User talk:Nishidani

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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

Shoah/Holocaust and 'wildly antisemitic'. A further set of reflections

                                         For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller

'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.'Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.

'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg.

'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable.

The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-

• (a) Shoah

Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.

That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.

• (b)The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.

This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.

Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?

Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s, and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945,M.R. Cohen wrote:

’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’

Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless. This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.

So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges and the larger number is widely remembered – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost. In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7 (Snyder) million upwards Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal.) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000 -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?

There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’ In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival. The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.

Pt.2. Categories and definitions in historical context

Two survivors from the holocaust concentration camps meet up and exchange some black-humoured repartee concerning the Shoah. They are interrupted by God who happens by and overhears their banter. He interjects:’How on earth do you dare banter and joke about this catastrophe?’ The two survivors snap back:’how could You know what it was like? You weren’t there!”

It took some time for scholarship to settle on an appropriate word to describe the phenomenon. The words used to refer to the phenomenon of WW2 mass slaughter are many,- from the ethnospecific khurbn, shoa, continuous pogrom, Final Solution, Event, judeocide, the unnameable/unspeakable, and pseudo-sacred sacrifice etc., to the more generic genocide, (H/h)olocaust, univers concentrationnaire, (Great) Catastrophe, Götterdämmerung and ethnocide. to name but a few,- and the denotative extensions and connotations of each differ.

Shoah in Israeli usage refers to a 12 year time span, while Holocaust tends to evoke (a) broadly the institutionalization of ethnic murders over the roughly six year period of WW2, from the invasion of Poland, or, (b) more restrictively, to the three years embracing the industrialized murder of Jews specifically that accelerated massively from 22 June 1942 onwards when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. Usage that restricts, implicitly or explicitly, the Holocaust to (b) means that the earlier propaiudeutic operations that set precedents for administratively organized group murders, such as Aktion T4’s euthanization of from 70,273 to 275,000 deemed unfit to live, or the 61,000 members of the Polish elite prescriptively targeted in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, of whom two thirds were liquidated largely in the opening months of the war, are scanted from the narrative or marginalized in contemporary Holocaust commemorations, as is the gypsy Samudaripen, 70% of whose Polish population alone was exterminated.

The AktionT4 story, in particular, is a crucial precursor for the holocaust process. One estimate made at the time was that 1,000,000 Germans would have to be exterminated on the grounds of being of unsound body or mind. The original technique consisted of killing the mentally ill with a bullet to the neck. This method of disposing of 'useless mouths' (whose murder was duly calculated to have saved the Reich 885 million marks in expenses) was replaced by building 'shower' rooms in the extermination sites, where groups of 10 to 15 patients were ushered in. Once sealed off, the showers were flushed with carbon monoxide to kill them by asphyxiation. The bodies were then burnt in crematoriums made for that purpose in adjacent buildings. What later occurred at Auschwitz and other death camps was not 'unique' but replicated on a vast scale the methods devised for those diagnosed as insane. In short, as Poliakov notes, the rapidity with which the Nazi authorities implemented the later rational and efficient industrial murder factories drew directly on the model developed to exterminate Germany's mentally ill. One striking difference, was that the euthanasia programme, despite its secrecy, generated widespread popular opposition and protests within Germany which eventually led to its suspension, as opposed to the persecution and deportation of Jews, which, according to one informal wartime poll, left 90% of the population indifferent.

All this is further complicated by the shifts in debate position and focuses over successive decades, with geopolitical pressures playing not an insignificant role. The Yalta division of Europe into an Eastern Soviet bloc sphere and Western Europe under American auspices, played into this, esp. after the Cold War kicked in. The partition translated into a neglect of the Holocaust’s other victims in countries which now became adversaries of the West. Archives were closed off from external scrutiny, with the exception of Poland; no systematic centralization of documentation had been organized, leaving archival material dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, and Soviet scholarship was given very restricted agendas. Further events like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the showcasing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) and the Six Days War (1967) also inflected reformulations of Holocaust discourse, as did the Yom Kippur War. To which one might add the impact of a renewed nationalism in the former Soviet states as they struggled to reconstruct their identities by addressing their respective histories, particularly with regard to WW2. This last aspect is the gravamen behind Grabowsky and Klein's critique of wikipedia's Polish Holocaust articles. Whatever the biases, we have empirical evidence that affirms that in Western awareness the immense toll of 5.1 million Slavic, i.e. Polish and Russian victims of the holocaust, has been studiously wiped off the public record. They figure marginally, though constituting almost half of the victims, way under other minorities like the disabled, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, in the awaremess of schoolers in their formative years.

As early as 1941 Churchill, sizing up reports of atrocities trickling in from Europe of Nazi policies, stated that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name.' It was Raphael Lemkin, three years later, who in his germinal study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) devised the neologism genocide to describe the ethnic and cultural restructuring being conducted by the Nazi authorities throughout occupied Europe, citing the mass murders 'mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians.' Citing Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that 'the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if the bearer is beaten to death by a rubber truncheon', he defines this as referring concretely in his contemporary world to 'the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders.' Lemkin had been from his youth struck by the impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the Armenian genocide. At age 18, he was shocked by the destruction systematically visited upon the Armenians and noted, 'A nation was killed and the guilty persons set free.' The term genocide was required because there was something distinctive about Nazi policy as opposed to ethnic massacres of the past and new conceptions require new terms. , for

'German militarism is the most virulent because it is based upon a highly developed national and racial emotionalism which by means of modern technology can be released upon the world in a much more efficient and destructive way than any of the pedestrian methods of earlier wars.'

Several terms vied for the choice of a terminus technicus for the Holocaust as it affected Jews. The primary Jewish victims of the Nazi onslaught eastwards referred to the Holocaust in their Yiddish mother tongue as a khurbn (חורבן), ‘disaster’. A loanword from Hebrew, as opposed to the biblical connotations of Shoa this term resonates in both the original Hebrew and Yiddish with an allusion to two earlier disasters that inform Jewish historical memory, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70.CE, and also to the exile from Eretz Israel. It maintains its currency among American Orthodox Jews, particularly those who speak Yiddish. Given the resonance of historical antecedents, khurbn implicitly disowns the idea that the European holocaust as it affected Jews was unprecedented. In the new state of Israel, contrariwise, the term was rejected: it retained a resonance of the language of Europe’s persecuted Jews, from whom the new society of Israelis wished to both distance itself and shake off memories of their tragic fate. According to Birgitte Enemark, at the time only examples of armed Jewish resistance were considered heroic, and 'all other aspects of the Jewish experience' were lumped together,' under the label "Holocaust"."Holocaust" thus became the `non-heroic' category.'

Shoah ( שׁוֹאָה) "calamity" was the word that emerged in a December 1938 deliberation of the Central Committee of the Mapai party, as the rampaging precedent set by Kristillnacht became routinized. Though mentioned in a work entitled Sho’at Yehudi Polin (Devastation of Polish Jewry), published in Jerusalem in 1940 to describe the calamity that had befallen European Jews, the term was rarely used during the war by the Yishuv in Palestine until 1946. The term has a biblical resonance- in the Book of Job it is used for a sudden unforeseen disaster and desolation - and began to enter common usage after the summer of 1947 , when, after its establishment in 1946 to commemorate the annihilation of European Jewry, Yad Vashem held a conference dedicated to researching both the Shoah and the Kabbalistic concept of heroism (Gevurah). Khorbn and Shoah were thereafter used interchangeably in public discourse until, by the early 1960s, Shoah emerged as the dominant term in Israeli usage to refer more broadly to what European Jews underwent in the period from the Machtergreifung i.e., Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 down to May 1945.

As alluded to above, in 1945 M. R. Cohen could refer to the general annihilation of European peoples under Nazism, Jews and non-Jews, as a 'holocaust'. The transition in the use of this term from the generic to the particular, from all victims to Jewish victims, took some decades. Hannah Arendt, in her seminal masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), speaks of 'extermination' broadly for what befell not only Jews but other peoples in both Nazi and Soviet hands, for which, outrageously, a relatively small phenomenon like 'the Jewish question' and antisemitism could become the catalyst of world war and its death factories. Léon Poliakov recounted in his memoirs that at the time of his foundational study of the holocaust in 1951, the word 'genocide' was deemed not fit for publication, and though he did employ it occasionally in his text, he generally uses the term 'extermination'. When Gerald Reitlinger undertook in 1953 the first comprehensive English study of the genocide of Jews, he chose to write. not of the Shoah or Holocaust, but of the Final Solution, the title of his book alluding to the specific Nazi decision for an Endlösung der Judenfrage.

In 1961 Hilberg, writing what was to become the cornerstone of later Holocaust studies, rigorously abstained from using the word in his monumental study. Ever stylistically wedded to detached clinical language, he preferred the term 'destruction' - a generic term shorn of the various emotional resonances instinct in these other labels-in describing the 'annihilation' of European Jews as ‘the world’s first completed destruction process’ . The decisive words here are (a) ‘first’ and (b) ‘completed’, both implicitly denying that, in his historian’s view, we may speak of the phenomenon as ‘unique’. For ‘first’ ominously suggests that the process may repeat itself in the future,(something that is sui generis cannot recur) and ‘completed’ affirms an awareness that the shoah was, at that point in time, the last of a series of comparable events, distinguished only from its predecessors by the thoroughness of its accomplishment.

That same year was to be a turning point in the assessment of the Holocaust in another sense, since the trial of Adolf Eichman contemporaneously taking place in Jerusalem had widespread repercussions on discourse framing the event. In contradistinction to the Nuremberg trials, where indictments were laid for "crimes against members of various nations," the priority of the proceedings was to focus on the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and, it was believed, justice could only be meted out by a Jewish court, which, paradoxically according to Hannah Arendt, citing the prosecutor Gideon Hausner's words, would make 'no ethnic distinctions.' This was understandable. given the extraordinary tolerance Adenauer’s Germany , for one, showed to the tens of thousands of minions of massacre in the midst of its citizenry, among them war criminals. Germany had jurisdiction to try Eichmann but studiously circumvented the idea of extradition, and given the extreme leniency of the courts in sentencing men with thousands of murders on their conscience, that country at least could not be counted on to render justice. We all know of the post-war Polish recrudescence of antisemitism, but who recalls incidents like that in August 1949 in Munich when police shot at a crowd of 500 Jews who had taken to the streets to protest the publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a letter that referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers’ (Blutsauger)?

