.In an effort to minimize further economic damage, Israel has increased its deficit and is pushing major budget cuts through parliament. These include cuts across the board, but the board isn’t flat. Reductions to funding directed to Palestinian citizens are slated to be three times higher than the rest — 15 percent compared with 5 percent. Through these budget cuts the Palestinians in Israel are effectively paying a disproportionate cost of the war against fellow Palestinians. Raghad Jaraisy and Ofer Dagan, A Special Anguish Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel New York Times 23 February 2024

Your kind of read

This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for that excellent essay link,Iskander. I speedread it given circs butwill have to eventually print it out to make a more comprehensive study of it.CheersNishidani (talk) 02:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I've often mentioned over the years the sense of deja vu this particular conflict invariably induces in someone like myself,coming from an Irish background. I now see Mark Levene has set forth the striking analogies in his'Words matter, lives matter more' in Journal of Genocide Research. Sorry I can't provide you with a link from this laptop which does not seem to allow me to copy and paste. It's not coincidental that the Irgun learnt from the IRA, the only difference being the Irgun were the colonial invaders whereas the IRA, like Hamas, were indigenousNishidani (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC).

Didier Fassin,The Rhetoric of Denial: Contribution to an Archive of the Debate about Mass Violence in Gaza, Journal of Genocide Research, (5 February 2024) referring to the German genocide of the Herero, analyses its three stages, and argues for a similar three phases in the Israeli genocide/ethnocide of the Palestinian people.Nishidani (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Despite the shared diasporic experience, there was one important difference. The Jews developed their communal life around the synagogue, and the attendant privileging of abstemious scholarship as the primrose path to survival in partibus infidelium. The Irish expatriate communities pinioned their fellowship around the institution of the pub where mastery in yarning and inventing improbable stories, given that no on felt there was much point in remembering the grief of dispossession, helped one's rise on the social ladder,(until one felloff it, pissed as a newt).Nishidani (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Despite trying desperately hard to retire, much like Finkelstein, you've been dragged back into the fray haven't you? Part inability to keep one's eyes off the news with all the historical echoes bouncing around the brain, and part, presumably, that slightly addictive element that Wikipedia has to it for certain personalities when they espy errancy. Iskandar323 (talk) 13:57, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Mentioning some minor kibitzer like me in the same breath as Finkelstein only diminishes the latter while grotesquely inflating myself. I don't actually follow the 'news' since there is little that is new in the recurring recitation of the same memes about this conflict - it is newsworthy if an Israeli is taken hostage or killed, and each gets massive personalised coverage: it is not newsworthy if day after day children and youths, so far 116 individual cases, are shot dead by Israeli snipers from a safe distance in the West Bank. Apparently the several thousand WB Palestinians whose families have seen the disappearance into the holding pens of the IDF's carceral system of administrative detention, don't experience the kind of noteworthy grief the families of those taken hostage in Gaza undergo, though in essence we are dealing with the same issue - holding a people hostage. Fortunately, the net does allow one to go beyond this skewing travesty with all its racist assumptions about significant human beings, versus those troublesome others. That is why students, who have no yet been socialized into the cognitivce status quo because they are adept at exploring topic far more broadly that their parents who just absorb mainstreamlined news, are one of the few bodies exhibiting residual signs of life in a deadening and deadly, lethally deadly world. And, in its own distinctive manner, wikipedia's design, and its, until now at least, relative immunity to lobbied or sentimental selectiveness of the facts, has a role of honour, and if helping it is taxing, it is a tithing of our increasingly short time well worth paying-Nishidani (talk) 08:21, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

The books are beginning to drop. [1] Iskandar323 (talk) 04:59, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip-off. I'll order the original Enzo Traverso, Gaza davanti alla storia, Laterza, from the superefficient girls at my local newsagent's, and should have it within days. But I have a dozen novels loaned to me by a friend on the fictional Neapolitan detective Ricciardi, excellent cop stories set in Naples under fascism written by Maurizio de Giovanni (perhaps taking a leaf out of Philip Kerr's masterly novels about a German detective, Bernie Gunther under Nazism) - I got hooked by reading a minor masterpiece - All Souls' Day, not translated unfortunately. So won't have time to tackle it till early August. Yes, I would expect that there is something of the beginnings of a paradigm shift, long in the works, but now precipitating, caused by the snowball effect of legal events, the insanity in Gaza/Israel, and the internal crisis in Zionism crystallising under Netanyahu's administration. It will take years to work itself into the mainstream, as scholarship always does, however. I've had reservations about one or two of Traverso's articles in the past, which is normal - that is what serious reading is about- but this looks stimulating. Grazie Nishidani (talk) 08:16, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

RIP

• Hind Rajab, age 6. On the 29 January, 2024, 7 members of a family, Hind's four cousins and her aunt and uncle, were warned by an Israeli alert to evacuate before further bombing of their once affluent Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood. To get round a collapsed high-rise, they had to drive north first to exit the area before moving south. Their Kia Picanto encountered Merkava tanks. Some time later, Hind's 15 year old cousin Layan Hamada rang the Palestinian Red Crescent, saying that apart from herself and Hind, all other members of the family had been shot dead, and pleaded for help. They were near a tank. Her voice cuts off, and, for 6 seconds on the audio a total of 64 gunshots can be heard, a volume compatible with an M4 assault rifle or a Merkava FN MAG machine gun. The surviving girl, Hind, managed to keep contact by phone. An ambulance was dispatched. Two weeks later, the ambulance and the bodies of its two medics wre found next to the Kia Picanto, which had been riddled by 355 bullets. Hind's body was also found. On the ambulance audio tape, at 6pm, just as they communicate that they had finally sighted the car (50 metres away), an explosion is heard, and they too were blown up. Hind's father hadn't formed part of the evacuees. He was killed in June. A study by Forensic Architecture suggests that the tank which fired must have been located within a distance of 13–23 metres from the Kia Picanto. The ambulance itself was probable struck by a High Explosive Anti-Tank Multi-Purpose-Tracer round. (The Killing of Hind Rajab, Forensic Architecture 21 June 2024; Vijay Prashad, 'The Unbelievable Stories About the Children of Gaza,' CounterPunch 5 July 2024)
• Elisha Ben Kimon,Palestinian convert to Judaism fatally shot in West Bank Ynet 21 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 13:51, 21 March 2024 (UTC) The grandfather, Eid al Zaitoun, had saved 25 Jews from the 1929 Hebron massacre. The grandson converted to Judaism, and was shot to death by IDF soldiers at a Gush Etzion busstop after a knife was found in his baggage.Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

• Idem for Rami Al-Halhouli. (Arwa Mahdawi, As Gaza is destroyed, Israel is killing dozens of children in the West Bank The Guardian 23 March 2024) A 12 year old, one of a 100 children (of 400 West Bank Palestinians) murdered since Oct 7. He lit some fireworks to celebrate Ramadan, and was shot dead because, the IDF state, he aimed the fireworks at them. Itamar Ben-Gvir called the officer who killed him a 'hero' for having eliminated a terrorist.

The point is, that on-the-spot judgment of intent to kill (against all the probabilities) warranting the child's murder. The ICJ is to deliberate on whether Israel has an intent to commit the genocide (or whether it is just an unintended consequence of the war) which, by any reckoning, is taking place. The massive evidence will be equivocated and pettifogged to death to deny the charge, because intent is hard to prove legally, as opposed to it being easy to establish when a child lights a firecracker in the vicinity of IDF troops.Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

• Idem for Tamar Pelleg-Sryck. Imad Sabi, 'In memory of an Israeli lawyer who never lost her moral purpose,' +972 magazine 22 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

• Idem for Majed Abu Maraheel 'Palestine's first ever Olympian dies in Gaza from lack of treatment due to Israel's war,' Middle East Eye 14 June 2024. Maraheel used to run all the way from the Nuseirat refugee camp to the Eretz crossing and then over to the kibbutz where he worked as an agricultural labourer. He died three days ago, at 61, for lack of care, a fate looking in the face another 1,000-1,500 patients in the Strip with his condition, since only 4 of 36 hospitals/ clinics remain (barely) functional after the bombing. Most are expected to join the casualty list in the near future.Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
• Marc H. Ellis, Jewish theologian. Those unfamiliar with him, may see Adam Horowitz, Weekly Briefing: Losing the Prophetic Mondoweiss 16 June 2024. Nishidani (talk) 12:38, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
• Mohammed Bhar (25), a Gaza downie/Down Syndrome victim was attacked by a battle-trained dog when he tried to pet it. His mother was forced to abandon their home, in what was once Shuja'iyya, as Bhar screamed - the dog was ripping into his arm. The IDF promised her they would send a medic, but never did. His body was found rotting when the family finally returned a week later. The Oketz Unit which had sicced it on is famous in Israel for conducting elaborate and highly emotional burial ceremonies for each attack-dog that dies in battle. Sotah49b reads:'The face of the generation will be like the face of a dog; a son will no longer be ashamed before his father. And upon what is there for us to rely? ' Gideon Levy, 'In Gaza, Israel Lost What Remained of Its Humanity,' Haaretz 24 July 2024. One of thousands of stories, (here's another, an epic trek to bring to safety orphans eith Down symdrome and cerebreal palsy managed with the help of fellow refugees) most of which will never be told because the victims are not hostages, except to (mis)fortune.Nishidani (talk) 07:38, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

  A poem: "He called the dog Habibi". --NSH001 (talk) 10:06, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Neil. For 9 months, as I watch the videos of those streets and their straggling, pingponged people, I can't help focusing on the donkeys, heads bowed, pulling carts, and I feel rather like those Africans who were shown a film by a foreign instructor on how to avoid unsanitary conditions, stagnant water etc. In the follow-up questionnaire, asked to describe their impressions (i.e. what had they learnt), they all leapt up and cried:'The chickens!!' (which the Western medicos and film crew hadn't even realized had been fleetingly captured in the film. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy 1962 p.41) I'm rather embarrassed by this, looking beyond the human tragedy, at the lowest on the rung, toiling on scraps without a murmurn under the inhumane orchestra of bombs dropped by cool technicians doing their day's job, and then going home to enjoy the beaches at Tel Aviv. I'm tempted to write something like that poem about it, but the task beats me.Nishidani (talk) 12:03, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Germany's Betätigungsverbot and banning of free speech re Palestine

• Samantha Hill, Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today,' The Guardian 18 December 2023
• Shir Hever, BDS Suppression Attempts in Germany Backfire Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 2019, Vol. 48, No. 3 pp.86-96
• Liz Fekete, Anti-Palestinian racism and the criminalisation of international solidarity in Europe Institute of Race Relations 2024

• The growing frequency of Germany police crackdowns on any form of manifesting solidarity for, or even publicly discussing, the issues of Israel's treatment of Palestinians suggests there might be an article covering this recent phenomenon. Slavoj Žižek described with exasperation the state of the German crackdown by saying that one is almost at risk of being arrested there if you repeat statements critical of Israeli policies made by the former heads of Shin Bet, 1.03 minutes into the youtube presentation of Deluge: Gaza and Israel From Crisis to Catastrophe'.The chapter by Colter Louwerse apparently contained a detail archival reconstruction of the diplomatic prelude to Operation Cast Lead (Hamas had in this interpretation, consistently sought a return to the status quo ante ceasefire (which Israel had broken) It should become when available a resource for the background on that article. On Dec 27, 11:30 in a fews minutes Israel dropped 100 tons of bombs on Gaza killing 300 people. He compares that to 7 October.Nishidani (talk) 16:59, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

• Yanis Varoufakis here, i.e. addio Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
• idem Ghassan Abu-SittahNishidani (talk) 08:15, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
• idem Nancy Fraser here Nishidani (talk) 08:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

• (2) The situation is even more drastic in Israel, as we learn with greater detail, thanks also to a courageous letter cowritten by our fellow wikipedian Shira Klein in Haaretz (Shira Klein and Lior Sternfeld, Students Are at the Forefront of Israeli McCarthyism (Instead of taking on the role of resistance, rebellion,and challenging conventions – as students do in other countries – in Israel, the students are leading the censorship enterprise Haaretz 17 April 2024)

The two cases, together with several notable instances of extreme pressure in the US academies to break with tradition and muzzle dissent over what is being permitted in Gaza, suggest that we need an article on the phenomenon, something along the lines of "(Neo-)McCarthyism in the Hamas Israel war", enabled I believe by the toxic influence of the soi-disant International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition (a political construct) on the political imagination these last decades in its parlous subtextual conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism/criticism of Israel's human rights record.Nishidani (talk) 15:32, 19 April 2024 (UTC) On the conflation or distinction there was an interesting clash between Paolo Mieli, one of Italy's foremost popular historians, and the art historian Tomaso Montanari on La7. Mieli could not imagine that anti-Zionism might not be antisemitic as opposed to Montanari who vigorously defended the necessity of distinguishing the two. Mieli narrowly defined anti-Zionism as a denial of the right of Jews to national self-determination, a recourse to the default language.*(note) Anti-Zionism (as opposed to anti-Israelism, which is inherently antisemitic) in the broad acceptance arguably consists in a critique of Zionism as an ideology which in practice denies the rights of Palestinians to self-determination and a state of their own.Nishidani (talk) 15:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC) *note. On this meme see Peter Beinart'a sensible deconstruction, There Is No Right to a State Jewish Currents 27 January 2021.

• The Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt Outside the Box Podcast, 18 April 2024 A critique of the lack, in their view, in the US mainstream media, esp.The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, of any information about Palestine. Surprisingly, both consider alternative media like Mondoweiss, The Greyzone, and the Electronic Intifada - consistently held hostage on wikipedia as unreliable RS, close to deprecation - as important sources of information. Nishidani (talk) 17:57, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
• Omer Bartov, Raz Segal, Jelena Subotić,'Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the Siege of Gaza,' Jewish Currents podcast A very trenchant discussion on the profound intertwining of Holocaust memory, its weaponizing and relation to Germany's crackdown on dissent, and the denial of the idea Israel might be engaged in genocide in Gaza.Nishidani (talk) 16:09, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

What is the likely international response to warrants being issued? Israel and its supporters will react furiously. Most consequentially, the US Republican party will pursue sanctions against members of the ICC. Such sanctions were imposed by the Trump administration, and a group of a dozen Republican senators wrote a letter to Khan earlier this month warning his office: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Julian Borger, 'Will the ICC approve arrest warrants for Israel and Hamas leaders?,' The Guardian 20 May 2024

Another example of the most extraordinary things being reported without an eyebrow raised, or eliciting a storm of controversy. The letter in question was apparently sent some three weeks ago without a stir, and I for one never noted any coverage, until today as his decision was rendered public. A political party is making a direct public threat to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan that he will be directly sanctioned by a state if he performs his duties as a prosecutor without fear or favour.Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

It is also expected that Israel will encourage US Republicans to reimpose sanctions on ICC officials, and urge ICC-signatory allies to pressure the court into preventing warrants from being issued.' Bethan McKernan, Israel calls on ‘civilised nations’ to boycott ICC arrest warrants against its leaders The Guardian 21 May 2024.

I.e. Another undisguised public admission, the politicization of the rule of law, that it is now legitimate to form a pressure group/lobby for the purpose of threatening or impeding one of the highest independent judicial bodies in the 'civilised' world from carrying out its functions in terms of what international law stipulates, regardless of the fallout.Nishidani (talk) 16:48, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

• Richard Luscombe, Outrage over police violence at pro-Palestine rally in Brooklyn The Guardian 20 May 2024. I.e. zero tolerance of any display of pro-Palestinian sympathies in New York, with police thrashing people already detained. Nishidani (talk) 20:02, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
• Peter Beaumont , Israeli officials seize camera from US news agency, cutting live feed of Gaza The Guardian 21 May 2024

Since revoked after wave of outrage.

The most lucid voice in the panicky shouting over the ICC's arrest warrant case for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.Kenneth Roth, 'Why is the West defending Israel after the ICC’s request for Netanyahu’s arrest warrant?,' The Guardian 21 May 2024

• So now Ilan Pappé was detained at Detroit airport, interrogated over his Muslim contacts and had the whole of his Iphone contents downloaded by Homeland Security agents. Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and “Collapse of the Zionist Project” Democracy Now 21 May 2024. Everyday since 7 October, something that sounds so 'Sovietic' to old ears, is happening in the 'civilised West'.Nishidani (talk) 21:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

See now Chip Gibbons,US surveillance of pro-Palestinian speech has a direct line to McCarthyism The Guardian 22 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 09:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Now that we have massive evidence of (a) the breaking of the First Amendment clause re free speech with (b) massive clampdowns on student protests (c) the arrest or forced resignation of academics and others in the US and Israeli for expressing their views (d) the extension of these practices to Europe (e) the close of Al Jazeera in Gaza/Israel and the seizure of Associated Press equipment allowing a glimpse of the actual war, and (e) mainstream documentation of the heavy financial threats of defunding of universities or political campaigns which express criticism of Israel an article along the lines of Censorship in the 2023-2024 Israeli-Gaza War seems almost obligatory, if it doesn't already exist. Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

• Amira Hass, Haaretz Investigation | Israeli Army's Extortion Campaign Against Gazans: 'Contact Us or We'll Say You Reported Your Neighbors to Hamas' Haaretz 22 May 2024

This does not strictly fall within the parameters of clamping down on dissent. Rather, the obverse: coopting Gazans as 'collaborators', by threatening them with certain death if they do not comply, by directly informing the Hamas authorities that they have, for whatever reason, putatively, been forced to 'spy' for Israel (you can be denied treatment for cancer etc., which often requires permission to enter Israel, unless you reply to Israeli requests for information about your neighbours etc.) Nishidani (talk) 14:03, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

• “The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation. What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence.” David Shulman, Israel: The Way Out, New York Review of Books May 9, 2024

• This however would fall within the ambit of the article suggested, i.e.

In 2023, the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 613 articles by media outlets in Israel, setting a new record for the period since . .2011. The censor also redacted parts of a further 2,703 articles, representing the highest figure since 2014. In all, the military prevented information from being made public an average of nine times a day. . . These regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact articles submitted to it, as well as those already published without its review. No other self-proclaimed “Western democracy” operates a similar institution. . . media outlets are prohibited from revealing the censor’s interference — by marking where an article has been redacted, for instance — which leaves most of its activity in the shadows.' Haggai Matar, Israeli military censor bans highest number of articles in over a decade +972 magazine 20 May 2024

Thanks to Haaretz we now have a specific example of what the military censor redacts in those thousands of articles. This is what they were permitted to print of the scandalous case of arbitrary detention of Bassem Tamimi:Jonathan Pollak, Israel's Cause for Detention: ████ ██ █████ Haaretz 29 May 2024.

• So would this, a report on the punitive self-reflection 'assignments' students at New York University are expected to do for being morally upset to the point of protest that 46,000 people have been killed (36,000+10,000 missing) and over 80,000 injured in Gaza.

The assignments include a five- to six-page “reflection paper” to be written by students in a specified font, with prompts like “what have you done or need still to do to make things right?” Students are asked to list “who was affected by the incident” that led to the disciplinary action, including “society as a whole” and “property.” Other student protesters are being required to complete modules in a 49-page "Ethos Integrity Series" that seeks to teach them about “moral reasoning” and “ethical decision-making.” They must rank a list of 42 values, including patriotism, family, and security and safety, in order of importance to them. . . Students are also directed to read the Wikipedia page for the Bible’s Ten Commandments and watch the “Lisa Gets An A” episode from “The Simpsons,” in which Lisa cheats on an exam. NYU spokesperson John Beckman did not answer specific questions about the assignments but said in a statement: “Reflecting on the consequences of your actions is a vital lesson, which is why educational assignments in student discipline cases are common throughout higher education. These kinds of sanctions, which ask students to think about the impact of the choices they're making, are often in lieu of suspension.”Matt Katz, [2] Gothamist 15 May 2024

Beckman and his ilk are too young to recall the Red Guards' 'struggle (批鬭 pīdòu ) sessions', of which this assignment remedy is a distant, individualistic descendant, where people were hauled in to engage in a public confession of their thought crimes and behavioural deviations, as expressed in dissent from Maoism. The fact that a wiki biblical article is cited as a 'must read' piece for student ethics should be mentioned in the appropriate wiki article on mentions of this encyclopedia in the news, wherever it is. Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

• (1)Ben Samuels, You Don't Stand With Israel, We'll Work to Defeat You': AIPAC and RJC Enter GOP Primaries Fray,' Haaretz 26 May 2024

I.e. if you are not loyal to Israel, you may not represent the United States, but

• (2)"Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to their interests of their own nation is listed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance as an example of contemporary antisemitism in public life.""US House of Representatives votes to condemn antisemitism after Ilhan Omar's 'Israel loyalty' remarks" The Jewish Chronicle 8 March 2019.

I.e.It is antisemitic to suggest American Jewish citizens (AIPAC members above for example) might be more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Nishidani (talk) 22:46, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

• (1) Reports of a Mossad chief's direct personal threats to the former ICC prosecutor to get her to drop investigations perhaps also enter into a future article on the silencing of protests. Fatou Bensouda, and her family was reportedly directed threatened by the then Mossad director Yossi Cohen in an attempt to dissuade her from opening war crime inquiries against Israel. (Harry Davies,Revealed: Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry The Guardian 28 May 2024:'According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family. . .The Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor. . .According to legal experts and former ICC officials, efforts by the Mossad to threaten or put pressure on Bensouda could amount to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court.'

The original investigative source is Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport, Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed +972 magazine 28 May 2024

• (2) Peter Beaumont, 'Journalist threatened over reporting on spy chief and ICC, Israeli newspaper say,' The Guardian 30 May 2024
• (3) Gur Megiddo, 'How Israeli Security Nixed Haaretz's Report Into Alleged Mossad Extortion of International Court Prosecutor,' Haaretz 30 May 2024 refrerring to a censored attmpt in 2022 to publish the details of Israel's intelligence operation to block the ICC.
• (4) Kenneth Roth, 'The ICC spying revelations show the Israeli government to be a lawless regime,' The Guardian 30 May 2024
• (5) Yossi Melman, 'Sounds Like Cosa Nostra Blackmail': Former Mossad Chief on Successor's Alleged Threats Against ICC Prosecutor Haaretz 30 May 2024 (words ascribed to Tamir Pardo)

I look forward to Israel or the US Republicans having a crack at Khan under the next UK government. That will end well for everybody... Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:58, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Is there anything to look forward to in this grotty little world where even doing one's job can result in punitive sanctions? Certainly, in terms of the higher comedy of farce, US Republicans taking over the UK government itself would make those like me, nostalgic for Monty Python episodes, tickle with delight, whether or not they snooked a cock or two at Khan or tried to kick his can.:)Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

• (This under manipulation of government research conclusions to assert they state what the experts writing them deny is the case)

Julian Borger, state department report absolving Israel on Gaza aid is false, says ex-official The Guardian 30 May 2024 According to Stacy Gilbert, senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration (one of 9 State Department officials who have resigned in protest against Biden’s policies, and who had resigned her post), the state department report earlier this month absolving Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza was “patently false” and went against the consensus of department’s experts, according to a former senior US official who resigned this week. . . Even more controversially, the report said the state department did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” in Gaza. It was a high-stakes judgment because under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act, the US would be obliged to cut arms sales and security assistance to any country found to have blocked delivery of US aid. Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report’s conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.'Nishidani (talk) 20:36, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

In other words, she is saying the Biden administration lied about its own internal conclusions in order to continue to break the law stipulating that countries which block humanitarian aid cannot be the beneficiaries of US arms sales. Nishidani (talk) 20:41, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

• Gloria Oladipo, New York hospital fires nurse after calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ in speech,' The Guardian 31 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 08:40, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
• The same month, as Israel reeled from the horror of the attacks, two Standing Together activists were detained for putting up posters with a message – “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together” – that police officers deemed to be offensive. Officers confiscated their posters, as well as T-shirts printed with peace slogans in Hebrew and Arabic.' Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum, ‘Solidarity over hatred’: the small band of Israelis stopping settlers obstructing aid trucks,' The Guardian 31 May 2024.Nishidani (talk) 17:14, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
• Sheera Frenkel, Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War New York Times 5 June 2024,
• Associated Press, Columbia Law Review board shutters website over article critical of Israel The Guardian 5 June 2024

The article is Rabea Eghbariah, The Ongoing Nakba: Toward a Legal Framework for Palestine N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change vol.48, 2024

Eghbariah is a Harvard doctoral candidate. I personally don't think the article passes muster for a law journal where one expects technical analysis, but that is not the point.Nishidani (talk) 16:49, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

• Book burning, which we associate with Nazi Germany, is a form of control by cancelling the founts of historic memory. Ergo this might be included.

