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:::::::::Whoops, I only read as far as the first part when I had to rush and fix a leaking water main. If the origins are, as you concede from a common root, then clearly neither one nor the other is an 'offshoot' (there are serious scholars who regard Judaism as an outgrowth of the Israelitic tradition as embodied by Samaritan lore, lore and practice). As to Undue, no. To note that is like saying that on the article [[Easter]], it would be undue in the lead to note that it has an overlap with the Jewish [[Passover]]. A large part of the rituals of Christianity are, historically, those practiced for over a millennium by the early Church's lineal descendant, Catholicism, which however, as we scrupulously uphold in these articles, does not allow us to write up these articles where numerous denominations have similar liturgies as though the latter were undue in the lead, since they are 'offshoots' of Catholicism.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 17:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
:::::::::Whoops, I only read as far as the first part when I had to rush and fix a leaking water main. If the origins are, as you concede from a common root, then clearly neither one nor the other is an 'offshoot' (there are serious scholars who regard Judaism as an outgrowth of the Israelitic tradition as embodied by Samaritan lore, lore and practice). As to Undue, no. To note that is like saying that on the article [[Easter]], it would be undue in the lead to note that it has an overlap with the Jewish [[Passover]]. A large part of the rituals of Christianity are, historically, those practiced for over a millennium by the early Church's lineal descendant, Catholicism, which however, as we scrupulously uphold in these articles, does not allow us to write up these articles where numerous denominations have similar liturgies as though the latter were undue in the lead, since they are 'offshoots' of Catholicism.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 17:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
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:::::::::: This is actually not the first time this issue has come up. There have been other articles where editors tried to add "Samaritans" or "Karaites" and were reverted for this reason (WP:UNDUE). If you feel strongly about this, you might try to propose a general change at [[WP:JUDAISM]] or some other forum. [[User:Debresser|Debresser]] ([[User talk:Debresser|talk]]) 18:28, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
:::::::::: This is actually not the first time this issue has come up. There have been other articles where editors tried to add "Samaritans" or "Karaites" and were reverted for this reason (WP:UNDUE). If you feel strongly about this, you might try to propose a general change at [[WP:JUDAISM]] or some other forum. [[User:Debresser|Debresser]] ([[User talk:Debresser|talk]]) 18:28, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
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:::Ethno-religious exclusivism has no place on Wikipedia. That there are precedents among a number of editors for eliminating any note to the marvelous internal rifts and variety of historic Judaism so that we get a neat image of unruptured unity doesn't interest me. Every edit is judged on its merits, and if there is some rule that Judaism articles must not be despoiled by noting the internal diversity of its traditions, well, numbers are what count here, not scholarship, and, well, let the articles languish in this complacent dream of oneness. I've better things to do. |
:::Ethno-religious exclusivism has no place on Wikipedia. That there are precedents among a number of editors for eliminating any note to the marvelous internal rifts and variety of historic Judaism so that we get a neat image of unruptured unity doesn't interest me. Every edit is judged on its merits, and if there is some rule that Judaism articles must not be despoiled by noting the internal diversity of its traditions, or analogies with culturally contiguous faiths well, numbers are what count here, not scholarship, and, well, let the articles languish in this complacent dream of oneness. I've better things to do. |
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:::Uh, we've finished here, Dovid, and should return to the standard courtesy of not editing each other's talk pages.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 18:45, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
:::Uh, we've finished here, Dovid, and should return to the standard courtesy of not editing each other's talk pages.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 18:45, 7 June 2020 (UTC) |
Revision as of 18:46, 7 June 2020
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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
Nomination of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for deletion
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Notes
Expropriation, immersion, purification, erasure: on Israel's frenzy of springs
A long investigative report. Warm regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:12, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
- Deeply appreciated note from a long-missed voice. Hope the pups are thriving, even if they are no longer dogteenagers. Coincidence, I was thinking about Ein Hanya the other day while doing this edit, having also read this piece a week or so ago. Further proof of the thesis that Israel's occupational practices spell the death of a core component of Jewishness, as we have come to understand it admiringly over the few centuries. Nishidani (talk) 14:32, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
- Do you even read Hebrew?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
- Hi Nishidani, I have invested a great deal of time in 2016-17 studying the many different types of the highly detrimental impact of the intersection/ interaction/ re-enforcing feedback loop (a process of adding fuel to the fire) between capitalism and Human overpopulation. In 2018-19 I have shifted to studying the many different scientific issues at the basis of Antinatalism, including e.g. the process of evolution by natural selection. I am basically spending almost all my non-working hours learning a lot more about antinatalism, by reading books and websites, and by viewing and reflecting upon posts on various social media, especially YouTube, Twitter and Reddit philosophical essays posted by thoughtful and insightful thinking people. The pups and I send our love to you. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
- G'day. Retrospectively, the irony of existing consists in being born without having been given any opportunity to have a say in the process. There's something piquant, too, in the idea that we are a statistically marginal byblow of the pursuit of anatalist pleasure - of several thousand orgasms in an average life, a couple occasion entities capable of consciousness, which then have to cope with the (mis)fortune. The polyphiloprogenitiveness of 'primitive' societies functions to provide parents with a pension, offspring, some of whom will survive the attrition of disease and hazard and whose affective liens will ensure support for parents when they themselves are no longer capable of hunting and foraging. It's a 'seminal' investment, in that perspective. There are many reasons for parenthood, none of them 'rational', but then love itself, without which there would be no civilized life, is not rational, but then again neither is 'civilisation'. Nishidani (talk) 09:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
- Hmm, only yesterday that estimable Aussie lady, Caitlin, released this short reflection: How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human beginning, "We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn’t make head or tail out of. We were then taught what’s what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier." --NSH001 (talk) 11:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
- NSH001, thanks for the link. Caitlin's essay is thoughtful and insightful. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Nishidani, agree that life is an imposition. In my view imposing life is highly unethical, as it involves enormous risk to the recipient of that so-called 'gift.' Being given life is more of a curse than a gift in my view, as the various pains, discomforts, needs, deprivations and suffering most people experience in their lifetimes, are much more impactful, powerful and important than the experiences of pleasure that most people experience in their lives (and many people on the planet live lives that offer them almost no pleasure). And besides, the vast majority, if not all, of the so-called 'pleasures' we may experience in our lives are just a form of a relief/ easing/ reduction/ amelioration/ partial alleviation of some (minor, moderate or major) pain, discomfort, need, deprivation or suffering. These needs/ deprivations/ pains should not have existed in the first place, they would not have existed if we were not brought into existence (without our consent) in the first place. There is no need to create the need, i.e., there is no need to bring life into existence that did not exist before.