Pt.3.The development of uniqueness

In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history." In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots".'

'According to Saul Friedländer: ‘The absolute character of the anti-Jewish drive of the Nazis makes it impossible to integrate the extermination of the Jews, not only within the killings the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on.’ I disagree.'

As seen above in Pt.2, the East European Jewish victims of the Holocaust appear to have suffered none of the brain-wracking vexations, that arose in the diaspora and Israel in the postwar period, over the mot propre for what was happening to them. They used the emic, historically resonant term khurbn. The word drew an implicit analogy between the scale of the catastrophe that hit them, and two iconic events in antiquity that branded Jewish memory with a profound sense of loss, the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Thus, khurbn disavowed uniqueness, by affirming an essential continuity, the idea that the physical destruction of the diaspora’s core population repeated an earlier pattern: it was a recurrent, if exceeding rare, event. The symbolic force of this analogy lay in the fact that, in the legend of the foundations of the diaspora, the synagogue, wherever erected, slowly came to be experienced as a substitute for the temple in Jerusalem, with rabbis replacing the priesthood, and rituals of prayer and observance supplanting sacrifice. The unique specificity of the one sacred site millennia before has been preempted by a creative solution dictated by necessity: the ‘temple’ was any site Jewish communities built to celebrate their religion. The Final Solution, in aiming to extirpate their communities and raze their synagogal institutions, constituted the third in a series.

In Israel, to the contrary, this Yiddish khurbn was disliked just as the imputed ‘sheepishness’ of the victims and those who, surviving, made aliyah to the new state with its heroic ethos, was a source of discomfort and embarrassment. One slang term in Israeli usage referred to the martyrs of the camps, as opposed to the Warsaw ghetto rebels who fought back, as 'soap'. In its stead, the word shoah, which had become current in the Palestinian yishuv, gained an ascendancy. The emergent preference for the biblical shoah marked a shift from profane history (secular time) to an idiom of religious thrust (sacred). On another plane, it was also emblematic of natural tendency, instinct in the structural dynamics flowing from the definition of Israel as the Jewish state for the Jewish people, to invest it with discursive authority, one with a final say on crucial matters of definition. One might be tempted to think of a kind of unspoken tendency towards a Vaticanization of authority arising to reign over the disiecta membra of diasporic life which had always been characterized by an intense dialogic interplay, creatively dissonant, between far-flung communities which were unified in their sense of a shared Jewish identity but which, one by one, had to, as circumstances dictated, respond to very different historical social and political challenges. The emergence of a Zionist state, which had a completely different, because national and geopolitical, set of priorities, naturally bore a logic that militated towards the subordination of the diaspora, by redefining it as a contingent expedient, chaotically dispersed and historically defeated, to what was the new unifying narrative of Jewishness as defined by the state of Israel.

Political interests play an important role in suppressing analogies, in order to assert the uniqueness of the holocaust. In the late 1990s, according to Norman Finkelstein, Jewish lobbyists in Congress succeeded in blocking the passage of a bill to commemorate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The USHMM, he adds, following declarations from both Elie Wiesel and Yad Vashem, and at the request of the Israeli government, virtually erased references to the Armenian genocide from its museum's exposition.

Over the last quarter of a century highlighting the Holocaust as a unique event affecting only Jews has passed out of scholarly fashion. though the idea that the holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews alone still holds the upper hand.

'(Genocide’s) usage in reference to the Shoah and similar events of comparable destructive intent, both prior and subsequent, has gradually increased, including by historians, especially since the 1990s. The word “genocide” in reference to the extermination of the Jews is, in some respects, more neutral than both “Holocaust,” which evokes an etymological notion of the sacrificial, and “Shoah”, which seems to exclude the affected non-Jewish groups. At the same time, the term “genocide” allows for a comparison of similar causes and effects, and emphasizes, by analogy with the legal definition of crime, the intent, which in this case is the endeavour to partially or completely destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’(Sullam 2020, p. 4)

‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and, it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case. As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples in order to colonize the East and extend the German Empire up to the Ural mts. Thereupon after the completion of the successful war he would he would have turned to the West and to subtract from the French people the 20 million Frenchmen he had promised in his conversation with Rauschning.’ Lemkin cited in (Moses 2008, p. 20)

If one trawls the global past for evidence of genocide, history becomes a charnel house. Though the holocaust is ‘the most documented of genocides’, genocide itself has always been a commonplace of history. It received powerful theological endorsement in the Tanakh/Old Testament, where the injunction was laid down to annihilate the Seven Nations (Deuteronomy 7:2, 20:16-18) namely the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. The logic and principle of exterminating any resistant population by murdering the males and enslaving the rest were first set forth in Western tradition in Thucydides’ vignette, The Melian Dialogue regarding the options given the islanders of Melos during the Peloponnesian War.

Lemkin was well aware of precedents stretching back to the deep past, but for our purposes, one should briefly reacquaint our fugitive modern memory with its selective, fragmentary interest in the past, with how the 19th century's periphery must have experienced the glorious march of progress whose beneficiaries, the West-is-besters, complacently celebrate. Incidents of mass killings in the name of civilization were commonplace, many implemented under impress of the Virgilian maxim drilled into the elites who emerged to gather up and govern their flourishing, expansive windfall empires, i.e., the purpose was to retread the path cut out paradigmatically by the Roman empire, whose Virgilian civilizing mission consisted of 'imposing the custom of peace, sparing the subjugated and warring down the proud.' . An illustration of how this worked out in practice was France's invasion of Algeria, beginning in 1834. At that time the country had an estimated population of roughly 2 million. Four decades later, by 1875 when the conquest was completed, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians had been killed. The necessity of genocidal killings lingered on in everyday conversation. One author in 1882 commented that 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him'.

An important principle in approaching history is the relationship between (imperial) core and periphery. Genocide as a twentieth century phenomenon arguably began with Lothar von Trotha’s campaign to decimate the Herero people in 1904-1905,-in one estimate 65,000 of 80,000 (80%) died- accomplished in broad daylight since it was duly covered in the German press. Remembrance of the holocaust is celebrated in postwar Germany but, until recently, this earlier episode of the country's colonial genocide was all but erased from memory. The idea of herding at gunpoint uprooted townsfolk into arid zones where they might die en masse of famine was taken up by the Turks, with their forced exterminatory marches, and the technique, a typical case of blowback, was adopted and widely deployed by Nazis, and to a lesser extent by the Japanese in WW2.

But this is all too facile, and culturally self-regarding to single out three examples which happen to instance the genocidal practices of those countries which were later to emerge as adversaries of the Western powers in two successive world wars.If we take the years around 1900 as an angle from which to reflect on what was to follow in the 20th century, perhaps the best starting point is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where the complacent Western core becomes, by a brilliant piece of topical tableturning of imperial prejudices, a planetary periphery. Wells reimagined this annihilation with the modern world refigured as aborigines, invaded and under mechanical extirpation from Martians just as Tasmania’s aboriginal population of 5-7,000 people was all but annihilated within a short century, starting with the Black War.

In 1896-1898 Spain’s concentration camp policy in Cuba wiped out 10% of the island’s population. The British adopted the same system in South Africa in 1899, closeting Boer civilians, women and children into barb-wire enclosures where over 2 years over 25,000 died of disease and malnutrition as their army wardens maintained guard. On the other side of the world, the the United States’ suppression of the Philippine war of independence had the collateral impact of leading to the death through disease and famine of 10 to 20 times the number of guerilla fighters killed. In all three, concentration camps, scorched earth and starvation policies took the largest toll out on civilians. Over a 20 year period Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous policies in the Congo (1885-1908) were so vastin their application that the minimal figure for those killed is 1,500,000, with a maximum estimate ranging as high as 13,000,000. By 1900, only 10% of aborigines (50,000) had survived the impact of British colonialization, with an estimated 20,000 of the original estimated 500,000 members of 300 tribes, each with their distinct languages, killed by direct genocidal settler practices. This was the international background for Germany's policies against the Herero.

After WW1, the metropolitan assault on peripheries resumed. In the Second Italo-Senussi War (1923-1932) Italy likewise killed one quarter of the population in the region of Cyrenaica, by the mass murder of civilians and surrendered soldiers, resorting to the mustard gas bombing of villages,(much as Spain was resorting to chemical weapons against the Berbers in the Rif War in Morocco at that time, as well as death marches into the desert). Having mastered the techniques there, they proceeded to Ethiopia where their spraying of areas with mustard and other gases, together with tactics of gunning down masses of surrendered soldiers and enforcing death marches. The conservative figure is that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the death of perhaps 225,000 people. Mann comments:'This was the equivalent not of the Final Solution but (on a smaller scale) the Nazi mass murder of Poles.' In the Terror Famine implemented in Ukraine in 1932-1933, Stalin intentionally starved to death over 3 million Ukrainians. At the time, the future core of the Luftwaffe’s new generation of pilots was, under a secretive Soviet-Germany pact to circumvent the Versailles agreement, being trained at Lipetsk fighter-pilot school with close to a thousand German military personnel, not far from the genocidal liquidations underway to their west.

David Stannard, author of a foundational study on the massacre of American indigenous peoples, American Holocaust, has argued that the view that the holocaust as a 'unique, unprecedented, and categorically incommensurable' stand-alone event restricted to Jews, is a recent construction. Questioning the late 20th century arrogation of the term to refer exclusively to what befell the Jewish victims of Nazism, he then argues that

'it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labour by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.'

While conceptually incoherent, the uniqueness model is defended, he then documents, with intimidating polemical vigour. Yehuda Bauer in taking President Carter to task publicly for mentioning the holocaust's 11, not 6, million victims, (perhaps influenced by Simon Wiesenthal's recent surmise) suggested in his excoriation such an attempt to 'de-Judaize' the holocaust was, albeit unconsciously, 'antisemitic'. Deborah Lipstadt, author of one of the most popular accounts of the holocaust, has also asserted that any comparison between the Jewish holocaust and other forms of genocide put such 'holocaust relativists' on an antisemitic spectrum, one end of which included Holocaust denial.