  Recently, Israeli soldiers set ablaze the remaining parts of the al-Aqsa University’s library in Gaza City and photographed themselves sitting in front of the burning books. Similarly, an Israeli soldier recently filmed himself walking through the ruins of al-Azhar University, mocking scholasticide and rejoicing in the occupation’s destruction of the university. “We’re starting a new semester,” he said, adding: “It’ll start never.”Chandni Desai, 'Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide,' The Guardian 8 June 2024 Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

• (1)Total mainstream media neglect of Richard Sanders (dir), The truth about October 7, interview with Peter Oborne Al Jazeera. (Perhaps not citable but Sanders states that Human Rights Watch is preparing a thorough forensic analysis of the allegations)Nishidani (talk) 13:37, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
• (2)Owen Jones inteeviewing Sanders, October 7th: The Whole Story Finally RevealedNishidani (talk) 14:38, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
• Erika Lopez, Tascha Shahriari-Parsa,We watched Ivy League law reviews censor Palestinian scholars firsthand The Guardian 11 June 2024 Nishidani (talk) 05:12, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

On the other hand, the censorship is apparently a left-wing protocols like conspiracy. See

But the group became part of what writer Ben Weingarten has aptly named the censorship industrial complex. That describes an effort in which a sinister combination of Internet and social-media companies, left-wing nonprofit groups and the Biden administration sought to shut down conservatives who dissented from a wide range of policies. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court passed on an opportunity to stop this blatant violation of the free-speech rights of citizens this week in a case that may serve as a green light for future efforts by the Biden administration and its Silicon Valley oligarch allies.'Jonathan S. Tobin, Censorship stand comes back to bite the ADL on Wikipedia Jewish News Syndicate 26 June 2024

• New German citizens must affirm Israel's right to exist. Zero^talk 02:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

I.e. I must imagine an alternative scenario in US history, with Trump winning the Presidential elections on a platform which included an oath stating that Afro-Americans, and anyone with a green card, must affirm White America's right to exist.

A demand for civil rights and equality for Palestinians in Greater Israel has been successfully spun as a denial of the right of Israel to persist (as a segregating, ethnocratic state). Nishidani (talk) 07:14, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

• Tom Perkins, Internal memo reveals Anti-Defamation League surveillance of leftwing activist The Guardian 8 July 2024Nishidani (talk) 22:34, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
• Bella Hadid, sacked by Adidas after Israel pressured the firm over her pro-Palestinian statements. Tom Ambrose, Adidas removes Bella Hadid from ad campaign after criticism from Israel, The Guardian 19 July 2024 Nishidani (talk) 19:54, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
• Fawzia Afzal-Khan, quite a detailed career analysis on the harassments faced by an academic with open pro-Palestinian views (particularly good on Susan Sontag's reaction to a question. Fawzia Afzal-Khan

US Academia and the Censoring of an Anti-Zionist Professor CounterPunch 19 July 2024 Nishidani (talk) 20:25, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

• A law limiting academic freedom of speech has just passed its first reading in the Knesset

the country’s national union of students . . lobbied for the law, including spending 500,000 shekels (more than $136,000, £105,000) on a billboard campaign to promote it nationwide. The ads prompted the Haaretz newspaper to warn in an editorial that the country’s “illiberal students need a lesson in democracy”. . . Of the 30 university chapters of the union, two-thirds supported the campaign. . . In Israel, criticism of the war in Gaza is already restricted and penalised, even for Jewish citizens. A teacher who was charged with treason and spent four days in solitary confinement after posting concerns about civilian deaths in Gaza, has described it as “a time of witch-hunts”.Emma Graham-Harrison, Matan Cohen, Draft Israeli law to limit academic speech labelled ‘McCarthyite’ The Guardian 21 July 2024

This is the best and brightest of the younger generation in Israel.Nishidani (talk) 20:16, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

@Nishidani, while I likely disagree with your evaluation, I think I have one for your list (with step by step context, so not just a quick report):

• Julius Geiler, 'Update „From the river to the sea“: Gericht verhängt erstes Strafurteil wegen israelfeindlicher Parole in Berlin,' - Tagesspiegel 6 August 2024 FortunateSons (talk) 10:33, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Much appreciated. In short, whereas anyone on the precedent in Mannheim, can shout From the river to the sea and not violate the German criminal code, on this precedent anyone in Berlin who shouts the same slogan can be fined €600 for criminally denying Israel's right to exist, referring to the same legal code. So it's a matter of a six hour drive that determines whether one can exercise free speech or not in Germany. Another example of the increasing subjectivity of the application of law, depending on where and who makes the judgment, Of course if you are a Zionist, you can shout the Likud version of the slogan "From the Jordan to the sea, Israel shall be free (of Palestinians and their statist pretensions)" and no criminal charges will be laid against you anywhere in the world for denying the right of Palestinians to have a state. So criminality now is taking on a distinction where the ethnic background of a speaker will determine whether they have a right to free speech or not. Nishidani (talk) 12:26, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

You’re very welcome!

A few minor details: it’s context-dependent in both areas and as Germany doesn’t have case law in the same way that many anglophone countries do, decisions by the same local court can vary. I would assume that someone’s catholic grandma who is just really concerned about Palestinian kids would be fine in both cities, and some college kid wearing a “Hamas did nothing wrong” or “Globalise the intifada” shirt might have a bad time no matter where they are.

Regarding the Likud analogy, while de facto advocating against a Palestinian state is unlikely to get you arrested, the specific laws used in this case aren’t based on any specific ethnicity, and instead target conduct. In practice, one’s mileage may vary.

Lastly (and this is definitely pedantic) the fine is based on income, and while denying the right for Palestinians to have a state might get one killed in some countries if you do it publicly enough, prosecution is indeed unlikely.

PS: your JVL link is dead for me.

don't listen to law students for legal advice, it’s quite possible that I’m wrong FortunateSons (talk) 13:35, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I hope I've fixed the link. If you mean in Arab states saying Palestinians don't have a right to a state might get you killed, the point is that Israelis/Jews anywhere can recite exactly the same slogan, changing Palestine for Israel, and face no legal risks in the rest of the world, ergo the disparity reflects ethnic priorization in rights claims. That is where the obtusity of Germany's law, with its attempt to compensate for an historical sense of guilt for the Holocaust, goes overboard, - Palestinians have no responsibility for Europe's genocidal antisemitism -relying as well on a total ignorance of the history of both versions. The Likud version predates the formation of Hamas; Hamas has no copyright on a slogan that circulated in the PLO and now in the PA; and any assertion that the slogan defends the 7 October atrocities is just inane politicking for discursive control. In any case, I think you might be interested as a law student in reading something from Neil Gorsuch (David French, 'Neil Gorsuch Has a Few Thoughts About America Today,' New York Times 4 August 2024 - if you can't get a copy I can email it), whom I follow despite my antipathy to the US Supreme Court, because he is a maverick with a mind of his own. Essentially his view is that the pullulation of laws, bylaws, etc.etc., leads to a totaliizing invasiveness of people's lives if they have the misfortune of being entangled in the system/cistern. Most irrational court decisions can be won on appeal, as the Berlin one might be, but it means either you have to crowdfund to cover high, indeed extravagant legal expenses, difficult, or get a bank loan or mortgage your house. In Italy effective impunity exists for the wealthy/powerful given its extraordinary proliferation of laws (designed by politicians to get elbow room against suits against them) because anyone with pockets deep enough to hire a string of capable lawyers for a decade or two will eventually win by prescription or some technical fine point (failure to deliver an obscure document to some tribunal within the designated time limits etc.) And Italy, like Israel, has much to tell us about the probable future nature of former democratic states. I don't think you can outlaw antisemitism out of sight. It just goes underground. Like Chomsky and Finkelstein, I believe free speech include the right of fuckwits to have their names publicly associated with hate, the better to know them. Nishidani (talk) 14:15, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

The link works now, thanks. Archive today seems to be temporarily out of service, but I’ll try for it later or report back.

That may be true, but Israelis might have a hard time entering some of those countries at all. And even if loudly advocating against a Jewish state might get you arrested in Berlin, advocating against a Palestinian state in Tehran, Beirut or Baghdad might have more significant consequences. Of course, those aren’t the places one would consider the pinnacle of free speech, but I would argue that the treatment of Zionists by Antizionist countries tends to be worse than the treatment of Antizionists in Zionist countries.

While German law does attempt to compensate for the holocaust (an, in my opinion, worthy pursuit and decent execution, though I understand the objection) in a way that may at times disadvantage certain activists more than it should, it’s also probably significant to acknowledge that - at least subjectively - many of the pro-Palestinian activists seem to have been cursed with an acute lack of decorum and tact, as well as the seeming inability to differentiate between fights worthy or unworthy of being picked. Many of them either seem to be unwilling or unable to acknowledge how the average German will view them, or simply so stuck in a “leftist-student-activist” bubble that they don’t care. It makes life easy for people on my side, but as someone who does hope that there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when Palestinians will have their own state (even if I will likely disagree with them about what the borders and rights ought to be), I have been bitterly disappointed by the quality of western advocates for Palestine (except on the “ground level”, those were great).

Regarding law and wealth, I’m inclined to agree. As someone who grew up with nice cutlery, the acute awareness of what sort of advantages it provided, including in the legal world, ironically allowed me to talk myself into a scholarship I’m not sure I deserve. However, it is my slightly jaded opinion that a difference in access to justice is almost insurmountable outside of a utopia, as much as I would like it to be.

I must have missed the Italian problem; I’m aware of the political mess, but what is wrong with the courts?

I understand the idea that hateful rhetoric should simply be freely attached to one's name instead of persecuted, and find the idea, for reasons I’m not allowed to elaborate on, rather charming. Having said that, I have yet to significantly disagree with the way hate speech is prosecuted in Germany, which I would argue shows that we’re doing pretty well. FortunateSons (talk) 14:55, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Why, whenever one thinks of an issue of general principles or modern institutions, one should draw in as contrary examples Iran. Baghdad or Beirut, effectively failed states (in good part also because of the geopolitical interests that have afflicted them) is beyond me. As someone who lives within a world of traditional democracies, it is the principles that have informed those specific countries, and on which they pride themselves as emblematic of their modernity and civilisation, which attract my attention.

• I don't allow my intense focus on my own backyard, in short, to get distracted by gossip about the shenanigans in the backyards of distant neighbours. Ah! gotcha, you might lawyerly note, then why the interest in the I/P conflict? Well because it affects the institutional structures and the ideal principles undergirding civil life, of many modern democratic states, and therefore I have a natural personal interest in it. Whaddya mean, I imagine you asking:).
• When AIPAC throws huge amounts of money to unset Democratic party politicians like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman (or Republicans like John Hostettler), or local pro-Israeli community groups (many lawyers) get news presenters (Antoinette Lattouf, David Velasco) or a nurse (Hesen Jabr) fired or militant pro-Israeli groups intervene to destroy academics (Steven Salaita, Norman Finkelstein) from getting tenure, or, as in Germany stops philosophers like Nancy Fraser, Jewish to boot, as it were from lecturing on their soil, or regrets having awarded Masha Gessen, Jewish to boot the Hannah Arendt Prize and hands it over informally, away from public sight; or bars entry to Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon with great experience in operating in Gaza to prevent him speaking at a conference; or some 300 people in Canada felt compelled to seek advice over threats or suspensions from their workplaces as schools for their views, I see a pattern already present in Israel, where a high school history teacher, Meir Baruchin, was fired (he won a legal appeal) for criticizing the IDF, where Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended from her post as in the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and subsequently arrested by the police for her views; well, I won't go through the whole list of 60+ people in my file on this, but the point should be clear.
• Namely, lobbying to restrict what may or may not be said with regard to Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and, as with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's patently stupid Working definition of antisemitism in its Orwellian insidiousness, actively pressuring states to legislate restrictions on free speech (successively in Germany) threatens to sap one of the foundational principles of Western modernity and civilization, by confusing one's right to think for oneself and express one's views with criminal assaults on public security and order.
• I am, in theory, directly affected by these practices because they potentially threaten a natural, if arduously gained, liberty to speak out without undergoing sanctions by a state. To be educated in my generation meant having George Orwell's seminal essays at armslength, and the world looks like its wiping its arse on them, out of some misbegotten belief that the Holocaust creates an Ausnahmezustand) for Israel, where international law cannot be applied without stirring an odour of antisemitic suspicion.
• Half of my intellectual formation came from reading German thinkers (Marx, Nietzsche, Boas, Mannheim, Elias, Hobsbawm, Stern, Steiner, Simmel, Cassirer, Kafka, Freud, Adorno, Arendt, Gay, Klemperer, Fraenkel, Mosse etc., to note but a few incisive for my formative late adolescent and university years, whose acuity of general analysis came out of their ability to rethink antisemitism as something suggestive of a far greater pathology in Western societies themselves, and not dwell obsessively on their Jewish identity, but on the nature, conditions and crises of man under the stress of modernity. All i see now is an infantile 'return of the repressed' nationalism they all sought to outthink, and, conspicuously here, the explosive coalescence of two neuroses, Germany's malaise with its past, and Israel's, to me, expropriation of Jewishness, a magnificent diasporic and global heritage, in the service of getting a few more miles of land on that wretched patch of territory. (I mention Nietzsche anomalously among all those writers of Jewish descent because fortunately, at an impressionable age, I read works (in English) like Jenseits von Gut und Böse and delighted in the way he tore the guts out of German nationalism while expressing deep admiration for Jews, of course within the discursive limits of the relevant prose of his age.Cf.Jenseits von Gut und Böse sections 244,250f., in particular).
• My apologies for this divagation. Don't waste your invaluable time as a student with a bright future in responding. I have no expectations of influencing anybody. I do hope that a bibliographic list of thinkers and writers whose work affected me deeply might prove, over time, stimulating, even in any number of directions I haven't thought about. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 17:05, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

  You’re getting (at least a partial) response, but I have attempted to alleviate my writers block with editing, and having failed that, will try to power through one of the driest and least meaningful bits of social media regulation in existence (exaggerating only slightly). I have only written about 4K characters today, and was really going for at least 6k, despite my poor mood and acutely developing flu. However, the poorly maintained train that I have to take home from the library is a great opportunity for contemplating and discussion. FortunateSons (talk) 17:41, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

  Sorting by points, else this will get chaotic:

  • I agree, just wanted to make a point on principle.
  • I must admit, while I disagree with the conclusions that led to the outcome, my obvious ethnic and ideological connection (and reading this book on a Spanish (or Italian, I’m not sure) beach when I must have been no older than 12) seem thoroughly unimpressive in comparison.
  • what are you doing, trying to make me feel bad about my very minor anti-Bowman slacktivism? ;) While I’m sure we disagree about the validity of targeting almost anyone who finds their way into the gaze of what one may consider the Eye of sauron, I strongly believe that there is one target where we both are directly in lockstep: [1] Having said that, I’m aware of many of those that have experienced personal consequences for their views, and (as with any termination for political reasons) would make the argument for a definitely totally serious case-by-case approach: it’s good if they are on the other side, and bad if they are on my side. I think such personal consequences always range from “not nearly enough” to “generally proportional” to “cruel and unusual”, and we would likely agree on some and deeply disagree on others.
  • nice, our first proper disagreement. I have no desire to relitigate the ADL discussion (an experience I had with half a dozen people in my life, where the consensus seemed to be against the view you hold :)) Having said that, it is my personal opinion that while working definition isn’t perfect, I’m unaware of anyone being harmed by the one example that wouldn’t have also been equally affected by 3D or any of the other definitions. It’s like an argument about racism: if you have to rely on “it requires prejudice and power”, I would argue that the person took a bad turn a while ago. On the other hand, I am partial to the argument (made in some paper, though no clue which one) that it insufficiently encompasses the opposition to all states as a concept. I’m unaware of a direct relationship between IHRA and the German laws, could you point me in that direction?
  • See the argument above, but I doubt we’ll find much except an agreement to disagree there. But on a human level, I get the fear. I just admit that while I did my best to read Orwell, I had mixed reviews on the books, and have forgotten about most of the content (I guess there is a joke in there somewhere)
  • I’m impressed with the accuracy of the blue links, you’re only two above the ideal number, and both of those did help. I also disagree with the assessment (except mostly on the settlements, though fighting about a pointless hill is not a pastime exclusive to Israelis). I’m a lot more concerned about the rising right in response to immigration, considering they (unlike, unfortunately, some of my Queer and/or female and/or Jewish friends and loved ones) are highly likely to never have made any negative experience with the people who have come to live where we do. Instead of any of the rational arguments against immigration (too many of which I must object to, if based on nothing but my (Neo-) liberal worldview), they seem to be driven by a fear of the unknown, despite making no effort to get to know it.
  • I will return to the list if I ever find the time, and if I don’t, I would still insist that the conversation was quite stimulating. Considering how meh writing is going (apparently slight emotional turmoil, heat and illness are bad for one’s concentration??), I would add an asterisk to bright (don’t tell my scholarship), I would say that this was a nice distraction from both the writing and the business on my talk page (but please don’t engage)

  FortunateSons (talk) 19:34, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Best wishes for a quick recovery, then.If you read Exodus at age 12, you were more precocious than myself. At that age my interests in fiction were limited to reading Biggles novels and Billy Bunter stories, which were a far greater improvement, I thought at the time, on the frightening fictions of the Bible they crammed down our throats:) Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much. In my defence, I somewhat stagnated since, and my mom made me (gifted me the book). FortunateSons (talk) 21:53, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

• 13 August 2024, it was announced that a scheduled piano performance by Jayson Gillham with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was cancelled after Gillham dedicated a prior performance to Palestinian journalists slain in Gaza.(Emily Wind, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancels pianist’s performance after dedication to journalists killed in Gaza The Guardian 13 August 2024) Nishidani (talk) 14:15, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
• Peter Kuras, ‘From the river to the sea’: six words that are testing freedom of speech in Germany The Guardian 16 August 2024.

For many German leaders bent on preventing the spread of antisemitism, the objections rendered by courts and legal observers in favour of free speech seem only to be evidence that better laws are needed. The most troubling among them is almost certainly a draft resolution being debated in the Bundestag. If passed, it would enact a wide range of measures that critics fear would have a broadly chilling effect on speech in Germany, including a provision that would require anyone seeking federal funding to submit to a background check conducted by Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The bill enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. . . It is hard to think that repressed mourning for Hitler is widespread in Germany today, but it’s equally hard to escape the conclusion that there is still some kind of widespread psychic distortion in place when it comes to questions of Jews and Jewish life. Hence the absurdity of the German police arresting Jewish activists and prohibiting a demonstration by a leftwing Jewish group out of a supposed concern for Jewish welfare.Nishidani (talk) 09:41, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Linfield

Bit baffled by that one, I removed Linfield, another returned her, and you have now removed her? I agree with that, but you seem to have a different idea? Selfstudier (talk) 22:56, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

My apologies. It's not much of an excuse to plead that, given a wild series of unforseen problems arising as I was extending hospitality, by the loan of my Rome apartment, to some French visitors (even having to find a plumber to fix an emergency when the shower heater broke down etc., etc.,) that I wrote that having managed only several hours of sleep in two days. Linfield's remarks are those of an uninformed airhead, silly because she thinks Arabs were wrongheaded to rejet, as 66% of the population, a proposal giving 30% of the population, almost all recent immigrants, the majority of the (best)land, and of no use, and I should have said that is why they should be removed. Or perhaps it's just further evidence of dementia.Nishidani (talk) 22:41, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

So they finally begin to notice

what happens every other week, and has so for almost 4 decades. Not a 'brief massacre' but a long-term one. Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

e.g. The Western media haven't ever carried images, until today (hence the outrage over what is otherwise an absolutely facet of life there), if on maginal sites, such as this (a headless child victim of one more precision strike), which Gazans have directly witnessed over the last 18 years with hundreds of children. Nishidani (talk) 22:23, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Thrall

Well deserved Selfstudier (talk) 23:24, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

May 2024

Please do not remove content or templates from pages on Wikipedia, as you did at Animal stereotypes of Jews in Palestinian discourse, without giving a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Your content removal does not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. If you only meant to make a test edit, please use your sandbox for that. Twice you have removed sourced information with no valid reason. This can be considered disruptive in a CTopic article.  // Timothy :: talk  11:48, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Come on now. Don't be silly. My edit summary said_'See talk page' where an extended set of reasons were given for the general mess of that page and specifically the rationale for removing the nonsense I took out. per WP:Synth, a nonsense apparently in sourcing to Bernard Lewis a view he does not entertain.Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

The disruption there consists in the editor, whom you support, consistently misconstruing sources. Source distortion is a reportable offence, particularly when it appears to form a pattern.Nishidani (talk) 13:32, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

A maths teacher in Gaza

Eman Mohamed, Rafah refugees are pouring into our starving, overcrowded city – and we hope they keep coming The Guardian 14 May 2024

Among other things, he recounts that of his class of bright girl students aged 11-16, - yes, they study in Gaza - 9 have been murdered, or as he politely puts it, 'killed', under the relentless bombings. Over the border, this means nothing to most: I assume these people are insignificant compared to the history of Jewish suffering taught there. Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

ps. Apparently some kindergarten students are spewing Nazi propaganda, around 59 minutes in, but also on the death of the Gaza teacher and poet Refaat Alareer. Nishidani (talk) 23:15, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Déjà vudoo or plus ça change מה־שהיה הוא שיהיה

(All things are wearisome, more than one can describe) . .The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; (and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun).Ecclesiastes 1:8-9

Suddenly he [Biden] said: “What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated.” I was certain, recounted Begin, that this was a continuation of his attack against us, but Biden continued: “It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’” Menachem Begin referring to his encounter with Joe Biden during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which unilaterally broke with a ceasefire agreement that had held up for several months and killed 19,000 Lebanese.

Ben Burgis, In the ’80s, Joe Biden Speculated to Israel’s PM About Wiping Out Canadians, Jacobin 22 October 2023 Nishidani (talk) 08:15, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

One recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that America needs “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.” David Brooks,The Authoritarians Have the Momentum New York Times 16 May 2024

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12. “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.” Megan K. Stack, The View Within Israel Turns Bleak New York Times 16 May 2024

Comment: There is almost no non-toxic drinking water in Gaza, and bathing to clean off the dust of bombings and the sweat of fear, not to speak of toilet needs, is the only means of not surviving befouled. And one dries oneself in the sun. because salty towels - the last commodity to pack on a donkey as one is endlessly exhorted to move on -cannot be washed in clean water. if this quiet holocaust has no meaning, then why teach the Holocaust? Nishidani (talk) 08:34, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Raja Shehadeh's Occupier's Law:Israel and the West Bank, came out in 1988, and in the last 20 years a mass of books, and NGO documents have completed the picture. Now, some 36 years later, the New York Times is writing up a 'scoop' about the 'dark secrets of Israeli justice' which are 'told for the first time' there (Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel, 16 May 2024). Well, that 'told for the first time' has a rider,'(told for the first time) by Israeli officials themselves.' That's new perhaps. But any reader could have ascertained these explosive revelations by simply following the academic literature that has be published and ignored for the last three decades. In Italian one says la scoperta dell'acqua calda (discovering (the existence of) hot water', (which none of those described in the article as killing or robbing Palestinians with impunity ever get into.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

• Coral Davenport, DeSantis Signs Law Deleting Climate Change From Florida Policy The New York Times 15 May 2024
• The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost. Oliver Milman, Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report The Guardian 17 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

• And yet, lucidity does pop up. Nishidani (talk) 20:28, 17 May 2024 (UTC)
• As it does magnificently in the following:-

In April 2024, during Passover, a group of American rabbis approached a border crossing in Israel. Affiliated with Rabbis for Ceasefire, the group joined Jewish Israeli activists attempting to deliver food to Gazans. One of the American rabbis told reporters at Democracy Now! that this was the only way she could imagine marking Passover, a holiday that celebrates the story of liberation from oppression and slavery. Marching to the gates of Gaza with food for starving Palestinians was consistent with Passover’s imperative to invite the hungry to every table. Atalia Omer, Many American Jews Protesting for Palestinians, Activism is a Journey Rooted in Their Jewish Values CounterPunch 23 May 2024

Pier review

The UN, Israel and the US all agreed weeks ago that aid would need to reach prewar levels of 500 lorries a day to even start addressing the scale of need. UN figures showed that over the past 10 days, only six lorries had been able to cross.

The US has anchored a temporary floating pier to a beach in north Gaza, and the UN is finalising plans to distribute aid shipped in this way, but it is less efficient and far more expensive than delivering it with vehicles via border crossings controlled by Israel.Emma Graham-Harrison, South Africa calls on ICJ to order Israel to end Rafah offensive, The Guardian 16 May 2024 Nishidani (talk) 07:47, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Camels

'A camel arrested in Jerusalem for not having a permit.' This refers to the fate of Kojak, Jerusalem's most famous camel, whose owners the Abu Hawa family, could not get past bureaucratic obstacles of a permit required to get his vaccinations. 'The Israeli policy and veterinarian services hauled him away and imprisoned him in a shack near the abandoned village of Lifta.' Penny Johnson, Companions in Conflict:Animals in Occupied Palestine, Melville House 2019 ISBN 978-1-612-19743-2 p.xiii,3-4. Nishidani (talk) 13:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Recognition by Norway, Ireland and Spain

was met by just one 'argument', showing a video of hostages:'Israel’s foreign ministry said it would reprimand the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian ambassadors and show them a video of female hostages being held in captivity by Hamas..'Rory Carroll and Sam Jones, Ireland, Spain and Norway to recognise Palestinian state The Guardian 22 May 2024-05-22

Perhaps the ambassadors should reciprocally show the Foreign Ministry the following video. Nishidani (talk) 13:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Netanyahu's criticism of the ICC was not fully translated into English, but truncated, breaking off apparently to avoid the following words, a biblical quotation which, in Jonathan Ofir's reconstruction, express a desire to exterminate the 'Amalekites/Palestinians'. Ofir may be wrong in his very close, precise construal of the censored passage and its contextual resonance, Netzah Israel lo yeshaker (נצח ישראל לא ישקר: 'the Eternal One of Israel shall not lie'.1 Samuel 15:29) of course, but the exegesis strikes this reader as cogent. See Jonathan Ofir, Netanyahu’s response to the ICC invokes another genocidal biblical reference, Mondoweiss 21 May 2024

Consensual convention for leads on settlements

Hi, can you direct me to the discussion about this convention?Eladkarmel (talk) 08:51, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Ask Nableezy. This point has been made several times over the years when that formulation has been removed, and Nableezy has the details at his fingertips, while I, at this late age, still have my fingertip elsewhere, and decaying memory hasn't the force to pull it out. Nishidani (talk) 08:54, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

@Nableezy can you please direct me? (@Nishidani I hope it's okay for me to use your talk page for this) Eladkarmel (talk) 09:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

WP:Legality of Israeli settlements. nableezy - 13:15, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for filling my memory blank.Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Religion

The wording in your edit summary was excellent. I'm adding that to my "How To Say Difficult Things" list. Joyous! Noise! 14:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. It was just an allusion to William James's view that any individual's religion is essentially private. To call someone a 'Christian', 'Jew', 'Buddhist', 'Muslim' begs too many questions to be an intelligible attribute, however much this linguistic, ergo conceptual, caution is abused in our sorry times. Regards.Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Hope you're OK.