- If one wants to be a parent, one can try to adopt an already-existing child (whom was born without his/her consent), given that there are millions of children globally that need to be adopted (about 500,000 in the USA), or to adopt pets (again, born without their consent), given that animal shelters globally are packed with dogs, cats etc, many of whom are routinely euthanized for lack of adoptive humans. Nishidani, both you and I are childfree, if I recall correctly you adopted animal(s)? As you know I adopted two small dogs (that were abandoned in the street near my home) that I love. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- I was asked some years ago by a sociologist of happiness what was the single happiest moment in my life. Though retrospectively I had numerous instances to cite, I told him the following. I'd worked several hours, eyes to the ground, sod-busting and sieving handful by handful the upturned soil to rid it of seeded weeds like couch grass, and ready it for planting tomatoes. As dusk flared, I finished the last flick of the spade, and sifting of the soil, packed my tools in a corner and went over to close the gate of that particular hortus conclusus. Doing so, I looked up,turning round to face the sun that had warmed my sweat for some hours and caught sight of the sun's iridescent panorama of symphonic colour on a distant hill, and, well, burst into tears. Tears of joy. And the immediate thought accompanying this was:'I'm just a coagulation of water and matter, the molecular work of billions of years of physical laws, and, like my species, nature has endowed me with consciousness, a form of consciousness that allows, though individuals like myself, nature to assume self-awareness and see the stupendous beauty of the world, the universe. This extraordinary privilege has been accorded me, as a member of the species, for several decades, and death cannot cancel it. Indeed, death is robbed of its meaninglessness and its menace if, in the interim, we can see things like this, which 99.999999999 of the universe's matter can never achieve the complexity to enjoy.' Something like that. So, I disagree. The basic value one must cling to in life is gratitude for its gift. The pain comes from its denial to billions, who are born with exactly that capacity that rewarded me that day. A desire for justice is not just grievance: it can rise out of a very simple sense that one's given capacity for a sensual pleasure in just being is harassed out of existence by the arbitrary circumstances that impose misery on billions of less fortunate others.Nishidani (talk) 18:41, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- NSH001, thanks for the link. Caitlin's essay is thoughtful and insightful. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Hmm, only yesterday that estimable Aussie lady, Caitlin, released this short reflection: How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human beginning, "We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn’t make head or tail out of. We were then taught what’s what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier." --NSH001 (talk) 11:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
- G'day. Retrospectively, the irony of existing consists in being born without having been given any opportunity to have a say in the process. There's something piquant, too, in the idea that we are a statistically marginal byblow of the pursuit of anatalist pleasure - of several thousand orgasms in an average life, a couple occasion entities capable of consciousness, which then have to cope with the (mis)fortune. The polyphiloprogenitiveness of 'primitive' societies functions to provide parents with a pension, offspring, some of whom will survive the attrition of disease and hazard and whose affective liens will ensure support for parents when they themselves are no longer capable of hunting and foraging. It's a 'seminal' investment, in that perspective. There are many reasons for parenthood, none of them 'rational', but then love itself, without which there would be no civilized life, is not rational, but then again neither is 'civilisation'. Nishidani (talk) 09:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
- As for childlessness, I never felt the need. I had the extraordinary good fortune to be married to a miracle of a woman for 38 years. I sang, at her request, psalm 23 in Hebrew at her funeral, which was attended by several hundred people. Mischievous to the last, she had managed to get her pagan lifecompanion to do something religious in the end.Nishidani (talk) 18:48, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Hi Nishidani, I have invested a great deal of time in 2016-17 studying the many different types of the highly detrimental impact of the intersection/ interaction/ re-enforcing feedback loop (a process of adding fuel to the fire) between capitalism and Human overpopulation. In 2018-19 I have shifted to studying the many different scientific issues at the basis of Antinatalism, including e.g. the process of evolution by natural selection. I am basically spending almost all my non-working hours learning a lot more about antinatalism, by reading books and websites, and by viewing and reflecting upon posts on various social media, especially YouTube, Twitter and Reddit philosophical essays posted by thoughtful and insightful thinking people. The pups and I send our love to you. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)
- Do you even read Hebrew?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Your comments at Talk:Trump peace plan
Note that your comment about user:Icewhiz at Talk:Trump peace plan is a violation of WP:CONDUCTTOBANNED. From that page: Personal attacks, outing and other behaviours remain unacceptable even if directed towards a banned editor.
Calling a banned editor a "POV warrior" on a talk page is beyond the pale and unnecessary. It's also the same kind of conduct that you acknowledge got you banned from filing at WP:AE. I suggest that you redact this comment immediately, or I may ask an administrator to do so at WP:ANI. I hope that's not necessary here. Thanks. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 15:34, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
- lol. nableezy - 17:55, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
- There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 00:54, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- Um, Nishidani? Not a good look. I get that you're still sore, but this doesn't help your reputation any. I closed the ANI thread in the hope that you'll think better of it all when you've had a bit of time to consider. Guy (help!) 08:41, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- I think I took to heart Arthur Koestler's advice about the dangers of subscribing to the Society for Kicking Dead Horses several decades ago, and the only soreness that afflicts me are the strains and twinges of physical ageing. I presume 'grave-dancing' is wikispeak for Schadenfreude, a rather nice domestication of foreign idiom, but we already have 'malicious joy', the way we rendered the theological sin of delectatio morosa, a Christian reworking of malevolentia, a term that is less accurate, as is usual, than the classical Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία (epikhairekakía), alluded to by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics. My sentiments are with Greek usage - triumphalism over the dead or departed, inimical to a civil world as they might have been, apart from an invitation to the exactions of nemesis, is despicable.
- I don't think I have any reputation to defend, other than being an 'erudite blowhard' with a somewhat tedious obsession with the correct use of language, and a respect for the rules, violations of which I cannot complain of at AE. I rarely did. I think I hold the record as the least plaintive editor there regarding the I/P conflict over 15 years.
