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:::<blockquote> 'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'</blockquote> |
:::<blockquote> 'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'</blockquote> |
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:::(By way of balance the Age also carried a half-page reflection by [[Ramona Koval]], former host of the ABC's Book Show, whingeing/complaining of how deeply uncomfortable Australian Jews now feel, in the midst of 'overbearing cultural enforcers' and pro-Palestinian activists). I shook my head, realising how, like myself mentioning my bout with Covid, a sense of shame should cut in and tell us at least to shut up, rather than indulge, as there, in the obscenity, contextually, of likening one's suburban anxieties about status-harm through association with an eternally victimized Israel and identitarian discomfort to what a German Jew would have felt reading ''[[Der Sturmer]]'' in the 1930s. [[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 07:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC) |
:::(By way of balance the Age also carried a half-page reflection by [[Ramona Koval]], former host of the ABC's Book Show, whingeing/complaining of how deeply uncomfortable Australian Jews now feel, in the midst of 'overbearing cultural enforcers' and pro-Palestinian activists). I shook my head, realising how, like myself mentioning my bout with Covid, a sense of shame should cut in and tell us at least to shut up, rather than indulge, as there, in the obscenity, contextually, of likening one's suburban anxieties about status-harm through association with an eternally victimized Israel and identitarian discomfort to what a German Jew would have felt reading ''[[Der Sturmer]]'' in the 1930s. [[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 07:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC) |
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== Arbitration Enforcement == |
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== Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion == |
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Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at [[Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement]] regarding a possible violation of an [[WP:AC|Arbitration Committee]] decision. The thread is '''[[Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Nishidani|Nishidani]]'''. <!--Template:AE-notice--> Thank you. [[User:Drsmoo|Drsmoo]] ([[User talk:Drsmoo|talk]]) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC) |
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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.'[1]
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.. .' [2]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
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.’ [4]
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’[5]. 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.[6]. 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.'[7]
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 [8]). 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.” [9]
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’[10], 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’[11]
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.’ [12]
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 [13], 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.[14]
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.[15]
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. [16]
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.[17]. 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'.[18]. 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.'[19]
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 [20] 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.' [21] 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.[22][23]
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.” [24]<
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.[25]
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’ [26]
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[27] 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 ’[28]
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)[29]. 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.’ [30]
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. [31]
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[32] 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.[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power[34]. 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[35][36]. 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.[37]
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.' [38]
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.'[39]
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.’ [40]
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’. [41]
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 unprovoked[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state[43] 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[44]. 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. [45] 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. [46]
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[47] 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'[48] 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.[49].
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), [50], 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".'[51]
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).[52][53] 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.[54]
(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’ [55]
'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.'[56]
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.
- ^ T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
- ^ Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
- ^ For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
- ^ Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
- ^ George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
- ^ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
- ^ Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
- ^ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
- ^ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
- ^ Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
- ^ Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
- ^ M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
- ^ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- ^ ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
- ^ John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
- ^ Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
- ^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
- ^ Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
- ^ Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
- ^ Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
- ^ Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
- ^ ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
- ^ cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
- ^ Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
- ^ Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
- ^ 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
- ^ Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
- ^ Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
- ^ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
- ^ 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
- ^ 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
- ^ 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
- ^ Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
- ^ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
- ^ William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
- ^ William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
- ^ Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
- ^ Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
- ^ James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
- ^ Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
- ^ See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
- ^ Numbers, 32:18
- ^ David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
- ^ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
- ^ Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
- ^ Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
- ^ Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
- ^ Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
- ^ Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
- ^ John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13
Further reading:-
- Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010
Notes
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Nakba denial
I know you're retired, and far be it from me to disturb your book scribbling, but I've created Nakba denial and I was wondering if you had any pointers on grossly overlooked sources or perspectives. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:28, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
- No book scribbling. A friend took a photo of me today, on my knees, tweezing out with my fingers weed blade after weed blade from a pebble garden whose plastic undersheath has succumbed to nature's rooted refusal to be suffocated. I still have forty square metres to pluck clean. Occasionally I make tea, interrupt the Gordon Lightfoot/Roy Orbison/Righteous Brothers etc (being in Normandy I also checked out Johnny Hallyday's French version of Unchained Melody. pas mal, but he couldn't imitate Bobby Hatfield's soaring crescendo of register in the climax) crooning from youtube to glance at wiki. Thanks for the Nakba denial article, a good solid start. Unfortunately reading it, I noted that doddering PA quisling in his dotage declared it a criminal offence to deny the nakba. If we set precedents for criminalizing the refusal to accept the facts of anything, science or history, nakba/holocaust etc., then half of mankind will risk a term or two in porridge (including a few dear wiki editors) for one thing or another. But for some months I will have precious little spare time from doing what I do best, nothing. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
- I saw your note on Kfar Asa - what I wasn't able to note, since it's been archived, is that page began with a count of 200 casualties, based on a Russian language source of all things and alongside the infamous 40 babies, long before any sort of due diligence kicked in. The drastic revisions in numbers, and the likes of the Russian source we have here, can't help but give one the feeling that the entire information cycle has been taken for a pretty almighty ride. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:00, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
- It's predictable. Someday one will have to write an article on deliberate information distortion in this area.On another related matter, have we an article on Settler attacks during the Hamas-Israel war?
- Quite a large amount of reportage mentions this, some in considerable detail, i.e.
But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Zanuta’s 150 residents have made a collective decision to leave. Armed settlers – some in reservist army uniforms, some covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying the children. (Bethan McKernan ‘A new Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages The Guardian 31 October 2023).
- I saw your note on Kfar Asa - what I wasn't able to note, since it's been archived, is that page began with a count of 200 casualties, based on a Russian language source of all things and alongside the infamous 40 babies, long before any sort of due diligence kicked in. The drastic revisions in numbers, and the likes of the Russian source we have here, can't help but give one the feeling that the entire information cycle has been taken for a pretty almighty ride. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:00, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
- Some background can be found in David Dean Shulman’s review of Nathan Thrall’s new book, in the New York Review of Books 19th October where he writes:
over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops…. What finally broke the villagers’ spirits came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen and handed it over to the settlers, Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.
- Some background can be found in David Dean Shulman’s review of Nathan Thrall’s new book, in the New York Review of Books 19th October where he writes:
I was there on May 24th, 2023. I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people, evacuated their homes and moved to various sites in the territories.”
- What happened at Khirbet Zanuta repeated itself at A'nizan just across the road the other day ([https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/residents-of-southern-west-bank-hamlet-fleeing-due-to-settler-violence/ 'Residents of southern West Bank hamlet fleeing due to settler violence,' The Times of Israel, 29 October 2023
- I'm retired, so I'm not in a position to do this, but it is definitely a subject that deserves its own page.Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
- Since October 7, Israeli settlers and military have been terrorizing Palestinian communities across the West Bank. At least 10 villages in the South Hebron Hills have been displaced through violence, and over 120 Palestinians have been killed. (Leila Warah, Israeli settler violence has been surging across the West Bank since October 7 Mondweiss 1 November 2023)Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
- I don't believe we have that yet (unless I'm behind), but I agree its overdue. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:24, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
- This past Saturday morning, Bilal Mohammad Saleh, a Palestinian sidewalk vendor of sage and thyme, went out with his family to pick olives.
It’s olive harvesting season in the West Bank and Mr. Saleh was helping pluck the fruit from the gnarled trees that his family has owned for generations.
Then, four armed Jewish settlers showed up, witnesses said. They started yelling, and the olive pickers stopped what they were doing and began to run.
But Mr. Saleh forgot his phone.
“I’ll be right back,” he told his wife. Two gunshots rang out, and in an instant, Mr. Saleh, who was known for his love of fresh leaves and being a fun dad, was face down in the olive grove, dead. (Jeffrey Gettleman, Rami Nazzal and Adam Sella,How a Campaign of Extremist Violence Is Pushing the West Bank to the Brink New York Times 2 November 2023)
Personal Notes
- More children have been killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than the total killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019, Save the Children said.(Rory Carroll, Peter Beaumont, Israeli forces appear to be advancing on Gaza City from two sides, The Guardian 30 October 2023
Nishidani (talk) 14:37, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- Rafael Eitan, in an address to the Knesset as far back as 1983 once spoke of Palestinians as drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle. I.e. 'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.’(Lawrence Joffe, ’ Lieut-Gen Rafael Eitan,’ The Guardian 25 November 2004
- That was a bit too gentle. In an imitation of classical antisemitic cartooning we now get this Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- Israel is using the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack as its latest excuse to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- I had read the article you allude to, before your first mention of it earlier. I should have replied but it is such a long (and very good) article it would have required a lengthier analysis than I have had time to do justice to for the moment. I would still insist that one should call things by their proper name, which in this case, as has been amply apparent since 1948, the structural logic of Zionism dictates ethnocide rather than genocide, despite many notable figures from politicians to influential rabbis speaking directly of the need to finish 'them' off over the last decades. That doesn't make things more palatable via a euphemism: it just fits the record better. It is true that massacres played an important role in the establishment of the state - Benny Morris records 24, the Palestinians upwards of 60 such incidents in 1947-1949, - and that they continued intermittedly, the Rafah massacre affecting Gazan's memory in particular (Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi if I recall correctly saw his uncle mowed down at Khan Younis by an Israeli death squad, something which drew him decades later, into Hamas).* But the point has usually been to seed the kind of panic that leads to mass flight, as when in July 1948 the Palmach threw grenades, or in one account, shot a missile into a mosque full of refugees, killing hundreds of Muslims taking refuge there, and thereby, as with the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that year the flight of tens of thousands).
- Israel is using the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack as its latest excuse to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- Aref al-Aref, whose honesty with figures shamed his contemporary Israeli historical colleagues (it was he who established that the figures for Palestinians murdered at Deir Yassin were less than half the figure the Irgun boasted of) estimated that 13,000 Palestinians died in 1948. Almost all of Israel's 6,000 fatalities in the war fell fighting Arab armies in formal combat. The gap has never been explained.
- The systematic fragmentation into 165 bantustans of Palestinians in the West Bank is not genocidal, but ethnocidal - as hamula structures, kinship, become the primary locus of identity. One of the technical problems facing Israel in destroying Gaza - plans envisage extending the border significantly into the Strip to 'protect the (reconstructed) kibbutzim' by thereby seizing that 25% of the land which is agriculturally fertile) is that 2.3 million will be squeezed into an even more crowded, foodless and waterless inferno, forcing identitarian consolidation rather than the ethnocidal dispersion engineered for the West Bank.
- Nathan Thrall's historical observation (in his The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine , 2017), that in the history of Palestine/Israel, Palestinians have always initially protested the usurpation of their rights peacefully and, on each four occasions, have found their strikes/ civil demonstrations put down with furious violence, first by the British Mandatory Authorities and then by Israel, after which they have had recourse to the same language as their adversaries, holds even in the latest case, the fifth. This October war comes in the wake of The Great March of Return, a civil protest demanding an exit from the world's largest concentration camp which lasted for 18 months, openly to be met with by the weekly mowing down of selected protesters, 223 murdered by Israeli soldiers shooting safely from embankments at youths some 100+ metres over the border, and wounding 9,000. Gaza is full of crippled, limping survivors from just that episode.
- Rodi Rudoren in The Forward some days ago wrote an essay What if thousands of Gaza residents breached the border fence carrying only Palestinian flags?. She never asked herself the same question of Israel adopting a different response every time over the last 75 years when Palestinians, including Hamas, have sought a stay in the violence. Again, the Palestinians are failed for not proving themselves more pacifistic than their masters.