Pt.4b.Hitler's awareness of a precedent for the Holocaust

Hitler himself, on the eve of WW2, one week before the invasion of Poland, in his Obersalzberg Speech of 22 August 1939, has the Armenian genocide in mind when he set forth before his generals the genocidal thrust of the imminent assault upon Poland:-

Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? .

Those who refuse on principle to entertain the possibity that the genocide of Jews might be further illuminated by analogies or comparisons must of course deny that Hitler's stated intentions here to liquidate the Polish nation are relevant to assessing the ensuing broader holocaust. They must dismiss the explicit justification, that Germany could get away with genocide and enjoy impunity because Turkey had, as immaterial to our understanding of the holocaust affecting Jews.

The Armenian genocide (1915-1918), with perhaps 1,000,000 of 1,800,000 murdered (55%) is defined by Niall Ferguson as 'qualitatively different' from earlier Turkish massacres. The word holocaust itself appears to have been indeed first used, by the New York Times, to describe a new round (‘another Turkish holocaust’) of Turkish pogroms against the Armenian Christian population.. '(I)t is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide,' he continues, endorsing the view of the American Consul in Smyrna at that time, that it ‘surpasse(d) in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world.'

In one sense Hitler was correct. Even today only Armenians recall their holocaust, and Hitler's onslaught on the Poles is lost to general public awareness. Western commemoration is overwhelmingly focused on the Shoah as a unique event, 'qualitatively different', affecting Europe's Jewish population. What would have been unimaginable in the European core in 1905, but proved perfectly practicable if, as with Von Trotta's extermination of the liminal Herero, the 'uncivilised' periphery of Africa was the field of implementation, had its blowback effect a mere three and a half decades later, as the technique was directed at Germany's immediate neighbour.

Pt.5. The politics of restrictive usage

There is nothing surprising in the connection between antisemitism and economic distress. A similar relationship has been observed in many other cases, and there is no reason to believe that antisemitism is exempt from social causation, or that the sufferings of the Jews are something absolutely unique. Unfortunately, the annals of cruelty are inexhaustible and other minorities have experienced at some time or other all the iniquities inflicted upon the Jews. The extermination of the Christians in Japan was just as thorough as Hitler’s genocide. If fewer were killed it was because they were fewer. When massacring the Armenians, the Turks perpetrated all of the deeds of which the SS men are guilty. If the history of antisemitism is particularly long it is because the Jews have clung to their separateness with unique tenacity. Most minorities could not be persecuted for so long because they dissolved themselves in the surrounding population.'(Andreski 1969, pp. 305–306)

How does the Hollocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term 'genocide' was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.'(Moses 2004, p. 533)

Analysing the explosion of Holocaust narratives in the United States in the 1970s, after decades of silence also within Jewish communities, Peter Novick argued that the phenomenon was in part motivated by a desire by many influential Jews to make Americans more sympathetic to Israel and Jews generally. Novick went on to call the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum American Jewry's 'epistle to the Gentiles.' Originally funded by private donations, official government involvement was announced by the White House in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of Israel's foundation. This was a political measure to placate American Jews displeased by what they regarded as the President's "excessive evenhandedness" in trying to negotiate a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The running expenses were thereafter largely taken over by the federal government. Political calculations also contributed to government funding of such awareness programmes concerning the Holocaust, a way to woo the Jewish electorate.

It was President Carter's understanding that the Memorial Centre, following on the report he had commissioned which he appointed Elie Wiesel to preside over, would commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust. In a public address on the occasion of its establishment, Carter happened to mention the 'eleven million innocent victims exterminated'. He was immediately soundly rebuked by Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian, for attempting to 'deJudaise the Holocaust' by including all of the non-Jewish victims. Indignant groups, led by Elie Wiesel reacted by launching a campaign, which eventually achieved its goals, to ensure that the Museum would refer only en passant to 'other' (non-Jewish) victims'. Throughout the following decade tensions arose, for example, between Poles and the Museum's authorities over the way the Holocaust was being portrayed. In a recent memoir recalling that period, John T. Pawlikowski, a Carter appointee, states that difficulties arose in efforts to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions. At that time, Poles were mentioned at the beginning and the end (as rescuers) but little was said of their engulfment in the central killing programmes at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which formed the main Judaiocentric focus of the Museum's depiction of the events.

Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general scholarly consensus of experts at the time was that a distinction did exist which militated against any notion the two annihilations could be equated. No decision was reached when, on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:

while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story- Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.(Pawkowski 2022, p. 425)

Pawlikowski adds also that, at an NPAJAC conference in 2004, the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-

For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained.’(Pawkowski 2022, p. 426)

When on 17 June 2019 the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the Trump’s detention centres, “concentration camps” and added “Never Again,” her choice of words was challenged by the Republican Liz Cheney, who accused Ocasio-Cortez of deploying a ludicrous, demeaning analogy with the Holocaust and thereby setting up a false analogy, Both concentration camps and Never again preexisted Nazism, though both are commonly associated with it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stepped in to the dispute by stating that it, “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” an assertion of the dogmatic position that the Holocaust, understood as referring to Jews, was unique. The declaration provoked an open letter of protest addressed to the director of the Museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, and published in The New York Review. The letter was undersigned by 560 academics, many of whom are Holocaust scholars, have supported the Museum, some in the capacity of fellows, and researchers given access to its archives. They remonstrated that

'By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.'

This narrowing of Holocaust to evoke a specific ethnicized denotation, related to Jewish victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing and racial extermination alone, and its successful promotion in this restrictive sense, had an unforeseen collateral effect. One now remarks on how envy and admiration for the publicitarian efficacy in political discourse of the term generated its imitative adoption as a catch-all term among aggrieved constituencies in the rising vogue of Identity politics. Yet, as the headquote from A. Dirk Moses above suggests, it was precisely the wresting of the term holocaust away from its generic usage and its exclusivist application only to the Jewish WW2 tragedy that constituted the first step in the ethnicization of holocaust discourse, and its modern deployment in identitarian discourse and its correlated politics of grievance.

Pt.6. Calling in outside institutions,and the need for scholarly caution in these areas

There was, and still is, a very fine line between Israeli government politicization of antisemitism for furthering its national interests—through hasbara [Israeli propaganda] and other political interventions—and scholarly work being undertaken at universities and in research institutes. The blurring of any differences between propaganda and objective research is one of the key factors contributing to the bitter and divisive battles over antisemitism research in the academy.(Burley & Lerman 2022)

le commun des hommes est ainsi fait que si la vue d'un subit désastre émeut et provoque une pitié agissante, la contemplation d'une souffrance prolongée finit par irriter et par lasser.(Poliakov 1993, p. 336)

We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with understanding.(Snyder 2015, p. xiv)

It is true that Israel’s current far-right government has turned dog whistles into fog horns.' (Brown & Nerenberg 2021)

This has been proposed by Chess, who nominated in this regard the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its 'institutional' expertise. That Wikipedia is self-regulating,-often ramshackle, provisory and imperfect in its day-to-day workings, but still remains a rare experiment in a project of an autonomous, anonymous self-governing production of an encyclopedia. Its nature means that all articles will be subject to a process of continuous internal development and analysis, and that the major, overriding rules consist in a goal of strict neutrality as a final outcome, as determined by a judicious weighing of all relevant positions emerging from the best available scholarly sources. This eminently internal democratic experiment fits the ideal Popperian criteria for the slow, incremental growth, by constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge.

As I indicated above, an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests, and functions quite differently, however excellent the results generally. In the case of the USHMM, its consultancy would be problematical for a number of of reasons. It has been known to exert pressure to censure criticism of arguments concerning the political manipulation of holocaust discourse. When Norman Finkelstein published his devastating exposé, The Holocaust Industry, and the then doyen of holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, endorsed the accuracy of its scholarship, the USHMM and Elie Wiesel reportedly pleaded 'relentlessly' with Hilberg to retract his support for the book, unsuccessfully. If, further, as one of its Council members has recently recalled (2022), the Polish story of the Holocaust won't get a fuller hearing at the Museum until Polish advocates recognize that their Jewish confreres suffered qualitatively more than Polish victims, then their participation in a wiki dispute precisely over the Holocaust in Poland, and the proper representation of the two sets of victims would, a priori, support one side, namely the position advanced tendentiously in Grabowski and Klein's essay.

I have no set views on the underlying historiographical issues of that paper, as opposed to deep reservations about its quality and methodology. Research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia, and tends to have a half-life not dissimilar to an isotope like Francium 223. It is true that nationalist editing has seriously affected the three core areas under Arbcom restrictions. But it is extremely naive, epistemologically, or indeed manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists, who, alone, exhibit a POV. The assumption is that there is 'pure' scholarship promoted by one side to any textual dispute and contaminated thinking exhibited by their nationalistic antagonists. All research in the humanities is embedded in, curricular, human, and social intrerests, the difference being that the reliability of the results is in direct correlation with the epistemological sophistication of the research. Too abstract? Let me illustrate.

That in January 2018 a conservative Polish government passed a “anti-defamation” law which is coercive, enabling libel suits against people including scholars like Jan Grabowski when their interpretations of the past do not run in lockstep with an official narrative, is well known. Less well known is that wresting narrative control over holocaust discourse, not only by insisting it be restricted to Jewish victims, has been a major concern over decades for several institutions, and various Israeli governments. The distinguished historian of Poland, Norman Davies was recently reported on Polish Radio as recalling that in 1974 Yehuda Bauer, the acknowledged contemporary doyen of the discipline, in a holocaust seminar for historians conducted in the Israeli embassy in London, stated that the historical actors should be broken down into perpetrators (Germans), victims (Jews) and bystanders (Poles). When Davies, whose Polish father-in-law had survived both the Dachau and l Mauthausen camps, protested, he was apparently shouted down as a Polonophile. Davies was later denied tenure at Stanford University, according to him, because it was imputed that he was ‘insensitive’ to Jews.

In reading the threads, I keep in mind what Timothy Snyder wrote in his Bloodlands (2010)

Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

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Resilience/Sumud.

The creativity of people under genocide. Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Notice that you are now subject to an arbitration enforcement sanction

The following sanction now applies to you:

3 week topic ban from the Arab-Isreal conflict, broadly construed

You have been sanctioned for this comment following a previous logged warning about unconstructive or unnecessarily inflammatory language.