- For the record, the ANI whingeing takes exception to a number of factual remarks I made, which had absolutely nothing to do with personal attacks. I stand by them, since they refer to what is on record here, and known off record by competent authorities. The problem is not such piddling trivia, but the fact that editors spend more time complaining of other editors than in carefully assessing the merits of evidence and respecting the rules of compliance governing our encyclopedic undertakings. Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- Nish, I think over those 15 years you should have learned something. That there are people here who a. cannot abide allowing what you so meticulously document with the highest quality sources to stand on Wikipedia, and b. have no policy compliant reason to remove it. So they have, and will continue to, gone with the only option they can to stop those facts and sources from being included, that being to report you for whatever it is they think will get you blocked and/or banned. So while yes, I agree there is nothing factually wrong with what you wrote, and that you were remarking on your own ban not really the verboten ones, you would still be wise to maybe no longer bring up that username again in the future. If and when we see the same face with a new name then SPI can be the place where he is mentioned. Besides that, it just gives the people who have no argument a chance at their objective. nableezy - 18:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- Nishidani, The fact that you see nothing wrong with calling another editor an ethnonational extremist and continuing to attack them on unrelated tangents shows a remarkable lack of self awareness on your part. Clearly the admins who have reviewed this, JzG and Drmies, acknowledge a problem, even if they don't want to escalate it to something more serious. Unfortunately, your above post conveys that you don't. If you keep hitting below the belt per WP:NPA and making comments in the same vein I will file another report documenting this pattern of behavior. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 18:29, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- WP:NPA: "Do not make personal attacks anywhere on Wikipedia." The policy applies anywhere on Wikipedia, including on Nishidani's user talkpage. What is a personal attack? They include, "accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence". At the top of this section, you accused Nishidani of "calling a banned editor a 'POV warrior' on a talk page." Nishidani did not actually do what you are accusing him of. Rather than calling Icewhiz a POV warrior, Nishidani actually made a statement about himself, saying that he was banned from AE for calling Icewhiz a POV warrior there. You accused Nishidani of gravedancing (the subject of this essay), which fundamentally means making "personal attacks against them in discussions about the blocked/retired user". It would have been wiser if Nishidani had not referred to Icewhiz by name, but otherwise what he wrote is a pretty straightforward (mild, even) description of what happened. As such, it does not fit any of the criteria for what a personal attack is. Therefore, Nishidani was not, as you claimed, gravedancing. In your previous comment, you say that Nishidani was "continuing to attack them [Icewhiz] on unrelated tangents," a personal comment which you shouldn't have made without strong evidence backing it up. You say that Nishidani shows "a remarkable lack of self awareness," a strong personal comment. Also, you state, "you see nothing wrong with calling another editor an ethnonational extremist." It's not clear whether your objection is to the description, epressing it, or both, but I feel sure that Nishidani thought it was accurate and, no doubt, there would be editors who would agree. The error that Nishidani made was in believing that the licence for making personal comments on the AE and AI noticeboards is broader than it actually is (which was actually, not too different to your apparent belief about what you are allowed to say on this talkpage). 'Etremism' is in the eye of the beholder and I'm sure that Icewhiz could have mounted a sturdy defence against the accusation. However, I think that it would have been interesting to see Icewhiz stating that he is not an 'ethnonationalist'. ← ZScarpia 02:36, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
And also, dear friend, please see WP:BLANKING. You are perfectly entitled to remove anything you like from your talk page if you feel it unworthy of being here. nableezy - 21:37, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- Given that Nishidani was sanctioned for, effectively, making a personal attack on an admin noticeboard, I'd be interested to see what happened if Wikieditor19920 was reported for doing the same on this talkpage. @JzG:: Guy, perhaps you'd like to comment on whether the remarks made here were acceptable. ← ZScarpia 14:47, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
- Not worth rehoeing, I think, and admins have a hard work load without having to tussle with textual archaeology on a talk page. I'd question though whether I 'effectively made a personal attack' in that case. If memory serves me correctly, I documented a certain attitude and drew an inference, and, as was noted at the time, policy allows one to set forth one's views on how another editor behaves if one takes the trouble to provide evidence through diffs that ground those inferences. That is how ANI/AE works. The admin in question didn't accept this, but thought a scroll through my log indicated I was a chronic case of engaging in disruptive ratbaggery. And, as always, the proper thing is to take the sanction on the chin and not whinge. But this is all down the Wikipedia memory hole, and it's time for a midnight stroll.Nishidani (talk) 22:39, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
- My 2 cents: I think the admins here are aware that Icewhiz is still very much involved with harassment and (attempted) outing of various wp-editors, myself included. As late as this year, 2020, (months after he was banned from wp) Icewhiz have stated things about me (off-wp) which he would never, ever have dared to state here (as I would have brought him straight to AE...I am certainly not banned from posting there.) (I will not link to it, but can email admin links if they want it.)
- It is rather frustrating only having to "take punches" (all "below the belt"), without ever being able to defend yourself. Nishidani has been accused of "grave-dancing": the problem is that this "wiki-corpse" is very much alive....on other internet-sites than Wikipedia.
- As for my opinion about Icewhiz and his "mates", that can easily be summed up: "#$%&/(%$#!"#$%&=)(/&%$#"#!!!!!!!!, Huldra (talk) 23:36, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
- I often think words tend to have more depth and personality than the people who use them. Calling people like David Dean Shulman and Zeev Sternhell - the former , a Gandhian exponent on non-violence who is often stoned, beaten and arrested for protecting Palestinian goatherds, the latter injured by a pipe bomb for espousing liberal views- voices on the fringes of the Israeli radical left, has only one meaning logically, the one I gave regarding the person who expressed that judgement.
- I know that in the scattershot blahblahing of contemporary discourse, words themselves mean nothing, it’s simply the throw-weight of innuendo or contempt they may evoke which counts. But if one calls people of profound liberal persuasion exponents of a fringe so extreme that it lies further left than even the positions characteristic of far-left politics, this can only mean that the person espousing that view thinks, in this case, that a liberal view of human rights is tantamount to subversion. If someone brands John Stuart Mill a far-left exponent of fringe leftist politics, the description tells us nothing of Mill: it does imply strongly that the values of the person espousing that caricature are so extreme that they cannot distinguish civil decency from outrageous delinquency. Those unfortunate enough to have some sensitivity to the world about them are of course only exhibiting ‘a remarkable lack of self awareness on (their) part,’ a lack of self-awareness more troubling than what we find when editors go ballistic about NPA even while, in their diatribe, resorting to insults and insinuations about their target’s lack of cognitive consonance.
- I'm sure we all have better things to do. I have a motherlode of pruned branches to clip into next winter's kindling.Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
Cleaning up human waste in Gaza
e.g.Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks for posting Nishidani. This is disturbing and depressing. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:04, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
Assange
Came across this from Stefania Maurizi (she probably deserves an article. BTW):
"Per me, è veramente choccante vedere come hanno ridotto Julian #Assange: negli ultimi 10anni ho lavorato con lui per il mio giornale incontrandolo molto spesso, so decifrare il suo volto, i suoi gesti: è una tragedia, una vergogna come l’hanno ridotto"
--NSH001 (talk) 12:24, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks N. I really don't know what one can do there, except add one more note to one's file on extraordinarily violent things that happen in our midst, and which almost no one, certainly not the majority of 'reputable' speaking heads, notice or deem worthy of, at a minimum, massive civic outrage.
- (first time I have seen scioccante' written 'choccante', which sounds ugly in Italian, apart from requiring the native reader to pronounce it as 'coccante', even while thinking of chocolate)Nishidani (talk) 14:17, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Nishidani, I'm aware that Maurizi is published in Italian media. If you come across any useful articles by her or anyone else in the Italian media, feel free to mention them on my talk page, and I'll probably add them to my Assange bibliography. --NSH001 (talk) 15:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
permit regime opacity
I was looking back at some things and see we never got around to adding material on the structural opacity of the regime. You still interested? nableezy - 19:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Israeli help in preparing for the corona virus in the West Bank
here.Nishidani (talk) 18:48, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks for posting Nishidani. This is yet more disturbing and depressing behavior by the Israeli government. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:05, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Indeed, disturbing. I, too, thank you for helping to keep us informed, Nishidani. El_C 17:08, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
One way to wake up on a Sunday morning:
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra stages a virtual performance of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' from their homes (Hat tip: Tania Mathias)
Hope you're well.