- The latest statistics suggest that 1,000 children are being killed in Gaza each week, and Israel states that it will be a long war.('It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.'(That is the first time, albeit privately, that Israel has admitted that, in defiance of international law, it thinks disprortionately killing large numbers of civilians to achieve its aims is legitimate. The parallel made is all the more extraordinary because Nazi Germany and Japan were major powers occupying other countries. Israel is the belligerent occupying power in this case) Michael D. Shear, David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, 'Biden’s Support for Israel Now Comes With Words of Caution,' The New York Times 30 October 2023)Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- There can be no equivocation over Hamas's resort to terrorism, but at the same time, when a string of six retired and historically illiterate Australian Prime Ministers try to elbow their way back into the headlines by screaming about some putative 'cult of death', one can't but murmur that three serial terrorists later rose to be the elected leaders of Israel. The 7th,Paul Keating, an extremely well-read man, withheld his signature. Perhaps he recalled what Churchill stated in the House of Commons on the 17th November 1944, in commemorating his friend Lord Moyne who had been assassinated some days earlier by Lehi:
If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. (Andrew Roberts,Churchill:Walking with Destiny, (2018) Penguin ed. 2019 p.846 - I read that yesterday and checking, see that the wiki page on Moyne quotes from Hansard a primary source. Roberts' book should replace the source.)Nishidani (talk) 00:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
- The latest statistics suggest that 1,000 children are being killed in Gaza each week, and Israel states that it will be a long war.('It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.'(That is the first time, albeit privately, that Israel has admitted that, in defiance of international law, it thinks disprortionately killing large numbers of civilians to achieve its aims is legitimate. The parallel made is all the more extraordinary because Nazi Germany and Japan were major powers occupying other countries. Israel is the belligerent occupying power in this case) Michael D. Shear, David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, 'Biden’s Support for Israel Now Comes With Words of Caution,' The New York Times 30 October 2023)Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- That quote from Churchill, if unsurprising in the context, is a remarkable one. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:30, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
Just a reminder that Helena is worth reading, as usual. Nowadays she's active mostly on her new site globalities. --NSH001 (talk) 08:31, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks Neil and sorry for neglecting to reply. I've been shifting loads of mulch, and with what free time left over, reading bios of people who had some claim to political greatness, (at the moment Jean-Luc Barré's monumental De Gaulle: Une Vie,) something that has disappeared from the world's horizon in recent decades. Sometimes I think anyone aspiring to political office should be asked to accept a public interrogation consisting of a spelling bee, and one hundred select questions on history - and they'd have to get a C grade before obtaining a right to candidature. That reflection arose when, during a summit in Rome, as big shots sat for a photo opportunity in the heart of Rome, they were asked to name the 7 (actually 11) hills of ancient Rome. Boris Johnson has a reputation as an ancient history buff, fluent in classical languages, and screwed up. I read yesterday an overview by Alain Gresh entitled Barbares et civilisés (Le Monde diplomatique Novembre 2023 pp.1,17) a trenchant historical analysis of the imposture of Western geopolitical discourse, with its comfortable distinction between civilised nations that can affirm themselves as legal great powers on the basis of genocidal colonialism and the 'savages' who, after decades, 'answer' their massacres and dispossession by rising up to slaughter even innocents among their tormentors. The latter are dismissed as 'terrorists' and the middle class press is awash with grievance and outrage calling for revenge, as if only those with dish washers, nice homes, fine educations merit empathy and earn the right to exact massive retribution against entire populations in which the terrorists are embedded. It's refreshingly asceptic, stringent in its lucid deconstruction of the hysterical partisanship of the mainstream's take (or is that 'takeaway', ugh!) on recent tragedies, which I well recommend, if you can access it. A rare antidote against the flushing of our sensibilities by the constant tide of prestigious drivel you get from the Bernard-Henri Lévy-Thomas Friedman-Anthony Blinken blatherers that add lustre to the slipshod slapdash opinionizing on events . . and the huge sutler army of rocketpolishing bullshit artistes who chime in in the wake of events to make out that even ethnocide must be understood as well, an unfortunate measure to defend the civilised ordure of our contemporary world.Nishidani (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
- The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers. "A leader of the settlement movement on expanding into Gaza, and her vision for the Jewish state." Written by Isaac Chotiner, published in The New Yorker, 11 Nov 2023. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- That's the usual piddling murmur in the mainstream press that, yes, Israel also has its problems but these are individuals, minorities, groups like settlers or hilltop youth. The military and political elite, the heart of Zionism, is, to judge from the following florilegium of statements, beating along quietly with the so-called disruptive margins of Israeli society. Read,slowly,
Yaniv Cogan and Jamie Stern-Weiner, 'Fighting Amalek in Gaza: What Israelis Say and Western Media Ignore,' Norman Finkelstein.com 12 November, 2023
- It would be remarkable for anyone who doesn't follow events over the decades there, but will be ignored, at least until Finkelstein writes the definitive account of this final episode in the extinction of Gaza, and even thgen responses will be buried in book reviews. Remarkable because almost all of those statements in a wartime context express, boastfully, criminal intentions, with no more restraint than Mein Kampf.Nishidani (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
- I hope someone out there is compiling an encyclopedic list of moronic comments made by journalists interviewed for their insights into the present conflict. A few minutes ago, I learnt from one of these authoritative donkeys that after Hamas is eradicated, the world must build a university in the Gaza Strip (whose several universities apparently don't exist) where Novel Prize Winners will teach this unfortunate people, so long indoctrinated to hate, to learn the virtues of peace. Reality check here.(Just anecdotally, many of the 37,000 who annually study for their finals have to do so with candleliught, given the chronic power outages)Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
- The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers. "A leader of the settlement movement on expanding into Gaza, and her vision for the Jewish state." Written by Isaac Chotiner, published in The New Yorker, 11 Nov 2023. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
a request
For an old friend, mind working on User:Tiamut/St H Stephan? nableezy - 02:14, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
- It's be easy - well, a couple of hours reading the sources - to fix if was then immediately shifted to article space. Otherwise, it would be pointless.Nishidani (talk) 23:46, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
- It will be shifted to article space and and DYK proposed for another one on her list. nableezy - 00:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
- Ya tryen ta drag a senile old fart retiré back in'a wikipaedia? The divine Huldra's already dunnit yonks ago.Stephan Hanna Stephan Nishidani (talk) 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
- Just want to send a gift to somebody I miss is all. Figured you would too. nableezy - 18:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
- Ya tryen ta drag a senile old fart retiré back in'a wikipaedia? The divine Huldra's already dunnit yonks ago.Stephan Hanna Stephan Nishidani (talk) 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
- It will be shifted to article space and and DYK proposed for another one on her list. nableezy - 00:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
help
User:Nableezy/aditloas. nableezy - 18:48, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
- Several thousand Israelis will each have a story like Abed Salama's to tell about what happened 7 Oct. Close to 2 million Gazans will too for what they experienced from October 7 for several months if not, as Netanyahu suggests, indefinitely. I don't expect we'll hear much of the latter, since it will remain oral. This is the way history is usually 'framed' there.
- But yeah, I can help there, but you'll have to wait a bit. I'll get a copy of the book in December when I go downunder. Nishidani (talk) 21:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
I see you decided to hide "ethnic cleansing" under the word "depopulated". It seems inappropriate to me. I again suggest opening a discussion about the latest changes on the article's talk page. Eladkarmel (talk) 09:25, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
- The secondary sources all speak of over 400 villagers being driven out of Najd at gunpoint. We have the euphemism 'depopulated' which is widespread on wiki but used in the passive voice, meaning editors 'hide' the facts about who did the depopulating, which however in the best historical sources always has an historical actor, namely various parts of the Israeli forces fighting at that time.
- I already posted on the talk page what you request me to do. There I note that your own edit removed facts in a form of historical denialism, asserting that there is something controversial about the facts. The pot calling the kettle black. If you excise historical facts referrable to first rate sources, on wiki, you are edit warring.Nishidani (talk) 09:31, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
Some reflections
- Stephen F. Eisenman 'A Small Boy and Israel, Counterpunch 10 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
- Yuval Abraham, 'Gazans worked in Israeli kibbutzim for decades. Then came Oct. 7,' +972 magazine 6 November 2023
- Anna Morrow, 'Israel’s war is the biggest threat to Jewish peoplehood,' The Forward 8 November 2023
- Erika Solomon, 'Germany’s Stifling of Pro-Palestinian Voices Pits Historical Guilt Against Free Speech,' New York Times 10 November 2023
- Tareq S. Haijaj The stories we don’t know how to tell Mondoweiss 10 November 2023 (Issam Ileywa RIP)
- Linda Dayan, 'Ahmed Wanted Israelis to Listen to Gazans. Then 23 of His Family Members Were Killed,' On the Facebook page 'Across the Wall,' Israelis read personal stories by Gazans in Hebrew, until the last update came in: 'The entire family of this page’s founder has been bombed to death.' The Israeli co-founder of the page now says: 'I don’t know if we’ll be able to build that bridge again Haaretz 2 November 2023
- Raja Shehadeh, 'Israel has long wanted Palestinians out of Gaza – my father saw it firsthand,' The Guardian 20 November 2023
Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.
This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- Raji Sourani, 'I Live in Gaza. Israel’s Horrific Bombing Campaign Is Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen Before,' Jacobin 7 November 2023
We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.
If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.
- Alison Avigayil Ramer, 'Bassem and Ahed Tamimi are in Israeli prison because they stand for Palestinian freedom,' 19 November 2023.
This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration.Nishidani (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'
- 'Israel/OPT: ‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’: Unlawful Israeli strikes illustrate callous disregard for Palestinian lives,' Amnesty International 20 November 2023
In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped.Nishidani (talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- Your list provides informative and thoughtful insights. BTW, did you get a chance to read the article from Oct. 27 by Max Blumenthal, saying there is high probability that many (perhaps even most) of the Israeli civilians (as well as Israeli soldiers) killed on October 7 were killed by so-called 'friendly' fire? It is not my intention to minimize, belittle or trivialize the proven fact that Palestinians killed many Israeli civilians on October 7, but it appears likely the Israeli military has also killed many Israeli civilians (and soldiers) on that day. Your thoughts? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
- What is remarkable about all these articles (only 1 is RS)
- David Sheen, Ali Abunimah, 'Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says,' Electronic Intifada 16 October 2023.
- Max Blumenthal, 'October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles,' The Greyzone 27 October 2023
- 'A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,'Mondoweiss 22 October 2023
- Ali Abunimah,“Shoot at everything”: How Israeli pilots killed their own civilians,'Electronic Intifada 11 November 2023
- is that they (a) draw directly on numerous reports in the Israeli press that however (b) like these articles themselves, are ignored by the Western mainstream press. So you have a paradox: Israel's press is 'freer' than its Western counterparts in reporting on the conflict, but its political elites (including the IDF) allow themselves a far more restricted set of options than would normally be the case in deliberations on critical situations in Western countries.
- Why destroy an entire landscape when the enemy is underground? There is a very simple technological weakness in Hamas's tunnel-system. It needs large numbers of audible generators, detectable by sensors, to induct and circulate fresh air. Any network could be 'neutralized' by destroying the generators, giving those inside the option of surrender or asphixiation.(Trying to think in strictly military terms, as though I were an IDF commander) Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
More remarkable statements
- Jonathan Ofir, Israeli rabbis tell Netanyahu that Israel has a right to bomb Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza,' Mondoweiss 31 October 2023
- Tali Shapiro Jonathan Ofir, Israeli doctors urge the bombing of Gaza hospitals, Mondoweiss 5 November 2023
Nishidani (talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023
Honourable men (once upon a time)
After the war, we heard that the first target usually seen by the pilots in the enclosed waterway was the Canberra. By chance, she was painted white, which was taken by the attackers to mean that she was a hospital ship. Without exception, the Argentinian pilots were honourable men, and not one attacked what they thought was a sanctuary for the injured.' Sharkey Ward,Sea Harrier over the Falklands, Cassell (1992) 2000 p.273.
Et cetera
- Elliot Colla, On the History, Meaning, and Power of 'From the River to the Sea,' Mondoweiss 16 November 2023
Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party.Nishidani (talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
- Interview with Max Blumenthal, posted on 17 Nov 2023. He summarizes his article above, and provides additional insights and analysis, not only on the events of Oct. 7-8 but also on more recent military, political, social and cultural trends in Gaza, Israel, the US and Western Europe.
- (As a Jewish Israeli-American who has many good [as well as some bad] childhood memories of growing up in Israel and still has a small number of dear family and friends in beautiful Israel, I personally found the part about the increasingly insane, increasingly ethnocidal/ genocidal indoctrination and incitement inside Israeli Jewish society to be particularly disturbing. But this is not surprising, in light of the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, a settler-colonial state.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- I have many wonderful memories of my time in Israel, and also of the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When enjoying a day off (I chose to work three shifts, from 3.30 am to 7 pm), I hitchhiked and invariably was picked up and given a free ride by taxi-drivers from Gaza, which I visited after talking my way past border guards who insisted I'd risk being murdered by terrorists. My father had been stationed in Gaza in WW2, and left a letter describing his pleasant evenings there).