This sanction is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Palestine-Israel articles#Final decision and, if applicable, the contentious topics procedure. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. If the sanction includes a ban, please read the banning policy to ensure you understand what this means. If you do not comply with this sanction, you may be blocked for an extended period, by way of enforcement of this sanction—and you may also be made subject to further sanctions.

You may appeal this sanction using the appeal process. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything above is unclear to you. ~~~~

Barkeep49 (talk) 18:34, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

If I had seen this comment from someone who just barely had ECR, I'd have likely indef blocked them (with the first year being a CT sanction if they were eligible). If there is another UNINOLVED admin who would like to discuss something longer, or refer this to AE to discuss a longer sanction, I am open to both of those, but after a bit of thinking this is what I felt appropriate given all the facts at play here. Barkeep49 (talk) 18:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Please see my comment on Barkeep49’s talk page. The point Nishidani makes, with the same cultural joke as an illustration, was made in a peer-reviewed academic journal of high repute. Unfortunately it seems this did not come up easily on google when quickly searched for. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:43, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

And my response where I note the peer reviewed journal is using the joke to criticize it as offensive (50+ years ago). Barkeep49 (talk) 18:57, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Barkeep This was flagged for me offwiki. I can find no evidence that this is a commonly familiar old Jewish Joke. So instead I see a joke weaponizing antisemtism on the talk page about such an article. Still considering whether other measures are appropriate Talk:Weaponization of antisemitism

In short someone emailed you offwiki to weaponize this totally innocuous edit and see to it I am put behind bars and kept there for 3 weeks, if not indeed permabanned. Well, that spell might enable me to finger where in the hell I buried Eric Berne's classic Games People Play to refresh my memory about this kind of social gamesmanship. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I contacted Barkeep about this for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted another set of eyes to look at it. As I've said before, I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Second, I was at work, soon to leave, had to stop for an oil change, and now I'm about to sit down for enchiladas with my wife, and my father is coming over to join us, so I didn't have time for all of this this evening. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:51, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Sounds like a pleasant evening. Thanks for your scruple in clarifying this remark by Barkeep. In short, no editor on the page complained, any more than in 2018, when I cited the same joke on my talk page, any reader or admin saw anything 'inflammatory' - had they I would have been immediately reported. That's really bizarre to me, but I'll call it quits if you could do me a simple favour, since I think I'm wasting my time on wikipedia in this kind of atmosphere of by now inveterate nagging over nothing (the nothing being my 'integrity'). At Killing of Nahida and Samar Anton, I promised to provide the page numbers for a source a hard copy of which I only received yesterday, and read last night. At Note 24 re after ‘with the Catholic parish’ the citation with the existing page = should read {{sfn|Sale|Neuhaus|2024|p=406}} and, just below the same ? in the citation should be fixed to ‘engaging in blood libel’ {{sfn|Sale|Neuhaus|2024|pp=406-407}}. These are necessary because an editor asked me to supply them. This is not a request for meatpuppetry, but a matter of courtesy, since Barkeep's original action was done, as he admits, based on insufficient evidence, and no courtesy note to me to ask for the clarification he needed to assuage his, and your, concerns. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

You probably don't realize this, but since the issue is about my behaviour judged in terms of a misreading of the meaning of a joke, your reply can be read as a crass example of Schadenfreude, with the same licence used by Barkeep and others in interpreting my edit as a disruptive violation of our civility code. Why? Because you can be heard as saying more or less

(a) it was I who reported you to Barkeep, because I was short on time in RL to handle this myself. (b)you are now in porridge, placed off-limits from your wikipedia community, being under a sanction I started while (c) I'm have a pleasant evening in a nice family setting.

I'm not singling you out. Habitually, reading the talk exchanges on wiki pages for what the subtext intimates, I see what I consider rudeness or crassness regularly, but ignore it, because it wastes serious editing time. It is that incivility that escapes through the nets of what admins think of as documentable incivility.

You see, though that was not your intention, that is how any number of literate readers, were this to occur in a social setting or a novel, might read it for context and tone, as socially inept and offensive. Just as my innocuous illustration was interpreted. Since this has happened several times in the past, - admin unawareness of how language works, leading to sanctions - I have lost faith in my future as a contributor to wikipedia because of eight fatuous complaints in a year one has achieved its end. I read it as the instauration of a wokish Miranda warning to the effect that from now on in, 'anything I write can and may be used against me in arbitration,' if it can somehow lend itself to raising suspicions of a possible infringement of our strict laws on courtesy. So I clearly cannot work here, suspension ended, with this sort of Gordian knot of surveillance hanging over my head, with the scissors in the hands of admins who have, in my view, at times snipped before reading closely and checking with their peers. On the other hand, I don't yield up a natural right certainly when thuggish off-wiki sites have increasingly pressured wikipedia (lately here) to raise the temperature and target editors like myself. Unless I get permabanned, I will retain and assert my right to edit here, if infrequently. but to avoid supplying anyone here with excuses to keep up the harassment I experience, I will exercise that right by no longer exchanging a single word on talk pages when, and if, I do feel inclined to add something. That will stop admins from these embarrassing wastages of everyone's time, since my voice will disappear, as many no doubt want, but my right to continue to influence article content will remain intact. Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Or less. That would be another option. Levivich (talk) 18:59, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Topic bans apply to your user and talk spaces, so if you'll have to wait until the topic ban expires to continue the discussion and provide page numbers. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:19, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

lol yall wild. Nish, if this is enough to say fuck this place for good I get it, feel similarly tbh. nableezy - 16:43, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

@ScottishFinnishRadish: this[1] was wholly unnecessary, and unreasonably provocative. Very disappointing behavior. Onceinawhile (talk) 17:41, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I see you are heavily involved in ARBPIA topics. Did you disclose this to Barkeep when you contacted them regarding this matter? Onceinawhile (talk) 18:05, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Hand in glove. Just leave it. Selfstudier (talk) 18:07, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

You may want to look at those edits, rather than the summary. This may provide some helpful context. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:20, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Would you mind letting us know what exactly was the original concern you raised with Barkeep? Onceinawhile (talk) 18:36, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

That an unnecessarily inflammatory comment had been made on an article talk page by an editor warned for unnecessarily inflammatory comments. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:40, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

And, now that per User talk:Barkeep49/Archives/10#Nishidani comment, it has been shown that there was nothing inflammatory about it, how has your view changed? Onceinawhile (talk) 19:15, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

The only unnecessary and extremely inflammatory comment made here was this remark by Barkeep who directly accused me of antisemitism by saying I was responsible for mentioning a joke that weaponized antisemitism (I see a joke weaponizing antisemtism). That reading borders on the illiterate. You endorse this egregious misprision. This is a failure of the most elementary reading skills. Since you both are highly literate, the only explanation that comes to me is that such a judgment reflects a personal impression over the last several months that there is something antisemitic, hard to pin down, but there, in Nishidani, and when I posted an utterly innocuous statement, confirmation bias kicked in, I'm sure unwittingly, but that is not a rational judgment based on evidence (that I am responsible for spreading antisemitic ideas) that would stand up in any court of opinion. I tried to be courteous in my dialogue with Barkeep but the door was shut in the face of evidence that his judgment was deeply flawed, and you second this closure. I'm not quite surprised. It's been in the air since that foreign lobby persuaded arbcom to allow one of its spokesmen to make a case against me, and, with the four subsequent cases, two by socks, something like this was on the books (the 'no smoke without fire' syndrome). Well, I'm fucked if I am going to continue to volunteer contributions for an organization that has now registered me, via admin fiat, as antisemitic, after 18 years in which this kind of repeated sockpuppet-type trashing of my work was dismissed dozens of times in an appropriate tribunal. Nishidani (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

ding. Why some admins think they should be handing out sanctions without any complaint or giving the person, with over a decade of contributions to this project, the chance at explaining themselves is something I fail to understand. I actually think Barkeep is generally a great admin so I’m a bit baffled at this sequence tbh. Especially when the basis for the sanction was nearly instantaneously proven false. nableezy - 19:37, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

It goes without saying that both are fine admins, dedicated and conscientious. That is why this profound misreading is disturbing. I suspect that the burden, which I would never have the guts to take on, of having to read vast reams of often inane prose in complaints or on talk pages, dulls the edges of concentration at times. I know that happens because that is what has always worried me about having to read so much uninformed argufying on IP talk pages, that the resolute attention in the face of tedious repetitiveness risks desensitizing me, so that the payback of actually getting articles written in full scholarly attire looks like a bad investment.Nishidani (talk) 19:44, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Meh on both. nableezy - 20:02, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

@Onceinawhile SFR is active in this topic area not because they are WP:INVOLVED in a Wikipedia sense of the word but because they are an administrator attempting to uphold behavioral expectations. So they reached out to me in an administrator to administrator capacity, despite the fact that we often disagree on the right outcome in our discussions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (I normally am for milder or even no sanction than what SFR supports). And that noticeboard was, until this incident, where I had limited my activity in this topic area. This includes times where SFR has reached out about specific incidents and I've declined to take action. Hopefully that better explains the context in which SFR contacted me. Barkeep49 (talk) 19:45, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

What you don’t know, dear Barkeep, is that was an allusion to an anecdote, talking precisely about the abuse of antisemitism claims by Sir Stephen Sedley, one of the great European jurists, six years ago.