--NSH001 (talk) 08:39, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
- Thanks, Neil. I hope someone organizes a sing-in of The Internationale to the same end, a thought inspired by the arrival of a squad of Albanian doctors, following a Russian army unit specializing in infections, a Chinese contingent, and a Cuban group of 52 doctors here in Italy. It has always struck me that the persistent American endeavours by trade sanctions to shutdown Cuba and make it collapse - eerily similar to Israel's efforts in Gaza - are tragically ironic given that the US has the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system in the developed world, and, were it not so morbidly ideological, could cope better than it will with the ongoing disaster if it abolished its strangulation strategies and asked Cuba for assistance (of course, there would be an ulterior political motive in doing so - if Cuban doctors could go to the US, large numbers might be incentivized - since this is also a US programme - to never return to Cuba, and therefore allow the US to recruit cost-free (in terms of training) large numbers of medicos while creating a vacuum for medical personnel in Cuba through drainage, thus achieving the long hoped for collapse of the system's brightest achievement).
- Since you're English, black humour is acceptable, I hope. As I read reports, I can't help thinking of the 34 sonnet sequence written by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli when a colera epidemic struck Rome in 1935, exploring the rich brogue and gossipy superstitions of the illiterate to chronicle popular reactions. One in particular on the eve of the outbreak assumes the voice of an undertaker, and their perspective. Since it's pure dialect, it can only be translated into a comparable dialect, with the same conventions, phonetic respect for actual pronunciation etc. This renders them unreadable to most literate eyes, unless you've been raised within a dialect, and are at home with how people actually speak, rather than how literature would prefer them to. Best wishes and keep safe.
1109 Li bbeccamorti
E cc'affari vòi fà? ggnisuno more:
Sto po' d'aria cattiva è ggià ffinita:
Tutti attaccati a sta mazzata vita....
Oh vva' a ffà er beccamorto con amore!
Povera cortra mia! sta llì ammuffita.
E ssi vva de sto passo, e cqua er Ziggnore
Nun allùmina un po' cquarche ddottore,
La profession der beccamorto è ita.
L'annata bbona fu in ner disciassette.
Allora sì, in sta piazza, era un ber vive
Ché li morti fioccaveno a ccarrette.
Bbasta...; chi ssa! Mmatteo disse jjerzera
C'un beccamorto amico suo je scrive
Che cc'è cquarche speranza in sto collèra. 18/3/1834
1109 Undatakers
Uh, bizness? Nowun’s dyen: gone oudda fashen.
This dash a malarial air’s just past, n’ ev’rywun strives
Ta kick on, they’re all ded keen on their bluddy lives . .
Strewth, its hard wirken as an undataker with a pashen!
Me pall’s in an appallen state! Look at the mold.
If things keep up at this rate, an the good Lord
Dudn’ enlie’en them quacks, we’ll all go overbord
An the prafeshen uv an undataker’s bound’a fold.
17, that wuz a good year. Them were the days!.
Ya cud make a fine liven on the market cos the ded
Were flutt’ren down like snowflakes an fillen drays.
Stuff it! . .; who knows! Yestadi, I was told by Jack
Ut a mate uv 'is in the trade’ud ritten an sed
Things wa shapen up, now ’ut this colera’s back. 11/12/2000
- enlie'en = Enlighten, (the intermediate 't' (like all final t sounds in male talk in traditional Australian dialect, is not pronounced, with a pun on 'lie'.Nishidani (talk) 15:41, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
One more reason to be proud of wikipedia
See here Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
- Haaretz is the only newspaper I know of which seems to have a Wikipedia correspondent. If my memory is correct, this is Omer Benjakob's WP user page. An interesting situation: being able to cite one of your own newspaper articles to update Wikipedia. ← ZScarpia 13:29, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
- Could technically be a conflict of interest, but since the identity is declared, and, judging by the edit link, the detail uncontroversial, I wouldn't worry about it. Hope all's well over there. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- When I commented, at the back of my mind I realised that what I wrote might be read as 'dark hints', but I hoped it wouldn't be. Real-life-wise, I'm doing fine. My biggest worry is trying to foil my elderly mother's death-wish attempts to escape self-isolation. How are you? What's the situation in your part of Italy? Are you allowed outside to do gardening? ← ZScarpia 10:47, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- I've a similar problem - caring for a relative with Lewy body dementia. In Lazio, there are 5,500 cases with 322 deaths. It's convenient that there's a Covid centre a few hundred yards away, though waiting six months to fix a toothache is a minor annoyance, considering the general grief. I've always lived in relative isolation so that's no problem. Whether I'm allowed or not, I spend a good part of my day in 4 gardens (at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to tighten the tension on a Makita chain saw, when not tinkering with a broken float in my underground cistern). It looks like we're a month ahead of the usual seasonal cycle, heatwise, so I've planted early, several varieties of tomato - doesn't matter if I might not be around to eat them, a grandnephew is crazy about them, and thinks they're better than lollies. Conceptually, it would be nice to live a bit more - given the huge systemic fuck-up, which will mean we're in for a revolutionary decade for once. Probably by historical precedent, not cause for optimism, but, for once, science is trumping political chumpery. On the other hand, we are now Eskimos, who kill their aged, just as many areas, not in Italy, are denying care for the disabled. In Italy the worst hit are professional thieves and cadgers - you just can't move round to case houses and plunder them. On the other hand, illegals might now have a chance to get papers since they are the backbone of the agricultural industry, and need incentives to get back to work - it's hardly worth dying for 2 euros an hour of backbreaking work under a broiling sun.Nishidani (talk) 12:43, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- Tightening the tension on a Makita chainsaw is something I have done. While I still have that dangerous and hard-to-start device, I prefer the battery operated units that became available in the last few years. They are less powerful but that means it takes 10 seconds for a cut rather than 3. Their principal benefit and curse is that they only need a light touch on the trigger (and safety) to start grinding fingers or anything else nearby, and you really must take the battery out before mucking about with them. Johnuniq (talk) 23:41, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- I've a similar problem - caring for a relative with Lewy body dementia. In Lazio, there are 5,500 cases with 322 deaths. It's convenient that there's a Covid centre a few hundred yards away, though waiting six months to fix a toothache is a minor annoyance, considering the general grief. I've always lived in relative isolation so that's no problem. Whether I'm allowed or not, I spend a good part of my day in 4 gardens (at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to tighten the tension on a Makita chain saw, when not tinkering with a broken float in my underground cistern). It looks like we're a month ahead of the usual seasonal cycle, heatwise, so I've planted early, several varieties of tomato - doesn't matter if I might not be around to eat them, a grandnephew is crazy about them, and thinks they're better than lollies. Conceptually, it would be nice to live a bit more - given the huge systemic fuck-up, which will mean we're in for a revolutionary decade for once. Probably by historical precedent, not cause for optimism, but, for once, science is trumping political chumpery. On the other hand, we are now Eskimos, who kill their aged, just as many areas, not in Italy, are denying care for the disabled. In Italy the worst hit are professional thieves and cadgers - you just can't move round to case houses and plunder them. On the other hand, illegals might now have a chance to get papers since they are the backbone of the agricultural industry, and need incentives to get back to work - it's hardly worth dying for 2 euros an hour of backbreaking work under a broiling sun.Nishidani (talk) 12:43, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- When I commented, at the back of my mind I realised that what I wrote might be read as 'dark hints', but I hoped it wouldn't be. Real-life-wise, I'm doing fine. My biggest worry is trying to foil my elderly mother's death-wish attempts to escape self-isolation. How are you? What's the situation in your part of Italy? Are you allowed outside to do gardening? ← ZScarpia 10:47, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- Could technically be a conflict of interest, but since the identity is declared, and, judging by the edit link, the detail uncontroversial, I wouldn't worry about it. Hope all's well over there. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
- I was a bit loath to start making suggestions about how to tighten the chain in case I found that, in the course of an eventful life, you'd done a stint as a lumberjack in British Columbia, or some such, so that I was being a bit patronising. Also, I'm sure that you're more than capable of using Google without being given tips. Makita has a site where you can download manuals using the model number here. Perhaps a reason why you were scratching your head is because you actually have a model with an automatic tensioner?