I'm a bit worried, having just seen your edit summary. "Hospitalised"? Hope it's nothing serious. --NSH001 (talk) 17:12, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Just old age making its first knock on the door of a body that's been obscenely fit for 73 years. Vertigo. Collapsed on the kitchen floor while bending to feed my cat, and couldn't get up for a while, as I vomited. As my head spun at this new experience, I made some tests: 14x18 =252, recited a poem flawlessly, so I knew it wasn't cognitive, which was the only worry. A neighbour summoned an ambulance, and they gave me a thorough checkup, scans, blood analysis, cognitive tests, heart - and concluded it was probably either benign paroxysmal positional vertigo or labyrinthitis, to be checked out with an otolaryngologist and neurologist, which I'll do. I learnt two things: my local hospital is very efficient and thorough, and (b) back on my feet, having reengineered my instinctive body movements to a slower measure (everyone complains I walk too fast etc.) I seem to be able to do what interests me,-other than reading - household tasks, gardening, etc. In any case, something like that was long overdue, and a salutary reminder to use time well, rather than kill it. Thanks for the inquiry, mate, but, for the mo', all's well, as I hope things are your way.Nishidani (talk) 18:56, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

This happened to me about 2.5 years ago. I woke up in the morning, got out of bed and walked towards the bathroom when suddenly I collapsed on the floor (fortunately I did not vomit). I managed to crawl back to bed and proceeded to describe the symptoms to my physician over the phone. He immediately diagnosed it as BPPV and emailed to me links to YouTube videos containing exercises for BPPV (the vids are easy to find on YouTube). I did the exercises and they helped to significantly alleviate some of the worst symptoms, but did not entirely eliminate all symptoms. The problem appeared to go away on its own after about 2 days and I was completely symptom-free for about a week until the BPPV reappeared (although the symptoms were somewhat milder this time compared to the first time), again I did the exercises and this time almost all the symptoms disappeared after about only 1 day. About one week later the BPPV reared its ugly head again although this time the symptoms were even slightly less pronounced than the previous time. Fortunately this was the last time I experienced BPPV or any type of vertigo.

In my case the BPPV may have occurred due to, or was exacerbated by, my habit of laying on my back in bed and reading for many hours in a row. I think keeping my head in this position for several consecutive hours may have caused some kind of disturbance with the fluids in my ear canal.

Wishing you a quick and full recovery. My cat sends his love to his granpa Nishidani and to your cat. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:56, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks IjonT. That is both very useful and consoling. A friend in Seattle gave me similar advice. I never read for more than an hour in bed, preferring an upright chair. I'll wait for the full consultancy with the local otolaryngologist before using any of the available methods, while observing myself these next few days. I went to the pub and resumed drinking, knocking down a pint to see if grog affected my walk back. Not at all, fortunately! Cat the pat spooneristically with a frisk of a soft mitten for your purring kitten. Damn it, this last runic run suggests I may have some cognitive disturbance after all :) Nishidani (talk) 22:24, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Nishi, sounds like you need to be careful in situations where you may need to change the orientation of your head, but overall your approach seems sensible. I hope the docs will be able to give you a definite diagnosis, which will help put your mind at rest. That wasn't the case with my father's last illness, where the medics (in Scotland) were unable to come up with a convincing explanation of his symptoms, and within 4 months he was dead.

Good that you don't need to travel very far to the hospital. Here, for many years, there has been a tendency to concentrate medical facilities into a smaller number of much larger hospitals. Has the advantage of "efficiency" looking at it from the hospital's POV, but outsourcing part of the cost – in time and money – to the patients, which of course gets ignored in the official reckoning. To get to the big hospital takes between 20 mins (by taxi at 3a.m.) and 100 mins (also by taxi, but during the day with 5 sets of road works along the way, and a traffic jam at every one); the main alternative is the train, which takes about an hour, including a 20-min walk at the other end (slightly longer if you're wearing a catheter). Bus is also possible, but they're slow and I just don't like them. I've become an expert on all the different ways of getting to the hospital! Next month I have a prostate-op follow-up appointment at a nearer hospital (which used to be quite good, but most of its beds have now been transferred to the main hospital). Only a ten-minute train ride away, plus some walking. The consultant has to travel there from the main hospital, so at least they're making a token effort to help reduce the hassle for patients. There is also a small local hospital, most of its beds have also been transferred, I think the only beds left are the maternity ward. There is a nurse-led unit for treating minor injuries, they have always done a superb job whenever I've needed help there. Better than the other hospitals, despite the relative lack of resources. Very impressed by the sister who runs it, highly competent medically. I once expressed some sympathy for the nurses' demand for more pay, she seemed shocked that she should be paid more money, what she wanted was more staff and more resouces (and less bureaucracy) so that she could give a better service. --NSH001 (talk) 06:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Were your father's symptoms like those I experienced? If so, then of course, something other than the condition's names could be there, e.g. Menière's disease. I don't apply to myself the urgent inquisitiveness, however, that this or that particular problem of textual interpretation tends to stir, being somewhat detached and fatalistic about the 'end thing'. On the floor, as i underwent the first dizzy spell, the verses I recited to test if my mnemonic faculty was functioning were Hilaire Belloc's The World's a Stage:-

The world's a stage. The trifling entrance fee
Is paid (by proxy) to the registrar.
The Orchestra is very loud and free
But plays no music in particular.

They do not print a programme, that I know.
The cast is large. There isn't any plot.
The acting of the piece is far below
The very worst of modernistic rot.

The only part about it I enjoy
Is what was called in English the Foray.
There will I stand apart awhile and toy
With thought, and set my cigarette alight;
And then — without returning to the play
On with my coat and out into the night.

These verses (not quite a poem, there's too much of an tacit, perhaps inadvertent narcissistic dismissal of the wonder of life, and of the pleasure of fellowship in it to qualify as poetry, but they nonetheless) capture a strong sense of fastidious unease in the world as it is shaping up, at least for a bloke of my years. Must have breakfast, but will get back to you re hospitals (and mny best auguries for the up-and-coming surgery, pal) Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

In answer to your question about my father, no, his symtoms were nothing at all like yours. I have a suspicion they might have been connected to a recent flu jab, but there is no way of proving or disproving that hypothesis. But ever since then I have eschewed the annual offer of a flu jab, and in that time (more than 25 years) I have had only a couple of minor colds, over with in 2 or three days. The hospital appointment is only a small query arising from the routine blood tests they do every 6 months for patients on blood pressure meds. I don't think it's anything serious, but we shall see. If surgery were involved, nowadays the only place they can do it is the main hospital. --NSH001 (talk) 10:38, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

I was surprised by how the local hospital responded. The Meloni government, constituted, save for two competent technicians, by dolts, dullards and ideological dingbats, is of course a disgrace: and is adopting the Republican line that health care should be privatised in order to reduce the ballooning national debt which they are vigorously adding to (only apparently a paradox). 4 million Italians have given up trying to get medical care because of the long waiting procedures (in place to incentivize people to go to expensive private clinics), and in response, with that impeccable stupidity of the new class of incompetents running the show, have cut outlays from 6.7 to 6.1% for the next two years. As in England, the only reason why you can still get appropriate care is that health care workers are, on average, morally a big cut above everyone else in society - they really work hard, despite being grossly underpaid (whenever I see, as one can't avoid seeing, celebrity articles or flashy news about the doings or 'trials' of billionaires, I think of nurses and ward workers). With half an hour an ambulance came, I had a first examination at home, then was whisked down to the hospital a few minutes away, waited just an hour, and given a thorough check-up. They didn't even ask me for my residence permit and health card, and, diagnosis made with advice to go through my local doctor for two further examinations, I walked out without paying a brass razoo (which I'd be quite happy to do, apart from being a taxpayer in a country where fiscal evasion is massive). When I had a checkup for a smoker's cough in Australia, my own country, last summer, it cost me $400 (again, happily paid, but one notes the difference). It's not that one wants a free ride. It is simply a matter of a very obvious principle. If a society in its rhetoric talks about 'community', 'rights', 'democratic values', that is all hollow if, in this fundamental sector, whether you can get adequate treatment or not for an illness depends on your ability to pay your own way, then obviously the concept of citizenship is a mirage: your survival or death, in a 'community', is directly correlated with your wealth/poverty, class/existence itself is indexed to personal assets.* Universal health care was guaranteed when Western nations were relatively poor. The massive inflation of national wealth has seen, at the same time, the dismantlement of that basic institution of existential security. But enough of this blather. Work.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

• It is the same weird mathematics of the latest Rafah bombing. Two hamas commanders were 'taken out'. Since the death toll was 45, that means 43 - mostly the children and women in those blasted tents - were acceptable 'collateral damage'. Which means that concept of proportionality in war in Israel operational terms now defines the acceptable level of killing bystanders to hit the enemy, as 95.55%. That may explain why the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto in the present Meloni government suddenly and unexpectedly attacked the behaviour of Israel this morning as 'unacceptable', stating his impression further (a position that has always been of one my own two core concerns) that by its actions 'Israel is spreading hatred, rooting hatred that will involve their children and grandchildren', i.e. complicit in feeding antisemitism. Nishidani (talk) 09:29, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

West Bank up for sale:)

Nettanel Slyomovics, Trump Is Desperate for Miriam Adelson's Cash. Her Condition: West Bank Annexation Haaretz 3 June 2024. The prospective buyer is Miriam Adelson. Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Not to pop in here without good cause, but does that mean that we need additional caution for anything by Israel Hayom that affects Trump? FortunateSons (talk) 14:54, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Since Israel Hayom was developed by Adelson specifically in order to (a) support Netanyahu as a personal favour (b) undermine the economic viability of 'mainstream' Israeli newspapers by its free distribution policy, it is not a reliable source for anything, certainly not for wikipedia. I personally regard Electronic Intifada as offering at times important and usable sources, but exercise self-restraint, deferring to the consensus not to use it (and not even trying to challenge that consensus), though it is regularly indisputably more insightful (per John Mearsheimer) than tabloid hack outlets like Israel Hayom, or for that matter Arutz Sheva. All the more reason to desist from trying to legitimize the latter two as sources.Nishidani (talk) 15:37, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I can’t find a RS for a relationship between an and b (only people claiming it), but we should definitely use high-quality sources wherever possible, and all 3 named in the article are to be generally avoided IMO (to the best of my current knowledge).

I thank you for the additional reasons not to use the latter two, though my almost non-existent Hebrew would probably be the immediate problem if I were to attempt that. FortunateSons (talk) 16:12, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

The connection between (a) and (b) is well known, and though I wouldn't force the point by an edit (WP:OR) it is obvious from lining up any number of quotes from numerous sources on IH's origins.

(b)Nir Hefetz key state’s witness in Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial testified Tuesday that the former prime minister actively pushed for the establishment of a free tabloid in order to blunt Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper, which he considered hostile to him.

(a)Adelson was willing to invest large sums of money into IH without any guarantee of a return on that investment, which allowed him to create a product of sufficient quality that people on all sides would be willing to consume. He also invested in a successful distribution strategy, placing IH in train stations and other central areas throughout the country.In just four years, IH became the most circulated newspaper in Israel. That’s stunning.

A primary principle in my tertiary education came from a scholar who, while appreciating my detailed genealogies of where this bad idea or that bad idea came from (not recognised as such, but emerging as such only when you tracked the origin down), asked me:'Have you every looked into who pays for the proliferation of these ideas?,' an abrupt realism that traditional proverbial wisdom summed up in the line:'he who pays the piper calls the tune'. Perhaps a formula more adequate to recent times would be 'he who pays for the paper calls the (looney) tune'. I don't use wikipedia's RS criteria for informing my own views. I tend to respect opinions which, beyond the impressiveness of the informed scholarship that must be indispensable, come from people who have nothing to gain personally from espousing them. To the contrary.Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

The link for b leads to a picture for me, but while I agree that it’s OR, I would say that your claim is very plausible.

Speaking only for myself as a person and not necessarily an editor, I personally consider for-profit and privately owned media to not be inherently less reliable (including by the very wealthy, though that may be my own political and social bias bleeding into it).

Nevertheless, I think we share an appreciation for those who create media without the expectation of material or immaterial benefit - especially including the sharing of opinions that may even be harmful to the greater causes which one subscribes to.

Thank you for sharing that story, it has definitely been a good reminder to be cautious when it comes to media consumption and use. FortunateSons (talk) 17:06, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

It's a bigger historically deeper divide than media. The larger issue is best summed up briefly, if one hasn't the time to go into the respective fields of scholarship, in this discussion between John Mearsheimer and Steven Pinker. I grew up thinking like Pinker (before I read his books), but 6 decades has me siding with Mearsheimer. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 17:14, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the recommendation! I’m avoiding my studies anyway, so it might as well be productive. Sincerly, FortunateSons (talk) 17:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Go figure

(a)At the end of 2008, there were some 233,700 Holocaust survivors in Israel. The number of survivors is decreasing and the projection for 2015 is 143,900 survivors and for 2025, approximately 46,900 survivors. Jenny Brodsky, Assaf Sharon, Yaron King, Shmuel Be'er, Yitschak Shnoor, Holocaust Survivors in Israel: Population Estimates, Demographic, Health and Social Characteristics, and Needs Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute February 2010

(b)“Many Holocaust survivors were hit particularly hard by the Hamas attacks, whether through the loss of their homes, support systems in the form of care,” a German finance ministry spokeswoman said. Each of the 113,000 Jewish survivors in Israel will receive the $236 as a one-off payment, according to the nonprofit Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) – a Jewish umbrella organization that seeks damages for Holocaust survivors and which worked with the German government on the scheme.' Nadine Schmidt Germany to give Holocaust survivors $236 payout to help them cope with October 7 attacks CNN 12 April 2024

The discrepancy between the projected figure for Israeli Holocaust survivors of 46,900 for 2025 and the actual 113,000 number given for them for 2024 is remarkable. Either the statisticians screwed up massively or there's something rubbery about the Claims Conference data, something which past experience with that authority lends little confidence in. Nishidani (talk) 08:29, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it. Looks very suspicious. The statisticians didn't "screwed up" just the estimate has a huge error margin on it. They might hang been overly pessimistic.

• They arrive as well as die. In 2022, and probably even 2014 onwards, there was a surge of people arriving from Ukraine and Russia, some of whom might have been Holocaust survivors. For a lot of Jewish Russians in particular Israel was the only or far easiest option to get out.
• Or it could be an increase in life expectancy within Israel. expecting more than 3/4 to die from 2008 to 2023 seems very pessimistic, but they're currently at least 79, if they were born as the camps were liberated, so it would be right at the edge and a small change in life expectancy would change numbers a lot. (most places had a life expectancy Drop in 2020s, but Israel was one of the first with the vaccine)

I think the first figure is the dubious one. At a guess, it looks like a pessimistic estimate that assumed no immigration and no life expectancy increase, which isn't realistic, but makes for a more shocking news story.

MWQs (talk) 01:11, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Filiu 1994

Hi, in this edit you use {{sfn|Filiu|1994|p=66}}. Is it meant to be 2012 like the other Filius? DuncanHill (talk) 10:54, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Duncan, once more you're spot on.Nishidani (talk) 11:19, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't know which page this should be added to

The carbon cost of rebuilding Gaza will be greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 135 countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the unprecedented death toll, new research reveals. Reconstructing the estimated 200,000 apartment buildings, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, bakeries, water and sewage plants damaged and destroyed by Israel in the first four months of the war on Gaza will generate as much as 60m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), according to new analysis by researchers in the UK and US. This is on a par with the total 2022 emissions generated by countries such as Portugal and Sweden – and more than twice the annual emissions of Afghanistan.' Nina Lakhani 'Revealed: the carbon cost of rebuilding Gaza after months of Israeli bombing,' The Guardian 6 June 2024

Nishidani (talk) 11:21, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Wonder what the carbon cost of the bombing was? Selfstudier (talk) 11:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Good point, though we are still in the present tense ('was'). Once Israel achieves what Curtis LeMay only dreamt of doing but was not permitted to carry it through in Vietnam, i.e. bombing it back to the stone age, this war will probably distinguish itself for breaking all the records of warfare over scores of statistical firsts like that. Anthony Doerr's description of the bombing of Saint-Malo in his All the Light We Cannot See provides a useful prompt for imagining what it must be, every day over the last 8 months, actually surviving the onslaught. As one point he imagines military observers looking on to the smoke, 'As though they are nobleman in grandstands viewing fortess warfare in the years of the Crusaders' (pp.201-202). As a reader in foreign comfort, one thinks of the moral cost of onlooking, recalling, in my case, Leontius in revulsion trying to avert his prurient gaze from looking into a pit of a mass of executed people, yet succumbing, shamefully (Republic Bk.IV 440a). 'Gazing into Gaza' will almost certainly be the title of some future book on how the bystanding world handles this persisting panorama of the unspeakable. Nishidani (talk) 11:59, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I can't work out of they've started on the West Bank? The reports are all rather strangely worded. MWQs (talk) 00:41, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

More than 75,000 tons of explosive during the first two hundred days, more than the total dropped on three of the most-bombed cities during WWII- London, Dresden and Hamburg. Selfstudier (talk) 11:36, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Arguably the most bombed city was Hiroshima, but it got just one bomb. MWQs (talk) 00:39, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

I worry the reaction will be "therefore we shouldn't rebuild it"? (i hope it's OK to interject?) MWQs (talk) 00:43, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Hostages released, and hostages taken

Jeffrey St. Clair Snatch-and-Grab Israeli Style: Disappearing into the Gulag CounterPunch 7 June 2024. Of the latter, far more widespread, almost nothing gets into the mainstream press. Systemic bias. Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Pa ---- pa-pa

story · music · places

Thank you for brightening our day Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:14, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Today is "the day" for James Joyce, also for Bach's fourth chorale cantata (and why does it come before the third?) - the new pics have a mammal I had to look up. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:31, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Gerda. Joyce's Bloomsday I always remember. It stands as the most winning portrait of a Jew in an assimilated normalcy that I know of. An anecdote. One Saturday morning over the breakfast table, I was grumbling to my closest mate, who had stayed the night with us, about the way, every time I tried to buy a copy of Ulysses, I was rebuffed, all over the city, on the grounds I was underage, at 16, and the book was reserved, under the counter when in stock, for adults only. 'Bloody silly. Any perve'd need a water bag, a cut lunch, and a pair of binoculars to wade through the bulk of the book and get to the juicy bits in the brothel scene, as far as I've heard, and probably be pissed off by the small returns on the effort expended'.

My father, an otherwise politically conservative man, who had a very elaborate ceremony for making a pot of tea, was fiddling with the pot at the stove and clearly must have eavesdropped on our curse-ridden railing at the cultural backwater we lived in. Weeks passed and then, one day, coming home, he handed me a premature present for my forthcoming birthday, wrapped of course. I ripped off the wrapping and there it was 'Ulysses', signed 'Pop' with a cartoon of my father's smiling face (he was, like his brother and mine, an excellent cartoonist) on the inside cover. 'Oh, Jeezus, Dad. . . !' I was lost for words. Fathers were shy in those days, but he just smiled, and went off to the pub for a snorter. It remains my most precious belonging.Nishidani (talk) 20:29, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

thank you for sharing, made my day! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:52, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

New pics of food and flowers come with the story of Noye's Fludde (premiered on 18 June), written by Brian Boulton. I nominated Éric Tappy because he died, and it needs support today! I nominated another women for GA in the Women in Green June run, - review welcome, and more noms planned. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:47, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

There may be some slight issue speaking of Tamara Milashkina's 'colourful voice', which emerges as an attempt to synthesize the source, which speaks of a voice whose beauty, natural tonality, lent colour to songs. Perhaps the editor was thinking of coloratura, which refers to textual ornamentation rather than the vocal qualities of a performer. I think they mean the distinctive 'timbre' of her voice. Perhaps I'm too finicky, but 'colourful' in my experience of English is used mostly of characters, particularly those who charm and stand out by the vivacity of their manners and exuberance of behaviour. Hope this is not a vexatious niggle.Nishidani (talk) 15:42, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the careful language analysis, - always learning. In German one could say "farbenreiches Timbre", but probably not in English. The source goes into great detail, speaking about her mezzo-like middle range, and different descriptions such as "creamy". I was looking for a summary, always afraid to be too close to a source. Feel free to edit as you think will be understood that her voice had many aspects to it. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:37, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

This is a good example of faux amis - terms that interlingually look identical but in their respective Sprachfelder bear quite different connotations. Offhand "farbenreiches Timbre" would suggest 'the tonal richness of her vocal range'. I should know, but don't. My closest aunt was a soprano, a former fiancée and my best friend's wife (at la Scala in Milan) also. I do know enough to appreciate that there is quite a large vocabulary of specialized terms to capture these things, as with wine-tasting, and that outsiders like me should step warily. Dunno. Think I'm being overpicky. Most readers will probably not overhear the nuance I noted (though colourful is pejorative in 'colourful language' meaning abusive or offensive speech, as opposed the the positive admiration attached to its use in 'colourful character'), and perhaps it's simplest to just leave it thus.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

الأقصى

If you have the time, do you want to help me build on the Al Aqsa story in Far-right politics in Israel? You seem to know more of the history than I do. (Not sure why I did arabic subject, change it if you like). MWQs (talk) 00:36, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

My apologies for this delay in responding. I made a mental note to do so, and then forgot to. Unfortunately I have 19 books opened on my work desk at the moment, mostly on a topic that has nothing to do with the I/P area. I've bookmarked the page indicated, and, will look in from time to time, as time allows. Cheers

The Diaspora Jew

Just saw you doing some editing of that section. If you're drilling deep into this, To Build and Be Built (written by a cousin I'm very fond of) might be of interest to you. [3]Dan Murphy (talk) 18:26, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Dan for directing me to Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built:Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity, University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN 978-0-812-23903-4 2006 which looks indeed very interesting. It naturally attracts me because of the poetics, though I tend to approach Zionist identity in different terms. I'll look into it slowly, when time allows. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

I thought it was beautifully written (last time I talked to him he said he was working on Israel's Stalag Fiction craze of the 50s and 60s and what that might say about identity.)Dan Murphy (talk) 20:45, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Identity's one of the trickiest things. I've tended since adolescence to think Jewish identity, when not purely personal or private as it frequently happened to be, was a mix between the pressure of external stereotypes and a defensive resistance among many Jews that took many forms. A Zionist identity is structurally antithetical to diaspora Jewishness, exerting an immense heft of stereotyping pressure on the latter, which I hope is sufficiently self-confident to, as in the past, resist being (re)manufactured according to the dejudaizing blueprint of its internal adversary.Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Let me put it this way. Historically, there are two vectors in identity, robust versus antagonist. The difference lies in the approach to the 'Other'. The robustness of Jewish diasporic identity consisted in its inclusion of the 'other' into that sense of self; Zionism repudiating this, tried to exorcise the 'other' which consisted of three elements: the 'feminine', 'weakling' diasporic tradition, with its contextual outrider, European culture in its Enlightenment dispensation, and, thirdly, the indigenous 'other', the Palestinian world, with which no contact was made, therefore evaporating it from any congruent presence in the new horizon. This asserted autonomy of self-definition accounts for its antagonistic character, and why it lines up so neatly with experiments in nationalistic identity-forging characteristic of European countries from the 19th to the mid 20th century (now back to haunt us). Well, on second thought, I'll have to sleep on that (which means I'll be having some nightmares in a few hours, I guess). Nishidani (talk) 21:44, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Take a breath and knock it off

About the time you start picking at its/it's, especially when 3/4 of the comment is about it, you know you're stepping into unproductive discussion. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:23, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

There was no discussion. I posed a question, with a detailed set of reasons. No discussion ensued. Rather, brief one liners, some inventing nonsense (such that adding 'allege' implies I want the whole article rewritten. Sheer nonsense. I then suggested a background overview be read. Neither of the respondents read it. They apparently looked at the title of the article, its author, and that was enough to form an opinion. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and there are two ways to construct it. (a) Read widely or (b) weed widely. The first is time-consuming but ensures familiarity with the topic, a fundamental premise for encyclopedias. The second is to master the rule system and use it to reject everything that falls outside the stringent confines of optimal RS. The advantage of mastering the second is that you do not need to read anything. You just find reasons not to read a good deal. So yes, the discussion wasn't productive. I laid an egg and it was left undigested, while dismissive comments on its quality and taste briefly followed. It's never unproductive to remind people that contributing to the composition of good encyclopedic prose is premised on at least a very basic literacy, even if one doesn't want to read round much. All tea in a tempest, as a Bostonian might have said some centuries ago.Nishidani (talk) 13:03, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

At last some good news

Afghanistan whupped Downunderland in cricket. While walking in a Roman park a month ago, I caught the unusual sight of some Asians playing cricket and pipped in when observing how one bowler was allowed to toss, rather than bowl, the ball with a bent arm. An action one 100 times more blatant than anything ever imputed to Ian Meckiff or the inimitable and often unplayable Eddie Gilbert. I asked if they were Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistanis. Nope. 'Afghanis', almost certainly clandestine immigrants. Congratulating them on beating the patrol boats and armies of a dozen repulsive countries to sneak into Italy and struggle to get themselves a decent life, I thought I could give a tip or two on fast and spin bowling by trying my arm out in both styles. 'Sure'. I was then comprehensively dispatched by the batter to the boundary on each occasion. That was just a crumpled geezer trying to be helpful and making a fool of himself while getting a laugh, though they did compliment me for managing to run 20 yards in before I delivered a reasonably fast ball. Now it is really stirring to see the national team thrash Australia. As I told the lads that day: 'the only known return on our world's macabre and lethal investment of $1 trillion dollars in bombing the living daylights over their country, was that in the meantime they managed to get a cricket team on its legs.' Something finally to celebrate and perhaps finally make the Taliban wake up to an enthusiasm their tellybrand spit-the-dummy fundamentalism can't control. Nishidani (talk) 05:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

On the 'riot'/ 'protest' distinction in IP reportage

I noted a week or so ago the chronic ethnic bias in the disparity in descriptions of Israel and Palestinian demonstrations. Compare now An Israel demonstration against the war, in which clashes took place due to police violence was called throughout a ‘protest’. When ‘riot police’ barged into and disrupted the funeral procession for Shireen Abu Akleh, the official police report stated it was a ‘riot’. The difference between the two otherwise well-behaved events was that in one, an Israeli flag was waved, ion the other Palestinian flags were flown. Nishidani (talk) 05:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

In case you didn't know

You're in media:[4]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:34, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

At the top of a few notes, jotted down about myself for some hypothetical future kid among my siblings' descendants who might have some curiosity about obscure, distant figures in the family genealogical tree, one of the headquotes is:

‘a faint streak on the surface of the tossing world of Samsāra’. H.W. Bailey, cited from a private letter in A. Toynbee, A Study of History, OUP, vol.10, (1954) 1963 p.16 n.2.