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

I quoted this, prefaced by the words:'The point was put with great lucidity by Sir Stephen Sedley in the brilliant essay I cite just above this.' and discussed it, on my talk page, when dealing with a query about a wikipedia editor whose behaviour was, in my view, antisemitic 6 years ago. Not a peep or boo from anyone. Nothing problematic. How times have changed. I don't mind the fact that Sir Stephen can retell an anecdote which gets both a laugh from his readers while inculcating a deep lesson, but I on wikipedia am sanctioned if I paraphrase it to the same purpose. What is a moral reminder by a great jurist is 'inflammatory language' for a wiki peon. I don't mind the offensiveness of this insult to my moral probity in these matters. I'm used to it. But how the trigger-finger now itches to shoot anyone who dares tread on this ground whose zones of what is discursively permissible are narrowed day by day, now even on wikipedia even with a light joke. My block log is thus crammed with just one more example of being punished because an admin didn’t read up, or ask around, and no doubt the usual reports asking for another sanction on the usual spurious grounds will have further 'evidence' to lead me to Galgenweg. Well, as the previous section says, sumud. Nishidani (talk) 19:32, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes. A known Jewish jurist warning Jewish MPs to not be hypersensitive is a rather different context than you using it to score try to convince someone you are correct on a Wikipedia talk page. This is indeed how something which can be thought provoking in one context is unconstructive or unnecessarily inflammatory language in another context. And good news - I intentionally did not add to your block log choosing instead a rather short topic ban. Barkeep49 (talk) 20:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

What you are saying is that a Jew can tell a self-critical Jewish joke to another Jew. If a non-Jew repeats that joke (to a Jew or not), they are being inflammatory (and many would say 'antisemitic'). In other words, no non-Jew may intrude on an infra-Jewish conversation without being inflammatory. The world is, admittedly, a lunatic asylum run according to Rafferty's rules, unlike the physical universe, but I try to maintain my sanity by trusting in logical analysis and the moral parity of all humna beings. You are in your rights to disagree, but your statement is not underwritten by any awareness of the principles of coherence. I say that without enmity.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

See User talk:Barkeep49/Archives/10#Nishidani comment. I apologize for the parallel discussion. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:35, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate this Once, but please don't worry about this here. I'll be off-wiki for three weeks, that's all. Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

I will admit that I am pushing for a fair resolution here mainly because I have a deep aversion to seeing the logical fallacy of belief perseverance.

Onceinawhile (talk) 20:59, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

For the record (which rhymes with 'bored'), what happened precisely is explained here Nishidani (talk) 12:01, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Reading Gershon Legman’s mammoth works on jokes in the late 1970s taught me an important lesson: listening to comedians, or diving into the vast lore of jokes could tell you as much, perhaps even more, than philosophy or logic about the human world, not to speak of the hilarious way it is recounted in top-shelf newspapers. Bassem Youssef blew up Piers Morgan’s haranguing insistence on Hamas’s putative use of human shields by interrupting the latter’s usual tactic of hammering interruptions with a simple comical analogy:’I know all about them! I’m always trying to murder my wife (she is of Palestinian descent) but she keeps using our children as human shields’. End of argument.

Wikipedia is increasingly, administratively, a tired humourless place, shorn of all of the delicacies of style like irony, where passionate ignorance gets a podium and the rules require that one take everything seriously. And if you don’t, and tell a joke, the surveillance of wokist minds will haul you over the coals for being ‘inflammatory’ even if they themselves don’t believe in anything other than the instrumental ('weaponised') opportunism presented by a joke to lay that kind of fatuous insinuation. Who gives a fuck? I think I’ll drop Georges Dumézil for bedtime reading and dip back into Legman’s magisterial anthology of limericks:) And now to bed. I don't think anyone in the Western world can feel entitled to any sentiment like unfairness or grievance - whatever occurs in the bitching banter of midget pissing matches we call the 'mainstream' reportage that we discuss to edit anything, - and that is all the more true of my response here,enjoying rather the farce in comical misreadings like the above. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 23:04, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

(Talk page watcher) A bad call, administratively, especially because of doubling down on the block despite getting further information about the Jewish history of the mentioned folklore. Perplexing decisions resulting in an outcome without justifications that hold up under scrutiny. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 01:29, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry about this block. I try and avoid anything like humor myself on Wikipedia as it simply doesn't travel well. I keep whatever I say straightforward and avoid saying anything that requires a modicum of thought, there's no point as it will simply cause trouble and not accomplish anything. Thank you for pointing out that problem with the Wikimedia Foundation trying to be woke and accomplish social goals. I fully agree with trying to get more women to edit - the purpose though is to help create create a free, reliable encyclopedia. NadVolum (talk) 15:50, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

When I told an Israeli scholar that joke after my suspension he laughed, never having heard it, and sent this link to another. Jokes are currency and should be repaid. They are one of the primary indexes of the self-perceptive temper of peoples and the quality of their civilization (which as regards the West began its death agony with the Holocaust, and, with the cormorant war on the Gaza fishbowl, banged the last nail into its coffin.). Some Auschwitz survivors remembered that they had to make jokes in order to survive and save themselves from lethal depression.

As early as 1927 the Soviet Union passed a law (Article 58) forbidding on pain of imprisonment the telling of anti-régime jokes and one calculation put the number of Soviet citizens who ended up in gaol for telling them at 200,000. The best Russian comment on this farce was the joke that has a judge walking out of court, bent up laughing. When asked why, he gasped that he’d just dispatched someone to the gulag for ten years for telling the best joke he’d ever heard, which, of course, he couldn’t repeat for fear of incriminating himself. Nazi Germany wasn’t slow to imitate the Soviet measure. One of the first laws passed in Nazi Germany in 1934 was the Heimtückegesetz, which outlawed as treasonable acts any jokes about Nazis. One of the reasons undoubtedly lies in what Henri Bergson detected when, in his classic Le Rire, he wrote:

(On y verrait) le rire accomplir régulièrement une des ses fonctions principales, qui est de rappeler à la pleine conscience d'eux-mêmes les amours-propres distraits et d'obtenir ainsi la plus grande sociabilité possibles des caractères (. .laughter regularly accomplishing one of its principal functions, namely, to summon the distracted expression of self-esteem back to a full awareness of itself and thereby obtain the greatest possible sociability of characters). Henri Bergson, Le rire:Essai sur la signification du comique, (1900) Presses Universitaires de France 1975 p.133.

As wiki wokifies itself, making an advanced degree in the niceties of political correctness, rather than familiarity with scholarship, the essential qualification for writing articles, I hope the picayune historic record of this nook in the selva oscura of the world will include me as the first, I believe, to fall victim to administrative humourlessness for an innocuously instructive on-topic joke. As for the rest, administrative failings in correctly construing simple English sentences are nonetheless nothing new, as my block log’s rapid overturnings of hasty suspensions show.Nishidani (talk) 14:12, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Once was maybe a misspeak in the moment so I disregarded it, but this is twice now that you've characterized the situation as wokist or wokifies. I thought you better than being one to play into right-wing authoritarian 'anti-woke' discourse but now I'm not as sure. This was a bad administrative call, but it wasn't a bad call because it was a 'woke' call. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:40, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Norman Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, Sublation Press 2023. When an authoritative scholar voices views I had already arrived at independently (I wrote extensively on the dangers in identity politics before it became a fashionable topic), I defer to their conclusions, preferring to get sceptics to read that book or article rather than argue with me briefly on a wiki page. Books have depth not allowed here, also per TLDR. which marks the default attention span customary on wiki Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

While Finkelstein has published quality work on topics like memory studies, antisemitism, and the genocide in Palestine, I think it's telling that unlike those works, I'll Burn That Bridge was not published with a university press, academic journal, major national publisher, etc. I know some editors think that anything a professor writes or utters anywhere is equally golden, but I think that publishers and venues matter. I consider "Cancel Culture and Other Myths", published in established academic journal The Yale Review and written by Kathryn Lofton—herself hardly a non-entity in academia as former Yale dean and current holder of an endowed professorship—instructive on the topic. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 21:35, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

For 2 thousand years hardly any of the books constituting the 'great tradition' of Western thought were published by a university Press. One of the greatest historical works in that discipline, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews was rejected by 3 university presses, included Princeton, because his research of agonizing moments of history woke anxieties, ante litteram. Personal anecdotes by friends still in academe underscore how careful teachers must be in speaking in classes on any topic about which some special constituency has ideas of being an historic victim of discrimination, just in case someone in the class may share them. If they do not learn to tiptoe around the minefield of these diverse sensitivities, they risk being reported to the deans, and having their careers damaged. And I am speaking of personal knowledge of people on the left. It's more or less what is happening on wiki with ARBPIA5Nishidani (talk) 22:48, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

For 2 thousand years hardly any of the books constituting the 'great tradition' of Western thought were published by a university Press: Yeah, and we still don't cite Augustine's The City of God on Wikipedia pages about human history.

In the meantime, I've been reading the reviews, and frankly I don't have money to spare on buying transphobic, anti-Black trash written by a red fascist annoyed that his students care about trans rights and learn about racial capitalism. You can keep your Finkelstein fanboying. If something goes wrong in ARBPIA, it's going to be because committee members think it's unnecessary to read up on the topic at issue beyond what gets filtered to them by osmosis through media mired in Islamophobic neo-imperialism. It's not going to be because they're 'woke' and voted for Obama in the primaries instead of Sanders. Verso didn't reject I'll Burn That Bridge because it was too radical. They rejected it because it was sloppy and reactionary.

That you had the gall to recommend this book as if it has any real wisdom—that's the funniest thing on this page, or it would be if it weren't so pathetic and sad. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 23:04, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

'I feel a real and solid pleasure when anybody points out a fallacy in any of my views, because I care much less about my opinions than about their being true.'Bertrand Russell, as cited admiringly in Finkelstein's book.