- Over the last few decades, I've come to the conclusion that Israel is caught up in an historical and structural logic, following on from the racial premises of Zionism, which militates against any resolution of its internal contradictions. Forget (in the sense of thinking they are part of the problem) about Palestinians: history has long wiped its arse on them. The problem is essentially what the internal, downspiralling dynamics of its limited options creates for the 'diaspora'. Zionism arose as an aggressive challenge to Jewish diaspora civilization. It took several decades of colonial accomplishments and intensive diplomatic and emotional pressuring to get Jewish communities throughout the world to anneal their vision of Jewishness, in all of its varieties, with the model Israel produced, a muscular, nationalist concept of the 'new Jew'. For readers of Josephus, all this is not 'new'. Rabbinical wisdom drew a lesson from the latter, which has now been forgotten in the tragic euphoria of successive, superficially successful wars. This latest episode, in a world where the mainstream media narrative no longer holds water because everyone, esp. the young, can access alternative media or the work of people like Blumenthal, will tend to give rise to exasperations which Israel and its commentariat will exploit to spin as a 'new' new antisemitism. No doubt antisemitism will indeed be strengthened - most cannot distinguish 'Jews' from Israel precisely because Zionism has insisted on their interchangeability. One can read Zionism, like Christianity, as a 'Jewish' heresy. The latter generated antisemitism, and Zionism itself may paradoxically, in one of those deep ironies beloved of history, produce a similar result for different reasons. But that will not relieve Jews in the diaspora of the difficult choices it must now make - retention of its assimilative humanism which has been the glory of its haskalah heritage, or endorsement, no ifs or buts, of a fierce ethnonationalism as the logic of history drives Israel even further down the path of maximalism. Best wishes 21:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- Jonathan Ofir, Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in Gaza,' 20 November Mondoweiss 2023
Retired Major-General Giora Eiland:
The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.
The whole article is worth reading for a clue as to the kind of mentality that one often notes among the upper echelons of the IDF.Nishidani (talk) 17:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be.
That is almost identical in tone and content to the drift of Himmler's speech addressing troops who had just mown down about 150 Jews near Minsk in 1941.Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
- Israel allegedly enforces 'Hannibal Protocol' on Oct. 7, killing festival-goers to prevent their captivity. "'What we’ve seen here is mass Hannibal,' [Israeli] Lt. Col. Nof Erez says on [Israel's] military response to surprise attack at festival, where 364 people were killed." Published by Anadolu Agency, a Turkish news agency.
- Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees, by the Yale Review of International Studies.
- Fool Me Twice. "The tried-and-tested tropes of the post-9/11 and Iraq War eras have been deployed for Israel's war in Gaza. The returns are diminishing."
- Israel's fears, its delusions and its future. Conversation with Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator and analyst who now heads the US-Middle East Project. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
- Philip Oltermann, Israel-Hamas war opens up German debate over meaning of ‘Never again’ The Guardian 22 November 2023
In Berlin, the city senate is considering pulling funding for the Oyun cultural centre in the German capital’s Neukölln district, after the centre’s directors reportedly refused to cancel a peace vigil by a leftwing Jewish group.
I.e.German hypervigilance against a recrudescence of antisemitism as part of its programmatic if clichéd Vergangenheitsbewältigung has now ironically morphed into a vigilante punishing of Jews who are critical of Israel.Nishidani (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
- Likewise,Apparently, right under our smog-insensitivized noses, US universities have been hijacked by a phenomenon even more terrifying than Hamas. They form a “woke mind virus factory,” Jack D The outsized place of the U.S. university in the current struggle, Mondoweiss 22 November 2023
- Basic Principles of Humanity, New York Review of Books (18 Nov. 2023). An interview with Human rights expert Sari Bashi, who lives in the West Bank and is the program director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she leads the organization’s research. “Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.” Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yoav Haifawi, How Israel undermined the prisoner exchange by widening the definition of ‘security prisoners’ Mondoweiss 7 December 2023
Breaking News Scoop
Hamas operatives are also trained to fire on IDF soldiers when they see them' Yaakov Lappin, 'Some 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions ‘significantly damaged’,' Jewish News Syndicate 20 November 2023
Cutting off foreskins as a military tactic
Taking a leaf out of battle descriptions of the Israelites against the Philistines in the Bible, the Israeli minister for Telecommunications Shlomo Karhi has apparently called for the circumcision of captured Hamas fighters.(Oren Ziv , Yotam Ronen, Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace, +972 magazine 22 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC))
- I don't know the common practice in Gaza, but most Muslim men are circumcised though it isn't compulsory. Zerotalk 12:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, I was going to say ... pretty empty, if fucked-up threat ... Iskandar323 (talk) 13:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
- Yes, of course, we all should know Muslims generally undergo circumcision. That was the point of citing this trash - the unbelievable obtusity of the ignorant who have a voice in shaping perceptions of this war. The 'Philistine' of the 'piece' is the fool who wrote that. See below for another bite from the tsunami of appalling crassness flooding the airwaves.Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- Yeah, I was going to say ... pretty empty, if fucked-up threat ... Iskandar323 (talk) 13:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
- Apparently some editorsin here are engaged in a new crime; the keyboard terrorismn of documenting suffering that is not IsraeliNishidani (talk) 16:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Forget Sumud. It's been trumped by 'Zionist stoicism'
Yafa Adar is home.The sub-humans around her are already lying deep underground, their house has probably been turned into rubble by the army of the state of Israel. That’s Jewish, Israeli power.(Yosef Israeli a reporter for Channel 13 cited Canaan Yidor, Israelis celebrate the return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ‘embodies Zionism’, The Times of Israel 25 November 2023 )
- It is natural that in a tragedy we connect and respond more instinctively to the fate of those whom we (may) know. Yaffa Adar was originally reported to be from Kfar Aza, where I once worked. I wondered whether I had known her during my stay, while deeply moved by the photo of her in a Hamas jeep being carted off to Gaza as a hostage. The photo of her resigned, apparent ease (almost 'well, I'd better get used to this new episode in my life') will figure as one of the iconic snapshots of the Israeli side of this war. I was really chuffed up to see her safe and sound, while naturally thinking that 10,000 plus 'sub-human' Gaza women and children would not survive to tell their side of the story. Hence the obscenity of the remark above. There are few things, readingwise, more nauseating that reading the infantile outpourings of an extremely jejune nationalism.Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
- Zionism – An Ideology for the Self-Loathing (27 October 2023). by Roger Harris for CounterPunch. "Yet growing numbers of us [American Jews] still embrace our ancestral identity and, especially in light of current events, wholly renounce its self-loathing antithesis of Zionism. What the Nazis failed to achieve – the obliteration of European Jewish culture – the Zionists are carrying forward. We have a word for that in Yiddish. It’s a shanda, a scandalous embarrassment and shame." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis would suggest we shouldn't help 'Pally' kids
- Rhana Natour, 'These Palestinian boys received life-saving surgery in the US. An Israeli airstrike killed them in their home,' The Guardian 28 November 2023
- I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment. We’ve reached a searing milestone: In just five weeks of war, half of 1 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the share of the American population that was killed in all of World War II — over the course of four years. Nicholas Kristoff,'What We Get Wrong About Israel and Gaza,' New York Times 15 November 2023
- Most editors won't have time to read the several good book-length studies of Hamas. But an excellent early study of its dynamics is available on jstor and should be required reading, as a cautionary prophylaxis against swallowing holus-bolus the Hamas=terrorism-and-nothing-else meme that is an article of faith in mainstream reportage, and the default staple of nearly all Israeli newspapers. I refer to Menachem Klein, Hamas in Power, Middle East Journal , Summer 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3 , pp. 442-459 Nishidani (talk) 21:20, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
- Tareq S. Hajjaj,'‘They shot her son in her arms and forced her to throw his body’: testimonies from the death march on Salah al-Din Street,' Mondoweiss 30 November 2023
The Salah al-Din Trail of Tears or something like that will probably be written some years down the track, when testimonies from masses of survivors of the trek involving over a million individuals are cross-checked. The killing of several dozen local reporters has made the collection of evidence extremely difficult, the systemic bias of giving intense coverage to Jewish victims of Hamas's outrage while only referring to the obvious death march in generic allusions to an abstract mass's plight in a line or two. Some of Hajjaj's material consists of rumours, but the hallucinating experiences of people like the lad with the smashed leg look typical and not unlikely for at least several thousands.Nishidani (talk) 07:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- The Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Understanding history. "Zionists say they do not understand why Palestinians take up arms, and that their insurgency is terrorism. Let them read their own history. Where it says Ana put Jana. Where it says Jews put Palestinians, where it says Warsaw put Gaza and where it says Nazis put Zionists. Maybe then they will understand."
- The Israeli perspective–on genocide–dominates our airwaves. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- Inside the Pro-Israel Information War. "Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices." Long-form article by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
I don't think the saying, 'scum always rises to the surface' is invariably true, but the bags here do appear to follow the rule. Thanks. Nishidani (talk) 06:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
- Israelis aren't seeing the devastating pictures Australians see from the war in Gaza. They're watching a sanitised war (9 December 2023). John Lyons in ABC News (Australia)
- ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians (8 December 2023). Gregory Shupak in FAIR. "What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:30, 10 December 2023 (UTC). --- Here are several additional thoughtful and insightful articles by Gregory Shupak on key media aspects of Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, posted over the last 3 years. He also wrote a book about this. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:54, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
- Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds (9 December 2023). Julian Borger in The Guardian. "Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than the average in all world conflicts in 20th century, data suggests." Original in Haaretz: "The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing. The IDF chief of staff recently boasted of the army's precise munitions and its ability to reduce harm to noncombatants. But the data shows that in the war on Hamas that principle has been abandoned. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
- Death and Destruction in Gaza (11 December 2023). By John Mearsheimer. "As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?" ["... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"] Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:31, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.” Jonathan Ofir, 'I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer,' Mondoweiss 8 December 2023
Nothing of this surprises me. What does is the moral cowardice of the communities who stand by. Nishidani (talk) 00:13, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
- There are several reasons for the moral cowardice of the wealthy western nations (especially the US, Western Europe, Canada, Australia etc). At least two reasons come to mind: (a) The tremendous power of the pro-Israel lobbies in these countries, and (b) There are very large fossil fuel reserves near the coast of Gaza, and the US strongly prefers that these reserves would be under Israeli control and not under Palestinian control, because if they're in Palestinian hands the Palestinians then could sell (most of) the fossil fuels to China, whereas if these resources are in Israeli hands, the US government could exert enormously powerful pressure on the Israeli gov't to refrain from selling them to China.
- Over the last 15 years or so, the US has been gradually shifting its foreign policy (for the US, its 'foreign' policy has always been practically indistinguishable from being a key component of its overall long-horizon economic policy) to focusing on trying to 'compete' with China i.e. to weaken/ hurt/ cripple the Chinese economy as much as possible. This is true for all US administrations regardless of political party affiliation, including both Democunt as well as Republicunt, starting in the last couple of years of the Bush Jr administration and continuing with the administrations of Obama, Trump and now Biden. The numbers don't lie, and the economic numbers are basically almost all that has ever mattered to US (and Chinese, Western European, etc) decision makers. Up until recent years, US GDP was by far the largest on the planet, but in the last few decades China's GDP has been growing faster than the US's and has recently surpassed the US: today China's GDP (PPP) is roughly about $33 Trillion, while US GDP (PPP) is about $27 trillion. That is, from the POV of US decision makers, their top priority, by far, is how to slow - and preferably reverse - the fact that the US has in recent years lost its undisputed global economic dominance to China.
- See this, among several other articles and books published in recent years about the geopolitical implications of the vast oil and natural gas reserves near the Gaza shoreline. Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:23, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
- The Death of Israel (17 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception."
- Well, I think that is a piece of wishful thinking. It is simply wrong-headed to assert that 'Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception'. The 'new' world is dominated by successful settler colonial states that have withstood the usury of time, and indeed thrived, and Israel will be no exception. Of course this latest triumph of Zionism rubbishes the moral force of both the haskalah tradition and the Holocaust, but they too are past their use-by date.Nishidani (talk) 01:18, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- What is wrong with Israelis? (27 December 2023). "Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 10:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- None of which is reported abroad. That Gaza is one huge whore, deserving of genocidal rape by missiles carrying the signatures of young Israeli women, is all over Israeli social media, as are euphoric chants by children, rabbinical students and entertainers in army camps mocking the destruction of Palestinian women and children. It's all there, and invisible to readers. Words fail one.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- More on moral cowardice: Saudis Attempt To Normalize Ties With Israel By Air-Striking Gaza (11 August 2023). By the writers of The Onion.