- I'm glad that that you've been able to go out into the gardens and sun yourself a bit.
- Here, there have been reports of burglaries on the homes of medical staff. They're the people that the thieves know aren't going to be home pretty much constantly.
- Yesterday I went to a car and bike spares place to buy new pedals, the first non-food shopping I've done since the beginning of our lockdown. Finding how much things have changed came as a bit of a shock. Shoppers were allowed in one at a time, where they stood at a barrier just inside the main door and about two metres from a counter, which was behind a perspex screen. An assistant went off to find what you were after, then held it up behind the screen for you to say whether you actually wanted to buy it or not. The last time I can remember shopping in a place where you didn't just browse the shelves for what you wanted must have been over ten years ago.
- A lot of the symptoms of LBD sound similar to my mother's. We took her to a series of consultants, but don't have a definite diagnosis. She deteriorated very quickly and it's still getting worse.
- ← ZScarpia 04:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
- It's tough on carers, very tough. All solutions are provisory but I've found or worked out several that seem to allow moments, even half an hour at a time, of brightness. It depends on those elements of childhood that can return as hallucinations or mannerisms. Spot them, or those that seem to occasion an easing of depressive hallucinations, and work them into a ritual: I use lollies, a feint at dancing together, mentioning a special biscuit type or lemonade bought exclusively for her (the idea of a present/surprise), and learning to interleaven, in her case, the ceaseless Joycean babble of disjointed phrases with words, exclamations and phrases that give the victim of dementia a sense that their fleeting inner world of images is understood. Every patient will have something there in their residual identity associated with joy, and if one can find pockets of such feelings, one can play along with them- At day's end, a few hours won from the stark disorientation and grief that afflicts sufferers, makes the world a little more bearable. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:47, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
Re this
Apropos these remarks on User:Debresser’s talk page
- Nishidani is indeed a disruptive editor
- tendentious insistence of a clique of editors
- that is Nishidani making his usual personal attacks and putting down people to squash all resistance to his opinions
- a scholarly point of view, however I have noticed that that point of view invariably coincides with your POV and in addition, that you convey your posiiton in talkpage conversations by using a very unpleasant tone of superiority, including explicitly stressing other editors' inferiority.
All these are personal attacks, and you've been repeatedly warned not to engage in them. So drop it. It is provocative, as is your invitation to me to report you to some forum. I assume that means you want me to provide you and the other editor on that page with an opportunity to rehearse the long stale list of complaints, mostly turned down, about me being an abusive editor. The situation you are describing as my 'bad attitude' refers to a curt dismissal of a disruptive editor who is almost certainly a sock or a sock's meatpuppet. Everyone else there knows this. I'm bad, yeah: bad at being inept. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
Precious anniversary
Three years! |
---|
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:47, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
Barnstar for you !
The Special Barnstar | ||
For helping editors like me who are not good at English, and whose writing skill is poor. Thank you very much for all your help. Gazal world (talk) 18:50, 24 April 2020 (UTC) |
- That's very decent of you, pal. But it is partially false. Your English is very good. And a further consideration: as a notorious blowhard, requests from others to help in the art of the précis actually help to save me from my vice, since they spur me to rein in my congenital longwindedness. So your occasional requests for assistance are really incentives for stylistic self-correction, and most welcome. Keep up your great work in expanding wiki coverage of Indian regional linguistic cultures, it is a powerful corrective to our occidental ignorance and biases (and you deserve a barnstar, actually in context a bahnstar (भण्) for that).Nishidani (talk) 09:01, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
- Nishidani, an barnstar from such an accomplished editor as Gazal world is indeed a most worthwhile acknowledgement. El_C 17:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
New interesting essay by Moshé Machover
Messianic Zionism: The Ass and the Red Heifer, written by Moshé Machover. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:43, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Much of this, reading so far, is familiar, - I once gathered a lot of notes on the Red heifer rubbish, intending to do a major expansion of that article - but like most of my wiki research it remains in files. Life's far too interesting in its variegations to allow it to be channeled into a single area of curiosity. But, on a quick first reading it is, like everything Machover writes, extremely informative and refreshing. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- No one has ever explained to me what why is a resident of Umm Rashrash is a member of the Palestinian people with national rights to Jerusalem while a resident of Aqaba or Taba is a peaceful neighbor of Israel, I expect anti-Zionists to oppose all nationalist movement rather than supporting the poor nationalists over the bourgeoises nationalists.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 16:57, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- I can't see the problem. A Palestinian Israeli in Umm Rashrash doesn't ipso facto have 'national rights' to 'Jerusalem, if only because both 'national rights' in this case, and what is meant by 'Jerusalem' go unexplained. And the same would apply to an Israeli in Eilat (had a great time there, though cut my thigh on coral). As to anti-Zionists, there are innumerable varieties. I would basically concur with Walter Laqueur's position, (if uniquely on this, since he was not a good historian, as opposed to an excellent Zionist): Zionism ended its mission in 1948, and persistence in its attitudes is dysfunctional to a state with democratic ambitions. Yes it was immigrant colonial land-theft and carpetbaggery on a massive scale but the state that emerged from 1948 assumed international legitimacy and its rights as a state cannot be questioned. States are, as scholars since Ernest Renan, affirm,founded on violence and persist culturally by myths that privilege forgetting, and stand on the complacent high ground of a mutual ethno-national self-admiration clannishness. Of course scholars have unearthed the real story, but newspapers never reflect that. It's strictly for seminars in historical faculties from Tel Aviv to Timbucktoo.