This you fail to do, unfortunately for this conversation, which ends here. That epitaph, to you, since I also cite it, is sheer gall, by a reactionary thinker, devoid of wisdom. Some of us live by that credo, which ultimately goes back to Plato and Aristotle, for both of whom personal affections should never compromise our loyalty to the pursuit of truth. There was of course, an implicit danger in that notion (amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas in a totalitarian state or family could provide a warrant for murder, if the 'truth' is confused with an authoritarian parent's right to domineer or with a party line which runs roughshod over people by advocating the betrayal of one's family or friends), a danger corrected by Russell. In his reformulation, in all of us, even the most gifted, there is a tendency for our self-esteem to get the better of realities and concepts that deflate and challenge it. But, of course, this is just my gall, livid and splenetic, and you are not obliged to torment yourself by reading this page where consolation for what one ardently believes is not my concern. Fare thee well.Nishidani (talk) 02:30, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

Far be it from me to stop you and Finkelstein from swooning for a eugenicist. "Fare thee well" indeed. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 09:10, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

古池や

盲飛び込む

空の音Nishidani (talk) 10:08, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

If my calendarizing is right, ur free to speak once more of matters that shall not be spoken of. Apropos of nothing I look forward to your participating in the upcoming ARC, no excuses. It's planned for December, after that you can put your feet up:) Selfstudier (talk) 19:28, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

been there, done that. Nothing I say, or for that matter in my view what the indicted write in their defence will alter substantially the outcome, substantial damage to regular, competent editors with a balancing ban for one or two others. The probable verdict is already present in the selection of names - the majority of those listed as under suspicion are commonly if ludicrously identified with a 'pro-Palestinian' profile. That is what I meant by 'wokist' above. And, indeed, I take the weird otherwise inexplicable sanction I received as a foretaste of what's to come, since it must reflect some irrationally cautious protective atmosphere surrounding anything deemed 'Jewish' (as opposed to Palestinian- there's no jumpiness about that term). In the IP conflict, Israel, reflecting the mainstream media bias, is, qua an ostensibly 'Jewish' state, increasingly considered ‘marginalized’ and therefore requiring the same special protections and sensitivities accorded other marginalized groups on wikipedia. This consideration does not apply to the other half of the equation, the Palestinian people, who are suffering extreme marginalization if not genocide at the hands of that state. Since 2019 this undercurrent has been slowly creeping into Wikipedia and, I expect, has essentially since 7 October, won the ‘argument’, thanks also to the, apparently, massive disruption of an organized sock farm, whose irruptions were mostly reverted by regulars, while the 'others' stood silently by. Good luck.Nishidani (talk) 21:54, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

I had the good fortune in September while in Paris, to sight and buy a copy of Foucault’s thitherto unpublished lectures on Nietzsche, which were finally edited and published in August. But perhaps I should rather reread his Discipline and Punish which seems more actual. I was reminded of this this morning when low and behold I was pinged to note the 8th report against me over the last year or so, and this time the in-your-face harassment hinges on an awesome innumeracy.

I’m always amazed at the lengths some types of editor will go to to rake up, or extort readings from, diffs in one’s record to exact punitive measures from contributors whose commitment to wikipedia they evidently dislike.Apparently there are some who work under a different calendrical system than the one I, and perhaps yourself, were raised to master by rotework in bubs. I.e.,

Thirty days has September,

April, June, and November,

All the rest have thirty-one,

Save February at twenty-eight,

But leap year, coming once in four,

February then has one day more.

Some years later, I realized that it had two anomalies: (a) has should be ‘have’ since the subject is plural, and (b) the rhyme scheme is defective because ‘thirty one’ and ‘twenty-eight’ do not rhyme with each other, as the format would lead one to expect. Something like

Thirty days have September,

April, June, and November,

All the rest have thirty-one,

With one exception to the sum

That’s February with twenty-eight

Stumbling with a shorter gait

On leap years, though, one in four,

February marches one day more. Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Thirty days have not September

April, June, or November,

by those baubles you remember,

and by Rote tis sworn 'twere "hath"

(changing nary a drop the dues of wrath).-- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 23:30, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Touché. Serves me 'write' for googling the text to save transcribing from memory.Nishidani (talk) 09:45, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

I stand corrected, and yet still the math

of ruling subjects with a singular 'hath'

Challenges usage. We must then 'hath' away

And let a plural 'have' assert its sway.

Of course the bard's example mocks the rule:

Both govern plurals, and damn the grammar school

In plays He penned, and few of us would dare

To let a pedant voice douse out His flair.

Though once a nob, - a certain E. de Vere -

A courtly farter, and a whinging brayer,

Tried to outshine Shakespeare, writing answers

To all the sonnets. The outcome? Paltry cancers

Upon the lithely body of English verse

Here's one to prove it. The rest are far, far worse.

E de Vere's riposte to Sonnet 73

Your glowering years lie on youth’s ashen bed,

And limbs that would caress shake in the cold

Winds of remembrance, grazing upon the fled

Warmth of yesteryear, with my self enrolled

As brushwood for that all-consuming pyre

Your songs stack up against Time’s freezing hour,

My boyhood’s voice enchanted in this choir

Of dirges skirling your necromantic power.

You stay your twilight with my dawning’s glow,

And fire your winter on my borrowed spring,

So you may keep warm watch on life, although

I shiver, bare and ruined, to see you fling

My youth’s green wood on age’s hearth and glow,

Refreshed by bracing coals, while I grow old,

Mere bedded ash left smouldering in the cold. Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Proposed party at PIA5

Hello, I'm notifying you that I have listed your name at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence#Seven proposed parties as being among the most active editors in Palestine/Israel noticeboard disputes, and I have proposed that you participate as a party to the case. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:29, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

And I decline your proposal. I'm retired, in good part because of this kind of behaviour, which undermined my confidence in the serenity of administrative judgment, not retarded.Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Indeed the last diff is particularly comical. I paraphrased a joke used by Sir Stephen Sedley, a distinguished EEC jurist sharing with a non-Jewish readership (The London Review of Books) a joke Jews tell among themselves to warn against the excesses of accusing indiscriminately critics of Israel as, ipso facto, antisemites. No one raised an eyebrow when I quoted this on my talkpage in 2019. By 2024, SFR thought it 'inflammatory' and was backed up by Barkeep, who said, unintelligibly, that my use of it 'weaponised antisemitism' when my use of it underscored how Jews themselves have jokes which caution the community not to weaponise antisemitism!!! And what is the result? an absurdly confused misreading of the evidence and flawed judgment and sanction is now part of the 'proof' I have a battleground mentality. That's called a disinformation feedback loop, and it is so thoroughly ingrained in the system that woe behold anyone dragged into its indefatigably superficial toils. I'll trust the judgment of admins to exercise their functions as serene IP supervisors when they can, as Slim Virgin did, write or rewrite from top to bottom a conflicted or difficult IP topic article or two, displaying mastery of the literature and respect for NPOV balancing between the two parties, an achievement all recognized, even while recognizing imperfections remained. Few of those who kibitz but refuse to help out and prefer to sit in judgment on the sidelines have the faintest idea of how conceptually, methodologically and ethically demanding a serious commitment to that area is, and to see so many good editors hauled over the coals for putative abuses or occasional slips is sad, given the impunity of the endless socks that infest the area with utter cynicism and contempt for encyclopedic aims Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

• I am notifying you of Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence#Request to add Nishidani. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:42, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Declined. I’m retired and stirring from the grave would aggravate rheumatic risks. I see no evidence there, unless for what looks like settling an old score/sore dating back to 19th of August 2023 where you appear to have been upset when I used the adjective ‘extraordinary’ to characterize an edit you made to Zionism, race and genetics (which I rewrote from top to bottom), an edit suggesting that 19th century science ‘provided evidence’ for the existence of races. It did no such thing, and it struck me as extraordinary for someone with a scientific background to suggest, by careless language (noting careless language has proved to be the bane of my former wikilife . It really upsets people), that science (or the pseudo-science of that day) had anything resembling evidence for its contention that ‘races’ (the ideological virus of modern history) existed. If any admin wants to make an informed judgment on the weird insinuations purported to emerge in those diffs, they’d better read the five archived discussions of that page beforehand, where they will find almost nothing from me but patience, urbanity and scholarship used to address other editors few if any of whom appear to have familiarized themselves with many if indeed any of the 103 or so academic sources I and others brought to bear to substantiate the article. Nishidani (talk) 23:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Since I believe the recent sanction was injurious to my bona fides here, however, and since in that request of yours to drag me into a deliberation which I think is conceptually flawed from the outset, further insinuations were made I am disruptive, I will drop a few notes in response to your 'evidence' because I like to think that, at least here, the record of my activities here should be complete. This interests no one but myself of course, so I don't desire any feedback. It may take some time since I am engaged privately in a lengthy argument over Dante's cosmology and the Timaeus, which consumes most of my leisure reading.Nishidani (talk) 13:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Being dragged repeatedly to AE can be evidence for every imaginable conjecture or nothing. Diffs like that look impressive, (that nothing basically happened only feeds into glancing eyes the suspicion that Nishidani must be one of the so-called Untouchables) in terms of the 'no-smoke-without-fire' effect in rumour-momgering, so I will open each up to dissect who said what of whom, in what context, and what the results were. Nishidani (talk) 13:39, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

No need, judging by this and this (altho not everyone is paying attention to that afaics). Selfstudier (talk) 13:49, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

'newly added parties have adequate time to engage in the case.'

I have no adequate time to engage with what is going on over there, which, in any case, is so humongously messy in its conceptual sprawl that to unpack the conflicting premises would take weeks, something which, given the austere word limits, is formally impossible anyway. Perhaps they have the liberty to try and drag me by the virtual short and curlies out of a contented retirement, but my gut feeling is that initiatives of this kind smack of being a kind of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel which bears some analogy to things that go wrong on wikipedia. Now, kindly leave the page to my annotations, which have no interest to anyone at this point but myself.Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• 'In the past two years, Nishidani has been the named subject of 5 AE cases': [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], although the last one was initiated by sockpuppets.

To underline the recurrency of my obnoxious behaviour as recognized at AE two precedents were cited: the second (Sandstein 2019) I deal with elsewhere down the page. The first goes back to a single, bizarre report for 2017

• 13 March 2017 "Nishidani clearly violated the consensus required sanction placed by the Committee on all ARBPIA articles."

The report arose from my adding to the List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2017 a datum about 4 Israelis throwing a stun grenade into an apartment where two Palestinian women, a mother and her daughter, lived ( apparently to drive them out of a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood). The mayor of Petah Tikva called it an example of racist violence. It was immediately reverted on the grounds that the incident was ‘a neighbor dispute over music and criminals’. I thought (mistakenly it turned out) that I was entitled to 1 revert, especially given the bizarre contrafactual edit-summary made by the reverter. This restoration was expunged by a second editor saying the incident was not dissimilar to Palestinian stone-throwing (?!!).