- Yet more on moral cowardice: ‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (13 October 2023). By the Editorial Board of The Onion. "Some may call us cowards for our decision. To this, we can only say the following: If a coward is a person [IT: or a government] who avoids taking a difficult stance on topics for personal expediency, then “coward” is a badge this editorial board will gladly wear, again and again and again." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
- NY Times October 7 hoax exposed (30 December 2023). By Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, who "meticulously debunk a New York Times article purporting to demonstrate that Hamas carried out a policy of sexual assault against Israelis on October 7, and demonstrate that the Times' Jeffrey Gettleman is guilty of journalistic malpractice and serving as a willing tool for the serially mendacious Israeli government." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:33, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
- That the NYTs article is a pretentious exercise in pseudo-journalism is self-evident, but I don't think Max B is at his best there. That challenge is not meticulous but somewhat offhandish. MB was showing signs of fatigue. Does an amputated breast maintain its shape so that it can be thrown around and juggled like a ball, as was claimed? That is now a meme, and I've yet to see anyone stop to think about it. Only in Picasso's imagination, one would think. I made the 850 mile train trip to Madrid in late 1981 just to catch the inaugural showing in that country of Guernica. There has been a Guernica every day since 7 Oct. The past has no more resonance.Nishidani (talk) 04:40, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
- Chris Hedges: Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (31 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:39, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
- The only thing to note is that the relevant provisions of international law can never, in all probability, be interpreted in a way to hinder Zionism's historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine. The present ethnocide will simply lead to a surge in industrial and industrious scholarship that, while confirming the obvious, will inflect neither Israeli opinion, world opinion nor international concepts of justice. The only thing that interests me at this point is to observe to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people. In any case, rather than Hedges, see the ever-lucid A. Dirk Moses, More than Genocide: The law occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense The Boston Review 14 November 2023Nishidani (talk) 12:30, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.
- Mearsheimer today, on his substack: Genocide in Gaza 4 January 2024. Finally he's come round to regarding it as a genocide. He's only saying, more politely, what the ranting Cornishman said days ago. --NSH001 (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, N. I noted in particular
the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.
- Application Instituting Proceedings regarding Israel's genocide lodged by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. pp.59-67 provide clear verbal evidence of genocidal intent by Israel's leaders.Nishidani (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
- The best overview I am familiar with now is Seth Ackerman, There was an Iron Wall in Gaza Jacobin
- This explained the anomalies in the attacks that I noted within the first two days, if the hypothesis of a rift within Hamas between the political and military wings, which led to a radical change in the battle orders by Sinyar et al., in the last three hours to include attacks on civilians, proves to be correct. Note that the rape, mutilation etc charges that were used to orchestrate Israel's case for retributive genocide against this collective of 'animals' are eerily reminiscent of, almost a replica of the testimonies about the Israeli assault on Palestinians at the Massacre of Deir Yassin in 48. Nishidani (talk) 01:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
- How Israel's war on Gaza exposed Zionism as a genocidal cult (11 January 2024). By Joseph Massad in Middle East Eye. "The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fit this description." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- Gaza and New York (Nov/Dec 2023). By Alexander Zevin in New Left Review. "America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?" Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- ‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (13 January 2024). By Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem, for The Guardian. "Meir Baruchin, who was fired and jailed for criticising the military, says that many who agree with him are afraid to go public." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:38, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- A Critical Look at The New York Times' Weaponization of Rape in Service of Israeli Propaganda (14 January 2024). By Randa Abdel-Fattah in the Institute for Palestine Studies. "The fact is that Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. This is the sobering reality Palestinians face. The racism that animates hyper-attention over crimes imagined to have been committed against Israelis is the same racism that desensitizes people to crimes actually committed against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Several recent reports by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate:
- Traumatizing the public into compliance w/official Israeli, US lies
- NYT atrocity propaganda continues to collapse
- Blockbuster Israeli report exposes Oct 7 friendly fire orders
- Max Blumenthal confronts State Dept on genocide support
- Life in Jerusalem under Israel's military dictatorship
- Israeli victims' families denounce NY Times 'Hamas rape' report
- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:06, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- Jewish Scholars vs. Jewish Donors on Antisemitism (22 January 2024). By Peter Beinart for The Beinart Notebook. "... But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out."
- A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name (22 Jan 2024). By Brad Pierce for The Wayward Rabbler. "The IDF is Accused of Causing Mass Civilian Casualties on 10/7." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:37, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
- Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity (29 January 2024), The New York Times. By Balakrishnan Rajagopal, with photos and accompanying text by Yaqeen Baker. Dr. Rajagopal is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Ms. Baker’s home was destroyed in the war in Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role? (31 January 2024). By Aaron Rabinowitz for Haaretz. "The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
- Thomas Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda (6 February 2024). Jim Naureckas for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
- Well if Friedman and his likes are now going mainstream with vermin tropes for the adversarial 'Other' (Theodor Adorno has a good early analysis of insect metaphors for despised ethnic groups, in The Authoritarian Personality (1951) - it was a serious element in antisemitic caricatures, vide Kafka for the most egregious example) I guess I'd better make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians.Nishidani (talk) 01:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
- Good idea. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
- Well if Friedman and his likes are now going mainstream with vermin tropes for the adversarial 'Other' (Theodor Adorno has a good early analysis of insect metaphors for despised ethnic groups, in The Authoritarian Personality (1951) - it was a serious element in antisemitic caricatures, vide Kafka for the most egregious example) I guess I'd better make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians.Nishidani (talk) 01:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
- AIPAC of Lies (6 February 2024). By Arvin Alaigh for The Baffler. "The pro-Israel lobby brooks no dissent on Capitol Hill ... The Israeli government is losing the battle of public opinion across the world, and increasingly, in the United States ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Israeli sources on friendly fire 7-8 October
Since the mainstream sources in English refuse to mention what the Israeli press is stating, the only way to get an RS-quality picture is to systematically comb the four sources above and cite the material from RS they cite or allude to.
- Quique Kierszenbaum '‘It was a pogrom’: Be’eri survivors on the horrific attack by Hamas terrorists,', The Guardian 11 October 2023
The counterattack on Be'eri was conducted by Major General Itai Veruv.
Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages
The Hamas militants held hostages. So stating that tank fire was used to blast kibbutz buildings where Hamas militants were hiding only begs the question: were Israelis detained by them also present in those buildings?
- Yoav Zitun, tricked Israeli helicopters, and pilots over WhatsApp | The Air Force on Day 1 Ynet 15 October 2023
- Amos Harel, 'Failures Leading Up to the Hamas Attack That Changed Israel Forever,' Haaretz 20 October. In summary form Harel's article states
Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Gaza Division, when the Erez Crossing and military installations close to it, his own Coordination and Liaison Office were attacked, locked himself and some staff in the subterranean war-room (underground refuges are not unique to Hamas) called down an airstrike on his own base, though many soldiers lay wounded above/outside
Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
- Hello Nishidani. There was a subsection in one of the main article related to the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, covering Israeli sources on the October 7 friendly fire. I can't find it now. can you help? Ghazaalch (talk) 04:23, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- I only dropped a note re this on the talk page, listing 3 RS for the matter though noting it was perhaps premature to add to the article itself.I don’t think it’s worth bothering about those articles too much. Some intelligible work can begin when the hundreds of eager editors jumping at the opportunities to make dogleg additions or subtractions to its Protean mess, move on and stop fiddling as Gaza burns. Then editors can do something useful harvesting what scholarship and NGO analysts report in their morticians’ death notes from the various autopsies to be made on the corpus relicti of this 1948 nakba remake. It’s too early, in short to cover this Srebrenica-like massacre as the IDF slowly but triumphantly nudges its meticulously efficient juggernaut trajectory towards the halfway mark as the exhausted world shifts its bleary attention over pancakes and cornflakes, to the fresh breaking news of Sinora’s upandcoming match with Djokevic or the details of a murder case in Italy (55 minutes of breaking news here – whose content details can be summed up as (a) the culprit was arrested (b) the community grieves, and (c) the relatives are distraught)Nishidani (talk) 11:34, 19 November 2023 (UTC) music festival massacre
- One may add this to the RS.
- An Israeli police investigation indicated an IDF helicopter which had fired on Hamas militants "apparently also hit some festival participants." (Re'im music festival massacre). Josh Breiner, Israeli Security Establishment: Hamas Likely Didn’t Have Advance Knowledge of Nova Festival,' Haaretz 18 November 2023. Nishidani (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- When I saw the videos of helicopters (drones?) firing on fleeing figures in a desert landscape , videos promoted by the IDF as evidence of their hunting down Hamas militants, I was disconcerted, thinking 'how do they know those fleeing figures are armed militants as opposed to the numerous Gazans who apparently profited from the breaches in the wall simply to walk around. Soon after, reading of 20 Apache helicopters making 300 strikes that day on people, together with the admission (or fiction) that this aerial fire had been indiscriminate, shooting anyone who ran, as opposed to anyone who walked, and the accompanying suggestion that Hamas had instructed its militants to walk (extremely unlikely and smacking like a cover-up storey to mask from error), I realised that one possibility was that, in the confusion of the day, the many fleeing Israelis might well have been inaddvertently targeted. Breiner's piece now corroborates, apparently, that suspicion. This doesn't mitigate the horror of what terrorists did captured on video, but confirms that some unknown percentage of the listed victims died from 'friendly fire'. We now have at least 4 RS for this.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you Nishidani.Ghazaalch (talk) 04:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- The Cradle. More ominous insider testimony emerging. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- Missed that, thanks. I.e.'Israel implemented 'mass Hannibal' directive on 7 October: Israeli pilot Col. Nof Erez says the Israeli military likely killed its own civilians in multiple instances on 7 Octob,' The Cradle 20 November
- This is not an RS source but it cites the Haaretz original in Hebrew with a link that qualifies. The source is also cited by the Turkish news agency cited above. And that along with the several sources above, means this aspect of 7 October is now acceptably referenced. I would still prefer to wait until however we get the mainstream English sources to cover the issue. Perhaps they will, after the conflict has ended and the simplistic unilinear narrative has served its function of securing consensus for whatever final disaster ensues.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
- The Cradle. More ominous insider testimony emerging. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you Nishidani.Ghazaalch (talk) 04:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
- When I saw the videos of helicopters (drones?) firing on fleeing figures in a desert landscape , videos promoted by the IDF as evidence of their hunting down Hamas militants, I was disconcerted, thinking 'how do they know those fleeing figures are armed militants as opposed to the numerous Gazans who apparently profited from the breaches in the wall simply to walk around. Soon after, reading of 20 Apache helicopters making 300 strikes that day on people, together with the admission (or fiction) that this aerial fire had been indiscriminate, shooting anyone who ran, as opposed to anyone who walked, and the accompanying suggestion that Hamas had instructed its militants to walk (extremely unlikely and smacking like a cover-up storey to mask from error), I realised that one possibility was that, in the confusion of the day, the many fleeing Israelis might well have been inaddvertently targeted. Breiner's piece now corroborates, apparently, that suspicion. This doesn't mitigate the horror of what terrorists did captured on video, but confirms that some unknown percentage of the listed victims died from 'friendly fire'. We now have at least 4 RS for this.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Hello Nishidani. There was a subsection in one of the main article related to the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, covering Israeli sources on the October 7 friendly fire. I can't find it now. can you help? Ghazaalch (talk) 04:23, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Analysis: Why is Israel’s military killing so many of its own? (21 December 2023). "The perils of urban warfare, coupled with operational issues within the army, appear to be hobbling Israel’s advance." By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera.