This fleck you link to made me smile, as I reflected that the 'faint streak' might begin to look like what you see on a slightly (or unsightly) soiled pair of underpants.:)Nishidani (talk) 08:59, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites, you too. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Just for the record the source alluded to is Rob Eshman, ‘Does anybody question the NAACP?’: The ADL head thinks Wikipedia is biased. Is he right? The Forward 24 June 2024

It's a good piece of balanced journalism as one would expect from The Forward, and it's rather a nice, rather flattering compliment, to think that in being smeared as anti-Israeli, I am explicitly likened to the sort of people who write for Jewish Currents.Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

One point. In paraphrasing Rhododendrites's views, the following text occurs:(The set of wiki editing protoclls in place) '‘mitigates against bias.’ I haven't googled but that idiom is probably more than acceptable in American usage, though to an Anglified ear, using a transitive verb like 'mitigate' absolutely, with a following 'against', niggles at any fastidious feel for the mother-tongue. I guess it kicked into customary usage by the assonantal proximity of 'mitigate' to 'militate' (intransitive), as in 'militate against'. But when we have a huge range of synonyms for the deliciously Latinate 'mitigate' (alleviate, attenuate, moderate, diminish, reduce, lighten, sap, etc.etc.,) the idiomatic variation seems pointless.Nishidani (talk) 12:45, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

'Another editor, Nishidani, who argued for labeling the ADL as being “generally unreliable” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, displays numerous pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel quotes on their information page.' Nishidani (talk) 12:52, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Peter Beinart the other day, in his substack, (What if Americans Saw Palestinian and Jewish Israeli Lives as Equal? Beinart Notebook 24 June 2024) drew attention to a Facebook exchange between Mehdi Hasan debating Dean Phillips, calling it 'extraordinary' and 'remarkable' because it set into stark relief something almost wholly absent from mainstream American discussions on the I/P conflict.Nishidani (talk) 12:59, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

What was the gravamen of Hasan's contention? An appeal to respect the need to be coherent when one makes any (factual, moral or political) judgment where the relations of two subjects are under discussion.

• Hasan asked:'Was it fair to kill 270+ Palestinians to free 4 Jewish hostages.'

Phillips admitted it was horrifying but it was a cost to be paid to liberate Jewish people seized and brutalized by Hamas.

• Hasan then asked an hypothetical correlative:' Would it be fair for a Palestinian militia to kill 200 Israelis to free say 4 of the (1,200) Palestinian men detained by Israel at the now infamous torture centre at Sde Teiman near Gaza, where some innocent men were not only electrocuted but also mechanically sodomised?'

Phillips denied that, by initially expressing his disbelief that Jews/Israelis could do any such thing, but the authority of the New York Times undercut his scepticism, and he was therefore left in speechless perplexity.Nishidani (talk) 13:08, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

What Hasan did wasn't 'remarkable' or 'extraordinary'. It was simply a matter of endeavouring to reset arguments over these incidents, issues, topics, on a logical, propositional basis, rather than to allow them to be swept up in goalpost shifting, discursive waffling. I.e. the principles used to justify an Israeli action must apply,mutatis mutandis, to Palestinian actions. If one doesn't in practice underwrite a universal principle in making judgments of this kind, but rather appeals to 'exceptional' circumstances for one's particular ethnic group, while tacitly endorsing universal moral criteria when the 'other' is judged, then most of the arguments will be meaningless, and their resolution achieved only through the exercise of power, physical or discursive. That is the problem the ADL has: its programmatic defense of groups subjected to prejudice is pinioned on universal values, on the idea of an underlying equality between all groups which, if violated, should be sanctioned. But it almost never* applies that criterion to the IP conflict Nishidani (talk) 13:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

• 'whether one wears a keffiyah or a kippah, the traditional Jewish headcovering, “if you make death threats against other people, that should be called out”.' In this Jonathan Greenblatt accepts universal principles. In practice, the organization as it operates under his leadership fails to apply them.Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Fix your own errors

Re: this. I was fixing a no-target error. You had his forename marked as his surname, and his surname as his forename, so {{sfn|McCann|2023}} couldn't call it. There are other no-target errors in the article, I'll try to remember you resent having them fixed. DuncanHill (talk) 17:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

My apology. I was so fixated on writing the article that I misread what you did.

| last = Joe | first =McCann was corrected to | first = Joe | last =McCann. I noting the inversion of the last-first order, I missed the fact that your correction fixed the mislocation of personal and family names. All I noted that the way you did that inverted the last-first order which is customary in my articles. Normally I don't even control your corrections, because they are always perfect. Perhaps why seeing the order inversion, I presumed in haste that nothing else was wrong. Regards Nishidani (talk) 19:00, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

You still need to fix "Baroud 2010" and "RB". DuncanHill (talk) 20:02, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I usually leave that to a bot a friend of mine runs through text when I have something substantial up. It corrects everything, and indeed was partially designed also to cope with the messes, and mechanically fix the potholes I habitually leave, out of sheer incapacity and technical insouciance, when I've driven through all the sources and built some road of minimal understanding of a topic. So don't worry about it. On past experience, the bot will kick in within a day or two, unless she's indisposed for a few days.Nishidani (talk) 20:24, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

thanks

darwin bless you my child (note both he and yahweh posit being fruitful and multiplying as the measure of success). thought you might get a kick out of a poem by flea scribner

the wikipedia backroom

almost soviet

in its labyrinthine byzantinanity Potholehotline (talk) 21:01, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

June 2024

Hello Nishidani. Please define "barely qualified". As far as I know, editors reaching EC status are completely legitimate ARBPIA editors, and this kind of commentary scares away new, good editors. Anyway, there's an ongoing discussion at the articles' talk page, and recent edits, as well as ongoing discussions, clearly show there is no consensus for adding it until new consensus is formed. I think you should revert yourself. 916crdshn (talk) 11:54, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You have 725 edits. It is not about editors negotiating against the overwhelming thrust of reliable sources by the most qualified specialists in the field that 'colonization' was the default term for Zionism's project in Palestine. We defer to experts. We are not experts.Nishidani (talk) 12:12, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia implemented the 500/30 rule to keep vandals and sockpuppets out of this topic area. If this isn't a clear case of gaming, and as long as they adhere to ARBPIA rules, they should be allowed to edit freely here. I'll repeat myself: with the use of terms like "barely qualified" and similar remarks, you're discouraging good editors who appear to act in good faith and rely on Wikipedia policies to support their statements. Many of the editors you label as "unqualified" have actually been active for several years. I'm tagging @ScottishFinnishRadish to see what they think about this situation. 916crdshn (talk) 12:23, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

This is primarily a content dispute that you are pretty transparently trying to turn into something else. Selfstudier (talk) 12:26, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

This isn't a content dispute, it's a recurring behavioral issue I've been witnessing from my hospital bed for long enough now. Time and again, across numerous IP articles, I see experienced editors forcing content changes without consensus and bullying those who rightly point out the lack of consensus and revert accordingly, calling them "unqualified editors" and then cluttering their talk pages with unverified allegations (see User talk:ABHammad#Enough already). I’ve seen this on articles about Zionism, Israel, the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and so on. This topic area desperately needs new editors, but you drive them away with your aggressive language and disregard for consensus. 916crdshn (talk) 12:42, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You haven't been an editor for long enough to say "long enough". Nor do you have any evidence for you drive them away with your aggressive language and disregard for consensus. You have a case, then make it at the appropriate venue, else....? Selfstudier (talk) 12:47, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Nishidani. In this topic area it is a demonstrable fact that we are plagued with waves of new editors that as soon as they pass 500, start making POV type edits in the topic area and continue to do so until whatever number of them end up being tbanned. Where are the long time editors? And I would likely have reverted it if Nishidani hadn't, because this alleged consensus does not exist. Selfstudier (talk) 12:13, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

It's not enough to ratchet up the minimal number of edits required to qualify. On a complex topic, one needs to show at least an above elementary grasp of the topic under construction. Those who challenge the academic consensus there have evidently no familiarity with the topic. I have, out of scruple, documented now where the consensus lies, namely in the declared intentions not only of Herzl, but of Zeev Jabotinsky, Franz Oppenheimer, Arthur Ruppin - the foremost theorizer of Zionist violence, a leading economist of Zionism, and the man who played the central role in implementing what he himself called 'colonization on the ground -and others, all outstanding figures of this formative period. It is a waste of serious editing time to frig around contesting the obvious. Nishidani (talk) 12:23, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

@Selfstudier:, exactly, this alleged consensus really doesn't exist. There is a significant group of editors who strongly oppose the use of "colonization," which was added to this article through edit warring, forcing others to acquiesce instead of achieving genuine consensus. I see at least five editors who oppose this addition, yet you continue to push it and blame others for edit warring. @Nishidani:, without even getting to the content in question, it's clear from the policy that the addition of "colonization" was imposed through force. Nishidani should apologize and self-revert. 916crdshn (talk) 12:27, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You have it exactly backwards. And content discussions are for the talk page not here. Selfstudier (talk) 12:31, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You haven't read what I wrote, or if you have, haven't understood it. Editors don't write wikipedia off the top of their heads. they are not entitled to group together and overthrow the historical rtecord out of personal distaste. That I have even to write this is proof that the objectors don't understand how wikipedia composition works, which is reflected generally in the paucity of their edits so far. They are obliged to read widely in the appropriate sources, and to faithfully paraphrase what those sources report, without tinkering with the primary and secondary evidence out of distaste for a term. The 'significant group of editors' are newbies with little real experience here. The pushing comes from that quarter, and it is a push against what all early Zionists explicitly state. They knew what they were doing, and if editors refuse to look at the evidence, whatever else they opine will reflect a (stubborn) nescience before the factual record. If there was a consensus of editors that the earth is flat, it would reflect nothing more than their ignorance. Nishidani (talk) 12:36, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You make valid points, but so do the others in their counterarguments. That's why we have discussions, and are supposed to reach consensus. The issue here is the aggressive language used consistently by certain veteran editors who forcibly push their own views regardless of consensus, dismiss newer editors as "newbies," ignore their arguments, and then inundate their user pages with accusations. 916crdshn (talk) 13:28, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Please don't edit this page. The value of editors in this encyclopedia lies not in their capacity to fill threads with discussions and opinions, but to produce technical evidence from specialist sources, preferably of a high order, that ascertain the factual lie of the land on any topic. If you have a grievance against me, and assume I'm a bully, don't fish for a responsive fight for your accusations here. Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

This starts to look like WP:HARASSMENT- Selfstudier (talk) 13:36, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Nothing so serious. One must exercise patience here, though several editors suddenly showing up to express a grievance (over what seems to be the way historiography questions the core dogmas of a faith one was raised in) over the same talk pages is notable.

June 2024 (2)

You are edit warring against consensus. I kindly ask you to self-revert, or be reported for edit warring and disruptive editing. Icebear244 (talk) 15:17, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I will certainly revert if you can show why the consensus you speak of is not for retention of that text. By all means tell me why 7 reverters represent the consensus, and 11 for retention are the minority. I was perplexed by your obscure assertion because it falsified the numbers on the edit history page, inverting them. Of course, being rule observant here, I will revert if you can show me I was the one that miscalculated.Nishidani (talk) 15:22, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

And secondly if your revert was neutral, you must explain why the multiple reverters over the last month, all among the 7, did not catch your attention, earn a warning, and were not reported. You have picked on the one person who over that period did just one revert, adding substantial new sources to justify it, until you forced me to revert a second time because your edit summary falsified the math.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

As an experienced user, you must be aware that Wikipedia consensus isn't solely determined by numbers. You and other editors are forcibly restoring the same disputed content again and again despite strong opposition on both the edit history and on the talk page. Despite an ongoing discussion, you've repeatedly reverted to your preferred version disruptively. "You have picked on the one person who over that period did just one revert". Now, you aren't. This is your second revert on this page within two days, and you were already requested to undo your edit yesterday. Please revert your changes now or be subject to reporting. Icebear244 (talk) 15:32, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Please see your talk page, for the record I would also have reverted the edit. Selfstudier (talk) 15:44, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm talking with @Nishidani right now. Icebear244 (talk) 15:48, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

And I am talking to you, you want a private chat with Nishidani, send him a mail. Selfstudier (talk) 15:50, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, consensus is not determined by numbers, but by cogency of arguments, esp. those grounded in thorough source checking and the use of high wuality RS, in theory. If you look at the talk page, from this section onward almost all the evidence from books comes from not just one side, because Levivich is not identiable as a partisan one way or another), but from editors who take their positions in terms of the weight of reliable sources, which were ignored by the reverters. The second section is mainly argufying against, without any hard evidence given. On the talk page, a discussion is underway, and so far inconclusive.

Look. Since you stepped out of left field and reverted the page to the minority position in the edit history, you sided with the minority with the highest record for multiple' reversions over the last month as the consensus version. That's how I saw your intervention. Not a neutral third opinion, but simply one more revert to a minority position. If you wait a few minutes, I will provide you with a complete diff history of the reverters in that minority since early June. Nishidani (talk) 16:14, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

When a discussion remains inconclusive, it is not within your purview to unilaterally decide its outcome. Persisting in doing so, while labeling those who oppose your views as 'unqualified,' is frankly detrimental to our goals here. Despite being given the opportunity yesterday and again today to self-revert until consensus is reached, you have chosen to continue advocating for the disputed version. Regrettably, you have left me with no alternative. Icebear244 (talk) 16:55, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Start an RFC to contest the current roughly 2 to 1 consensus, else...Selfstudier (talk) 16:59, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Hang on. You asked me to revert, and I asked you to clarify. You simply repeated that there was a 'consensus' for the text you restored, and when I asked for evidence, providing my own to the contrary, you didn't give a meaningful reply. So I asked you to wait, while I showed you the evidence for habitual reverters on that page. As I started to do this, you posted the complaint at AE against me. That is discourteous. But having an evening drink in the pub is more important at the moment. I may look at it later. Nishidani (talk) 17:02, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

You have been given many chances to self-revert (over the past two days), but instead, you continue to debate. Despite agreeing that consensus isn't based on votes, you continue to focus on numbers [5] and unjustly dismiss those who oppose you as lacking sufficient edits or experience (which is incorrect). [6] [7] You leave me with no other choice. Enjoy your evening drink. Icebear244 (talk) 17:22, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

There is no evidence, apart from the diligent Vegan, that editors there are willing or able to come forth with the only evidence that counts here: RS that challenge the fact that for a half a century, colonialization (colonise, colonies etc) was the virtual default term in Zionist discourse. I don't take anyone's word for it that they know a topic until they can provide evidence that they have read widely in the area. For your information, this term was dropped in the 1950s because in its international relations, Israel's diplomacy cultivated strong relationships with precisely those African countries which had just thrown off the shackles of colonialism to achieve their independence. So, quite rationally, the language of Zionism discarded the negative implications of how it had defined its own purpose, and adopted, quite often the newly minuted language of national liberation movements. This is all known. What the seven editors I mentioned argue is simply a revarnished updated rhetoric which repudiates the terminology of Israel's Zionist roots. But historical usage should not be reritten in Orwellian fashion by binning what was the line of yesterday and rewriting the past to accord with recent political changes of the rhetoric.Nishidani (talk) 21:55, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Revert what many times. Did something escape me. Links please.Nishidani (talk) 18:51, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you.

On method. Why one should be abstemious in making articles out of breaking news reports.

Example. Killing of Abir Aramin Nishidani (talk) 19:58, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

The core facts were simple, and were confirmed by the Israeli court decision that compensated the family. A 10 year old girl preparing for her math exam, dropped into a store in 'Anata to buy some candy. As she emerged from the shop, a jeep of Border guards unexpectedly burst into the town and that street. She began to run away in fear. Some boys threw stones, and the jeep fired back, and one of their rubber bullets smashed into the back of her head. She took two days to die, because the bureaucratic obstacles (roadblocks) placed in the family's way, to get her promptly to Hadassah hospital where equipment existed to relieve the pressure of blood clots on her brain, took that long to be disentangled. We have a summary in Colum McCann's masterly reconstruction of her (in Apeirogon), and the parallel Israeli child Smadar Elhanan, of how this was reported. I will transcribe just how the first's death was reported.Nishidani (talk) 20:06, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

The newspaper reports said (a) that a ten-year old child had died in hospital after an incident in the West Bank. . .(b)The army released an official statement denying any involvement. (c) A TV segment said that rumours of an incursion were spurious. Later there weree reports of (d) rioting in protest against the Separation Barrier being built through the school playground. Another report said that (e)the girl had been seen at the school gates holding a stone. (f) She was killed by a rock to the back of her head from nearby rioters. (g) She was shot by the Palestinian Authority forces. (h)She was epileptic, (i) she smashed her head when she fell. (j)She implicated herself by running away from the jeep. (k)She was found to have stones in her pocket. (l) She picked up a shock grenade which had exploded in her hands. (m) She was buying sweets. (n) She threwe her arms in the air to surrender. (o) She was walking defiantly away. (p) She had been mistreated in a Palestinian hospital. (q) She was airlifted immediately to the Hadassah where she had been given priority care. (r)The Muslim parents had refused to get help from a Jewish doctor. (s) She had no ID. (t) Reports of an illegal incursion were categorically untrue. (u)The girls had been throwing stones, (v) it was caught on closed-circuit television from the school gates. (w)Her father was an active ranking member of Fatah. (x) The teacher in her school was a known Hamas activist. (y) No such Border Police operations were logged that morning. (z)The delay in the ambulance absolutely did not hasten her death and was directly linked to the riots on the ground.' (pp.68-69)

Of this flood of coverage whose main points exhaust the alphabet only (a) and (m) are correct, the rest was fabricated bullshit that gives every impression of being planted to obscure the simple facts, or draw a picture so confusing any fragment of truth would be lost in the messy disinformatsia.

Editors should draw a lesson from this. Most of our articles on such events, and wars, are patched up by waves of breaking news, much of which reflects a practice of partisan distortion, or just authorities responsible covering their arses. I could transcribe a similar if far briefer lesson from the summary of Smadar's death and how it was reported, with similar dissonances from what was later ascertained with careful analysis. It is not peculiar to the IP world, but is by now entrenched, if to a less blatant degree, everywhere.Nishidani (talk) 20:27, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

On the AE I/P issue. A reflection in response to ScottishFinnishRadish (you are under no obligation to read this per TLDR

I'm just dropping a passage that came to mind the other day while reading the complaint. It sums up what most worries me about so many of these IP AE summonses. I'll translate it tomorrow. These things seem pedantic, but they help me at least to concentrate, esp. after I've slept on them. To anticipate. The point of this particular quote is that one can make a very good argument, as Karl Popper did, that the work in question is the fountainhead of totalitarianism. The more we succumb to the temptation to legislate and regulate, down to the smallest capillary sphere of human behaviour, and enforce these intrusive, proliferating rules by punitive prescriptions, the greater the risk to democracy.

ἐάν τις ἀσεβῇ λόγοις εἴτ᾽ ἔργοις, ὁ παρατυγχάνων ἀμυνέτω σημαίνων πρὸς ἄρχοντας, τῶν δὲ ἀρχόντων οἱ πρῶτοι πυθόμενοι πρὸς τὸ περὶ τούτων ἀποδεδειγμένον κρίνειν δικαστήριον εἰσαγαγόντων κατὰ τοὺς νόμους: ἐὰν δέ τις ἀκούσασα ἀρχὴ μὴ δρᾷ ταῦτα, αὐτὴ ἀσεβείας ὑπόδικος γιγνέσθω τῷ ἐθέλοντι τιμωρεῖν ὑπὲρ τῶν νόμων. Plato, The Laws 907d-e. Nishidani (talk) 23:35, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

• We’re all here to write an encyclopedia, that aspires ideally to use the finest high quality RS to inform its comprehensive coverage to every significant element of human civilization and history any reader anywhere may access at zero cost.The intuition that grounded it must pass as one of the most ingeniously creative innovations in history itself. A global democracy of learning self-constituted by a variable collective of anonymous volunteers from every imaginable background the world over.

• Given the conflictual nature of knowledge itself, always provisory, and the strong currents of personal bias, national interests, and ideologies, enculturated world-views or formal systems of belief as they may be, the undertaking challenges credibility, a credibility continually dented as we reach past 6 and a half million articles.

• This has been achieved by creating a virtual culture of its own, replete with self-regulating mechanisms that (a) are designed to ensure the probity of the knowledge contributed and (b) ensure the integrity of its modus operandi. The recruitment and retention of editors is fundamental to this end, and thus we have an array of formal rules which are crafted to allowing new participants to feel welcome in signing on to this formidable task. A certain, in my view, responsiveness to woke concerns to ensure every editor is 'comfortable' has been accommodated.

• As two decades pass, these regulations, adapted and honed through administrative oversight of malpractices, have developed an impressively detailed body of wikilaw It is, nonetheless, so complex in its contextual intricacies, that things can still derail the practical functioning of our individual and collective endeavours.
• This last point is thrown into egregious relief in those areas where both national interests and personal attachments to a cause and very powerful. Identitarian values are everywhere on the rise, all attached to rhetorics of grievance, resentment and exclusion (and many of those things are not mere expressions of rhetoric), and this can aggravate, as much as it broadens the range of, clashing perspectives that articles must cover.
• History, notoriously for its most experienced practitioners, is however intrinsically discomforting. As the quote on my main page states:

“The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly.” Tony Judt, cited by William Grimes, ‘Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62,’ New York Times 7 August 2010

• There is nothing comfortable, by nature, in the I/P reality we have to describe. It is profoundly discomforting to everyone, from whatever side. As the most intensively studied yet chronically intractable conflict in modern times it naturally attracts and stirs passionate partisanship by those who are part of it, and fascinates by the challenge it poses to gain mastery of its historical intricacies in order to describe it. The tensions in editing have long been such that 3 ARBCOM resolutions have been successively taken and finessed to try and guarantee that the spillover from the actual conflict does not flood the editing environment of IP article composition itself. While these measures have had quite positive effects (socking which infested the area has been reduced notably by the 500/30 rule), it would be self-deceptive to believe that more intensive regulatory steps will incrementally act to elide the problems instinct in the area itself, so that it will become an editing environment as serene as that dealing with the field of ornithology or classical literature and the like.

• Bref, attempts to ask ARBCOM continually to 'fix' it, again and again, won't change this tragic reality of the conflict, let alone the tensions among editors vying to narrate it in all of its intricate forms. The idea of clearing the house and starting afresh with new editors under even more draconian principles that prioritize an ever more minutely regulating behavioural galateo as the determinative principle for participating is seductive, but more expressive of frustration than of a practicable proposal for instaurating a viable, remedial system freed of these problems.