- Israel is no exception, though of course, like the other state it imitated, the USA, it vaunts its exceptionalism (basically by adopting the American narrative of the conquest of the West (all those films about the murderous Indians raping and killing settlers =all those stories about Palestinians killing settlers) and repackaging in a 'Jewish' idiom the American rhetoric about (a) City upon a Hill, though turning this on its head by inverting the Isaian Light unto the nations to mean 'a beacon for the diaspora'; (b) using the same geopolitical profile of the Monroe Doctrine, to mean that Israel's existence requires every other contiguous or distant nation in the area to keep a low profile, and persist in an unthreatening state of dedevelopment to secure Israel's safety. The expectation that anti-Zionists must out of logical consistency oppose all nationalisms shows a weak grasp of nationalism. The major theoretical books on nationalism in the 1980s,( apart from the extremely awkward, indeed embarrassing exception of Anthony Smith's book) by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Peter Alter, for example, never mention Israel, except in a hurried glance, excluding it, one assumes because it doesn't sit easily with the notion of an indigenous ethnic movement to achieve sovereignty over its traditional land, being a late exemplar of a colonizing migration which used a set of myths to legitimize the denial of national rights to 95% of the historic population (1900s) in order ostensibly to solve an infra-European issue, Christian antisemitism. Bourgeois vs proletarian has absolutely nothing to do with it. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Having written the above, I am now speed reading, before closely rereading, the essay by Moshe Machover kindly referred me to by. In it there are several passages that corroborate the last thing I wrote above. I.e.
From the viewpoint of national theory, Zionism needed a fiction that was incompatible with the accepted concepts of national theory.… [It] needed a much broader conception than the simplistic one. In this other conception…referendum of the world’s Jews superseded referendum of the population of Palestine.
- As Ernest Gellner once advised his Japanese government interlocutors along the following lines (if my memory of the occasion serves me correctly: 'You're a powerful, rich, successful nation. Recent conflict with others seems somewhat pointless. There are other options. Why not just ease up a little on further global economic expansionism (and frantic ideological self-justifications) and begin simply to reap the fruits of a century of successful economic development?' Translated into the Israeli context that would mean: drop the mess of messianic expropriations and regional hegemonic fury. Of course, that won't happen, except for thousands of individual Israelis who privately prefer an intelligent life of decent expectations to being endlessly coopted into justifying the cruelty, or burying the shame of an evil exercise in nationalistic hybris. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- All of these arguments still don't matter to the fact the Palestinian narrative is just as flawed and full of moral failure. The creation of Israel is an event that was inevitable. The Jewish people were spread all over the world in established communities, but always lived under threats to their lives. The only idea that existed among the Jews that could unite them all together to one place in the world, abandoning their host nations where they've already established their cultures, languages, traditions and history, is the idea of the Land of Israel. It is taught to every Jew for over two millennia. There were two options for the Jewish people to survive the last two hundred years, either to mix with the European societies, abandoning their identity or to create their own nation-state, equal among the nations where they could defend themselves together. The first option, of Jews integrating among the nations might have been more peacefull. Since integration means abandoning your identity, the Jews would have quickly lose their status as a damned people, untrusted and hated. The second option was unprecedented in human history, an entire collection of foreign communities far from apart, manage to physically relocate into a completely foreign territory of the world and using a religious history book as a guide. This wasn't supposed to be accepted by the world. A collection of citizens from all over the world communicate with letters and turn themselves into sovereigns of someone's vital territory. But in history as we know it, the pressure mounted on Europe's Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries was so high that the Jews had no time to decide whether they want to keep their faith or not and whether they want to move to Ottoman Palestine and take it for themselves or not. The Jewish settlers moved there, to be able to protect their lives, a basic human need.
- The time arrived for the Jews to establish a nation state in Jerusalem, when Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans, the Europeans were fighting over who has the biggest muscles and the idea getting rid of the Jews was pretty popular. I don't need Zionist history books to tell me that I simply need to talk to my grandparents who suffered both the tragedies of the Holocaust and the tragedies of Israel, getting shot in the head by a sniper in Bar Lev's line, or having family members return home in pieces from when this line was crossed by the Egyptians, and I understand why the creation of Israel was so tragic. All of the people who established Israel lived in post-traumas, and this allowed them to do radical things to defend themselves. My grandfather arrived to Palestine after he finished his military service in the British army, to whom he joined at the age of 17 (lying about his age) upon hearing his whole extended family in Thessaloniki and Kos was killed by the Nazis. My entire family was people who fled because of war and became some soldiers in Israel's wars.
- The creation of Israel wasn't perfect and many people suffered because of that, but it isn't Israel's fault. This is what they had to do to survive, and the outcome was determined by the circumstances. The British Empire played with the world as if it was a collection of wild animals. It was a time in which the new morals of the modern age were still combatting each other hegemony. In a way, these morals eventually are acceptable by all and this allows for radicals to rise up. This is the only expected outcome of a fragile peace, like the one achieved after World War I.
- With the British playing dolls with entire populations, the Nazis swiftly develop into a brainwashed ultra-fascist dictatorship with the Chutzpah to decide the faith of Europe without minding killing millions, the Jews under the immidiate threat of extermniation virtually anywhere in Europe the only place they go and can trust is Israel, because no nation treats the Jews better than the Jews themselves. The Arabs of Palestine were caught in the middle of this, while their brothers in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt were caught in the middle of other fights between different world factions. The reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict matters so much is because of the Arab and Islamic nations, who overlap each other and use Palestine as means to unite themselves in a failed attempt to return their Impirial glory. This is not rare in the world with Turkey occupying both northern Cyprus and Syrian territory, Iran having proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon which are involved in sabotage operations against Sunni and pro-American factions. You have Russia, occupying Crimea and militarily supporting the independence of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, forcibly controlling Chechnya and gripping Belarus. You have China with their occupied territories in India, which are all in the border with Tibet, another nation occupied, and claims to Taiwan and huge regions of the Chinese Sea. This reality is foreign to the Europeans. They live in a post-modern world where they have redeemed themselves of their horrible colonial, fascist and communist past and now they are here to lecture anyone else.