- Analysis: As Israel escalates Gaza war, its ‘kill-rate’ claims don’t add up (9 December 2023). "The claims, aimed at fending off criticism over civilian casualties paint a picture of the war that makes no sense. By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:53, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- The directive: prevent (Palestinian attackers) from returning to Gaza "at any cost," even if they are holding Israeli hostages (10 January 2024). Published in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. "At noon on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The order was to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is despite the fear that some of them have hostages." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:32, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- Official confirmation of what Nof Erez last month, the difference being that the Hannibal directive here was issued at noon, according to that report, whereas we know an informal version of the same was issued within an hour or so of the Hamas attack, and was applied earlier that morning. We'll never know how many of the 1,130+ Israelis were killed by, not 'friendly fire,' but indiscriminate 'hannibal fire' (). Nishidani (talk) 09:44, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
Consensus note regarding Israeli settlements
Hi. Can you point me to the consensus note you are talking about in this revert? --Orgullomoore (talk) 23:36, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
- For that you will have to ask Nableezy, who organized the consensual phrasing which you will see on every page dealing with Israeli settlements. Someone has manipulated the text on Mehola by adding and the US government (meaning, I assume, the Trump administration) uniquely there, whereas this is not the consensus form agreed on. I.e. someone has rewritten the text while ignoring the source, thus WP:OR.Nishidani (talk) 00:01, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- I found it here. Yes, the USA part should go. I'll do that. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- Well done. Thanks for your diligence and scruple. Nishidani (talk) 00:08, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- Ha! You're welcome. Thank you for keeping calm. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:11, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- That is indeed it, by the time I saw this you had already found it. Though there was a later discussion that sought to overturn that RFC, but it ended with no consensus. I can find that if you need me to. But, remarkably, that discussion ended what had been a conflict that spanned dozens of pages over years with topic bans for all sides, and it’s held up for the 14 years (god damn I been here too long). Everybody is of course welcome to see if consensus has changed. nableezy - 04:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- Noooo... I honestly think it's a decent result. I was just under the impression that we're not supposed to imply conclusions from broader statements even if the connection is obvious. For example, [1], [2], [3]. With that impression I removed this consensual statement from a settlement article I came across in proofreading the Hamas article, which Nishidani reverted me on. But if there is relative peace and quiet and people are not fussing about this "The world knows settlements in occupied territories are illegal, but Israel believes this does not apply to them," then my position is we should let well enough alone. --Orgullomoore (talk) 04:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- We generally aren’t, and if somebody wanted to push it they could probably insist on including only a reference that includes that specific settlement but that will almost always be trivially simple. The consensus came around to just using the BBC general ref even though I agree it isn’t the best source (I’d go with the Barak Erez source in the lead of International law and Israeli settlements personally cus then I can be like uh look at her job to anybody challenging it as biased) but the fact that the most notable thing about almost all of these places is that they violate GCIV will typically make it pretty easy to find a specific ref for each. nableezy - 05:16, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- Noooo... I honestly think it's a decent result. I was just under the impression that we're not supposed to imply conclusions from broader statements even if the connection is obvious. For example, [1], [2], [3]. With that impression I removed this consensual statement from a settlement article I came across in proofreading the Hamas article, which Nishidani reverted me on. But if there is relative peace and quiet and people are not fussing about this "The world knows settlements in occupied territories are illegal, but Israel believes this does not apply to them," then my position is we should let well enough alone. --Orgullomoore (talk) 04:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- Well done. Thanks for your diligence and scruple. Nishidani (talk) 00:08, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
- I found it here. Yes, the USA part should go. I'll do that. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Nomination of Palestinianism for deletion
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Typo?
This looks like you went in to fix a typo but deleted a line instead. Iskandar323 (talk) 23:10, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
- I'll readily confess to advanced senescence, but most of the many errors I make seem due to the neopaleolithic laptop I use. It's fine for reading, with just a four inch window, but plays up tremendously if two windows are open, and the mouse has developed an A1/Chatbox capacity to run amuck according to its own lights, or darks. I fixed a reduplicated piece of copy and pasted text there.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Ha. There's no problem is there. I misread the edit. My mistake for peering at screens late at night. My eyes played a trick on me, and I don't even have your antiquated tech excuse to save me. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:17, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- 'Excuse?' Pretext! There's that odd nonsensical expression, a pathetic euphemism, we have about the 'wisdom of old age', which essentially consists of old codgers thinking up dodges and ruses to mask the proliferating spoors of their decline and fall(ure), ways of covering up for the foibles of the enfeebled. It's not a matter of lacking a quid or two to pop out and buy a new laptop, but rather a canny feeling that were I to manage such a rational solution, I'd lose any residual excuse or pretext I have for explaining orthographical and other screw-ups. Come to think of it (and at this stage one does gradually come around to actually doing a bit of thinking), 'the wisdom of old age' is a somewhat evil smear on younger generations: it implies one is stupid until one's senescence kicks in, the opposite of the case. Cheers. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- People are often criticised for the indelicacy of wearing their hearts on their sleeves. In an age where evidence for that organ's survival is growing scarcer by the day, perhaps the practice warrants less disdain, but only in so far as the shirt itself is cut from the cloth of intimate historical recall. Watching the Palestinian Trail of tears (almost all of Israel's history can be read as a systematic, consciously applied reevocation of the American Conquest of the West, displaced to the Muddle Yeast), I recalled something I read a few days ago the following description of the flight of French people south out of the way of the German assault on northern France in 1940:-
- la situation matérielle, physique, morale d'un peuple jeté sur les routes, mitraillé par les avions ennemis, impuissant à comprendre les raisons du malheur qui l'accable e n'aspirant plus qu'à voir l'issue de son cauchemar.'(the material, physical and moral situation of a people cast out onto the roads, machine-gunned by enemy aircraft, powerless to grasp the reasons for the misfortune which has overwhelmed them and desiring nothing more than to see an end to/escape from their nightmare').Jean-Luc Barré, De Gaulle:Une Vie,Bernard Grasset volume 1, 2023 p.410 13:52, 19 November 2023 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)
- 'Excuse?' Pretext! There's that odd nonsensical expression, a pathetic euphemism, we have about the 'wisdom of old age', which essentially consists of old codgers thinking up dodges and ruses to mask the proliferating spoors of their decline and fall(ure), ways of covering up for the foibles of the enfeebled. It's not a matter of lacking a quid or two to pop out and buy a new laptop, but rather a canny feeling that were I to manage such a rational solution, I'd lose any residual excuse or pretext I have for explaining orthographical and other screw-ups. Come to think of it (and at this stage one does gradually come around to actually doing a bit of thinking), 'the wisdom of old age' is a somewhat evil smear on younger generations: it implies one is stupid until one's senescence kicks in, the opposite of the case. Cheers. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Ha. There's no problem is there. I misread the edit. My mistake for peering at screens late at night. My eyes played a trick on me, and I don't even have your antiquated tech excuse to save me. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:17, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
Closure of hospitals
I've yet to see, but I don't read around that much, any mention of what is the most logical explanation for the systematic closing down of hospitals throughout the Israeli controlled north. Since they have no strategic value to anyone, one reasonable conjecture is that the whole Gazan system of registering deaths is centered on hospitals, esp. al-Shifa. The procedure is that deaths are entered into the register as corpses or the dying are carried there, and a preliminary control is made by technicians to correlate the dead, and identify them, with archival records. Once this is done, the resulting data is collated and the statistics are updated. If one dismantles the hospitals and their administrative staff, no further empirical work of precise record-keeping would be possible, something also consolidated by the lack of power to maintain or recharge servers and computers. Perhaps something like that infrastructure survives in Khan Younis and Rafah, but the data from the north would, I suppose, now be frozen. Worth keeping an eye out for this technical issue if RS come round to examining it. Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
- Palestinian hospitals have very significant strategic value to the Israeli government's overarching goal of ethnic cleansing the Palestinians. By destroying or severely damaging hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure, and killing large numbers of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical staff, the Israeli gov't aims to significantly increase the suffering and misery of Palestinian civilians, including - but not limited to - drastically curtailing the ability of the Palestinian healthcare system to ward-off the spread of infectious diseases including pandemics, epidemics etc. The Israeli gov't is hoping that this would lead to significantly higher numbers of dead, near-dead, severely sick or permanently maimed innocent Palestinians, especially among the weaker segments of Palestinian society i.e. children, the elderly, the infirm, etc.
- More generally, see this. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- The Epidemiological War on Gaza (5 January 2024). By Maya Rosen, published in Jewish Currents. "Disease is poised to become an even deadlier second front in Israel’s assault on the besieged Strip." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:16, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Some other stuff
- Masha Gessen In the Shadow of the Holocaust New Yorker
- Emma Soteriou, 'There are no Christians or churches in Gaza, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem has claimed after the Israeli army killed two women at church,' Leading Britain's Conversation 19 December 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
i.e.,Manuel Musallam doesn't and never did exist. It-s extraordinary what influential morons can get away with.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for posting these two interesting and informative articles. The long-form essay by Masha Gessen is very good and well worth a read, but regretfully it contains several omissions and inaccuracies - for example, it neglects to mention that Stepan Bandera was directly involved in the murder of many thousands of innocent Jewish civilians, and the article also repeats the Israeli bald-faced lie that 1,200 Israelis were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7-8 when in reality the majority [probably the vast majority] of these 1,200 were killed by the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] including IOF heavy fire from attack helicopters, armed drones, tank shells, tank-mounted machine guns and armored-personnel-carrier (APC)-mounted machine guns.
- However, in my view these omissions and inaccuracies do not have a significant adverse effect on the overall good quality of the essay by Gessen, and overall this appears to be a thoughtful and insightful essay. What are your thoughts and reflections on this essay? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:05, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Well it was clear from the first day the figure of 1,400 came out, that it was guesswork. Perfectly rounded figures always are. Now it is down to around 1150, from which some 400 appear to members of the IDF/border/kibbutz police in combat roles. Of the remaining 750 or so non/combatants how the figures will break down for those killed by Hamas and those killed by Israeli forces will remain unclear because of the nature of the subsequent battles to retake the area, and because the forensic neutrality of those controlling the evidence of autopsies will remain suspect. But one must refrain from assuming that, given the success of the Israeli manipulation of the core data to set the tone of the ruling narrative, the truth will be accessible by simply inverting that Israeli narrative, i.e., inferring that the massacres were largely self-inflicted. Hamas almost certainly had units trained to shock and awe by killing Israeli civilians. Most of its operatives grew up from childhood to early manhood witnessing masses of civilian corpses regularly littering their streets, and everyone in the Strip has numerous relatives murdered by 'precision' bombing, sniper or tank fire. Many irregulars also roamed about ready to revenge themselves on any Israeli they came upon. The IDF has a record going back to 1948 of deliberately murdering Palestinians in order to subjugate the population by sheer terror, and that means blowback of similar violence is inevitable. In any case. if you haven't seen it, watch the interview with Paul Rogers here. Unlike 99% of newspaper reportage, he actually understands the historical and comparative context of these events. Gaza is a rerun of Mosul, only a little more thorough as one would expect.Nishidani (talk) 12:48, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Just from a technical viewpoint, there has been since Oct 7 an enormous confusion in the statistics, mixing civilian casualties in Israel and military casualties in the Gaza Strip operation. Rogers notes now that
There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded. Ten days ago, Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, published information obtained from the ministry of defence’s rehabilitation department. This put casualty numbers at more than 5,000, with 58% of them classed as serious and more than 2,000 officially recognised as disabled. There have also been a number of friendly fire casualties, with the Times of Israel reporting 20 out of 105 deaths due to such fire or accidents during fighting. Paul Rogers, 'Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
When the White House announced additional funding to UNRWA for its Gaza emergency response, Almadhoun said he had to balance gratitude with reality. “OK, yes you are giving a mom a can of tuna, but you also killed her son and bombed her house,” he says he told Biden administration officials.' Rhana Natour, 'He’s raising millions in aid for Gaza. But still he couldn’t save his family,' The Guardian 22 December 2023
- Well it was clear from the first day the figure of 1,400 came out, that it was guesswork. Perfectly rounded figures always are. Now it is down to around 1150, from which some 400 appear to members of the IDF/border/kibbutz police in combat roles. Of the remaining 750 or so non/combatants how the figures will break down for those killed by Hamas and those killed by Israeli forces will remain unclear because of the nature of the subsequent battles to retake the area, and because the forensic neutrality of those controlling the evidence of autopsies will remain suspect. But one must refrain from assuming that, given the success of the Israeli manipulation of the core data to set the tone of the ruling narrative, the truth will be accessible by simply inverting that Israeli narrative, i.e., inferring that the massacres were largely self-inflicted. Hamas almost certainly had units trained to shock and awe by killing Israeli civilians. Most of its operatives grew up from childhood to early manhood witnessing masses of civilian corpses regularly littering their streets, and everyone in the Strip has numerous relatives murdered by 'precision' bombing, sniper or tank fire. Many irregulars also roamed about ready to revenge themselves on any Israeli they came upon. The IDF has a record going back to 1948 of deliberately murdering Palestinians in order to subjugate the population by sheer terror, and that means blowback of similar violence is inevitable. In any case. if you haven't seen it, watch the interview with Paul Rogers here. Unlike 99% of newspaper reportage, he actually understands the historical and comparative context of these events. Gaza is a rerun of Mosul, only a little more thorough as one would expect.Nishidani (talk) 12:48, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Damien Gayle and Nina Lakhani, 'Flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater risks ‘ruining basic life in Gaza’, says expert,' The Guardian 23 December 2023
- Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza Civilians to Go (22 December 2023). A New York Times investigation used aerial imagery and artificial intelligence to detect bomb craters that showed that Israel dropped many two-ton bombs - in addition to smaller bombs - in south Gaza, in the same locations where it specifically ordered Palestinians to go when it ordered them to evacuate their homes. Video posted on the official YouTube channel of The New York Times. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
'In a Dec. 21 video report based on analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.” Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.” Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs” to Israel.' Norman Solomon, President Biden: Learn the Names of Children You’ve Helped Israel to Murder, CounterPunch 27 December 2023.