• There is a law in systems analysis that states that the greater the complexity of a structure, the greater its exposure to the risks of collapse. There is also the common observation that the more one piles on rules, the greater the astuteness of specialists in any number of fields in devising technical dodges. (Much of taxation law corroborates this. The US tax code runs to 6,871 pages (basic) to 75,000 if you take in guidelines etc. The sum of taxes avoided by US billionaires in 2024 is $150 billion according to the IRA) This is the point made by Plato's grandiose last book which sought to heal the ongoing travails of democracy by legislating a system of such reticular surveillance and punitiveness, that a perfect world would emerge.

• He's talking about impiety, so to make my point, I'll replace that word ảσεβεία (impiety) with impoliteness (I can’t think of any ancient Greek abstract word that exactly fits this concept but δυσγένεια 'low-bred meanness would be close). This is the result:-

If anyone behaves impolitely in word or deed, whoever encounters them will defend the law (forbidding impoliteness) by informing the authorities. The first magistrates so alerted shall arraign the person in accordance with what the law stipulates, and failure to do so will make the official himself in question liable to a charge of impoliteness that may be laid by anyone who desires to exact vengeance on behalf of the law.

• The history of countries which adopted this kind of intricate 're-engineering' of man to conform to a perfect model of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung represents the extreme face of this imposed 'political correctness'. A reader will take this as a hyperbolic form of analogy, and to some degree it is. Wikipedia's rules are extremely intricate, non-invasive of personal beliefs, but what can and cannot be said in the I/P world has over the last decades been widely legislated under the guise of a battle to tamp down antisemitism, and criticism of Israel, and this, rather than the sober scholarship on both these issues, has a notable incidence on the way many editors argue and interact on I/P talk pages.

• Since I don't read AE/ANI etc discussions, I can only generalize from my own experience of being reported. And that is, for some time, calling for sanctions on ever more flimsy evidence seems to be easier than it used to be, and the core of such reports concerns a putative failure to conform to the wiki code for civility. Uncivil behaviour is not arguing at length, and reverting, without significant RS evidence to support your view. It is not reverting out of left field while ignoring the talk page. It is not refusing to acknowledge the weight of evidence. 'Incivility' is just saying something, even one phrase, which offends or can be construed to offend another person's self-esteem, sensitivity or right to feel comfortable as an editor.

• Every editor has a block log, and every edit (thank the tetragrammaton or his human avatar Mr Wales) is scrupulously conserved on servers. When a report is made, the ancient history of an editor's behaviour, as it has been crystallized at AE/ANI, is summed up in that log. In recent reports,a single diff is enough to draw the administrator's attention to a possible issue, while the weight of evidence is pegged on citing the block log. No one, I think checks to verify how each verdict in a blocklog was reached. A decision was made, and it represents some community judgment that has force as an ascertained fact. Several notes on the block log constitute a profile of the frailties of any indicted editor, as confirmed in the past, and these are often used to amplify what is barely discernible in the otherwise paltry evidence of a contemporary complaint. That is how this weaponization is developing: exploiting the most rigorous reading of 'civility' I'll take apart the way Icebear244 uses it.

• The complaint is two diffs, with no 1R infraction, or any careless language other than an allusion to the group of 7's scarce familiarity with the topic and the IP area.

• The real thrust comes from citing 5 previous sanctions corroborating the theory that I am a congenital harasser given to personal attacks.
• (1) Drsmoo’s 2024 case against my using one phrase as evidence I was a Hitler-mouthing antisemite. That insulting claim was turned down, but the closing editor reminded me not to use 'inflammatory language'. The term used is not intrinsically infammatory, but is, unknown to me, regarded as such in certain circles because apparently it is also used by antisemitic guttersnipes on social forums, of which I have no knowledge.
• (2) Consists of citing the fact that five years earlier in 2019 Sandstein had permabanned me from AE for calling Icewhiz’s views ‘extremist’, without providing evidence.’) True.

But, Sandstein was wrong. because I did in that thread provide very strong evidence for making that judgment, with a diff that shows Icewhiz affirming that Bezalel Smotrich (see here) and [Rehavam Ze'evi] (see here) have opposed the occupation throughout their careers.

• That statement was blatantly false, and patently ludicrous in its boldly contrafactual nature, because the whole world knows that these two extremists vigorously militate(d) against Palestinians' right to their land, and advocated thorough settlement of it.

• If an admin is unfamiliar with the full story of the names mentioned in a diff, the parsing of the language of the diff being the only evidence to be considered, then misreading them will all too easily lead to false conclusions, as it did there.

• I’m sure Sandstein read that diff with his due diligence. But he apparently did not go beyond reading it by doing the further legwork to familiarize himself with the public statements of those two, nor with the real anti-occupation figures Icewhiz described as on the fringes of the Israeli radical left. .I.e. David Dean Shulman, Baruch Kimmerling, Zeev Sternhell, Ronit Lentin, Yehuda Elkana, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Avraham Burg, Uri Avnery. Apart from Lentin, they are all (click and see) Zionist centrists, men of moderation. If Icewhiz could have made such an extreme caricature in branding moderate scholars as on 'the fringes of the Israeli radical left', that judgment strongly suggests that it came from someone whose judgment confounds Zionist liberals of high distinction and moderate politics with fringe extremism on the grounds they are critical of their government's abuses against Palestinians.
• And it was unquestionably extremist to assert that people who promote(d) full scale settlement of the WB and call for the expulsion of millions of Palestinians are ‘against the occupation’. They were or are publicly famous for being against the Palestinian occupation of their own lands.
• I remember thinking something like, it must be exhausting being an admin. He doesn't know the topic, but just evaluates diffs at face value. I didn't appeal the judgment, as always, on principle.

• (3) Cites Sir Joseph’s complaint in 2017 which consists of just one diff of me reverting the plaintiff, who maintained that an incident of 4 israelis throwing a stun grenade into two Palestinian women’s apartment in Petah Tikva to drive them out of the suburb did not qualify as an I/P related news item! My explanation of improper unmotivated teamtagging was deemed not convincing because the teamtaggers had consensus. Apparently, I learnt, 1R had been qualified to add that "Editors are required to obtain consensus through discussion before restoring a reverted edit". So, and this is reasonable, I was given a 24 hour block (it was noted I hadn’t been blocked for 4 years, i.e. since 2013).

• (4)The fourth = 1 January 2013 User:Snowolf is indeed comical. Nableezy was branded as an antisemite, and no admin defended him from this injurious slur. It was Jan 1st. To prop up his morale, I made a private in-joke on Nableezy’s page. This was immediately seized on by a passing eye as an outrageous personal attack on Nableezy, revdeleted, with my being immediately blocked. After a discussion, after Snowolf with decent scruple had asked for a review of his own block, User:Boing! said Zebedee promptly undid the block against me. I then made this comment to enlighten all and thanked the blocking admin because it was an understandable mistake for someone unfamiliar with this area.

• If anyone wants to know what was revdeleted, see my reconstruction of what happened here, here and and especially here.

• (5) Jehochman’s weeklong block in 2009 per my putative personal attack on Ashley Kennedy, another classic admin mistreading which was immediately overturned, as explained here.

• I've never complained or taken the trouble to clarify these elements in my notorious blocklog. Wikipedia is an immensely complex organism, and individuals whingeing about what they see as screwups and injustices waste everyone's time, including their own. The principle should be mostly, 'wear it' as just an unfortunate error and sit out the penalty.

• I've been loose-tongued several times in 18 years, but these cases don't illustrate it. On my block log (4, from 2013) and (5, from 2009) register blocks for incivility when all that happened on each occasion was a private joke among wikifriends, and were immediately overturned. (3, from 2017) is a one day block for reverting against a consensus that throwing stun grenades inside a Palestinian home in Israel was not an I/P issue. (2) is a permaban from AE based on an admin's judgment that I gave no proof to an assertion of extremism, when I thought I had. (1, from 2024) consists of a case based on a single diff, where I was accused of being a Hitler-type antisemite, a case dismissed, with a warning to be more careful about the use of language which had led the plaitiff to make that otherwise wild inference.

• No admin can be expected to have at their fingertips the inside story of every element in a blocklog. Fuckups, like the above, are inevitable. And we just have to put up with them because there is no remedy. And ultimately, in the big picture, irrelevant to what we should be doing, i.e. reading books and articles, and adding essential information to wikipedia.Nishidani (talk) 20:49, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

You're quite right. I TLDR'ed after the first few points. What on earth is the point of getting annoyed by editors on Wikipedia? Especially when you know some of them value their country right or wrong far more than they do Wikipedia and think they will serve it by doing you down? Haven't you seen the cartoons On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog or Duty calls? NadVolum (talk) 10:15, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Well, I haven't kicked the lifetime habit of reading 100-200 pages a day on average, so I am constantly tickled by surprise to see complaints about reading something that may require as long as five minutes of concentration (newspaper article now supply a reading time-length to readers who like rabbits like racing against the clock of personal time consumption). I know that the digital world loves clips, snippets, takeaways, abstracts (most of the quotes in our complex genetics papers appear to be excerpted from two paragraphs in the abstracts), sound bites, and that man's Attention span is shortening, except in the case of playing online games for several hours a day. Unfortunately I had my tertiary education under men who could recite by heart large stretches of Homer (just as my traditionalist uncle knew the whole of the German original of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by rote; who could, offhand in a class improvise a lecture on Heian dress codes providing one with a dozen archaic terms that supplemented the one old word for a garment in a given text; who could, when I was puzzled by a simple Greek grammar book's entry on negatives, reply:'Yes, the text is flawed. That problem was clarified by so and so (perhaps Denniston?) in an article in Classical Quarterly in 1948; who could sit down and decipher cryptic Sino-Japanese private banking documents when bewildered Japanese scholars flew down to ask him for help etc.etc. These were not exceptional people: they drank beer, played cricket, watched football and told jokes like the rest of us. They were just bright men and women passionate about the subject they had mastered and had been raised in a world where extended concentration was not only a prerequisite for teaching at a tertiary level, but a form of existential pleasure.

Can an encyclopedia be composed by speed readers clipping googled 'info' rather than spending an hour or two on just scrutinizing the available information to make just one edit on a marginal page? Perhaps. The ancillary devices of A1 etc., can be programmed to read, sift, digest and compose an article on anything in five minutes or less, and people like me will join the dinosaurs, while lingering the while as croaking (in both senses) fossils in nascituro. In the meantime, if I am smeared as a congenital bully as part of the ephemeral flow of gossip, I am not too prepossessed with some urgent need to defend myself before others (even if obliged to do so here) but from scruple I prefer to delve into all of the details that are lost to a history of behaviour in diffs (short attention span stuff potentially) to reassess the merits as impersonally as I can, and set the record straight at least for myself. None of us can understand ourselves completely (the traps of amour-propre are infinite), let alone others. But what others say about oneself can, at times, jolt one's complacent self-regard positively. Hence the archaeology above, when doubts arise. The Persian poet Rumi once wrote:Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself. There, I answered your TLDR beef with another pastiche of similar unreadability. But, I retain some rights to do so, on my own page. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:45, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

And, my friend, if I cared a rat's rectum about some misbegotten idea that writing for wikipedia would secure me recognition and credit, I wouldn't have happily spent 18 years volunteering to work for this encyclopedia anonymously. I would have written several books and been paid for it, and junketed around with paid-up conferencing. I simply figured that the global re-public doesn't read scholarship, that academic works are lucky to sell 500 copies a year and are mainly perused by fellow specialists in any given field, and that therefore helping to bridge the yawning gap between the general communities of the world and the small, intense enclaves of cutting edge scholarship was a stimulating way to spend retirement, which had the collateral benefit of learning more for my own self-instruction.Nishidani (talk) 13:20, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I did read this, although it is long enough that I can't guarantee I'll pass the quiz. My original plan was to let things lie, but with the AtG imbroglio so topical right now I figured I'd stop in and share a bit of my thinking about this.

You're on a similar path as those charted out by many editors before you, e.g. Eric Corbett, BrownHairedGirl, and AndyTheGrump. You clearly understand that your manner and communication style can rub people the wrong way and create unnecessary conflict. It's obvious to everyone who's spent more than a moment or two on Wikipedia that there is no clear line on civility, and a lot of disagreement in how sub-par communication, personal attacks, uncivil comments, and whatever other categories you might slot shit into should be handled.

A problem arises once the ball gets rolling. Even if, as you maintain above, only one of the earlier sanctions were warranted some part of the community agreed that they were. When the behavior keeps recurring it creates a feedback loop of drama, which is itself disruptive. It draws people in to comment and makes what should have been in your case a short trip to AE with the filer taken care of into a many-days-long slog of arguing. As the ball keeps rolling more and more people get exasperated with the drama it causes, and even though your individual "violations" aren't severe, a larger and larger group starts wondering why you won't just knock it off and save everyone the trouble.

This is why there is a 1.5 tomats discussion at ANI about AtG and Lb right now, and so many calls for sanctions, up to and including indefs/cbans. No one has argued that AtG's positions are incorrect, but they just want them to knock it off. What eventually happens is either there gets to be a large enough group who is irked about something or the dice come up bad for you at a trip to a noticeboard. Then the community spends more dozens of editor hours dinking around about some shit that never should have gotten to that point.

My intention with most of my AE actions and arguments is to:

• Stop troublesome behavior before it becomes something that needs an indefinite remedy
• Prevent enormous spiraling drama fests that waste everyone's time by addressing issues before they reach that point

Obviously things don't always work out that way and, despite what I tell my wife, I'm not perfect. What I don't want to see is a 40,000 word ANI report that ends up with you CBANNED because you yet again got a bit uncouth, snippy, grumpy, or just had a bad day and went a little further than you normally would. That's a recurring theme here on Wikipedia, and it would be great if it didn't happen.

As for the Arbcom thing, that's to look at the larger issues that AE isn't equipped to handle. Multi-party disputes, sock farms, off-wiki coordination, and the like. That, with the fact that all of the reports on established editors involve long-term patterns and other long-term editors means that it should really be looked at in a larger scale than AE provides. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:49, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

It's extremely rare for me to have a general interest in wiki, to be familiar with all of the forums for general discussion, and with ANI/AE cases other than those I have been dragged into. I see some mention of off-wiki sites etc., (WPO's meaning escapes me) generating huge discussion. I have never read them. I am amazed at the people who have the energy and time to familiarize themselves with these things, a familiarity which is certainly needed by the relevant admins and experts, but which, since I am incapable of getting enthusiastic about reading up on such topics, I have a close to total ignorance. I can recognize two of the three names you mention, Eric Corbett, BrownHairedGirl, and AndyTheGrump, namely, the last two, but that is only name recognition - though I have several times seen ATG's work by casually editing the same page. Not more. I marvel at the ability of so many editors to use the large range of software to find patterns in editors' behaviour. I don't know how it works: if I am forced to cite diffs from years back, just fishing up several takes four or five hours, by a combination of memory, and then hunting up a page's edit history. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever who Eric Corbett is or what his edit record is, and what he was banned for, and can't even recall ever seeing an edit by BrownHairedGirl. So these allusions only tell me there is an assumption I am a full participant in a broad wikipedia community where everyone more or less follows the ups and downs of policy and all notable editors who get into trouble. I realize that I work in a very small area, writing articles on subjects that catch my whimsy, mostly alone, or otherwise, keeping a close eye on the I/P articles. But that's it. I don't even study policy - and can only admire exchanges by experts on these obscure things when I note Nableezy, Levivich, yourself and others raising them on the pages I've bookmarked. I'll leave it at that: otherwise I'd let myself launch into another TLDR screed that would implicitly steal up on your own time and interests, whingeing for attention, something I find repugnant. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 21:58, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

TLDR mark 2. Finally, judgment on wikipedia tends to get more subjective the more intricately complex the rules become, and this is particularly true of the increasingly cited 'civility' clauses. I won't argue formally against the, to me curious, impression that I do have a bullying, battleground mentality streak that, you suggest, now borders on turning a snowball into a running streak towards an avalanche. I'll just give an anecdote, more readable if less, to many minds, less convincing. There are many cultures, each with its own code, and I'll compare just one other to our wikiworld's modus vivendi (or morendi).

Of the several distinct groups who, together or at different times, gather for morning coffee, at the bar where I breakfast, the largest consists of a retired priest, Don A., and several to ten of his elderly parishioners. Several of them are his childhood friends. They are poor, and he generously pays for their daily cups of coffee when they sit and bat the breeze.

I always read there, but occasionally rest my eyes, and cock an ear to their nearby banter. Several months ago, there was some light joshing about a new entry, quite well-off, paying for at least a round (No. She insisted the priest keep paying). I reflected, and, after some minutes, got up, went inside the bar, and paid for the priest and his guests, telling the bar maid to keep my gesture anonymous. Priests' pensions are not substantial.

Well, as I keep learning, word always gets out in small worlds like a town quarter. Every day since then when I drop in and sit at my table, I'm greeted by all and sundry or some nod comes my way from occasional blowins. One of the group offers the priest assistance as a chauffeur, and drives him home each time. He is vociferously religious, to the point of even remonstrating with the old priest on points of doctrine, about which he knows nothing. A bit annoying, but his rants are tolerated, as is proper.He often mentioned that he'd been taken up in the arms of Christ and cuddled six years ago, a transformative fantasy which drives him towards an intolerant anger with the way the world lapses from the 'Church'.

Some months afterwards, word got to me that the day before, he'd treated the woman of the bar, and her barmaids, with extreme rudeness in an outburst, upsetting them and, it emerged, this was becoming a problem. A week down the line, I happened to be nearby when he started to harangue the group about the horrible sexual temptations the mere existence of women caused. As I got up to leave, I stopped, tapped him on the shoulder, and said:'Like most intemporate fanatics, you don't know much about religion. Go and read John, chapter 8, if you have the Gospels at home, which I doubt, and think over what Jesus said about women sentenced to delapidation. You're not a Catholic but a brow-beating Pharisee.' Well, he exploded in a fulminating rage. I heard him out, turned, and said, Go and get fucked, you dopey prick. You're a sanctimonious hypocrite. He was stunned into silence, humiliated. I could hear a murmur of agreement with my peremptory judgment - the group could never allow itself out of friendship and respect for the priest (though he on occasion has dropped a 'get fucked' phrase in his more secular moments), to speak like that - as I strode off.

The next day, I made up my mind, not to retract, but to apologize for the harshness of my words. The same group was there. he had his back to me as I walked over to my table. The priest nodded my way, greeting me by my first name. I touched the ranter's shoulder, who jumped when he caught my gaze, and said, 'I'm sorry about yesterday. Whether my intemperance was deserved or not is one thing. But humiliating someone, rather than taking them aside for a private word, was unfair.' We have been, since that moment, on very good terms and he doesn't rant as often, at least when I'm around, though he won't change, nor will I. I'd say I've broken my usual silence at the bar three times in several years, to make some vehement point. (On another occasion against a loud-mouthed but very decent drunkard I'd befriended who then used our familiarity to interrupt and dominate conversations I was having with one or two other groups, etc. The others thanked me, and my tipsy acquaintance became more careful, and a real friend, accepted as such by the group he had annoyed)

In wikipedia's distinctive culture, those three incidents could be noted over time, in a file, and be reported, when the opportunity presented itself, in order to request my ostracism as a congenitally uncivil person with a bullying disruptive attitude that intimidates other editors. Nothing off the particular circumstances, their rarity and exceptionality, would be relevant. A long discussion would erupt citing the words used in the three cases, and whatever judgment of exculpation, dismissal or of temporary suspension was registered on each occasion, the log would underline them as a behavioural pattern. Every report, however frivolous, would fall under the shadow of that exiguous complaint list. The obverse reality, most of the editing story - the 99% of one's work of laborious discussion conducted with source-richness and flat logical arguments, would disappear as irrelevant, not a significant pattern compared to the one detected in the rare exceptions. The way opportunism jumps at 'civility' to question my bona fides or underwrite the thesis that I am a '(inter) net negative' is, I think, evident. Regards Nishidani (talk) 16:11, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

To close this, I see I overlooked just one further part of my block log mentioned by Red-tailed hawk. Here's what happened.

• (6) Red-tailed hawk also mentions 2012, 1-month long TBAN the Israel-Palestine area after violating 1RR in 2012. The sanction was absolutely correct.

The page was Zeitoun killings, where the IDF confined the Samouni family in their home and subsequently blew it up with missiles, killing 48 family members.

The source said the IDF had struck an area from which Hamas militants were firing, and witnesses said those rockets were launched a mile away from the homestead. A team of editors insisted on retaining 'in the vicinity' and erasing 'a mile away' in order apparently to have the IDF spokesman's version (we were reacting to a Hamas threat from that home's vicinity) prevail. I broke 1R and was duly reported. I immediately admitted that indeed I had violated IR, inadvertently, and would either self-suspend for a month or accept any sanction admins thought appropriate. What I couldn't do was avoid a sanction by restoring the source-falsifying edit. That would mean to get myself off I would be ready to restore false information to a wiki page. So justly, I was suspended for a month. No one was insulted. There was no incivility. The diff shows I had edit-warred on one page in 2012, admitted as much, and accepted without protest the sanction due. If that can be construed as proof of some congenital 'battleground mentality' characteristic of 18 years, well. . . Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

a liittle crabby, that's the summary Selfstudier (talk) 21:43, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

My Aussie ear tells me I should scratch my knackerbag then:) or drop in on a chancre mechanic for a check-up downbelow, or downundies.:) Seriously, 'crabby' is spot-on. (Tryptofish) now suggest that 'snottiness'/the quality of being 'annoyingly or spitefully unpleasant(MW).' fits my attitude to editors who disagree with me). I would add 'crabbed' as well, for the earful of constipated elucubration I at times toss at editors. I sometimes wish I could write as I think, in the old dialect of Strine, which is extremely colourful in its comic hyperbole and brio for larriken chiakking/sledging all in the spirit of bonhomie. Unfortunately, only bogans speak or understand it now (I favour their company when I go to Australia), so I have to do daily exercises in pruning my tongue, and brownnosing the OED to write out something that is neither offensive nor risqué but addresses some point or other in a rationale idiom.Nishidani (talk) 22:18, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

• bogans are 'uncouth' but they are not 'lower class' as I see dictionaries assert. Most I know, being tradesmen (tradies), are millionaires, but refuse to bang on tone as though they had made it into the middle class. The sort of blokes who, if a mate's short, pull out a wad and offer to patch up the short-fall by an interest free loan of $10,000 bucks.Nishidani (talk) 22:23, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Your 14 June 2024‎ edit to the "Be'eri massacre" page

The justification you gave that "WP:OR. One cannot cite one statement and infer it applies to several people." is not applicable. What Emily Hand's father said when he heard that she was killed in Be'eri (before it turned out that she was actually kidnapped and not killed) is only one of many examples. Search for it yourself, don't take my word for it.

There are many interviews with Israeli women who say they prefer dying to being raped. It is well documented that Hamas strategy and orders on October 7 was to intentionally sow that kind of fear. Annette Maon (talk) 05:44, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Why are you posting this here? We have the article talk page. In any case the passage I took our read:

There is at least one media interview indicating some residents strongly held the attitude that being killed was preferable to being taken hostage, including for their own children

Is technically WP:OR and editorializing. It prefaces one interview, and makes an inference from it which extends 'Anthony's' point of view to other residents (implicitly in Be'eri).

It is furthermore, garbled grammatically.'prefer being killed. . .including for their own children'.

You justify the OR by cross-referring what 'Anthony' said to the spontaneous outburst of Emily Hand's father, Thomas, when he was wrongly informed his little daughter's body had been found (i.e. that she hadn't been taken hostage), Anthony declared that he would have killed his own children rather than have them taken hostage. Thomas Hand said that he was overcome by relief to find that Emily had been killed (by Hamas) rather than taken hostage. It is one thing to assert one would kill one's children to avoid their being captured, and another for a father to assuage his profound grief over his daughter's reported death by the thought that it was better to be killed by Hamas straight out, than spend perhaps years as a hostage in captivity in Gaza.

My point stands. Given the confusing flurry to conflicted reports over this tragedy, we should avoid the temptation to editorialize or generalize, and stick to the factual record, and certainly not preface reports with personal opinions, as did the editor of the remark I excised.Nishidani (talk) 09:19, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Your experience in the IP area is limited (603 edits in eight years). To work there fficiently, one must learn to exercise particular scruples over issues of NPOV, editorializing and OR. And one should not personalize edit disputes by addressing someone's talk page, as if they were the problem, but by sticking to the relevant talk page of the articles in question.Nishidani (talk) 09:24, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

To what degree do the multiple murderous onslaughts by Hamas on 7 October (I am reflecting to myself) qualitatively differ, morally and otherwise, from the multiple murderous onslaughts in Gaza, every day, for the past 270 days since then, the latest of which is the following, bringing the minimum death toll there to at least 50,000 plus (38,295 ascertained+10-20,000 missing believed dead)? Lorenzo Tondo, A game of football, a boom, then scattered bodies: video shows moment of Israeli strike on Gaza school The Guardian 10 July 2024 Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

• Chris McGreal, Israeli weapons packed with shrapnel causing devastating injuries to children in Gaza, doctors say The Guardian 11 July 2024
• Oren Ziv ‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza +972 magazine 8 July 2024.Nishidani (talk) 20:51, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Ethnic definition of malice. example

According to the The Jerusalem Post, a preliminary investigation found IDF instructions to soldiers in Shuja'iyya/Shejaia were to open-fire on any man of fighting age who approached them. Following an investigation, the IDF stated the killings were preventable, but disciplinary actions were not needed since there was "no malice" on the part of the soldiers Killing of Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka.