Administrators all agreed that the RS confirmed this violent incident was clearly related to the I/P conflict (i.e. my addition was justified). The technicality that in my one revert I’d failed to get consensus meant I’d apparently infringed an Arbpia ruling. Getting consensus for inclusion of even obvious facts was technically impossible at that time, since from 2016 there had been a concerted ‘pro-Israeli’ majority relentlessly reverted a great number of well-sourced contributions I had made to IP pages on the most spurious or picayune of reasonings. But the technicality stands and, in those terms, I was justly blocked for 24 hours. The long-term result was (a) that nothing can be reverted if one editor challenges an addition, save by talk page consensus (a rule consistently breached since then with impunity) and (b) that this perfectly valid datum is missing from that page to this date. The case can hardly be cited mechanically as evidence for my putatively consistent bad behaviour. I had simply misunderstood the nicety of a rule.If anything it constitutes strong evidence of how rules are abused tactically both to erase legitimate data from IP articles, and to manoeuver content editors into errors that can feed AE reports and get them removed. Nishidani (talk) 14:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Background. Just prior to the first diff, a stub (about a baker's dozen of refs) was posted, Zionism, race and genetics, which was immediately marked for an AfD. I happened to have extensive files precisely on this topic, and was amazed to see every wikipedia negative voice thrown at it (WP:NOR, WP:SYNTH, WP:RS, WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST, WP:HASTE, WP:AND, WP:TNT, WP:BATTLEGROUND etc) by a handful of editors who clearly were totally unfamiliar with this topic, which has accrued a substantial scholarly literature over the past decades. I stepped in and rewrote it thoroughly, with 45 first-class references. In the AfD Tryptofish voted for deletion on the grounds it was a synthesis of 'bogus and nasty scholarship promoting antisemitism to legitimate scholarship rebutting antisemitism.’ Presumably as main drafter I was spreading ‘bogus scholarship promoting antisemitism’. Tryptofish then was miffed that I didn't take this weird claim seriously (how could important historical scholarship most of it by Jewish academics, published by the most prestigious universities and academic presses in the world be smeared as 'bogus' and a promotion for anti-semitism?), and noting his complaint personalized this by stating he felt these remarks were 'badgering' a 'career professor'. So I gave him a detailed rationale. A week later he was still upset ('offended'), despite my gesture. He made the extraordinary and offensive inference that my sardonic rejoinder implied in turn that I was effectively

caricatur(ing) my good-faith comment as some kind of laughable conspiracy theory a la the Protocols of Zion makes me uninterested in taking such a reply seriously.

Sigh. How on earth could one suddenly twist a piece of obvious irony - the technical term is reductio ad absurdum -into a wild insinuation about his intentions is beyond me. Nonetheless, I persisted in trying to mend these hurt feelings, which I found inexplicable, by apologizing if my dismissal of what struck me as a ludicrous assertion offended him and provided an even longer set of reasons for my scepticism about his claim. He apparently remained disgruntled. Nishidani (talk) 16:31, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

• (1) On the 11 August Drsmoo filed a report against me for 'bludgeoning and hostility . . . (and) making personal attacks, assuming bad faith, and casting aspersions on the talk page of Zionism, race, and genetics'.

Drsmoo cited for my ostensible bludgeoning mentality a 2019 case where Sandstein took no action against Icewhiz, reported by Nableezy, while blocking me for a week for a ‘battleground’ use of Wikipedia: I'd characterized Icewhiz as someone with extremist views. Sandstein judged that I’d given no evidence (the evidence I gave was that Icewhiz characterized ) several famous left-centrist Zionist scholars in Israel (Avishai Margalit, David Dean Shulman, Baruch Kimmerling, Zeev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana) as people militating on ‘the fringes of the Israeli radical left’, whereas, in his view, Bezalel Smotrich and Rehavam Ze'evi, figures on the radical right, were simply on the generic right side of the political spectrum and putative opponents of the occupation (radically false). Anyone who actually knew the records of all the named figures would grasp that my inference from that evidence was more than reasonable, not an 'aspersion'. But, true, it was an inference, and Icewhiz was only permabanned six months later, surviving as a prolific sockmaster, even after his Eostrix admin candidate puppet was detected. Technically Sandstein’s sanction was understandable – reasonable inferences are not evidence, even if well-founded. But it was certainly not a battleground aspersion to note that IW’s skewering of those prominent Israeli intellectuals as fringe radical leftists in contrast to the putative moderation of far-right settlers was an ‘extreme’ distortion of the know facts about their respective profiles. Citing a prior case result as a diff, as usual, can be question-begging, since the later record arguably vindicated my inference. Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Palestine-Israel articles 5 updates

You are receiving this message because you are on the update list for Palestine-Israel articles 5. The drafters note that the scope of the case was somewhat unclear, and clarify that the scope is The interaction of named parties in the WP:PIA topic area and examination of the WP:AE process that led to two referrals to WP:ARCA. Because this was unclear, two changes are being made:

First, the Committee will accept submissions for new parties for the next three days, until 23:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC). Anyone who wishes to suggest a party to the case may do so by creating a new section on the evidence talk page, providing a reason with WP:DIFFS as to why the user should be added, and notifying the user. After the three-day period ends, no further submission of parties will be considered except in exceptional circumstances. Because the Committee only hears disputes that have failed to be resolved by the usual means, proposed parties should have been recently taken to AE/AN/ANI, and either not sanctioned, or incompletely sanctioned. If a proposed party has not been taken to AE/AN/ANI, evidence is needed as to why such an attempt would have been ineffective.

Second, the evidence phase has been extended by a week, and will now close at 23:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC). For the Arbitration Committee, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 03:20, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

You have been added as a party to Palestine-Israel articles 5

At the direction of the Arbitration Committee, you have been added as a party to Palestine-Israel articles 5. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Evidence. Please add your evidence by 23:59, 21 December 2024 (UTC), which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Introduction. For the Arbitration Committee, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 21:36, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the courtesy but decline to participate. Still, on reflection, I owe this page a fuller explanation to explain why, and will set out several reasons why, even as a retired wikipedian, re-engaging would be pointless and a waste of everyone's time. A second point is that I do not wish whatever material I may have to cite here furnish matter to be re-cycled against editors there.

First Reflection

I have been very diffident about arbcom since, in my permaban of 2009, analysed here, the case for my putative ongoing ‘incivility, personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith’ included this, which got my account immediately blocked by Jehochman. Several editors within hours complained and his sanction was almost immediately reverted by Bishonen because he had misread the point of my edit. Note that in Jehochman’s defense I immediately added that while wrong, Jehochman’s mistake was understandable.

One month later, Arbcom, completely ignoring or totally unaware of the fact that Jehochman and Bishonen had annulled the suspension, recognizing it had nothing to do with a personal attack, cited it as core proof of my incivility. It permabanned 5 ‘pro-Palestinian editors’ and 2 ‘pro-Israeli editors’ (not 3: every editor probably knew, as I did, NoCal and User:Canadian Monkey were one and the same person (the stylistic thumbprints and tagteaming were a dead giveaway but at that time I certainly doubted that was sufficient to report the sock), still highly active under other names on wikipedia. My mere 8 reverts over 45 days of the politically explosive ‘Judea and Samaria’ for the default term in international literature ‘West Bank’ consisted of desultory but reasoned restorations of proper text (in terms of thick RS evidence) not some mindlessly mechanical and partisan ‘edit-warring’. Indeed I wrote an extended scholarly article on the whole issue of that naming, which still remains at the top of this talk page. Of course, arbitrators probably, and understandably, did not read it. TLDR, and perhaps to many, looking like a personal divagation, mere 'opinion', irrelevant to evidence, rather than a comprehensive academically orientated background paper to Arbcom's deliberations.

Within months, the overwhelming evidence for this led to an obvious consensus that ‘West Bank’ was the default neutral term for Wikipedia. Had arbitrators any knowledge of the state of the considerable literature on that consensus, they probably would not have taken those rare reverts as indicative of edit-warring. But they are formally under no obligation to read up on the topic and consider that such things are just 'content disputes'). The result was that the I/P area was 'gutted' of most of its regular 'pro-Palestinian' (ugh) editors, with only very minor damage to the editors whose POV invariably favoured a 'pro-Israeli' (ugh) POV. Not malice, just sheer disattention.

My diffidence is, furthermore, based on principles of method.

• (a)an admin cannot be expected to be familiar with the topic literature (immense in the I/P area);
• (b) no diff elicited in ‘evidence’ can be properly evaluated unless the original thread (often long) in which it is embedded, is read closely. If that is not done exhaustively, the likelihood of small but persistent misreadings of what is apparently going wrong increases exponentially;
• (c) the most common forms of abuse are not verbal incivility but an obstinate refusal by editwarring parties to read the sources while dilating at length on their views about the article, and comments made by others about their equally source-insouciant impressions (WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT).
• (e) if an editor fully fluent in the high quality RS literature, (which editors have imposed as an I/P area article sine qua non, thank god), complies with the obligation at WP:Consensus to negotiate in these endemic stonewalling threads by replying to the manifold of vagrant assertions at length, that gets them nowhere except risking a sanction as someone who spiflicates
• (f) If you show and state that a persistently objecting editor doesn’t appear to have read the sources, that will be cited as an WP:NPA attack, something which encourages the practice to continue with impunity. The result is that the way we are obliged to achieve consensus, under these conditions, resolves nothing, but lends itself to AE reports of the serious editors’ incivility per occasional outbursts of frustration. An Arbcom5 review, covering several hundred diffs at a minimum, cannot afford the time to read all of the pages where the implicating diffs are embedded. So everything is reduced to ostensible ‘conduct issues’ in the words contributors used. And that MissManners approach totally disregards what we are supposed to be here for, i.e., not to pass the time opining on an interesting social medium, but to muster the finest available sources in such a way that the global public can trust the high quality of its encyclopedic articles.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Second Reflection

Mention has been made that Sandstein banned me from appearing at AE. That has been in effect since June 2019. I may only appear there if I am reported, i.e. to defend myself, but otherwise no. The implication there is that I abused that arbitration process. Since that right is universal in Wikipedia, it looks like a very black mark, indicative of some horrendous behavioural trait. It was odd, however. To my memory (I will stand corrected), from the very outset of my wikiwork here I had undertaken to never resort to arbitration by reporting another editor as a means of settling differences. No matter how incomprehensibly stressful a talk page might be, differences must be thrashed out by careful argument on the talk page. I thought I must allow myself no margin for weaponizing AE etc to get at my interlocutors (though I fully understand that this system is indispensable otherwise). This, even though many of them were to relentlessly pursue me there. I was faithful to that decision from 2006 to the time Sandstein banned me in 2019 save for one exception. I reported Galassi in 2016, only because Sandstein himself suggested I do so after warning Galassi that he was breaking his topic ban at Khazars by challenging me and my edits at that page, which I had managed to retrieve from a messy slough of conflicting POV clashes to bring it to its present, close to FA state.