In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing one of its staff. Mouin Rabbani, The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip,Mondoweiss 28 December 2023
- Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide (6 January 2024). By Nicola Perugini for AlJazeera. "The designation of safe areas in Gaza allows the Israeli army to carry out war crimes more efficiently and then to deny them." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:30, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- On the now obvious Warsaw Ghetto-Gaza analogy
'Political value is not the only merit in underscoring this disturbing comparison. The unsettling analogy is also a crucial means of exploding long-held myths: in other words, that Jewish victimhood is beyond compare, exalted and singular in its gravity. Indeed, it is precisely the exceptionalism with which Israel envelops itself that has allowed the Zionist political elite (wherever it may be – in the US, UK, Europe, or Israel) to flout international law repeatedly for more than 75 years. It is this cultivated sense of transcendent sublimity (arising from the weaponization of the Holocaust and the manipulative use of the Bible) that elevates Israel’s status to an arrogant actor on the world stage, one that is indifferent to all red lines (that is, to virtually all Geneva conventions and UN resolutions). . . Once pitied as the collective victim of genocide, Israel is now the perpetrator, the state that, paradoxically, wields victimhood as its quintessential raison d’être.' Michelle Weinroth, Why we have to make the Jewish Ghetto comparison Mondoweiss 7 January 2024
- The ongoing evidence that the aim is ethnic cleaning per '48
Peter Beinart, What Will Happen to Gaza’s People? New York Times 7 January 2024
- The area referred to below consists of the best, most fertile agricultural land left in the Gaza Strip
Yadlin. . .said the IDF’s southern command, which has responsibility for Gaza, had started planning buffer zones within the territory that would be heavily mined to prevent any repeat of the 7 October attack. Jason Burke, Israel says Gaza fighting could last a year, amplifying fears of regional war The Guardian 8 January 2024
- John Mearsheimer expands on the essay concerning genocide and the institutional apartheid, since 1967, of Israel, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald. About 33 minutes into the link.
- Prof. John Mearsheimer on Israel-Gaza, Escalation Risks, Ukraine War, & More 5 January 2024Nishidani (talk) 00:52, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
- There appears to be an extension of targeted assassination to influential civilians, i.e. going after a whole family strike after strike. 7 poets have been murdered when their homes were bombed. It reminds me of both the Nazi and Soviet targeting of the Polish elite.
Wael al-Dahdouh al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza, lost his wife Amna, his son Mahmoud (15) his daughter Sham, and his grandson Adam, aged 1 and a half, on 25th October while sheltering in a private home in Nuseirat refugee camp. Then he himself was wounded by an Israeli airstrike on a school in Khan Younis on 15th of December. Yesterday they took out his son Hamza Dahdouh when a drone hit the car he and other journalists were travelling in en route to the Moraj area.
- The Palestinians don't figure much if at all in the Guinness Book of Records, so I guess they may thank Israel now that they are finally breaking dozens of records for historical firsts that will earn them some proud notoriety. This is the latest one
There are about 700,000 people in the world currently facing catastrophic hunger, 577,000 of them are in Gaza.' Archie Bland,'The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza,' The Guardian 8 January 2024
And this record.
The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US. According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. Nina Lakhani, Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe The Guardian 9 January 2024
- Israeli comic among the ruins of Gaza, showing a kitchen for cooking babies Times of Israel 7 January 2023 Nishidani (talk) 13:45, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
- a couple of Israeli murders of youths in the West Bank and then a jeep running over the body of one of the wounded/dead. Nothing newNishidani (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
- I see that Israel's finest mind in the sphere of international law, Malcolm Shaw in his preliminary remarks before the ICJ, spoke of the Israelite tribes entry into the land of Israel ca 1,500 BCE. Cripes. Two ridiculous anachronisms (there were no 'Israelite tribes' at that time, and there was no geographical entity called 'The Land of Israel' until at least 500 years later), and one ignoramus-style pratfall in archaeology ('entry') in one sentence. The poor fellow in his greying eminence ought to read a history book, rather than recite the usual Biblical bloopers.Nishidani (talk) 09:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- Another record. The 29,000 munitions -shells and bombs- Israel has dropped on Gaza in 3 months greatly exceed those (3,678) dropped by the United States between 2004 and 2010 during its Invasion of Iraq.(Nicholas Kristof 'The Things We Disagree On About Gaza,' New York Times 13 January 2024.) Nishidani (talk) 00:24, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
“Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.” Eugene Borowitz cited Marc Tracy, 'Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?,' New York Times 14 January 2024.
- This is a good example of seizing on a topic and consistently failing to think it through while elaborating on its various aspects. So that Israel as a political reality is now perceived as crucial to Jewish identity and has been so for some 70 years but had not been so for 2 millennia, or that anti-Zionism is now a Jewish heresy, yet in 1900 Zionism was widely condemned as a Jewish heresy. As Arendt noted, the essence of Zionism was to repudiate 'exile' by exiling another Semitic people, solving 'the Jewish question' by creating a 'Palestinian question'. The problem of Zionism is that it dumbs down anyone who subscribes to it, since its praxis seeks self-vindication in an appeal to a history of Jewish ethnic dispossession, persecution and alienated scattering while imposing precisely the reality of all three grievances on another people. To affirm Zionism is therefore, logically, to disavow any moral lesson from Jewish history in the diaspora, other than the Hobbsian inference from the Holocaust: we are entitled to be above the law, and may now do unto others (Palestinians) what Europeans did to us. Nishidani (talk) 00:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- Well, like any generalization that should be tweaked. Ami Ayalon obviously is one of those rare birds a rational Zionist (as many ex Shin Bet directors become ironically), and concludes that the only political outcome that makes sense is to release Marwan Barghouti from jail and have him as a candidate for elections. Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader The Guardian 15 January 2024
It's the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God. But it's the fate of only a very few races that they're sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.' The Jewish German detective Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not,Quercus 2009 p.305.Nishidani (talk) 06:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
I don't get this
Regarding this revert, I think you are saying I' a newbie? What? Also, I am engaging on the talkpage. Can you explain? ☆ Bri (talk) 15:18, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
- I dont get why you removed something based on it needing attribution, but you are indeed not a newbie. But you havent really engaged, you answered one of several questions and then declined so far to answer the follow up. nableezy - 15:22, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
- Newbie to the area, sorry. In any case, the edit summary was inept. To complain that attribution is lacking as a warrant to remove text, instead of providing attribution, is not an adequate motivation and (b) you left in the intercept while, if I recall, taking out the text sourced to it. Bad practice.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
Major perils to global society associated with Washington’s New Cold War projection of military and financial power aimed at stopping China’s economic rise
- The U.S. threat of a “new Opium War against China” found in the pages of the US Air Force’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. (1 December 2023). By the editors of Monthly Review. "Fearful of losing its imperial hegemony over the world economy due to the rise of China as a major economic power, the United States is seeking to translate its military ascendancy into renewed economic domination, resulting in unparalleled dangers for humanity as a whole." Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
- Another Major War in 2024? (21 December 2023). By Michael Klare for TomDispatch. "The U.S. and China at Year’s End - Still Treading on the Precipice." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:44, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
- Contrasting Strategies of the US and China (27 December 2023). by Roger Harris in CounterPunch. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- I'm prepared, I guess, having picked up for 3AU$ at a country recycling bookshop the other day Neville Shute's On the Beach, with Rowland's original jacket intact, in what was the third reprint, and read it yesterday.Nishidani (talk) 03:28, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- Hahaha. What did you think about the book? Hope you liked it. I like the film based on the novel, I bought the DVD many ago and have been re-watching it every few years. The full film is also freely available on YouTube. Hope you will enjoy the film.
- My cat and I are now fixing to go on our customary evening walk. On our walks, he freely and happily walks or runs by my side without a harness or leash. He sends his love to his Granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:37, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- Well, having read Shute's Round the Bend a week earlier, which I really enjoyed because his flatness of style was nicely compensated for by an engineer's precision of technical detail in the description of planes, I found it a dutiful read rather than a page-turner. Naturally enough, because I saw the film 60 years ago and in so far as there was a plot, it held no surprises. And, since my purpose here is just living the landscape, I was struck by his failure to capture its beauties, or even sight them. I have delighted relatives in Europe by showing them photos of breakfast on the verandah here, where we are joined by king parrots who perch on the table and eat cashew nuts from one's hand, while magpies await their turn, and a pair of satin bowerbirds vie with currawong, topknot pigeons, butcherbirds and galahs to assert their ascendency over the backyard garden. The best Shute could do was make something of the merits of a fly over a spinner in fishing for rainbow trout on the Jamieson.
- It's interesting that in a small upcountry town like this, with no more than 2,600 people, one can pick up off the shelves things like The New Yorker. I bought the October edition this morning and read something thematically linked to what is alluded to above. I.e.
Trump recently made an appearance in which - even as he was calling Biden "cognitively impaired" - he suggested that we were headed toward "World War Two".' p.10
- It's great that you have a companionable walking cat. I raised mine (temperamentally I'm a dog person) as a canine, and so for 17 years it walked, ran, responded to whistles etc, as dogs would. The autistic kitten we saved several years back now responds similarly, but limits her excursions to waiting for me at dusk halfway down the bottom of the incline that leads up to my villa, and then racing me back home when I return from my evening sundowner in the local bar. Give her an avuncular caress. I don't mind the extinction of man. It will give the world time to get back on its evolutionary feet. There are 1 million invertebrates in Australia, and only about 15% have been classified till now, most of them disappearing under climate and anthropo-obscenic changes. 'Full many a March fly is born to swarm unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.'Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- I'm prepared, I guess, having picked up for 3AU$ at a country recycling bookshop the other day Neville Shute's On the Beach, with Rowland's original jacket intact, in what was the third reprint, and read it yesterday.Nishidani (talk) 03:28, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- Why the US is the Warring State in Israel (8 February 2024). by Stephen Reyna for Counterpunch. "The point at issue here is a general one. The are many states that participate in wars -provide troops or supply weapons and funding. Currently, Israel is one; Ukraine another. But they are not warring states useless they supply the sufficient conditions for the violence to occur. Rather, they are useful idiots in another state’s designs; in this case, US global supremacy. The importance of this position is twofold ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
- Imperialism, Lenin, and US Wars Abroad (3 Feb 2024). By Rob Urie for The Journal of Belligerent Pontification. "Liberals, the American left, and yours truly, perceive current US actions with respect to the Israelis in Gaza to be ‘fascist,’ in the sense of committing a racist genocide against the Palestinians. However, the Israelis plan an economic benefit from exiling Palestinians from Israel. They want the land for additional Israeli settlements, and possibly oil and gas extraction from the sea just off the coast of Gaza. The Americans want business for the MIC, a place to land and refuel fighter jets, control of the wider Middle East, and continued American domination of the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:14, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
I enjoy reading about your travel and outdoor experiences as well as your various interactions with domestic and wild animals. And thanks for your reference to the beautiful, moving Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Moreover, my cat sends a big thank-you to his beloved granpa Nishidani for all the pets and caresses you sent him, he enjoyed them. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
Notification
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Hamas
Added your material here Selfstudier (talk) 18:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
no words
Haaretz. nableezy - 14:26, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
- so,how often has that article been taken up by the mainstream English press?Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Source for 3% Levantine ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews
Hi Nishidani, thank you for waging the good fight here on Wikipedia on Israel-related articles. In Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry, you reference the figure of a 3% Levantine component of Ashkenazi ancestry. I've never seen such a low figure before, do you mind citing it? I'm asking as someone inclined to agree with you on the basis of other investigations; I would appreciate being able to back up such a number. Brusquedandelion (talk) 04:46, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
- says 60% fwiw. Selfstudier (talk) 11:40, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
See ELhaik and Das's 2017 paper for the 3% Levantine vs 88% Iranian component. I'd link it but for the fact i am using borrowed computers as a guest and cannot seem to copy and paste anything. Nishidani (talk) 09:33, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
- 'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017 Selfstudier (talk) 10:25, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
courtesy ping
courtesy ping that another user mentioned your changes in an WP:AE, and they neglected to inform you, so I am. but don't worry. it's not really about you except incidentally. I'm just extending the courtesy of the notification since your friend forgot to. Cheers. Andre🚐 22:05, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
Merry Christmas!