I.e. there is no 'malice' in shooting at any Palestinian in Gaza from 18-65 on sight, when they are in your vicinity (i.e., whenever you move into their neighbourhood). Nishidani (talk) 06:57, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

July music

story · music · places

My story today is - because of the anniversary of the premiere OTD in 1782 - about Die Entführung aus dem Serail, opera by Mozart, while yesterday's was - because of the TFA - about Les contes d'Hoffmann, opera by Offenbach, - so 3 times Mozart if you click on "music" ;) -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Today's story is about a photographer who took iconic pictures, especially View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, 9/11, yesterday's was a great mezzo, and on Thursday we watched a sublime ballerina. If that's not enough my talk offers chamber music from two amazing concerts. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:46, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt My apologies for not thanking you for this. Making myself a hamburger with fiery peppers, and some of my first crop of tomatoes a half an hour ago, I remembered to apologize, and the meal's ingredients suggested I link you, in my usual larrikenish fashion, to this. Um, I think this might get me into trouble with Firefangledfeathers and a possible suggestion to Arbcom that I be referred to some wiki doctors' forum for a psychiatric referrel and assessment of whether or not my mind is a 'strange place':)

Thank you, and no apology ever needed ;) - The linked music is lovely. Minds will remain strange places. I came to share - after you inspired us with memories of not visiting Notre-Dame - a bit from my life. Look at music today: three music-making women there, - a sad record. The Main page also has a Mozart symphony I love, and my story was connected not only to Max Reger's death in 1916, remembered in 2016, but also the death of a friend who - and we around him - knew he was dying when he listened to the concert which was his last time leaving home, and music from Reger's Requiem was played for his funeral three months later. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:46, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

The anecdote about your dear friend and Reger's requiem, sent me back to listening in 1975 to a recording of Dinu Lipatti's last concert at Besançon in late 1950, when though dying for months, he struggled out to play to a hall as a mark of respect for the booked and packed audience. He played magnificently but, having broached another of Chopin's waltzes (Op.34 No.1), he broke off, and walked off the stage, feeling too exhausted to continue. After a brief pause, he came back and concluded by playing Bach's Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring. . . .of course, you will be familiar with the story . .I'd better stop, because I'm thinking of other similar performances, of singing wonderfully as the performer is dying: Kathleen Ferrier's toughness in going on to sing (was it?) two arias from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice after her left thigh broke up while she ws on stage (as a result of the radiation treatment she was undergoing). . . .ah, damn it, now I'm thinking of Andrea Parodi's last concert (as he also was dying of cancer ) when he sang to his wife the exquisitely beautiful elegiac Sardinian love song Non potho reposare. My wife was of Sardinian origin . . . Better stop. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 19:45, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, and no I didn't know the Lipatti story, nor Ferrier's. I just nominated her for TFA, two years ago, and this year it worked. I wondered if inviting the friend and his wife to the concert was a good idea, but then thought that they of all people might find it meaningful. But when I noticed them in the audience before it began I had some trouble managing all the stone steps up to the organ balcony that the composer had used in what he had called his "Sturm- und Trankzeit". It was meaningful for all, in the end. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:23, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		This is for your tireless contributions related to Arab-Israeli conflict. Pachu Kannan (talk) 08:39, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. 'tireless'. Hmmm. Perhaps, but only in the sense that I'm probably close to having worked off all four tyres on this mental jalopy of a brain, having chucked too many Uwies while jollying the gearstick as I zoomed along the mindbending labyrinths of this topic. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 08:56, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

ITN recognition for ICJ case on Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories

On 20 July 2024, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article ICJ case on Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, which you updated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. Stephen 09:19, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Asking for a friend

Hello @Nishidani, I have an unusual question. A friend (as in actually a friend, I didn’t have much luck with the randomly assigned topics) is writing her Bachelor’s thesis on a legal fragment of the current iteration of the I/P conflict, and is unsure where to start the historical part (and secondarily, the relevant historical weight).

I gave my advice, but nobody is free of bias. Would you mind giving a second opinion, as you have a significantly better grasp on the older history? FortunateSons (talk) 20:23, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

A hundred years ago or three thousand years ago? Good luck with that! I'd have chosen a less fraught topic. NadVolum (talk) 20:41, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

We don’t get to choose, and if we did, I would have chosen hers, mine is worse.

Yeah, that’s about the issue she‘s having, which I hope Nishidani can help with (if possible, through mail). FortunateSons (talk) 21:28, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. We're having a Notte Bianca in my district, and since life after Covid seems to be returning to the streetscape, I accepted an impromptu invitation by an elderly engineering friend to eat out, have a few drinks and observe the milling passers-by for sign of resurrection.

a BA thesis has no need to strike new ground. Rather it (used to at least) functions to give an indication of the student's capacity to survey, digest and summarise the existing best scholarship on whatever topic is chosen. Managing that well qualifies one to go onto a master's, and then doctorate where greater margins open up to do really interesting and often original research.

I'm not quite sure what 'legal fragment' may refer to.

The first principle is not to get lost or overwhelmed by biting off too large a chunk of a subject matter.

The historical part (I would think that alone would be sufficient for a BA thesis) should begin with the Balfour Declaration. If so, then the quickest overview that would allow your friend to take in, in a few hours, the scope of such a research topic, would be:-

• (Scepticism of legality) John Quigley, Britain’s failure to gain legal standing for the Balfour Declaration,' in Cogent Arts & Humanities, Volume 10, 2023 - Issue 1 pp.1-15
• (Affirmation of legality) Alan Baker, 'The Legal Veracity of the Balfour Declaration,' Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs 16 March 2017.

If this looks worthwhile, then it is not difficult to discover books on the topic, for and against. Regards and my auguries for your friend's BA and thesis, whatever the topic. Nishidani (talk) 21:48, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

No apologies are needed, I consider your response to be rather fast, particularly considering the question. I hope that you enjoyed the Notte Bianca and the company, both sound lovely; personally, I regret missing out on the Parisian version last year due to my scheduling, and do have plans to cross it off my bucket list eventually.

I’m deeply grateful for the detailed recommendations, well wishes and the excellent advice and will forward both (to be read once it’s no longer 1 am), as well as utilise the general part for my thesis, and hopefully future academic work, considering I was definitely not about to take a bite too large to chew.

In retrospect, I noticed that my question was poorly phrased, leading to me taking the liberty of sending you a message through the Wikipedia mail. I generally try to avoid this avenue of communication but would like to protect my friend’s privacy (even if a Bachelor‘s thesis is rarely published at our university), and apologise for this method of communication. FortunateSons (talk) 23:25, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

No need to apologize, though perhaps I should since, rushing, I wrote 'enderly' for 'elderly', which, now that I reread this morning what I dashed off late last night with a large plate of baccalà and Spaghetti alle vongole doused by several beers. more on my deliciously distracted mind than stomach, may either be more evidence for incipient senility, or my chronic, mostly off-line, habit of punning. It's not a bad neologism for 'elderly' which some might think has an edge of juvenile condescension for the aged, a community I myself belong to, with its diurnal reflections on a sense of an ending. On the otherhand, it may be just Anthony Burgess playing up in my unconscious - some echo from Edenville of his portrait over four novels of his semi autobiographical Enderby.

I see from your email that the project is quite different from the one suggested here, so I'll, unfortunately only briefly, answer there. A first thesis is a stepping stone, so it is always important to choose the right stream where to place it, in order to safely leap to the other side where a larger life, and a thicker jungle await the adventurer. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:54, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

There is no need to apologise either, particularly considering food, drink, time and my personal preference for punny jokes.

I envy you for the food and admit to being mostly unfamiliar with the literary references, something I should probably remedy at some point.

No comment on the ‘benefits’ and ‘drawbacks’ of age (mostly due to a lack of personal experience), though I must admit that youth being wasted on the young is an idea that - despite my personal opposition- does seem to be less unconvincing than I used to believe it to be.

I appreciate the kind words, and am eagerly awaiting your message! FortunateSons (talk) 08:44, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Take all the time in the world getting there (old age), no hurry! I had the benefit of reading in mid-adolescence Babette Deutsch's translation of Yevgeniy Onegin, much criticized often on solid grounds. But one couplet stuck in my mind, as a sort of manual of instruction to curb the natural, and necessary excesses of my younger years.

Youth's fervor is its own excuse
For ravings that it may induce.

I often recall these lines when rereading some TLDR remark some dispute in here drives me to writing. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 08:53, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I will do my best, though I do feel that my studies are rapidly accelerating that process - which probably isn’t a good sign.

My childhood nanny tried to impress a love for Pushkin and the Russian language onto me, and while she did not fully succeed with either, I do like the quote and will add the book (probably as an audiobook in modern Russian, which is a sin of its own) to my ever growing list of media to consume. FortunateSons (talk) 09:32, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Well here's the quote in Russian, since you think it memorable:

Простим горячке юных лет

И юный жар и юный бред. (Евгеній Онѣгинъ,2:15,ll.13-14).

Pushkin filched them, as all first rate poets do, from a second-rate writer (Claude Joseph Dorat), and with his usual magical touch or touché, made them memorable. Dorat had written ..les tendres erreurs,/Et le délire du bel âge) I'll take some time to email you, since there seems to be a plot round here to kill me with kindness, by repeated invites to lunch and dinner, and protests that I never eat lunch, esp. on Sunday, were of no avail.Nishidani (talk) 13:09, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the quote. I always find it funny how much the word use and subjective implications vary between languages, and admire the skill of those doing such translations.

Oh, such horrors, how will you survive?? You have my full understanding, enjoy the time with your friends :) FortunateSons (talk) 17:39, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Sources on Zionism

I'm still working on putting together a list of sources to use for a re-write of Zionism. Here is what I have so far:

• Gorny- Zionism and the Arabs
• Flapan- Zionism and the Palestinians
• Avineri- The Making of Modern Zionism
• Penslar- Zionism: an emotional state
• Khalidi- Palestinian Identity
• Rabkin- A Threat from Within
• Shafir- Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• Yadgar- Sovereign Jews
• Sternhell- The founding myths of Israel
• Finkelstein- Image and Reality
• Masalha- The Zionist Bible
• Masalha- The Palestine Nakba
• Goldberg- To the Promised Land
• Shapira- Land and Power
• Shimoni- The Zionist Ideology
• Finkelstein- Image and Reality
• Almog- Zionism and the Arabs

If you could add to this list that would be very appreciated. DMH223344 (talk) 16:00, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I could but I won't, out of consideration for what you are undertaking. You already have an embarras de richesses. It is very refreshing to see editors sedulous in the comprehensivenes of their source studies, with a readiness to master both a difficult article's overview and the intricate details of its many facets. The sources are endless because they are tantamount to the history of Israel. As a working method, I find that restricting oneself to five core books to make a preliminary outline is a safeguard against getting lost in details and byways. Once that is done, one can then sweep more broadly to build on, and add flesh and muscle to the skeleton. But that just shows my own working preference.Best regards. I'll of course follow your work keenly and assist where possible.Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

It is indeed a lot of content. I was mostly looking for additional sources to make sure I am not missing some crucial pieces that might not be represented here (a lot of the sources are quite old, and others are quite recent and specific). I'm sure once I put together a draft, many people will come in bringing their own favorite source, so I would like to at least be aware of them early on. DMH223344 (talk) 17:15, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Okay. Have a look at (because it is out of the circuits of the Anglophone world)

• Alain Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel, Hurst & Company 2003 ISBN 978-1-850-65595-4

I have a lot of reservations about several of Walter Laqueur's works but I do recall him remarking that Zionism had completed its mission in 1948. With statehood it was no longer relevant. After 1967, with the iron logic of sociology, it enters into the phase of its self-deconstruction via overreach/hubris, as I think Laqueur eventually intuited (again,from memory) Despite its age you might find something of value in his

• Walter Laqueur, Zionism and Its Liberal Critics, 1896-1948,Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 6, No. 4 (1971), pp. 161-182, and also
• Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel, Knopf Doubleday 2003 ISBN 978-0-805-21149-8 Nishidani (talk) 20:03, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I wrote a section on zionist ideology/beliefs: User:DMH223344/sandbox-zionism-beliefs. If you have some time to leave some comments, it would of course be very much appreciated. I do think this still needs a lot of work, but I will take a break from it for a bit to look at other aspects of the article (specifically, putting together an outline for the History section).

I thought this would be the most difficult section to write, and once the details are established then writing the history section should be "easier" in the sense that we would have at least said what Zionism is. Describing what Zionists did and experienced should be more straightforward I believe.

I did not get a chance to get the Dieckoff book from the library yet, but will do so soon. I also want to give some time to the Laqueur references. DMH223344 (talk) 03:03, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll keep an eye on it. It's a hard topic to write because ideology sits uneasily with what is essentially a faith-based religious set of anything-will-do-if-it-sounds-like-a-plausible-reason set ofpractices, based on a very hard-nosed and highly pragmatic reading of political opportunities and influence networking. That's of course just how I read it. Because of its thinness and the fragility of its arguments. Zionist 'ideology' in so far as it exists effectively means it can't win any debate grounded both in the historical record and logico-evidential argumentation. Ultimately, as Ben-Gurion famously argued, ' It's not important what the world says about Israel. It's not important what they say about us anywhere else.' I.e., external (non-Jewish) criticisms are water off a duck's back since we will do what we think any situation we find ourselves in requires, and fuck the rest.' An ideologist in the classic sense, of someone bound by a complex set of fundamental principles with not much wriggle room to tweak the doctrines significantly, is perhaps alien to this system. This has been a source of enormous strength (and is only suffering a crisis because, as is natural, the deeper the internal contradictions consequent on its historical desire for an ethnic state in all of Palestine, the greater the temptation for a real classic ideological movement (messianic settler Zionism) to rise to the challenge by making a bit for power by resorting to a rigid orthodoxy). That's just my own impression of course, and of no use to you. Your work is excellent, and by all means consider that we write things for the long term, and haste is no ally. Best regardsNishidani (talk) 09:18, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. This was a difficult topic for me to start to engage with since I'd previously been almost entirely uninterested; I think it was Joel Beinin who said something to the effect of "it doesn't matter what zionists say, it matters what they do."

To be clear, I did not write this entire section, I lifted entirely the section on "Ethnic unity and descent from Biblical Jews" from the current article.

I strongly agree that we have no need to rush. DMH223344 (talk) 14:06, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

One point I struggled with, but having read your comment I might change my mind, is whether to bring in a discussion about post 48 zionism. At the moment I haven't attempted that at all, but I think I will (especially since many sources do in fact discuss post 48 zionism). DMH223344 (talk) 14:12, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I skimmed the preface to Lacqueur's book--I'm somehow still shocked to see antisemitic sentiment in the writing of the zionist historians (him, shimoni and avineri (and at this point I'm sure there are many others) all embrace the idea of "parasitic life" of the diaspora jew). DMH223344 (talk) 14:19, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

It was very widespread from the very outset, as I tried to sketch in Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism and Zionism, Race and genetics (the proper title editwarred out). Because class is now discarded, and is replaced by ethnicism, all of the discomfort settled assimilated Jews felt for the masses of Ostjuden, though abundant, is underestimated or neglected, creating a certain methodological incoherence: if a non-Jewish figure rubbishes them, he is an antisemite(true). If a Jew expresses scorn, he is no such thing. Someday I expect an historian will look at that notable aspect in Zionism of dumping these poor Jews outside Europe ( Pinhas Felix Rosenblüth's defining Palestine as a big "institute for the fumigation of (all) Jewish vermin", together with weeding out physically weak Jews for aliyah, and advising them to fuck off to America (a lucky break for the United States nonetheless, a fluid goldmine of talent, ambition and hardwork). It's not really surprising, though.'Race' is always there, hidden or politely redressed and wherever race or ethnicity form a predominate concern, one will get a cultural corollary of contempt for outsiders along side the vainglory of a cultivated sense of uniqueness. In internal terms, however, the patching over of differences (still marked) in Israel appears to go hand in hand with a ratcheting up of antipathy for any or all outgroups, per the old dictum, that the best solder of values in divided communities is shared fear or hatred of any enemy or bogey of an enemy as that is variously conjured up by the usual suspects. If Palestinians hadn't existed, they would have had to be invented to fulfill the role of a parlous 'other' in forming an Israeli identity. CheersNishidani (talk) 15:40, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

ps. be careful about 'lifting material' from other articles, except, as I understand you are probably doing, to fill a gap which, so far, you don't have much material on. Most of our articles on biblical themes are painful to read, as ropelets of current scholarship try to hold down the quivering Gulliveresque mass of memes that languish there.Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

@DMH223344, Nish, et al., FYI: Bibliography of the Arab–Israeli conflict#Zionism. Levivich (talk) 17:04, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed Lev for all of that work.Nishidani (talk) 19:43, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

wow thanks, ill spend some time to go through them at some point not too long from now. is there any guidance on what the inclusion/exclusion criteria might be for this list? DMH223344 (talk) 23:19, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Much of it was already there before I started expanded it; I don't know what the criteria was (if any) for inclusion. I've been adding scholarly works from mainstream academic publishers (e.g. Springer, Routledge, T&F, university presses, etc.), mostly from the past five years, that have words like "Israel," "Palestine," "Zionism," "Nakba" in the title -- not a very scientific approach, admittedly. Later I plan to look through other published bibliographies (e.g. Oxford's) to add anything missing. Please feel free to add/edit it! Levivich (talk) 02:31, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Being a bit of a duffer lately, any addition I might have time to make might end up in the wrong category (everytime I use the word 'wrong' I think of Arthur Caldwell, who made a racist slur against Chinese in opposing their immigration by saying 'Two Wongs don't make a White'), so if I bungle the section, shift it to a more appropriate one.Nishidani (talk) 10:08, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, it's much appreciated! Levivich (talk) 12:50, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Note to self

Um, $900,000,000 divided by 4 equals, ah, yep, lessee now. It cost $225 million to expel one illegal immigrant. Megan Specia U.K. Deportation Plan Cost $900 Million. Only Four People Left. The New York Times 22 July 2024 Nishidani (talk) 01:33, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

One of the world's foremost historians Niall Ferguson dismisses the Hamas-run Gaza Health Authority figures on casualties, trusting that what his friends in the IDF tell him is correct, that civilians deaths are proportionate. 7 October was the iranian octopus extending its tentacles. There will be no Palestinian state, and the fault is Palestinian. Israel will have to destroy Hezbollah in a further war (i.e. repeat 1982's carpet bombing of Lebanon) before peace is achieved between Israel and the Arab world. This the influential assessment of 'a covert Marxist'. It is notable because he has far more 'authority' than the usual mainstream sources, even if he knows nothing about the topic's historical and contemporary specialist literature, apparently, preferring private conversations with the elite establishments in the relevant countries.Nishidani (talk) 17:33, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

This is being hailed as prophetic. The Matzpen declaration of 22 September 1967

"Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule entails resistance. Resistance entails repression. Repression entails terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately."Hilo Glazer, 'What the Veterans of a Legendary Israeli anti-Zionist Group Feel Now,' Haaretz19 July 2024

This analysis was almost identical to that made by the orthodox rabbi and scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz at that time: a kind of analytical unio oppositorum, where deep piety and atheistic Marxism coalesced in a moment of shared judgment and prescience.Nishidani (talk) 20:50, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

• “no one in the world will allow us to starve two million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages” Bezalel Smotrich The Guardian 8 August 2024 Nishidani (talk) 02:13, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
• On Channel 12‘s 'Morning News' (8 August) Yehuda Shlezinger, a journalist for Israel Hayom, reportedly supported Israeli soldiers’ rape and torture of Palestinian prisoners.

Schlezinger reiterated his indifference, saying the only problem is that torture isn't part of official Israeli policy. "First of all, they deserve it. Second, it's a great form of revenge and can serve as a deterrent for us," he stated.' Etan Nechin, To See Israel's Moral Deterioration Since October 7, Just Turn on Your Television Haaretz 9 August 2024 Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

• The Israel Police recently recommended shelving the case against Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of the Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa for remarks made in March in which he said Jewish religious law requires the killing of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, including babies and the elderly. '"Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists," he said, adding that when someone comes to kill you, you should be quick to kill them. "It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. There's really no difference".' Chen Maanit, Israeli Police Recommend Closing Case Against Yeshiva Head Who Said All Gazans Should Be Killed Haaretz 18 June 2024
• 'We shouldn’t be surprised at Sde Temein.'

“Although intercourse with a female gentile is very grave, it was permitted during wartime … out of consideration for the soldiers’ difficulties, . .And since our concern is the success of the collective in the war, the Torah permitted [soldiers] to satisfy the evil urge under the conditions it stipulated for the sake of the collective’s success.” (We shouldn’t be surprised at Sde Temein. The Chief Rabbi of the IDF Eyal Krim was appointed to his role as shepherd of the IDF despite being on record as saying rape of non-Jews, in certain circumstances, was ok:' Eyal Karim, chief rabbi of the IDF.IDF taps chief rabbi who once seemed to permit wartime rape The Times of Israel 12 July 2024

COI notice

If you want to complain about my behaviour then take it to WP:ANI, and your friend too. DuncanHill (talk) 22:05, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh fachrissake! (this comes straight after another weird complaint that I make personal slights) What on earth are you talking about? I questioned the necessity of templating a page which restated what Nableezy had stated 4 years ago on the same page. Which friend (Nableezy, Lustick . . .? Sensitivities! Jeezus! I did not complain about your behaviour. In any case, this is the second time (where I putatively resent having my slips fixed) when you have, uncomprehendingly to me, taken exception to my words on this page. Save yourself the trouble and kindly desist from dropping such remarks on this page. Nishidani (talk) 22:08, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

(several e/c) The other case was when you undid my correction of your mistake with an incorrect edit summary. I will not refrain from issuing valid COI notices. DuncanHill (talk) 22:21, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh. You missed my express gratitude for your work correcting my errors expressed here, right on this page, before your first angry remonstration over the outrage of my mere questioning one of your, mostly useful, corrections. So, thanks for the laugh. I read that, I hope last post plunked here, as the sort of thing that might merit a prestigious Profile in Courage Award (per 'I will not refrain. . . .'). I find hyperthermia over trivial disputes, one of the most melancholic things observable in wikiculture, ultimately narcotic, because I value self-awareness and by physical constitution am inert to the allure of stupefacients (even cocaine, once snorted to please a girlfriend, had no effect). Now kindly go away.Nishidani (talk) 06:06, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Don't feed the troll

They are just bludgeoning the topic because they desperately feel that Jimbo's talk page could attract some more favorable attention. I don't want to fathom why Jimbo allows the topic to stay alive while not responding to them. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 21:41, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I made brief comments, unlike many there. Mr Wales is perfectly entitled to allow wikipedians to air their grumps there. he doesn't have to read his own page. Tolerance is a fundamental liberal virtue, and implies no assent one way or another.Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Using the word 'liberalism' reminded me of a relevant passage in Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism (2012)

'Ethically, the ADL and AJC are caught between the liberalism that defined organized American Jewish life before 1967 and the tribalism that has dominated it since. The result is schizophrenia. .. (The ADL's) Foxman has eloquently condemned anti-Muslim bigotry. But, in 2010, when that bigotry ran wild during the debate over a plan to build a Muslim community center near the site of the World Trade Center, he concluded that the religious freedom of Muslims must bow to the sensitivities of anti-Muslim bigots.’ pp.46-47 Nishidani (talk) 21:56, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I couldn't resist, but this ages like... -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 02:03, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Very good. I'm glad to see the art of irony is not only admired but put into practice on wikipedia. All we need to recivilize this place is to expand the margins of tolerance, already squeezed out to a miserable borehole, as people are invited to weaponize real or instrumentally imagined sensitivities and petty resentments when sourced arguments fail.Nishidani (talk) 06:29, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Wikiproject

Hi, I see you've contributed a lot to Epic of King Gesar, would you be interested in a taskforce on oral tradition? Kowal2701 (talk) 10:11, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

I did a lot of research on that, with a thesis, requiring a lot of comparative study on the techniques and roots of epic narratives (and, with the Gesar epic, a particular love of Tibetan culture), on the Odyssey and shamanism when I was young. So I knew the area of interest, and have many books on the topic, up to 1975. But that familiarity with the topic is now highly dated. I won't have much time, given the 24/7 requirements of following the Paris Olympics, but, if this proceeds, then by all means drop me a note if the project grazes things that you might think, from the above, that I have a reasonable knowledge of. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:22, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

the project page is Wikipedia:WikiProject Anthropology/Oral tradition taskforce, maybe watch it for a short while to see if any discussions pique your interest? Kowal2701 (talk) 11:57, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Bookmarked- But I have far too much on my plate to actively participate, as apart from keeping an eye on the pages. Regards Nishidani (talk) 12:04, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

That's okay, no worries Kowal2701 (talk) 12:06, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

July 2024

Please stop attacking other editors, as you did on Majdal Shams attack. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Comment on content, not on other contributors or people. In this discussion, you’re accusing an editor of POV-pushing because they Wikilink the article Druze in Israel in relation to Druze in the Golan heights. However, the scope of that article covers the Druze in the Golan heights.