In short, though often quoted at face value against me, there was no need for Sandstein to deny me the right to make reports to AE because on principle I had denied myself recourse to that instrument before that decision and afterwards. I think what happened is that Sandstein’s way of phrasing his decision created an ambiguity. He did not want me to participate, as a commentator on reports against other editors made by third parties in the IP area, which, from his strictly decontextualizing legalistic perspective (i.e., no interpretations please, only diff data, to be measured strictly against the rule book), quite understandable. But it cancelled in theory, inadvertently, a natural right all other wikipedians have to exercise. The anomaly persists. Any editor or sock can, as they have done repeatedly for 16 years, make reports against me, but I, uniquely, cannot exercise that right in their regard. That, and my own refusal from the outset to use that forum, has given potential harassers a very strong advantage, particularly over the last five years. I'm not troubled by that unique ruling against me. Together with a probable doubling of a permaban, I might even feel somewhat tickled that my work here has been skewered as so 'toxic' (a 'net negative' as one admin insists) that otherwise unexampled measures must be taken against me to bring serenity back to this place, a kind of backhanded honour:) Nishidani (talk) 15:01, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Third Reflection

When the ARCA discussion opened, I noted, while objecting to be sucked into it, that 10 contributors drew dire pictures of utter chaos in the IP area, all of which struck me (impression) as uniformly ill-informed and almost all blaming this putative abusive morass on a small core of highly experienced ‘regular editors’.I’ve been reading that invariable impression by people who rarely if ever engage in editing there, for 15 years. It is one of wikipedia’s clichés. But, reading between the lines, the intimation was that the IP area had been hijacked by ‘pro-Palestinian’ POV pushers. FOARP wrote of these putative POVwarriors as being editors ‘seeking to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS.’

Like all acronymic links, this has its uses, but often begs the question. It suggests that the ‘pro-Palestinian’ editors are abusing Wikipedia, by trying to twist the known facts in order to secure justice for Palestinians, in civil POV-pushing. If one concedes there might have been a 'great wrong' (i.e. since 1948 at least 3 million Palestinians have lost their land, homes and livelihoods, with 55,000 homes bulldozed in the West Bank alone, as a byblow of the establishment and development of Israel as a homeland for the diaspora), that ‘wrong’ cannot be righted. I have consistently asserted this, advising potential editors not to work in the I/P area if they have succumbed to the naïve notion that such contributions can change the outcome.

Yet, history is not, contrary to Hermann Göring ’s view, written by the judges among the victors. It is written retrospectively by the descendants of both victors and vanquished. There is a remarkable overlap between Israeli/diaspora and ‘pro-Palestinian’ approaches in the scholarship on this history, reflecting the greater detachment of retrospective learning. A large number of pages where key issues of summary judgement and phrasing are contested reflect the contentions between the abbreviated generalizations of contemporary mainstream media overviews and that shared body of historical research, which lives in a far more complex universe.

The associated implication, again, that the putative 'pro-Palestinian' 'regulars' (a bad word whose military connotations seem to have slipped past the attention of too many here, vie to wrest control of the narrative, never collaborate, and in editing do so with such violence that they deter new editors, and discomfort 'pro-Israeli' colleagues, is undermined by the fact that whenever a promising new editor, espousing a strong pro-Zionist view, shows care over RS, erudition and a commitment to rational talk page dialogue but still gets into hot water, they have been consistently defended by their ostensible ‘pro-Palestinian’ ‘adversaries’. Suffice it to glance through the AE records of cases involving Arminden (here),Monochrome Monitor here, Bolter here, or what happened at AE in the frequent cases against Davidbena but his importance to the project, given his erudition, has been defended by his so-called POV adversaries to mitigate the severity of sanctions. Nableezy indeed took over the role of mentorship The problem amongthe slandered regular 'core' has never been what POV an editor may entertain, but the potentials for improving the quality of the encyclopedia. I myself even had an informal agreement with Irondome, who mentored ‘pro-Israeli’ editors aspiring to work in the IP area, to help him out to that end. All this is lost from view in simplistic snippety diff histories, as is the fact that reciprocal gestures of this kind seem unexampled among editors identified with the other POV, with the outstanding exception of Irondome, who stepped in to defend me at just one more frivolous AE report in 2016 –the year I was so repeatedly reverted over numerous pages by several mostly tagteaming editors that I was close to throwing in the towel. Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Fourth Reflection

Tryptofish insisted I be listed at ARBPIA5 as a problematic editor, and this proposal was accepted. There is a long story behind this which goes back to strong differences of opinion that emerged between us when I rewrote the article Zionism, race and genetics that had been put up, when a stub, for immediate deletion.

People upset at the article dealt almost exclusively with a phrase or two in the lead, or the title. Almost all objecting editors showed themselves wholly indifferent to the extensive scholarship underpinning that article. Andrevan and Tryptofish in particular vigorously argued that genetics and race should be removed from the title (which I didn’t invent), and were successful, following standard procedures, and now we have ‘Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism.’ It was renamed but the title remains a glaring misnomer: that article has nothing to do with the very broad concept of ‘racial conceptions of Jewish identity’ : it is narrowly focused on the scholarly documentation of how early Zionist ideas about race later inflected quite a bit of Israeli research on Jewish origins, a subject intensively analysed over the last two decades by Israeli scholars. The fact that half of the article is about traces of the earlier thinking about a 'Jewish race' in Israeli genetic studies has been buried from sight by its elision from the original title. Between the lines, I think one editor at least, sincerely believed that the scientific discipline nof genetics was being unfairly 'tainted' by the original title, however strong the academic evidence for this might have been.

In that discussion for the proposed name change discussion the breakdown of the main editors’ comments is

• Andrevan 59 comments
• Tryptofish 45
• Nishidani 27

The same two editors, each took me to AE subsequently, and now participate in the evidence section at ARBPIA5, where I was not listed. Tryptofish in particular insisted I be included. His argument is that I appear to suggest that their views coincided throughout an extenuating thread of sheer argufying in which there is little evidence of their displaying any familiarity with the topic’s literature. Much of this irrationality (my view) appears to be linked to a common perception that I am pushing an ‘anti-Israel’ POV ‘agenda’.

That diff shows no such thing. It reveals on my talk page an acute and troubled sense, shared with an Israeli and based on scholarship, that Israel’s systemic political choices, in the name of Jews, half of whom live by choice in a diaspora, will exacerbate common perceptions that Israel and Jewry are synonyms, and what is done by the former will be blamed on the latter, and feed anti-Semitism. All these careful discriminations are lost when editors persist in thinking that criticism of actions taken by an occupying power of territory outside Israel against a people militarily occupied for 57 years, are read as delegitimizing Israel proper. This blurring of precise conceptual distinctions is inscribed in the politics of language vigorously promoted in attempts to get the (notoriously unworkable) Working definition of antisemitism translated into many legal systems, so that work in various media, Wikipedia included, to document human rights abuses, can be spun as intrinsically anti-Semitic, if Israel is mentioned. In the IP area, Israel is not the focus, but Israel's occupying policies in the Palestinian territories. There are two subjects - an occupying power acting outside of its recognized borders and an occupied people both of whose rationales must be represented with equal weight per NPOV. It is an uncomfortable topic, but must be covered whatever the intense, intimidating pressures may be, also here, to 'normalise' this as a struggle by a democracy against terrorism, or as a result of resistance to the unilateral right of one people to self-determination, whatever the expense may be to the rights to self-determination of people in the other half of the equation may be.

Tryptofish challenged the suggestion of something that looks close to tagteaming, by citing one diff, from a combined 104, where he disagreed with Andrevan. Note that Andre and I did not always agree with one another

Andrevan, I actually don't agree with you about the SYNTH

He had evidently forgotten that he originally voted for deletion of the article on the grounds it violated WP:Synth (aside from the absurd claim that it ‘promoted antisemitic pseudoscholarship’ which, when asked for diffs, he couldn’t corroborate.

Evidence makes a huge issue of POV inconsistency. There is merit in examining this, but, over a manifold of pages across years, it is not hard for even the most self-aware editor to slip up. POV-pushing is said to be where double standards are evident. That doesn’t worry me overly. You can point it out on talk pages without harassing the editor by an immediate AE report. A real problem emerges only when the POV-pushing editor repeatedly returns to his notion despite being reminded it is incoherent. All one gets are further recycling, at length, of arguments already disposed of, often at tedious length when the simple solution is to admit one's fallability. I'll give but one example related to the aftermath of the Zionism, race and genetics page dispute.

At Zionism, Andre removed material by the (Palestinian) anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj on the grounds that an anthropologist cannot be RS on a point of Jewish genetic origins because ‘she is not a geneticist.’

At Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism he introduces here the Israel historian Anita Shapira’s view that genetic studies confirm a Jewish view that they all have common Middle Eastern roots. Shapira is not a geneticist. A scholar without specific qualifications in genetics can therefore comment on that topic is she is Israeli, but not if she is Palestinian.

A year earlier he made much of Abu-Haj being Palestinian (invalidating her scholarship) and imputed that she was a political activist, and possibly therefore associated with antisemitism.here,here, here and here, to cite just a handful. Cf my comment.

There is no evidence for that contention or its anti-Semitic insinuation. The whole thread on the exchanges in those two days has to be read to be believed for its WP:Stonewalling and aspersions about the competence of a Palestinian anthropologist. A year later, this ‘resolved’ issue is still be exhumed with the same intensity of argufying on numerous pages, at Zionism.and on the Arbpia5 workshop pagewhere he is still worrying even the Workshop page., using the instance as proof of some bias on the assumption, I assume, that he is above some POV 'fray' whereas on his own record he has himself a decided POV. Sigh.

I raise this here, after the Evidence page has closed, because I do not want to be involved there and have no interest in providing diff evidence that might embarrass or complicate the wikilives of other colleagues. Apart from socks, no differences among regular contributors on talk pages should lead to AE actions except in exceptional circumstances. Nishidani (talk) 15:10, 20 December 2024 (UTC)