Hello, Nishidani! Thank you for your work to maintain and improve Wikipedia! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:35, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- And the very best god jul to you too, pal. I apparently got pinged here where it was said that someone put the boot into me in the 23 Dec version of the Spectator (Australia). Read the new link, and came away weeping that either my eyesight was fucked or my late bid for fame had once more been stymied, since I could see no such other mention (apparently it's in some dumbfuck link). The coincidence is that together with the New Yorker and several other quality mags, I bought a recent edition of the Spectator the other day on the strength of its former reputation for some intelligent commentary, and threw it into the dustbin after three moronic articles in succession flushed apparently from pseuds' corner. I shouldn't be surprised: flaunting one's ignorance or lazy disattention for details that disturb the music of one's paid-up chanting in the meme choir no longer stirs even the slightest wince of shame in the thriving world of hack jejeurnalism. Nishidani (talk) 14:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
- Fwiw, the relevant links seems to be in the "Another case is of an experienced editor quoting antisemitism denialists and going on to draw parallels between the current Israeli government and the Nazis." sentence. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:08, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
When I saw the Maori greeting for Christmas above, I was reminded of hearing the similar Polynesian term, the Hawaiian mele kalikimaka while staying over the Christmas summer break at the Moana Hotel on Waikiki beach in 1964/5. But that just brought back to mind the obscenely foul passage that led me to dump the Christmas edition of Spectator Australia
‘massacre of the innocents’ is certainly a literal and apt description of what occurred less than a hundred kilometres from Bethlehem some two thousand and twenty-three years later. Nearly fifteen hundred innocents mutilated, kidnapped, tortured, raped and /or murdered in the most grotesque and evil fashion. The ramifications and trauma have shaken to the core not only families, friends and loved ones but an entire nation and an entire diaspora scattered round the world. 'Massacre of innocence Spectator Australia 16 December 2023.
(The dunce who copypasted up that pastiche doesn't appear to understand what a pleonasm is, hence the bolded example. As if a diaspora could be other than a scattering of people around the world, the implied antithesis being a 'diaspora in Israel'. Sigh.)
This came with a vignette by Ben Davis who in obtuse cleverness expropriated a Christian image to further the genocidal narrative of a country where mayors in places like Nazareth Illit can still ban that ‘antisemitic’ feastday, where an Israeli sniper* can take out, first an elderly Christian mother, Nahida Khalil Anton and then her 50 year old daughter Samar as she rushed to succour her within the protective precincts of the Holy Family Church in Gaza. And where, in solidarity with Gaza, and bowing to necessity as Israel’s long stranglehold on Bethlehem makes this year’s visits to the nativity virtually impossible, authorities have cancelled the event, though the nativity scene now shows a baby buried in rubble.
In reading that callous piece of mindless trash, I couldn’t avoid yet another possible definition of a type of Zionist in abstracto.
‘A Zionist is someone who, coming unhappily across some mention that 8,000 Palestinian children have been murdered under the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, murmurs to assuage any residual twinge of unease, ‘yeah, but what about the 40+ Jewish under 18 year olds** murdered by Hamas terrorists on 7th October.’
The thought of one crushed life, if Jewish, cancels out any thought of the 200 parallel non-Jewish/Palestinian lives smashed by Israeli retaliation because, well, they're not special, like us. Judaism appears to have no answer to the abyss into which Zionism is driving its adherents, esp. since a Zionist could cite scripture in self-justification, i.e. psalm 137, l.9:'Blessed is the one who seizes and dashes your children against the rock.'
- If one has to measure reliability by the source, then I take the very diplomatically cautious Franciscan Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s word for it over whatever a spokesman for the chronically duplicitous and mendacious IDF spokespeople might say. If only also because that same day, 17 December, the lads of the world’s most moral army blew up with a tank shot the generator and fuel stocks of the convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa in the same area, rendering the 54 disabled people there homeless.
- Casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war tells us that, according to the Times of Israel, as of 4 December, 49 Jewish/Israeli children and youths were killed: two infants; 12 children under the age of 10, and a further 36 aged 10-19. I wrote 40+ because, under Israeli secular law 18 is the legal age for the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and therefore upping that to 19, uniquely, here appears to play a numbers game. How many 18-19 year olds, adults, figure among the 36 children?
If only the 800,000 children now wintering in famine conditions in camps reeking with shit from burst sewage spills could chance to see, on at least one quiet night, after a minimal meal something as profoundly instructive as this, speaking to their fright.Nishidani (talk) 03:32, 24 December 2023 (UTC)
Managing a conflict of interest
That may be the wrong template; do you have a connection with the topic Nihonjinron? Andre🚐 09:25, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
December 2023
You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.
Points to note:
- Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
- Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.
If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Andre🚐 09:43, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.Andre🚐 09:46, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
- The question is, rather, why after being involved first with me, and now with Nableezy, two I/P specialists, in interactions that led to you nearly being topic banned in the first instance, and now topic banned with Nableezy, you straightaway went to an article totally out of your known range of interests, but which happens to be one I edited back in 2006. In my book this is not disinterested. And of course, as a former Japanologist, I know that topic. Looking at your edits it is apparent you are way, way out of your depth. So drop it, and stop shitstirring.Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
- Predictable. Well, I trust some admins can see what you're up to. I've wasted enough time pointlessly reasoning with your confusions. Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
- i've edited on Japan for years. I created maneki-neko. Andre🚐 10:16, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
Your AE ban
[Bishzilla is a little miffed.] The correct way go about these things is alert Superclerk Bishzilla to them! She correct everything, never repercussions! [Smiles at thought of repercussions from tiny regular clerks. Ho ho.] bishzilla ROARR!! pocket 09:34, 29 December 2023 (UTC).
- G'day Bish, though it's midnight downunder and I'm as full as Fatty Arbuckle's sock after a liquid evening round a campfire with a solid gang of 'tradie' friends. Well, nah, no wuz, fageddit. It's probably to the good that Sandstein permabanned me from commenting there, all round, but your kindness is, as always, much appreciated. I made myself useful tonight by just listening, and, unobtrusively, watching the dazzle of the southern hemisphere nightsky, as bright in the bushland backblocks as it was in my childhood, and coming back to see your note was a nice chime of further illumination! Have a great New Year. Best Nishidani (talk) 12:36, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Revert
Hi. Just wondering why you felt the need to do this reversion, as a "retired" user, on a talk page that isn't yours, with the rude remark (You had your say. Go away
)? I'm not one to pick fights, or to purposely wade into I-P, but I don't like having my legitimate comments reverted with a rude remark as the justification. Can't you just leave it alone? JM (talk) 01:17, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- I reverted it because apparently it was you who 'just can't leave it alone.' Nishidani (talk) 02:15, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- It was one single comment on a relevant public talk page. The only one I've ever made to that person's page. Let's not be unecessarily combative, I know tensions are high, but you must know that was inappropriate. It's not your talk page, as far as I know the only person allowed to remove comments from a user talk page is the user themselves. Which they did once I restored my comment, but that doesn't negate what you did. JM (talk) 02:32, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- Wanna go into it in more detail? I see you are very young, so perhaps you are not quite familiar with good manners. When one posts on another person's page, one is addressing someone. You do not address Nableezy, you refer to this user. When you do that, you are signalling that your intended reader is not Nableezy, but editors who have Nableezy's page on their watchlist. That is offensive. I read it as a provocation. And, since grammatically, the post is not directed at Nableezy, I'll remove it again. If Nableezy is less concerned about the niceties of polite usage than I, he can restore it and tell me to fuck off in good grace. Nishidani (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- If you're not willing to follow WP:REMOVED and WP:USERTALKSTOP you should probably avoid user talk pages altogether. You should also refer to the guideline that says we must always directly address a user to whom a user talk page is connected in the second person. You should also assume good faith; my comment was not directed at the watchlist, but at the participants of the discussion, including the user. I was unaware that editors use the watchlist for user talk pages (I certainly don't). It was not my intention to push you on this, but you still seem unaware of (or unwilling to follow) those user page policies and guidelines, so I think that I should just make you aware of them again. It would be beneficial if you could link the policy/guidline you refer to when you say I must refer to a user in second person on their talk page. JM (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- No doubt one could ratchet up thousands of edits with this tedious jejune backchat, but not here. A lot of people cite policy without understanding it. I just construe sentences, and yours is as I construed it, rude. So, there's a good laddie. Off you go. Nishidani (talk) 03:16, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- If you're not willing to follow WP:REMOVED and WP:USERTALKSTOP you should probably avoid user talk pages altogether. You should also refer to the guideline that says we must always directly address a user to whom a user talk page is connected in the second person. You should also assume good faith; my comment was not directed at the watchlist, but at the participants of the discussion, including the user. I was unaware that editors use the watchlist for user talk pages (I certainly don't). It was not my intention to push you on this, but you still seem unaware of (or unwilling to follow) those user page policies and guidelines, so I think that I should just make you aware of them again. It would be beneficial if you could link the policy/guidline you refer to when you say I must refer to a user in second person on their talk page. JM (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- Wanna go into it in more detail? I see you are very young, so perhaps you are not quite familiar with good manners. When one posts on another person's page, one is addressing someone. You do not address Nableezy, you refer to this user. When you do that, you are signalling that your intended reader is not Nableezy, but editors who have Nableezy's page on their watchlist. That is offensive. I read it as a provocation. And, since grammatically, the post is not directed at Nableezy, I'll remove it again. If Nableezy is less concerned about the niceties of polite usage than I, he can restore it and tell me to fuck off in good grace. Nishidani (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
- It was one single comment on a relevant public talk page. The only one I've ever made to that person's page. Let's not be unecessarily combative, I know tensions are high, but you must know that was inappropriate. It's not your talk page, as far as I know the only person allowed to remove comments from a user talk page is the user themselves. Which they did once I restored my comment, but that doesn't negate what you did. JM (talk) 02:32, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Might like this book
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press 2023 TrangaBellam (talk) 18:28, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks. But it is very hard to speak of liking a genre of books that dwell on the slow triumph of deceit, detonation and dispossession which is essentially what IP history is.Nishidani (talk) 23:49, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Finally some great news that things are getting better in the Gaza Strip
'There has been some incremental improvement in the south. Palestinian deaths, according to statistics from Gaza health officials, have averaged about 171 a day so far in January, down from 230 during the last week of December.' (Karen DeYoung, John Hudson, Despite U.S. pressure on Israel, casualty count in Gaza remains high,' Washington Post 14 January 2024 Nishidani (talk) 04:36, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- I imagine historians can now rewrite WW2. For example, after Kristallnacht, there was an incremental improvement in conditions for Germany's Jews, with a notable drop in the number of Jewish shops smashed and looted (7,500) in the following months. Nishidani (talk) 04:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Israeli occupation of the West Bank
Please self revert this revert, which is currently under talk page discussion (which you have not participated in). And please refrain from accusing me of POV edit (this is the second time you have done so) Longhornsg (talk) 22:54, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- Normally in the morning, one breakfasts, has a shit, does a crossword puzzle, while of course thinking over bad edits one has reverted to reply duly with the caffeine etc., kicks in. I was about to jot a note when youi rushed here to protest. But I reverted you, apart from the general excisionist approach on lame pretextual grounds, because in the talk discussion just underway, you asserted no connection in sources with historic apartheid, and, when another editor pointed out one existed (*I.e. you stuffed up, you then dismissed that perfectly academic source saying you disagreed with it. That kind of frivolousness and disattentiveness bodes ill.Nishidani (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Your kind of read
This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed for that excellent essay link,Iskander. I speedread it given circs butwill have to eventually print it out to make a more comprehensive study of it.CheersNishidani (talk) 02:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
- I've often mentioned over the years the sense of deja vu this particular conflict invariably induces in someone like myself,coming from an Irish background. I now see Mark Levene has set forth the striking analogies in his'Words matter, lives matter more' in Journal of Genocide Research. Sorry I can't provide you with a link from this laptop which does not seem to allow me to copy and paste. It's not coincidental that the Irgun learnt from the IRA, the only difference being the Irgun were the colonial invaders whereas the IRA, like Hamas, were indigenousNishidani (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC).