Worse, in my view, you are doing this by misrepresenting their edit. You’re claiming that the displayed text was “Druze in Israel town”, when it was in fact “Druze town”.

Please remember that WP:CIVIL is a policy, and that article talk pages are not the correct place to raise conduct concerns. BilledMammal (talk) 13:58, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

I did not attack editors. I commented on the content, which consisted of a legal falsification. You followed up by appearing to say the text I challenged could stand, (Druze in the Golan Heights? Israeli Druze in the Golan Heights?) and I asked you not to second that kind of editing. It was a request. Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Your section is titled "POV pushing", and you say ABHammad’s revert is particularly POV-charged. You’re accusing ABHammad of POV pushing, which is an aspersion - one that you justified by misrepresenting their edit.

This is attacking editors, and I ask you withdraw it. BilledMammal (talk) 14:13, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

I am getting sick and tired of editors, this must the fifth time this year, scouring my contributions to find some piddling evidence to take me to AE. If you are saying that no editor should correct another when the latter falsifies a text blatantly - there is not a flyspeck of doubt that to state, as they did in their link, that the Druze in the occupied Golan heights town of Majdal Shams are Druze in Israel is 'POV-pushing'. POV pushing consists, as you know, in this case, of using wikipedia to put across an opinion that happens to coincide with a nationalistic viewpoint, as though it were a fact. And the method used, creating a link identifying the Golan Druze as Druze in Israel did exactly that. It is not a content dispute, since the Druze in question are not in Israel. You disagree, fine. But the text was falsified, and the falsification mirrors an Israeli national POV, which was used to replace an objective legal definition of that area. ABHammad's case at AE is still under adjudication, and this revert of his doesn't help. NB that I am virtually the only editor in this area who rigorously avoids recourse to any form of sanction in wikipedia forums when these abuses crop up. I use the talk page, exhaustively. I didn't complain about your templating an experienced editor either, though it is again, poor practice, and somewhat intimidatory in appearance. Why did you head this lament July 2024 by the way. Is this going to be a monthly thing? Don't answer. Just desist from this niggling. Nishidani (talk) 15:44, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

The article that most comprehensively covers the Druze in the Golan Heights is Druze in Israel. You might see it as POV-pushing, but it is reasonable to see it as linking to the article that provides the most information for the reader.

I don't want to take you to AE, because when you are being civil you're an excellent editor. The issue is that you are often not civil, and this is yet another example of that - and a particularly concerning one, because you misrepresented their edit, claiming that they added On 27 July 2024, an explosive projectile hit the Druze in Israel town of Majdal Shams in the northern Golan Heights, when what they added was On 27 July 2024, an explosive projectile hit the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the northern Golan Heights.

Your own evidence confirms my point about falsification 'an explosive projectile hit the Druze in Israel|Druze town.' Perhaps someone else can point out to you that Druze on the Golan Heights are not in Israel, as the link insinuates, and many of them have Syrian citizenship. The missile hit Syrian territory, and killed mercilessly Syrian Druze. How you think I 'misrepresent' the edit is beyond my powers of comprehension.Nishidani (talk) 19:37, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

You misrepresent it most significantly in this comment, where you misquote them as having said "Druze in Israel town", when they actually said "Druze town".

You also misrepresent it in your earlier comment, when you say they state that it is in Israel, when all they do is wikilink an article.

All I’m asking is that you correct these misrepresentations - and hopefully, also avoid personalising disputes in the future. BilledMammal (talk) 22:59, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

@BilledMammal: Adding a POV wikilink is also considered POV pushing, and we have a policy against that – it's called WP:DUE – which explicitly applies not only to article text but to images, wikilinks, external links, categories, templates, and all other material as well. You might like to acquaint yourself with it. — kashmīrī ^TALK 12:00, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm asking that when you contribute to article talks pages you focus on the content, and not the editors - and if you do need to comment on the editors, you do so on their talk pages or the appropriate noticeboard. This isn't difficult to do, and it would make the topic area a more pleasant area to edit in while also saving you from having to deal with editors complaining to you about this.

I would like to drop this now, regardless of whether you correct the issue or not, and hope you keep it in mind in the future, but because you've misrepresented ABHammad's edit I don't think that is appropriate. Can you at least correct that aspect?

Why did you head this lament July 2024 by the way. Is this going to be a monthly thing?

Because Twinkle automatically applies that heading when a warning is issued. Regarding the template, I follow WP:TTR. BilledMammal (talk) 16:46, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Nope. Wikipedia is not a reliable source, as you know, and one cannot cite the primitive to middling articles we have as evidence of anything. The rest is rubbish. We're all grown up here, adults. I focus massively on content, and don't need to be lectured on it as if in 97,000 edits and a 1,000+articles I have been focused on random passers-by who edit them, rather than the content. I probably am the major content contributor in this area, in an area where most contributions are monitoring and tweaks. It is not 'pleasant' to edit tragedies, but anyone with an historical sense who does so should do so with detachment, and zero tolerance of messing with history.Nishidani (talk) 19:19, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence AFD

If the Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence article survives its AFD, are you committed to improving that article and making it better sourced? I haven't voted yet either way in the AFD, because while that clearly is a notable topic, I also think the article in its current state is not worth preserving. But if I could know for sure that you'll improve it, I might vote for keep. 2A02:FE1:7191:F500:1D68:AEEA:EBA5:D751 (talk) 01:58, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm really astonished that editors could ever think that topic doesn't deserve an article. It may be true that, as gutted, it isn't worth preserving. but that only begs the question as to why this earlier version was disembowelled?. And sows a suspicion that any effort to do or redo the article on scientific lines will, despite the time spent, end up being editwarred out of existence.

Since the votes are overwhelmingly for deletion, I decided not to waste my time improving it. To do that means sitting down, reading nothing else, and writing it up at one stretch for several hours, with a sense that one has a clock ticking nearby, a kind of temporal gun at one's head. Articles should be written also for the personal pleasure of doing them. If this survives by some freak, I'll revise it from top to bottom, but probably first offline (and then plunk the result down as a single edit), and not immediately. Certainly not while viewing the Olympics is a priority. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 05:56, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

As I said in my comment in the AFD, the reason most of the content about this topic keeps being removed appears to be that other users aren't willing to follow WP:SOURCEGOODFAITH. Some of the recent comments in the AFD support that analysis. Elisha'o'Mine recently made a similar complaint about excluding the journal Intelligence. [8] Another example of an evidently high-quality source being removed as a non-RS, just a few days ago, was this edit. [9]

@Elisha'o'Mine: Can you offer any suggestions about how to address this issue of WP:SOURCEGOODFAITH? It has affected many separate articles and sources, so it can't be resolved on a single article's talk page. 2A02:FE1:7191:F500:1D68:AEEA:EBA5:D751 (talk) 08:51, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

I know virtually nothing about wiki policies, and avoid discussions of them like the plague. Like many, I obtained a tertiary degree, in a discipline that required (a) mastery of primary sources in another language (b) the best secondary source commentaries and interpretations then (c) paraphrasing (a) in terms of (b) so that (d) one could produce an overview of the given topic (and we had to do that three times a year, with papers that ran to 5,000 words or so, at least in my case). So, when I cam to wiki, I proceeded to implement this commonsensical but standard scholarly approach. I can see the reasons why we have so many intricate policy discussions because we are a very mixed community that, quite fairly and properly, must cater to all backgrounds, and develop its own culture to mediate and negotiate disagreements. A lot of them, though, reflect either unfamiliarity with a fairly straightforward mode of writing things up, or POV/politically correct sensibilities of pronounced sharpness.

So I can provide no advice here, except to note that theories that rub up against either common ethical perceptions of equality, or which, in terms of the consensus of a scientific discipline, don't get that much traction or are viewed as contentious, methodologically or otherwise, tend to start alarm bells ringing and panic attacks that destroy coverage itself. I once termed what I did professionally as 'morology' the study of stupid statements made by notable scholars - and I think the best way to counter ideas that challenge a general consensus is to analyse them coolly and provide the public readership with a guide to the concepts and their reception. When I did this with the travailed Khazar hypothesis, an unbelievable amount of contentious deletions, challenges, etc., arose wanting to rid wikipedia of the very possibility of covering it. Fortunately, after long 'battles' eventually I wrote Khazars (and the essential core of Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry) to a fair GA level, but it took months to obtain an understanding that I wasn't a true believer in the idea the Ashkenazi derived from Khazaria, or that my sheer curiosity was somehow an anti-Zionist dodge, to the contrary. Since Koerstler's book came out I have remained sceptical. The idea has a fascinating history that merited close study.

At this stage in my wikilife I don't want to work in articles entangled mercilessly in hostilities and revert battles. If the air clears, I'd be delighted, however, to chip in.Nishidani (talk) 09:51, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

I notice you've begun working to improve the article's sourcing. Thanks for putting effort into that. But I'll need to see whether improving the article proves to be possible before I can decide how to vote. There will likely be a lot of attempts to remove sources and content from this article, like there were in the article's past version, and that seems to have begun happening again already.

As you decide how to handle that issue, I suggest reading my comment here, along with the external discussion I linked to in the first sentence of that comment. For the reasons I explained there, on this and similar topics there is a tension between the view that is held by a majority of Wikipedia editors, and the view presented in the majority of secondary sources. Wikipedia editors have actively discouraged the systematic examination of secondary literature that was done there. Unless someone can find a way to resolve that contradiction, it will be necessary to choose between rewriting the article in a manner consistent with the majority of the secondary literature, as required by WP:NPOV, or in a manner consistent with internal Wikipedia consensus. 2A02:FE1:7191:F500:1D68:AEEA:EBA5:D751 (talk) 20:43, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, the usual ideological nervousness forming a stumbling block. If even an addition to a bibliography can lead to erasures, an addition that is cited in numerous secondary sources, then I've no desire to waste my time there in editwarring and endless talk page divagations, esp. among editors who show no interest in the topic other than as ostensible allo-POV monitors. I can imagine that if I paraphrased the following passage from a reputable book, the majority of editors you mention would go bezirk.

Piffer (2015) published another study using molecular genetic data in a different way to reach the same conclusion about genes contributing to between-group differences in intelligence. He used data about how frequently particular alleles appear in different racial and ethnic groups throughout the world and discovered that populations that have high average numbers of alleles associated with increased intelligence did indeed have high average 1Qs. Piffer (2019) later replicated this study. However, it is important to recognize that these two studies investigate a tiny handful of alleles that could contribute to intelligence differences. Even if Piffer’s (2015,2019) studies are correct and all the alleles have a causal impact on IQ (both uncertain prospects at this time), the total impact on those alleles is still to small to explain any non.trivial amount of the IQ gap between racial groups.

Piffer’s studies, though, examine averages across human populations. Individual-level data would be more conclusive. A recent study (Dunkel, Woodley of menie, Pallesen, & Kirkegaard, 2019) suggests that the same genes that may cause individual differences in intelligence may also cause average group differences in intelligence. The researchers calculated polygenic scores of intelligence for Americans descended from European Jews (the ethnic group that has the highest average IQ in the world) and Americans descended from non-Jewish Europeans. The results showed that the European Jewish group had more alleles (on average) associated with higher IQ than the comparison group. Although the comparison did not involve different racial groups, it is important because European Jews spent several hundred years genetically isolated from their Christian neighbors, whioch could create unique genetic characteristics compared to other Europeans (Cochrane et al., 2006, Cochran & Harpending, 2009). Therefore, this study provided circumstantial evidence that genes can be implicated in some between-group differences in average IQ.(Russell T. Warne, In the Know:Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Cambridge University Press 2020 ISBN 978-1-108-60221-1 p. p.275.)

When I read RS with an excellent publishing venue by recognized experts, I don't purse my lips like a gudgeon and take the juicy bite because something there might tickle my fancy (to mix metaphors) or react with horror because it might upset some opinion I've long entertained. I just register it, and make some mental notes (in the above I noted a possible Utah-Mormon connection tacitly present in several of these positive evaluations, which might bias the author though no secondary source I'm familiar with makes that possibility present) while accepting that the source passes muster. I follow various trails, and read things like D. Piffer, A review of intelligence GWAS hits: their relationship to country IQ and the issue of spatial autocorrelation, Intelligence Volume 53, November–December 2015, pp 43-50, Curtis S. Dunkel, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Jonatan Pallesen, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Polygenic scores mediate the Jewish phenotypic advantage in educational attainment and cognitive ability compared with Catholics and Lutherans, Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences vol.13, issue 4, pp. 366–375 etc.etc. And while I do these exercises in thematic spoor scouring, I imagine that too many editors editors are just hanging around like birds of prey over articles and talk pages to spare themselves enough time to actually chase up a subject down to its obscurest byways. That would mean a lot of reading. if you read alot you have less time to edit articles, which seems to be a sexy pastime (all present company excepted).

So, as has often been the case in the past, I've decided to write the article in wiki style without posting it, just for my own illumination, which is one of the primary reasons that drive me to contribute to wiki, a venue for extended autodidacticism. It'll go into a file. Who knows, if I still stick round like a stale fart, and see the temperature in this room has lowered, and the anxieties diminished, I might add it some years down the track. I have enough bickering in the IP area for my daily nonsense quota without getting dragged into that censorious parlour. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

And just in case there is any ambiguity read into my citation from Warne about some hidden POV I might be suspected of entertaining, I’ll dump here my comment at the relevant page. I actually giggled to myself when I spotted the naivity of Warne, with all of his qualifications, under the impress of Cambridge University Press, taking questionable research, published in RS, so uncritically. Nishidani (talk) 04:05, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

The article is dead in the water, and the short version is a laughingstock, and remains so because editors, instead of diving into the full scholarly history on this topic, keep flensing it to its skeletal caricature of an article. I simply noted in that bibliography how a future article, radically rewriting this nonsense, should be sourced (only a small sample). With the atmosphere surrounding this topic, evidently any work on actually rewriting the page for wikipedia would be pointless.

I find it very comical to see that knee-jerk approaches to what would have been a Sander Gilman-(I have cited him as authoritative in many articles long before encountering this one, and subscribe to virtually everything he writes) type analysis of the fringe or minority 'researchers'(most have academic credentials, some like Davide Piffer even had a research position, apparently at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and get their ideas into peer-reviewed journals and even highly praised books like Warne's (see my page) who meddle with borderline theories of ethno-racial differences can't get past an editorial consensus hostile to even naming these people on wikipedia. In my own view these ideas are rubbish, but influential rubbish (built, nb, on a core of results on allele distributions among populations that emerged from a scientific methodology but whose interpretation, and generalizations from them, is extremely complex, as often such things are in evolutionary population studies) and should be taken apart as such, just as a couple of us did with numerous articles on the trash pseudo-scholarship surrounding Shakespeare's identity, despite the biliousness of editors who subscribe to that nonsense. So, all the anxieties about exploring this nonsense are totally dislocated from that curiosity with weird stereotypes (in this case about Ashkenazi, often promoted by some notable Ashkenazi themselves) which the equanimity of deep scholarship handles with ease (for which Sander Gilman is our palmary guide). I'm done here, in both senses. Nishidani (talk) 03:53, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Archaeology in the IP area today

• Nesrine Malik, The Gaza archaeologist: Inflation is 500% – and the tents are like an oven,' The Guardian 2 August 2024
• Ruth Schuster, 'After October 7: Israeli Archaeologists Create Methodology to Find Human Remains in War Zones,' Haaretz 30 July 2024 Nishidani (talk) 07:56, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Does this pass the smell test?

Hey, I hope you are well. It appears pretty plausible to me, but it’s a BLP, and I might be missing something.

The wrap about Bisan Owda FortunateSons (talk) 13:10, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

G'day. I'm fine though, as I watch Carlos Alcaraz showing signs of wilting under a revitalized Djokevic's play at the Paris Olympics, somewhat disgruntled myself moodwise. Nothing against Djokevic, but the old ought to leave some space for the young, though it's fair that the latter must earn their way up by the same hard yakka their elders applied themselves to.

So a pro-Israeli lobby with the comical name Creative Community for Peace, associated with the deplorably mendacious StandWithUs (apparently to secure tax-free status), cites a certain Eitan Fischberger as reported in TheWrap, an entertainment news outlet well known for the ‘toxic’ environment in which its many disgruntled employees work, for a possibly damaging innuendo about Miss Owda.

Fischberger apparently came across or dug up' some traces in the record suggesting that Bisan Owda, who keeps having to shift around the Gaza Strip as her home, and then areas where she flees to, are sequentially bombed, in the past may have had some links to George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which down to 2004 had engaged in a number of suicide bombings, a practice later disowned (the presumed association with the Murder of Rina Shnerb was extracted under extreme torture). The PFLP is a ‘terrorist’ organization for the USA and some other Western countries, and therefore an award for her reportage from under the bombs would be sanctioning a terrorist. Go figure how all of the dots here are connected.

The guilt by association with the PFLP recycles the technique used to try and destroy Khalida Jarrar. The point of all this is character-assassination, and the source for it is Fischberger who reports from his comfortable digs in Jerusalem on the terrorist connections of a young bomb-dodging Gaza lass who risks ending up on the list of 113, so far, mainly Palestinian journalists killed by IDF strikes in the Gaza Strip since October. (I always do this mental background work as I read news articles: imagine the lifestyle of the journalist reporting, and the life(less) styles the former write about) As Owda huddles in the rubble, after managing to fork out the inflated fees charged there to recharge her Iphone and reconnect to the internet, some folks in LA have gone ballistic at the idea that her reportage from a war zone (it lacks 'context and nuance', hahaha!) was being given some recognition, ergo indirect empathy with the victims of a Palestinian tragedy in which roughly 140,000 people have been killed or wounded so far. Good grief. Leave the pseudo-journalistic 'terrorist' to scurry about anonymously like a hunted rat. It's none of our business to scrape up some inkling of what's happening there.

I'm prejudiced in this, since I admire George Habash. Admiration has nothing to do with approval of the PFLP's past history. It is a matter of grasping the extraordinary predicament highly intelligent men like him found themselves in, within a factional world riddled by personal corruption and opportunism (Fatah, but the same could be said for many mainstream Israeli and Western politicians).

In short, while I find this order of gossip, as I do all gossip, tasteless, and feel all this stinks, and I don't think the source is good, if better sources come forth stating that Creative Community for Peace called for her Peabody Award to be recinded because of her alleged past connection with the PFLP, then that probably should be acceptable. (I don't think getting interested in that kind of 'news' very healthy for the project because it all reflects image battles conducted for political ends and narrative dominance on the internet, not significant historical data). Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:43, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll cut to the chase. Since there are several highly reliable sources that affirm prominent Palestinians (Refaat Alareer, Adnan al-Bursh, Ismail al-Ghoul etc.etc.) were targeted because they were considered close to Hamas (mostly crap), the mere fact that a bruited connection to PFLP can be made out for Bisan Owda qualifies her immediately as targetable, since Israel holds that organization as in part responsible for 7 October. This places editors somewhat in a predicament, BLP-wise, since publicizing even by correct reportage, such an insinuation makes space for a casus necandi(grounds for killing). The insinuation is on the internet, but whether it should be reported on a wiki bio, given such a possibility, requires more expertise in BLP than I can boast of.Nishidani (talk) 15:37, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

I think this is the most convincing argument, and also the one that made me hesitate enough to instead prefer waiting for a few days or weeks instead of adding it today.

Regardless of my own wholly unqualified legal opinion on where the line between „mere“ propaganda and the engagement in hostilities is to be drawn, I’m rather hesitant to place information that I would plausibly consider legal justification for the targeting of a person barely older than some of my friends to be something done without at least a second of hesitation. Having said that, the information is out and covered by RS, and I don’t believe that an Israeli strike cell is likely to read her English-language Wikipedia article but miss the news source, even ignoring the practical question of it being a mistake, whether or not it’s a crime (whoever one attributes this quote too). FortunateSons (talk) 10:03, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

As always, I appreciate the thoughtful response.

My condolences for Alcaraz‘s loss, but I’m sure the young will have the chance to beat the old guard another day.

I understand your dislike for that sort of „news“ (even if I am one of the people advocating for its inclusion) and don’t love some of the ties of that org either, even if the same or worse could be said about organisations on the other side.

I empathise with the plight of Palestinians in general and of Bisan specifically (not least of all because an acquaintance/friend of mine has chosen her as an avenue of „unbiased“ information, despite my recommendation to the contrary).

No matter one’s opinion on the Rina case, their participation in the Oct. 7 attack doesn’t seem to be disputed (based on the wiki page, I don’t speak any Arabic). I think you can guess that we end up on opposite sides of the discussion and its practical results when it comes to the PFLP and those that choose to align themselves with the organisation. In the same way, we are likely rooting for opposite sides of the book I’m currently reading too. I intellectually, even if not emotionally, understand your position, and hope that you can say the same.

Having said that, and based on the information provided, I would still consider the source reliable (in line with its perennial sources listing), and will likely cite it with attribution, despite your plausible ethical objection brought forward. However, I wouldn’t at all be offended if you choose to revert me for it :) FortunateSons (talk) 09:47, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

No. If people ask me for advice on an article, I don't follow them around to revert them if they disagree with my counsel. As to Bergman's book, it is a very important, if rather too 'sexy' a work, documenting many of the 2,700 murders/targeted assassinations the state of Israel has carried out since just before its foundation onwards. The precedent this world record sets is that Israel should never complain if any other state murders any of its citizens on the grounds that whatever they do is a threat to their security. The number of course is far larger, since murdering protestors who pose no threat to your life or limbs, being snipered at from a safe distance of 80-400 metres would make that minimal statistic skyrocket. In my view it means again that Israel has adopted the principle of Ausnahmezustand elaborated by a Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whereby extralegal measures are justified in a state of emergency. Since Israel will always live in a state of emergency, for structural reasons, the lesson is one must get used to killing as a natural exercise of an existential Staatsräson, no matter who wins the elections. Nishidani (talk) 22:19, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the perspective, and thank you for the time and the wise thoughts, even when I (respectfully) disagree with the assessment.

I know, I did pick it because it was „sexy“, but I was more than done with dull, particularly considering I’m committing the cardinal sin of reading it as a PDF on my smartphone during my daily commute, a hazardous task due to my generations famously short attention spans. On a lighter note, is the weather bearable down there? Here, it barely gets over thirty, but the reports for most of the Mediterranean look bad.

I would argue that the Americans (and likely the Soviets/Russians) have almost certainly exceeded the Israeli record on targeted killings (though not per capita), particularly considering that both are rather likely to be a lot less transparent about the actual numbers than Israel is (not necessarily due to any ethical distinctions, just structural ones). However, neither of those is likely to win a „most ethical state“ award in the near future, so…

Regarding the hypocrisy of states - I’m inclined to agree with the logic but disagree with the outcome. Otherwise, Palestine and Lebanon would have no right to complain about their soldiers (or honestly civilians) being blown up by Israel, based on de-facto representative armed bodies doing it to Israelis before.

Murder (implying unlawful) is an almost pointless category when discussing actions taken by a state against what can plausibly be described as combatants, though that again is a pedantic distinction. The innocent people dying during protests (both violent and non-violent), are a tragedy neither side is taking any serious steps to avoid, but definitely one where Israel is doing maddeningly little to fix a perfectly solvable problem.

I’m not educated enough on the concept to disagree beyond a gut feeling, but will add it to my seemingly never-ending to-be-read-list. As always, thank you.

Do you really believe that there won’t be peace/a two-state solution within our lifetime? I feel like once this round of fighting ends, few people will have an appetite for more. FortunateSons (talk) 23:31, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

I made it clear from the beginning of editing the I/P area (almost two decades ago) that I believe it pointless to edit under the assumption that setting the record straight will have the slightest impact on soi-disant peace talks or the resolution of what is, by its nature, politically intractable (for Israel - there is no possibility any coalition would ever have the numbers to assent to withdrawing from the West Bank). As to Italy, yes, it's very hot: the desertification of the south, its Africanization, is proceeding, as was long predictable, at the rate of 12 kms per annum. But I at least live in a forested niche that is always cooled by a air currents running along the partially walled landscape, so that the house and its gardens are always pleasantly fresh. A basement apartment defies any heat wave. I'm lucky in my original choice. Everyone else every evening complains of the swelter.

Ernest Gellner once asked me why I chose to live in Italy. I replied that since the early 80s I had a strong impression the postwar world's miracle was ending (an intuition seemingly corroborated two decades later by the thesis of Thomas Piketty), and that we, denizens of the peaceful aftermath of empire, were sleepwalking into a dangerous structural revolution of drift towards chaos for which more developed countries were ill-prepared. 'Progress' in the naively optimistic sense, as 'change for the better', was a dead letter. In that sense, Italy was relatively safer from the temptations of recrudescent ideologies and the politics of resentment. Gellner, who'd got out of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust, and who had a villa in Imperia, nodded understandingly.