- We the Israelis and they the Palestinians are all righteous victims.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:22, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- Well, I can't easily reply to a response which, however well intended, is not thought out. I feel like a Russian PhD student who, after 4 years work, makes a summary of his research on, say, the failures of Marxist theory to give an adequate typology of social structures attested in history, only to get back a note from his supervisor that ignores its thrust and gist and, instead, briefly trots out the party line. What you write has no trace of personal thinking. This sounds condescending, and somewhat self-regarding. I'm old, you're young. Half of my education must arise from 'Jewish' thinkers who made a profound contribution to modernity, most of yours appears to come from growing up in Israel - they're two different worlds, and not really communicable. Best wishes, Stav, stay safe, lad and consider at some stage in your long future, a deep draft of diaspora experience. Nishidani (talk) 07:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
- By 'Jewish' I means, as always, people in what is called a diaspora, regarded, implicitly or explicitly by the various majority social and cultural traditions (and prejudices) they were steeped in, as a minority, addressing general questions about the modern world. For a large number of them, the 'Jewish question' wasn't the question at all, as much as a foreign pathology. Nishidani (talk) 07:30, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
- All I am saying that after reading more and more western opinions on our local conflict, as opposed to things I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears, I think more and more that this reality cannot be understood through western eyes. This whole conflict is a complete built upon narratives and misconceptions. I am being told by many people, it doesn't matter if it is you with your army of intellectual sources, or my father, or a 60-year-old Falafel shopowner in Jaffa. I live in the reality of the current generation and I have no idea what happened before 2001 when I trace back my deepest memories. So all of the values and histories before that only help me understand 2020. When I'll be 45 years old, and one of my children will start reading the news or go to the army, he will know better than me what's going on, even if he will not open a single history book. I was raised on a lie, that the Israeli narrative is true and the Palestinian narrative is fake. Me, and many other Israelis have decided to adopted their own narratives and there is a large group of people who realise that history matters less when it doesn't make the Cottage cheese cheaper. None of the histories in the West contribute to peace by writing books to destroy the Israeli narrative. Jews are capable of empathizing with the Palestinians, but the Arabs rarely do the same, and that's the source of the problem. It is just too convincing to be a Zionist. Add rockets, threats of BDS and international condamnations on a nation that remembers Holocausts and Pogroms and what you have is an over protective nation that doesn't give a damn about your international laws. We were and will remain the world's scapegoats. This isn't about values nor human rights, this is an intellectual tournament about how the world should look like, with no regard to how it really looks right now. When the rest of the world will get the same attention that Israel gets, things might be better.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 17:07, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
- Well, let's have a conversation. Not now. I'm watching Peacock at the moment, purely on the strength of Susan Sarandon's advertised appearance in it. You might reconsider in the meantime what on earth you mean by 'western'. Anything I say on these matters has been said by Jews in the diaspora, or professors at TAU and other universities, i.e. all I can give you is part of the 'Jewish' narrative that has no political weight, and is not sexy. 'Western'/'Israel' as opposed terms is, for me, as in other national narratives using the us/outsiders binome, meaningless. Nishidani (talk) 19:42, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
- Well no. Pointless continuing this because you've just defined yourself as a middle eastern redneck with a contempt for learning, a very peculiar position within a culture one of whose shining ornaments for millennia has been love of scholarship.
- In my tradition, we were raised to laugh when the answer to the question, 'Why are the Irish like mushrooms?' was 'Because we're raised in the dark and fed on bullshit.' After a trip back there, my father said:'Never trust the local Irish on matters of history. They're too fond of blarney to ever get the past straight.' I've found that that is an excellent rule-of-thumb for every people I've lived among, and, as a writer you like, Yuval Harari puts it (essentially respinnning Ernest Renan's thesis that, 'L'oubli, et je dira même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation' (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation 1992 p.41), with Benedict Anderson's concept nations as 'imagined communities'), societies are functional to the degree they are bound by, incarcerated within their foundational just-so stories or myths that have no objective reality and
'There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down or our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison' (Sapiens p.133)*
- Harari also wrote:-
Having so recently been one of the underdogs in the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties about our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty leap.' (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015 p.13)
- Make the obvious substitutions: 'underdog' with Jewish people, the 'savanna' Europe, 'over-hasty leap' (Herzl's ignorant assumption that one could jump out of a diaspora and into a nation 95% of which was constituted by another people without engendering as its conditio vivendi endless violence rather than a modus convivendi, and 'historical calamities' with a state condemned by its choices to endless warfare within its asserted borders, and enmity against all outsiders who don't admire one's achievement and lack the appropriate clan and blood credentials, or if they have them, betray the good herd by criticizing its shepherds).
- I find Zionists and their stories particularly boring because I read the Bible as a boy, and nothing in Israel's history, for one, is news. If one has a life to live, rather than being a piece of biological tissue yarning time passes through uncomprehendingly, the minimal criterion must be to strive to wake up from what James Joyce called 'the nightmare of history'. That is what the Bible taught me: history is a neurosis of an eternal drudgery of repetitive recursion of archetypes of experience. Everything that will happen in this context has its precedents there,** meaning those who regulate their lives by its residue, wittingly or not, accept that existence must consist of being a marionette in a puppet theatre's plots, scripted by unknown people millenia ago. It's utterly predictable (like much history generally). The only thing distressing about it is the innovative crassness and stupidity its defensiveness, at times vindictive, a times ressentimentale(Nietzsche), blots the modern Jewish tradition with, by associating strategically Israel with the culmination of, or essential redemption of, Judaism. They are two different things: Jewishness and 'Israeliness': the former is comfortable anywhere in the world, with a condign reveling in the plurality of identities: the latter an emotive redneck contempt for anything smacking of a metropolitan spirit. Nothing unique there - Israel marks the lost of Jewish diasporic 'uniqueness' in exchange for becoming a sad theatrical rehearsal of the usual fate of nationalisms that have plagued the world for the last two hundred years.
- Israel is no exception, though of course, like the other state it imitated, the USA, it vaunts its exceptionalism (basically by adopting the American narrative of the conquest of the West (all those films about the murderous Indians raping and killing settlers =all those stories about Palestinians killing settlers) and repackaging in a 'Jewish' idiom the American rhetoric about (a) City upon a Hill, though turning this on its head by inverting the Isaian Light unto the nations to mean 'a beacon for the diaspora'; (b) using the same geopolitical profile of the Monroe Doctrine, to mean that Israel's existence requires every other contiguous or distant nation in the area to keep a low profile, and persist in an unthreatening state of dedevelopment to secure Israel's safety. The expectation that anti-Zionists must out of logical consistency oppose all nationalisms shows a weak grasp of nationalism. The major theoretical books on nationalism in the 1980s,( apart from the extremely awkward, indeed embarrassing exception of Anthony Smith's book) by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Peter Alter, for example, never mention Israel, except in a hurried glance, excluding it, one assumes because it doesn't sit easily with the notion of an indigenous ethnic movement to achieve sovereignty over its traditional land, being a late exemplar of a colonizing migration which used a set of myths to legitimize the denial of national rights to 95% of the historic population (1900s) in order ostensibly to solve an infra-European issue, Christian antisemitism. Bourgeois vs proletarian has absolutely nothing to do with it. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
- I woke this morning expecting a conversation, which means a step-by-step assumption of responsibility for the logical and factual basis of whatever one asserts, rather than an exchange of opinions. But I can see it is pointless. You just keep pouring out trite herd-like memes shorn of anything resonant of an interest in reasoning. I admit to a sense of disappointment, not for myself. You're young and bright, and to see someone anticipate their future on the basis of a premise - we will do what we like, so fuck'em while dismissing the achievements of 'Jewish' scholarship as 'western' crap doesn't augur well. So, rather than begin to tease out the assumptions, I've just written an essay summing mine, which are of course opinionable as well, but, unlike your's, they can be logically and factually defended. They do not squirm with contempt, enmity, resentment or defensiveness, as everything above does. I wish you well, nonetheless. Everyone who is young can, if they so opt, be different from what is expected of them, or what they are taught to expect from themselves. If you do come round to the idea that serious argument can have a heuristic value, and I am around, by all means, drop a note here. Otherwise, good luck.Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
- This metaphor has a racy splendor about it, but of course, a compost of a Foucaultian reading of Kant, breaks down, like much of Harari's bolder claims, looks slick the moment you examine its assumptions.