- Didier Fassin,The Rhetoric of Denial: Contribution to an Archive of the Debate about Mass Violence in Gaza, Journal of Genocide Research, (5 February 2024) referring to the German genocide of the Herero, analyses its three stages, and argues for a similar three phases in the Israeli genocide/ethnocide of the Palestinian people.Nishidani (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
- Despite the shared diasporic experience, there was one important difference. The Jews developed their communal life around the synagogue, and the attendant privileging of abstemious scholarship as the primrose path to survival in partibus infidelium. The Irish expatriate communities pinioned their fellowship around the institution of the pub where mastery in yarning and inventing improbable stories, given that no on felt there was much point in remembering the grief of dispossession, helped one's rise on the social ladder,(until one felloff it, pissed as a newt).Nishidani (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- I've often mentioned over the years the sense of deja vu this particular conflict invariably induces in someone like myself,coming from an Irish background. I now see Mark Levene has set forth the striking analogies in his'Words matter, lives matter more' in Journal of Genocide Research. Sorry I can't provide you with a link from this laptop which does not seem to allow me to copy and paste. It's not coincidental that the Irgun learnt from the IRA, the only difference being the Irgun were the colonial invaders whereas the IRA, like Hamas, were indigenousNishidani (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC).
The "other" Abu Sitta 2003?
Hello! I'm looking for a source and thought you/your talk page watchers would be a better first stop than WP:RX. The source is:
- Salman Abu Sitta, "Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present", Between the Lines, 15-19 March 2003.
That's all the information I have about it. I saw it cited exactly like that in Pappe's 2006 Ethnic Cleansing book, p. 273 n. 35. I have no idea what Between the Lines is and I cannot seem to find that publication (there is a 2007 book with a similar name but it doesn't appear to be the right source), or anything written by Abu Sitta with that title ("Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present"), or anything on Google scholar with that title. When I search Google web for that exact phrase with quotes, the only place I find is in Pappe's 2006 book.
There is of course another Abu Sitta article from 2003 that is often cited, which is this one, but that has a different title ("Traces of Poison"), is in a different publication (al-Ahram Weekly), and a different date, 27 Feb-3 Mar, 2003.
Did Pappe just mis-cite the 2003 Abu Sitta article? Or is there another Abu Sitta article that was published a couple of weeks after "Trace of Poison"? I suspect it may be that it was written in another language (I presume Arabic but maybe something else), and the title Pappe used in his citation is his own English translation, and that's why I'm not finding it. Anybody have any ideas here? If not, I'll ask at RX. Thanks, Levivich (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- Levivich, apologies for following you here (I'll fully admit that I was curious what you were up to). The "2007 book with a similar name" that you mentioned seems to actually be pretty relevant. Here's what the foreword of the 2007 book Between the Lines says:
This book contains a selection of articles from Between the Lines (BTL), a political journal first published soon after the eruption of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000. BTL was published on a regular basis from Ramallah and Jerusalem until September 2003, when it was forced to stop due to difficulties in its material circumstances.
Note 1 (attached to that quote) says this:Between the Lines was cofounded and coedited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad in November 2000. From its inception, it was produced on a volunteer basis, with great help provided by our writers and a circle of individuals and organizations who likewise believed in its mission. It ceased publishing as a consequence of its accumulated debt.
This review of the book contains some more information about the journal's history.Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the journal digitized anywhere (the review says that the journal was. Malerisch (talk) 15:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)mailed to readers around the world
—perhaps it was never available online) - It turns out that this journal is present on WorldCat, and there is a website linked: www.between-lines.org. Internet Archive has saved this website, but I was only able to see articles up to February 2003 (so close). There are some sources that cite this website on Google Books and on Google Scholar. Malerisch (talk) 16:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
- @Malerisch: Hey you can follow me anywhere with research skills like that! Thanks, I think you've solved this riddle. Unfortunately, it looks like Between-Lines.org stopped updating their archives in Feb 2003 (doesn't it figure!), as even as of Oct 2003, their archives page only had archives going up to Feb 2003 [4]. I bet Zero is right and this was just a reprint of the March 2003 article in Al-Ahram Weekly. What are the chances he wrote two articles about the same thing in two different publications in the same month? Idk, but I appreciate you hunting this down! Maybe you can help me find my mind next? I seem to have lost it recently... Levivich (talk) 19:30, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
My apologies to you Lev, and joining you in expressing deep thanks to Malerisch for their timely and insightful response.My access to the internet, since I don't have a laptop or one of those smartphoney thingamijigs is somewhat restricted by continual travelling.(even the police in Seymour detained me, if gently, when they found me enjoying a night walk at 3.30 a.m. Apparently, old men with backpacks sauntering around empty streets looking for a petrol pump and all night cafe where one might intercept trucks at dawn and hitch a ride to a busless destination is thougbt indicative of an altzheimer's condition these days).Nishidani (talk) 02:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
The world's foremost authority on Gaza
here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
- In recent weeks, Norman Finkelstein on his blog has been providing additional context and insights into Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:28, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks indeed. I try to avoid checking his blog frequently, and do so only once a month. I refrain because he anticipates most of what I would think, and reading him before I thought things out myself would be economical, but an inducement to mental laziness. It is very rare to encounter a brilliant mind informed by a moral passion which however never muddles the lucid analysis of the facts. There have been two Holocaust voices that stand out, that, formerly, of Elie Wiesel and that of Norman Finkelstein. One made a fortune out of it, the other had his career destroyed and his life ghettoized because he absorbed in the marrow of his being the experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz and elsewhere of his parents, and drew a general, not an ethnic, lesson for how to read history, all history and empathize with its silenced victims.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
- I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Norman Finkelstein, exactly because of the reasons you have so beautifully articulated.
- I was going to write more about both Elie Wiesel (a sellout) and Finkelstein, but my cat is persistently demanding my attention, he is ready for his dinner followed by our customary evening walk in our neighborhood. He sends his love to his granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-
‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)
A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.
This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.
I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.
I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
- I am now deeply moved to learn that Yesh Din’s Ziv Stahl, a Kfar Aza resident who survived the massacre, publicly opposed revenge and spoke of the tragic plight Palestinians were suffering over the border. Orly Noy Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 magazine 25 October 2023.
- Coincidence as usual. I make an edit about the destruction of bakeries in Gaza, then return to my reading, totally unconnected to any wiki interest, and immediately come across this note re de Gaulle in his first stay in Poland after WW1. ‘Notre civilisation tient à peu de chose, dit-il, toutes les beautés, toutes les commodités, toutes les richesses dont elle est fière auraient vite disparu sous la lame de fureur des masses désespérées . .Il ne peux oublier ces ‘’interminables files de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants hagards attendant des heures à la porte du boulanger municipal le morceau de pain noir hebdomadaire’’ Max Gallo, De Gaulle, Robert Laffont 1998 volume 1 p.172.
Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024. "A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine." --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
- Well, in 1948 the sacking of West Jerusalem enabled notable collections of books and manuscripts on Palestine to be plundered as war booty and shifted to the emergent libraries of Israel. That has continued sequentially in 1967, in 1982-5 (Palestine Research Center) etc., and now most thoroughly in the meticulous bombing of everything in the Gaza Strip smacking of higher learning institutions from Universities down, to the core archives, now scattered to the wind and little better than toilet paper for those having to keep clean in the midst of the estimated 50,000 tons of shit now flooding the streets.Nishidani (talk) 01:10, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
- Israel's Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza's Heritage Sites (8 February 2024). By Hesper Cane for Sidewalls magazine. "Once a testament to a rich cultural history, Gaza now lays in ruin, rubble, and debris, with more than 200 heritage sites damaged and destroyed." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:01, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
- The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems (8 Feb 2024). By Chandni Desai for The Conversation. "Scholars say Israel is intentionally destroying education and cultural institutions in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
- Most of these sources (including several further above added recently) appear in 'marginal' sources and therefore, whatever their cogency, 'fly under the radar, and, if mentioned more broadly at all, can be dismissed as just catering to a cantankerous fringe. As my father once said to me, as a realist with a deep understanding of how things get done outside the hefty world of voluminous theories, 'It's not what you know that counts, but who you know.' In the lazily contrafactual world of the mainstream 'commonsensical' representation of geopolitics, even the turbulent impetus of the obvious barely stirs more than a rapid ripple on the serene surfaces of our acclimatised complacencies. For at least a century it has been understood,'in the proper quarters', that under the institutional arrangements of democracy, that the classical three estates can be suborned by the fourth Estate, with its massive powers of persuasion, be that a matter of a totalitarian 'engineering of souls' or the 'democratic' manufacturing of consensus as theorised by Lippmann (and quickly picked up by Bernays). Zionism won through with its febrile, to me hysterical, vision of a solution to the non-issue of the so-called 'Jewish Question' by mass expatriation to an Arab country, by an intense reticular working at every venue, at any opportunity, of Jewish communities to win them over to the 1dea of a distinctive 'Jewish' politics, corresponding to the antisemitic politics of their adversaries. Despite understanding the reverence, infle tdx by the retrospective' post-holocaust assessment of Herzl as a profoundly, uncannily percipient 'realist', a reading of his biographies and the extraordinary figure that emerges from his diaries, has never altered my earlier view that he was cast in the Elmer Gantry mode, a snake oil chandler. Time and again in entry after entry recounting meetings and sketching politics of networking, I at least see his figure pacing feverishly up and down his rooms, just a few steps from his near neighbour Freud's home, as, well, Chaplinesque, twirling and retwirling the ball of his thoughts to spin a yarn that would globalise his own narcissistic self-inflation and allow him to have the secular Jewish world at his messianic fingertips. Oops, I meant to respond simply by suggesting you follow recent contributions to the Journal of Genocide Research where the majority of people who actually know their history have now no hesitation in calling a spade a fucking shovel. I must rush. My siblings sill be back from their walk and if they find me out of bed, ignoring my Covid exhaustions, they'll go ballistic which, contextually, means refusing to serve me any more of my daily ration of dim simsNishidani (talk) 04:47, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
- Wishing you a quick and full recovery from your Covid exhaustions, and hoping you will continue to enjoy plenty of dim sim. Regretfully I have not yet had a chance to enjoy dim sim, looks like they are delicious based on articles and videos online. In the past I enjoyed a variety of tasty dim sum from various restaurants in California, including in lovely Chinatown, San Francisco. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
- It was a lapse into the most complacent narcissistic vulgarity to even allude to the minor discomfort of Covid, a trivial sense of slight fatigue every time I'd read any of 50 pages of the many engrossing books I am reading through during this idle sojourn in a Lucky Country. I thought as much catching sight of a brilliant cartoon in today's Age picturing a mass of people huddled in a tight corner of a barb-wire-topped, walled in area, otherwise in its length and breadth stacked with smoking rubble. Emblazoned on the walls were signs reading'No Exit', while a megaphone sited on a corner above blared:'In our efforts to minimize civilian casualties, would 1.4 million of you please move to a safe zone.(The Age 14 February 2024 p.25)
- That kind of image cannot but remind one of Raphael Eitan's now eerily prophetic remark back in April 1983:
'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scuttle around like cockroaches in a bottle.'
- That image, I then recalled, reemerged in October 2023 as the Israeli counter invasion got underway, in cartoons like this.('Palestinians as cockroaches' cartoon should prompt boycott of antisemitism conference' CJPME 16 October 2023)
- Checking Norman Finkelstein's website later, I noted a recent blog on the incipient invasion of Rafah, a scenario alluded to in the Age's cartoon. He writes:
'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'
- (By way of balance the Age also carried a half-page reflection by Ramona Koval, former host of the ABC's Book Show, whingeing/complaining of how deeply uncomfortable Australian Jews now feel, in the midst of 'overbearing cultural enforcers' and pro-Palestinian activists). I shook my head, realising how, like myself mentioning my bout with Covid, a sense of shame should cut in and tell us at least to shut up, rather than indulge, as there, in the obscenity, contextually, of likening one's suburban anxieties about status-harm through association with an eternally victimized Israel and identitarian discomfort to what a German Jew would have felt reading Der Sturmer in the 1930s. Nishidani (talk) 07:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
- Wishing you a quick and full recovery from your Covid exhaustions, and hoping you will continue to enjoy plenty of dim sim. Regretfully I have not yet had a chance to enjoy dim sim, looks like they are delicious based on articles and videos online. In the past I enjoyed a variety of tasty dim sum from various restaurants in California, including in lovely Chinatown, San Francisco. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
Arbitration Enforcement
Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo (talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)