Functional modern nations (Italy has always been a failed state in the classic sense) would have little in their cultural DNA to cope with the inevitable disruptions of what had been taken to be the normal state of life, with its slow ameliorative progress. Italy has coped with fuckups for 2,000 years by drawing on a kind of self-defeating but momentarily effective, grabbag of complex flexible work-around solutions that tend to give one a momentary respite. They are in good part instinctive existential bricoleurs who, comparatively, don't tend to vent their frustrations in violence. Even Mussolini despaired of ever re-engineering the country to some semblance of institutional coherence and efficiency. A good number of fascists in my area hid Jews, or tipped them off, or secreted in their gardens valuables the affected families confided to their care and returned them after the war). That is not to underestimate the evil of the regime, and its satrap-bootlicking followers. It's a country I disliked at first (aged 19), but grew to admire and prefer over any other for its traditional decencies. Having said all that, mentally I am taking apart every affirmation I've made as reflexive challenges to what are feelings kick in. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 01:36, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

I understand that view, and believe that you may be right, though I would place the blame for the inability to find a reasonable compromise (even if it had to be that atrocious thing Trump considers a peace plan) firmly on both sides, owing to both sides (misguided) belief that further fighting will have any benefit worth the price being paid by innocents on both sides. While it may be idealistic, and my goal is to build an encyclopedia, I do have a likely naive hope that an agreement on a set of facts may in some way - even if marginally - aid the finding of a compromise, that, if not reasonable, is at least tolerable for all sides. I’m sorry to hear about the heat and desertification, and am glad you found a good escape, even if partially by coincidence. I’m not enjoying my time in the significantly milder German heat (or, one might argue, became spoiled by the air conditioning installed in my childhood home during my teens), despite us rarely getting over 30 degrees. My best friend is considering moving to a colder place, and I’m tempted to follow her for the climate alone, though I will feel differently in the fall.

That’s a fascinating argument for Italy, and one I must admit to never have considered. I have put - or more accurately, am putting - a significant amount of thought into the question of where I want to live, having likely excluded Israel and the US despite my love for both cultures (which might be a hot take here, considering how different both are), and with the exceptions of escape plans (or hopes?) to New Zealand if our local problem makes the northern hemisphere unliveable, I’m genuinely unsure. I have spent little more than a month in Italy during my life (in total, split across a few excellent beaches, Rome andVenice), and found the people, culture and cuisine to be amazing, but while I have strong plans to visit more in the future, must admit that I didn’t ‘vibe‘ with it in the same way I have with France and Austria, though that could simply be the cultural proximity.

Nevertheless, your description of the culture seems rather charming to me (even excluding the hope that if push came to shove, the people might buy me a bit of additional time, however unlikely and arguably irrational that scenario is). Perhaps I should give the country a proper chance as a place to settle down…

Was Italy that different from where you came from? Was the initial dislike just culture shock, or a more specific objection?

As always, I thank you for the fascinating read. FortunateSons (talk) 19:47, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

No. There is no parity. Israel is a nuclear power, with over 600 aircraft, among the most advanced missile delivery systems in the world, which have offloaded by now somewhere like 70,000 tons of bombs on Gazans, whereas Hamas has piddling Qassam rockets that have no guidance systems and cause little damage, most hitting desert areas. (Hamas has had the rocket and mortar capacity to obliterate the kibbutzim on its borders for a decade. It never exercised that option). Israel's pro-capita GNP is about $56,000 vs Palestinians' $3,700 (in Gaza $800. There is a book by Sara Roy arguing that Israel, certainly in the Gaza Strip, has planned its 'dedevelopment' since 1967). All four uprisings by Palestinians started as popular peaceful strikes, and were put down with extreme repressive violence first by Great Britain and then by Israel (Thrall) All conflict there is a foregone conclusion even before it starts. Israel is backed to the hilt, financially and militarily by a superpower. Palestinians who manage to secure arms generally have AK-47s, knives and slingshots. Negotiations between midgets and giants will not find the former kindly patted on the head, with their Hobbit farmlands restored. As Nathan Thrall has perceptively concluded, the only way peace can come about is if the world imposes it. For Israel has nothing to win, being a great military power with extensive settlements, and the Palestinians have little to gain from any peace the U.S. and Israel would broker. I met a Palestinian businessman by sheer serendipity or chance in a restaurant yesterday. His family was land-rich and were expelled from Haifa at gunpoint in 1948. They could have pocketed a few million dollars were he to sign over their historic landholdings, now technically alienated 'enemy property'. On principle, they didn't, and won't. Very few people, esp. in Israel and the U.S. have any understanding of how profound that sense of rootedness in their homeland remains, and their readiness to put up with impossible conditions at whatever cost just to remain who they are. It is not some theological abstraction of homecoming to them, but the taste of the soil, its air, its groves, even its ingenious poverty.

Italy. More hunger shock. The only cultures that have ever 'shocked' me are Anglophone places like the U.S., England and Australia. I left my wallet in my luggage, which arrived 10 days later, so I had to survive on just one piece of pizza a day after breakfast in a prepaid hotel. No English people understood me because I spoke rapidly in pure Australian dialect, so I had to take on a reading course in New Testament Greek (I'd already studied classical Greek for a year so that was tedious) just to sit next to a PhD graduate from Cambridge to pick up his accent, and learn to speak with what, when I returned, my relatives called a 'plum in the mouth' (posh). I lived in Italy but only left my room for an evening walk and piece of pizza, or a quarter loaf of bread with mortadella, the rest of the time I spent reading for 14 hours a day in classical Greek, French and German, apart from reading Dante and Cavalcanti in Italian. So i had no contact with the country at all. All I noted was young couples getting engaged in mid adolescence, strolling happily down the street, and then 19-20 year old couples, now married, pushing a pram with exhausted looks on their faces. When, as some distraction from my studies, I first went into a bookshop in Perugia and purchased Che Guevara's book on Guerrilla warfare and an annotated copy of the Bhagavad Gita, - the cost meant I had to forego eating for a day - the communist bookseller asked me if I needed to see a doctor. I decided I was cut out to be a Tibetan Buddhist and, after some months in Kfar Aza, was heading for Nepal when a death in the family prompted me to return home, where I completed my classics degree, thankfully.Nishidani (talk) 20:29, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

That story is moving, and quite sad. While I consider his choice to be unwise, I also can’t say with confidence that I would make a different one under equal circumstances. However, if for no reason other than the Israel nuclear program, they cannot be effectively coerced by force, the probability of sufficient political pressure is low, and the Palestinians (insofar as polling can be indicative of such a thing) do not seem to be willing to take a deal „bad enough“ for Israel to accept it, and Israel does not seem to be willing to make an offer good enough to entice the Palestinians. Even just the Jerusalem problem will be a permanent obstacle to peace, and there is nothing (except my personal pet theory) that other countries could offer Israel to give up on the strategic (or „strategic“, depending on who you ask) parts of the occupied territories, even ignoring the facts on the grounds created by the people in the settlements, who can neither be forcefully removed nor forcefully placed into a Palestinian state. In other words: I hope you are wrong, and I fear you are right.

Regarding Italy: I must admit, whenever I read your stories, I feel like I’m squandering my youth (and also like my generation is rather soft compared to yours). Except for dodging old Greek, no regrets there. I was tortured with Latin for half a decade, and my displeasure with the alternative (French) was likely been minute compared to old Greek, despite having to admit that I seem to be missing out on some amazing literature due to my regrettable dislike of dead languages. To read them seems to provide an insight quite literally lost in translation.

Considering I can’t keep my British and my American spelling in line, I would say a posh accent isn’t the worst thing in the world. The lost wallet must have felt like a kick in the gut, while it must have been 40 or so years ago, I do really feel sorry for you, it surely was highly unpleasant.

On an off-color note, I’m personally always shocked by such couples; I can barely keep myself appropriately fed, and just had tea and chocolate for dinner (to be fair, my illness has taken out both my sense of smell and appetite at once, but still).

If you have spent time in Kfar Aza, I do hope that the people you know there are ok. FortunateSons (talk) 21:14, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

I knew many good people there but never kept up correspondence. It was the first thing I checked and rechecked on Oct.7. I believe several older people I must have known died, and many young people. Just as I believe most of the kids inside Gaza who engaged with me as I walked round Gaza (getting past Israeli border guards who told me I risked being murdered), offering me marujuana, and when knocked back, Turkish coffee and sweets in a bar run by a dear and gentle old man, are probably dead or maimed. Some kibbutzniks may have been upset that I emptied the box of free prophylactics in their pharmacy to make balloons for a party. Only one was annoyed by my walking around with a keffiyah and a borrowed Scottish kilt:) Don't take my personal stories as sorrowful. When Alitalia found out I had no money, they gave me a gift of 15,000 lire (160 euros adjusted for inflation), and I had a secret thrill at the challenge of getting by on that for perhaps a month. It was great fun. As my relatives said of me, I seemed to like slumming it. My earliest drawing, aged 4, was a self-portrait of a swaggie with a caption telling my father I was going to hit the road:) Nishidani (talk) 21:43, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

You have my deepest condolences, for both groups. War is hell.

I must admit, that story is representative of just about everything I know and like about Israelis ;)

I‘m glad you took it well. Perhaps it’s my own peculiarity (and privilege), but I’m glad it was a pleasant rather than an unpleasant story for you. Considering my worst stories with food are primarily living off chocolate cookies smuggled into the accommodation at a two-week „educational“ summer camp in England (for no more than five days, caused by my stomach and taste buds disagreeing with the food served, before the revolt of my peers got us edible food) and not eating anything in Paris for a day while walking no less than 20.000 steps after getting a table for one on a restaurant I wanted to absolutely try, only for them to „lose“ (not like my young face and German accent) my reservation, and everything else having closed on account of it being a holiday, it could truly just be me being way too soft. You don’t still happen to have the drawing? I can’t imagine how a child would draw that. :) FortunateSons (talk) 22:03, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, don't get me started on English cooking. After all, I live in Italy which sets the benchmark. My sister conserved the drawing and gave it to me some years ago. Drawing ran in the family: my father began as a professional draftsman, his brother, my uncle, was a commercial artist with a brief stint at the Disney studios before he was arrested and repatriated after joining the US army to avoid starving, and then going AWOL. My brother is an accomplished artist: some years ago he did a wall-size reproduction of Banksy's Flower Thrower on commission and picked up another to reproduce a Monet both covering a whole wall. His drawings when he was six never depicted trees: he drew distinct species like stringybarks, messmates and river redgums. My brother still insists, too generously, I was as competent as he turned out to be, but I never kept it up, after I topped the class in drawing at 10 (as a new boy to the college) and the lad I wanted to make friends with, who customarily won all the prizes at school, broke down crying. Since then I only did one drawing, a portrait of my wife asleep in an armchair just after we married. I'm writing these anecdotes on the slim hope that they may distract you from your distressing symptoms.Nishidani (talk) 23:15, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, I have never been disappointed by Italian Food. That’s an incredibly sweet story (except the hunger an repatriation), and must admit that having enough income to commission good art is at least part of my motivation to get a high-paying job. Perhaps you should try drawing again? There must be something in your area that is worthy of being drawn, if you aren’t looking to do people?

I really appreciate it, thank you! However, as my fever flipped into a burning headache, I can’t quite provide a response of equal quality. FortunateSons (talk) 09:30, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

To answer the initial question, Creative Community for Peace has no expertise on Owda or the PFLP, and their unsubstantiated smear would, if put into the article on her, be removed per BLP. nableezy - 16:51, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

I disagree with that. Creative Community for Peace likely has the necessary expertise to comment on media broadly, and RS take them seriously, as they have here:[1][2]. In addition, there has been additional coverage by lesser sources, which, while not proving significance, does indicate it [3][4]apologies for linking that garbage, but they actually got a NATAS response, which for me indicates something about the general state of US media. With 2 or 3 standalone articles in RS, it’s due for an attributed mention at the very least, particularly with photo evidence. FortunateSons (talk) 20:00, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Your first source attributes it to a "pro-Israeli activist", your second is indeed garbage. If you were to put in rumor about a living person, attributed or not, it would be removed. If you restore it you would be violating WP:BLPREQUESTRESTORE and would be brought to AE for violating the BLP arbitration case. For Creative Community for Peace being taken seriously, you provide a garbage source (Algemeiner) and an opinion piece by Seth Mandel. Again, there is no evidence for the claim that Creative Community for Peace has any expertise in Owda or the PFLP and if you were to attempt to cite them to include an unsubstantiated smear against her you would be reverted. nableezy - 20:51, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Thankfully, I can state facts, not rumors, considering that „advocate against Emmy nomination, citing ties (based on photo)“ are all facts, not rumours, and, to the best of my knowledge, also not seriously disputed by any of the parties involved. You should (by now) also know that I don’t edit war, but I don’t mind the warning and notice, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Actually, Algemeiner is a RS and cited by others, despite obviously having some bias and, considering an acquaintance failed to pressure them into running what I can only describe as a hitpiece, have pretty good editorial policies. Together with the original source, there is RS coverage supporting the allegation as credible, and claim for the removal of her nomination is due. The other piece is indeed WP:RSEDITORIAL (at least I think, maybe it’s poorly styled news), but it’s also an indication for it being due, at least in my eyes. The other two sources are meh (with the former being technically reliable but just bad, and the second being bad and unreliable). However, 2 RS + 1 High-quality editorial are enough for a talk page discussion, which I will start by making a bold edit for inclusion (which, just for posterity, is permitted by policy) once I’m rid of my infection and my deadline. I invite you to participate in or start the discussion. FortunateSons (talk) 21:28, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Generally, the past IP record, while not wholly dismissing the Algeiner, does consider its material of poor quality in its all too predictable POV warring.Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Can something different be said of any right-leaning or right-wing Jewish source? I’m genuinely asking, it seems like the same objection is levelled towards any source with that POV, regardless of their de-facto reliability for facts. FortunateSons (talk) 09:32, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

What’s a Jewish source? nableezy - 10:50, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

In this context (as in, referring to news) a „community-oriented“ newspaper (or similar), by implication though not necessarily primarily for people in the diaspora. For the purposes of this question, List of Jewish newspapers is probably a decent indicator, even if the article is less than great. FortunateSons (talk) 11:05, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Algemeiner may be a good source on the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, but on the IP conflict it is trash. If Jewish source includes things like ToI then that’s a perfectly acceptable source. JPost closer to the edge. Ynet is fine. None of those strike me as particularly "liberal" in the Israeli usage, ie portraying Palestinians as human beings deserving of fundamental human rights. nableezy - 11:10, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Would you say that any of the right-leaning diaspora sources are reliable for I/P? FortunateSons (talk) 11:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know why we would cite groups with no reporters or insight into what they are reporting. It’s like people citing a times of India article for an attack in Gaza. You do that because you can’t find a real source that knows what it’s talking about for the claim, so you use some crap source to pretend like you have a reliable source for whatever it is you want in the article. nableezy - 11:31, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

International reporting, by professional news with their own fact-checking, can be reliable even without people on the ground. By that logic, we should stop using AJ if Israel is successful with severing their ties with Gaza and the West Bank, a view I’m reasonably confident you would object too. If Times of India is reliable and are reporting information without the information being disputed by a comparable or better source, I see no reason to exclude them for not having reporters on the ground FortunateSons (talk) 11:39, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

I said no reporting or insight. It’s some random person in Brooklyn talking about things they have no idea about. And it’s only used because real sources don’t support what you want to put in an article. Anyway, I’ve answered your questions, if you’d like to try putting in a blp violation you can do that. It’ll be reverted though. nableezy - 12:42, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

The Wrap is a real source for this purpose, I’m just also showing that it’s relevant elsewhere, and an US award given by an organisation headquartered in the city makes it at least indirectly locally relevant, something a professional sources with no other significant issues outside an alleged I/P problem can probably report without issue, as long as the only relevant evidence required is photos, as they are here. FortunateSons (talk) 15:02, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Edit: just as an off-topic note, but The Times of Israel is centre according to Wiki and left of centre according to the (not necessarily reliable) MBFC, same with Ynet (with not comment on the wiki page and left-leaning here, and The Jerusalem Post is the only clearly right-leaning one on your list (MBFC) FortunateSons (talk) 11:33, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

lol nableezy - 12:43, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Good luck with that. nableezy - 03:05, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

'RIght' and 'left' don't have much meaning, certainly in these contexts. A rightwing party can be antisemitic and yet be a strong supporter of Israel (and be politically acceptable to its PM). Ynet, and Jerusalem Post publish a lot of tripe (I read this laughable crap on Ynet this morning) ToL cannot help writing articles based on IDF handouts. The basic line of division is between journalists who take considerations of general human rights into consideration, and journalists who pitch their comments to a particular ethnic community or readers who support such a community. Between journalists who write with a lynx-eyed focus on the full record, and those who just erase much of that record as uncomfortable for their readership.Nishidani (talk) 12:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Of course, there is a variety in integrity between media sources unrelated to political leaning, and even generally reliable news occasionally publish crap. However, if parts of the mainstream political spectrum are not represented by RS, it is a reason for concern IMO. FortunateSons (talk) 14:55, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

August music

story · music · places

Today I have three "musicians" on the Main page, one is also the topic of my story, like 22 July but with interview and the music to be played today -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:09, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for those links, Gerda, particularly the reminder that Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony premiered on this day in 1942. It was uncannily in elegiac harmony with the point made in an earlier exchange where examples (Dinu Lipatti, Kathleen Ferrier etc.,) were cited who performed divinely in public while literally dying on their feet. One can hardly grasp the force of spirit which the members of the Leningrad orchestra who played it must have mustered to give their audience, many of whom were themselves dying of starvation, an evening of music. Three of the players died, I believe, while rehearsing. 'Starvation' naturally makes me think of Gaza, and of Daniel Barenboim's visit there in 2011 ( see his remarks on what, retrospectively, was a kiddie's battle compared to what is happening now), I imagine many of those young people in his audience are now dead, or bedraggled nomads across a bombed-out landscape, much as the audience that listened to the Shostakovich premiere became in 1942 some months afterwards. Musicians should govern the world (musicians of language, poets, absolutely not, despite or because of Mark Twain's dictum that:'History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' Nishidani (talk) 20:05, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

While watching the Serbia vs. US basketball semifinal, my attention drifted away to recalling a Yiddish song appropriate to Gaza. Though written several years earlier, it was often sung in the Warsaw ghetto. I.e. Mordechai Gebirtig ‘s Es brent The best version I know of is Moni Ovadia’s performance before Liliana Segre back in 2016. There are different versions but the core is:-

Es brent, briderlekh, es brent.
Undzer orem shtetl, nebekh, brent!
Beyze vintn irgazon,
Brekhn, brenen un tseblozn,
Un ir shteyt un kukt,
Azoy zikh, mit farleygte hent.
Oy, ir shteyt un kukt
Azoy zikh, vi undzer shtetl brent.

Which I think is fairly comprehensible for a German ear (But if anyone else is peeking: 'It is burning, brothers, it is burning/Our poor little town, a pity, burns!/Furious winds blow/Breaking, burning and scattering,/And you stand around/With folded arms./O, you stand and look/While our town burns.') Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Too often the only way out seems to be singing. The symphony premiere was my story last year. Planned or not, the composer's Piano Quintet is on DYK today. (If planned it was cleverly planned.) I want to expand the Cello Concero in today's story now. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:49, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

On 13 August, Bach's cantata was 300 years old, and the image one. The cantata is an extrordinary piece, using the chorale's text and famous melody more than others in the cycle. It's nice to have not only a recent death, but also this "birthday" on the Main page. And a rainbow in my places. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:04, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Now playing in my library. By coincidence, on 13 August 2024, it was announced that a scheduled piano performance by Jayson Gillham with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was cancelled after Gillham dedicated a prior performance to Palestinian journalists slain in Gaza.(Emily Wind, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancels pianist’s performance after dedication to journalists killed in Gaza The Guardian 13 August 2024) Nishidani (talk) 14:13, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Not sure if this is relevant to you

But it goes part of the way toward explaining why I was quick to revert that particular IP: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Fq90. Wishing you the best, Generalrelative (talk) 15:09, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. To clarify. In the area where I have worked most for almost 2 decades, experience told me from quite early that half of the editors I collaborate with are socks, 99% of whom disagree with me. In some periods, over months, these (to me) obvious sock accounts (and SPA tagteaming groups) constitute up to 80% of the editors one has to deal with on a number of pages.

Until there is evidence that proves that my intuitions, Sprachgefühl, etc., are correct, by checkuser proof following a report, I like many others work under the obligation of WP:AGF, even when the obvious should be staring anyone, admins included, in the face. This has often meant laboriously answering, on multiple pages, one or another editor's comments and reverts, in measured detail for months. What one knows from experience is not enough. Admin-guaranteed proof is required to ensure all editors are protected.

That holds true of the present case. I leave that kind of investigation to capable experts, it is outside the range of my interests. My interests lie exclusively in looking at a piece of text, from whoever, and examining its tenability as encyclopedic. Were one to work in any one field to revert an editor's contribution, simply because one's instincts tell one there is more than an odour of suspicion that one's interlocutor has Been (There) Here Before, the subjective judgment would constantly disrupt the creation of serious content. Nishidani (talk) 16:13, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

For the record, I picked up in an Osaka bookshop and first read material on this topic when chancing across Darlington, Cyril D. (1969). The Evolution of Man and Society. George Allen and Unwin. pp. 183–186. ISBN 978-0-045-75011-5. in December 1975. In the succeeding 49 years of reading, I have never come across convincing evidence that biology has the upper hand in the formation of civilizations or human populations. But I am not unnerved by any argument that has cropped up from time to time asserting the primacy of genetics. I look at the science, and, if its technicalities are beyond me, correspond with friends having that expertise. And if I find it worth writing about, I treat these moments in intellectual history as narratives whose claims, nature and standing in science and history merit clear full neutral exposition. That is what readers need in an age of endless spin, fake narratives and endemic attempts, be they wokeish or wankish (the rightwing version of wokism), to control or dominate what may or may not be said in the public domain about anything 'controversial'. Corralling discourse of any kind is something that disconcerts me, from whatever quarter, politically correct or otherwise. Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for this very thoughtful response. I do appreciate it, and I broadly agree with most of what you have to say. The real sticking point in the R&I topic area, as I see it, is that it is possible for editors to disagree as to where to draw the line between "corralling discourse" for ideological/emotional reasons and simply insisting upon good scientific methodological standards. A great example is this recent paper which I've been adding to articles where the R&I consensus has been challenged. Note that the paper argues that methodological considerations alone should be sufficient to keep most racial hereditarian literature from being published in respectable journals, even where ethical concerns also come into play. It's a pretty good summary, I think, of the way responsible scientists and historians of science view this issue. But when these points get raised in talk space, it's seldom long before someone dismisses them as driven by ideology or emotion. Another good statement is this letter, co-signed by e.g. Agustín Fuentes and Jonathan M. Marks.

Btw, while I'm not a frequent contributor to Palestine/Israel articles, I've long seen you as a voice of reason and just remarkably knowledgeable in that area. You're clearly a deep thinker and a careful reader. So I take your words to heart, even if I may come out the other side disagreeing from time to time. Best, Generalrelative (talk) 19:35, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

That's very kind of you (and by the way for their own sanity I always advise editors to try to avoid the time-sink that is the IP area, unless they have some idealism, a masochistic streak and too much unused time on their hands). Just a short reply for now since I've been nudging the booze all evening while listening to a rock concert in our piazza, the best pagan way to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption:)

We differ only in this. I include science itself in one of the objects of a sociology of knowledge, even while considering that scientific methodology yields better results generally than most other fields of thought because it imposes more constraints on our innate subjectivity. A lot of science in the past turned out to be pseudo-scientific (psychoanalysis, which I still esteem for the way it profoundly enhanced modes of reading what we hear or read in human discourse generally, and, arguably, Skinner's nutty Behaviorism, but one can learn much by studying them historically. If one was raised in a world where in the 60s onwards, one learnt to think in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, White’s metahistories, Foucault’s era-anchored epistemic grids etc.etc., one learn to take on an obligation, both intellectual and moral, to grasp that even the best knowledge we have is inflected by interests, historical, cultural, economic and ideological, and therefore, as we work within any one paradigm, functional, productive, cogent as it may be, that we must keep an eye on its exclusionary complacencies. I'll add a clarifying note on what I mean concretely here when I shake off my hangover and the cognitive disruptions of a trip down a musical memory lane tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

David Brooks finally wrote a good column, and one indirectly related to our article. You’re Only as Smart as Your Emotions New York Times 15 August 2024. As I read it I thought: Why do the emotions one feels in watching the War of the Worlds not vibrate within the very fibre of our human sensibilities when viewing daily for over 9 months an identical reality, which has nothing of the fictional, over the landscape of the Gaza Strip. My apologies for mentioning this. No comment needed.Nishidani (talk) 22:31, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Arbitration notice

You are involved in a recently filed request for clarification or amendment from the Arbitration Committee. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment#Amendment request: Referral from the Artibration Enforcement noticeboard regarding behavior in Palestine-Israel articles and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. Additionally, the Wikipedia:Arbitration guide may be of use.

Thanks,

— Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 18:17, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the notification. I don't consider myself 'involved' however. At this point in my wiki career, I am only interested in writing articles. if someone wants to express a grievance about me, well, they are exercising their natural right. But I am way past being able to stir myself for the nth time to justify my existence here.Nishidani (talk) 21:49, 17 August 2024 (UTC)