- Last night, as I said, I watched the film Peacock, and the experience underwrites my generalization. From the moment very early on when the protagonist lifts up a board to get at a box hidden there, and glances up at a window on the second floor, the whole plot was obvious, and therefore the following hour and a half a tedious dénouement. Because that framed moment was an allusion to Hitchcock's Psycho, meaning the man would be a crossdresser - his own 'wife'- and the two would play out a dialectic of roles, masculine and feminine, from a single distraught past. Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
- My immediate instinct to almost everything you write is defending what you discredit, and calling out your sources is the method I use. You have probably read more books than I will ever be able to, since you had the privilage to have no cellphone and videogames as a child so your concentration is much stronger than mine. This is why my comments are much more abstract and impulsive than yours, my opinions are based on the feelings I have for the things I read and see since I can barely remember them. When talking about Israel, there is a paradox. On the one hand, I see things with my eyes and on the other hand, sources say otherwise. Not very smart, not very intellectual, but that's how things go in my head.
- We both share the same worldview. When I studied chemistry in 9th grade I realize everything is bullshit and that we are all just dancing molecules, which is even "worse" than Harari's outrageous opinion that we are no different than other living organisms. For me, the only real Jews are those who are found in tombs from the Iron Age in the southern West Bank. I have so much goy blood I must look like a pig already. But I live in a society and you have grand claims about this society, about its history and about its ideas. When I call out "western" sources (when I say western I generally mean the western part of WWII's allies in the European theatre) it is not because they are wrong in what they say. It is because I see things worth talking for hours that none of the westerners will ever see. I use the same amount of intellectual care you use for Zionism when I look at the modern Israeli society, which is completely foreign to you. My reality is the reality of 20-year-old Israeli people and I unintellectually chose to dismiss anything else because all I want is to look forward.
- It is hard to truely respond to all of your comments, becuase there are so many and each one triggers so many fuses in my mind that my response goes far away from your actual comment. This doesn't prove to me these discussions are worthless, but maybe they are frustrating indeed.
- I feel deep love to my surrounding and I want to protect that with myths and I cannot engage in a conversation that deals with my myths when there are millions of others. Israel is a shitty state that lies and occupies. I can only prove many other states are shittier, and that the society created by these lies is actually a pretty decent one. I enjoy the ability to play war in the West Bank and then dance with foreigners in the middle of the desert to repetative electronic music in 145 beats per minute with psychoactive substances in my blood, and then turn rocks and found pieces of pottery and make grand claims to contribute to my myths. It is hard for me one when your comments try to prove all of these are the outcome of a sin.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:35, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
- I lived in Israel for several months, and was a 'Zionist' for more than a decade afterwards, so your contrast between the intellectual outsider and the local observer is a bit wrong-footed. While there I never read a book, for the only time in my life. I worked and observed. And I have Israeli correspondents who see exactly the same things you see, did army service, and came out with utterly different impressions, and who retain deep family and personal connections with that country. When I've visited I sit and observe all sorts of things: a black Beta Israel guard with intimidating wrap-round cop glasses scrutinizing crowds of them alien blow-ins -Palestinias with that stupid belief they are native to his country, to spot 'suspicious' activity or those gay bands of young twentyish girls in military uniform bouncing happily, with their Uzis on the ready, and exchanging jokes as they walk through the Arab souk near the Western Wall - that's meant to humiliate the Palestinian shopkeepers I suppose; or listening to Palestinian hoteliers over a beer telling me the technical difficulties endlessly thrown up by the Israeli bureaucracy to make their entrepreneurial activities even more difficult; . . .
- I don't know why you think I am implying you are a son of some crime or sin. Most nations have massive crimes on their record book - genocide in Australia, England's genocide against the Irish centuries back; the refusal to acknowledge the fundamental role the enslavement of Afro-Americans played in the building of the American economy, together with the genocidal policies towards Indians; Russia's genocide in the Ukraine; China's 26-50 million dead from 1959-1964 when Mao decided to ignore Soviet advisors and go for the 'great leap'; Belgium's genocide in the Congo; the French genocides to secure Algeria from 1831 down to the 1870s; Germany's holocaust etc.etc.etc. No Australian, American, Englishman, Frenchwoman, Chinese or Russian, let along Germans who are now raised in those countries wear any congenital 'sin' for the crimes of their forefathers. There is nothing worse than watching people agonize about the sins of their forebears, for which they, being born later, bear no responsibility. The only moral responsibility one has is to understand what happened, and see to it, in so far as an individual can, that at least one will not repeat the crime or be complicit in it. My parents told us as children, stories of the violence our forebears wrought on indigenous peoples, as well as telling us of the horrors of the famine of 1845-49, and earlier Irish history's long record of genocidal oppression - perhaps a third of the population died as a result of English military strategies in just twelve years.
- These two elements engendered neither guilt nor enmity, any more than living as a Catholic minority in a Protestant area, and being stoned as children by Protestant kids as we walked past their school to ours, and not being allowed to set up any commercial practice unless as publicans, was spun as a story that we, the proverbial offspring of Irish 'apes' as the common 19thy century meme had it, were historically hard done by, feeding into some perduring clannish sense that we were history's victims and had some unbeatable superior claim on the world.* You didn't whinge about the past, or wallow in anguish - good parents teach one how to cope, the art of canny survival and to get above the pettiness of resentment, the most infantile if widespread malady one can be afflicted with, aside from jealousy. We are, lad, responsible for the future, not for our forebear's past(s), though the two are linked. And in whatever historic shithole one is born and raised in, love of landscape, if one has it (many don't) is an unquestionable right. It doesn't matter what the history of that landscape was, (Remodelling the landscape to put fucking conifers everywhere instead of respecting the natural ecology since ancient times, is a stupid example of what is called ecological imperialism.
- My primary aesthetic allegiance to the Australian bush landscape is something independent of my sense of the devastation colonialism wrought on the Aborigines. By happenstance, we grew up in a relatively natural bush setting, and even ate grubs, as did Aborigines, caught under the bark. We learnt that the traditional landscape we loved was known with extraordinary intimacy by its former inhabitants, and took on board whatever we could learn from them. The same would apply to any Jewish Israeli in their landscape, regardless of the history. It's a pity that Zionism persists in being so unaesthetically Eurocentric, and has never learnt to graft into its sensibility a biblical attachment to the land as it was. I first had this thought while sitting in a trench and watching a Gazan farmer plough his patch of the strip with a donkey, after a day linking up irrigation pipes on a kibbutz, work which made on see every day, dozens of dead birds in the fields, killed off by toxic accumulations of pesticide.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
- By the way, you made many strange assertions earlier which I ignored. But I'd like to correct one at least.
There were two options for the Jewish people to survive the last two hundred years, either to mix with the European societies, abandoning their identity or to create their own nation-state, equal among the nations where they could defend themselves together. The first option, of Jews integrating among the nations might have been more peaceful. Since integration means abandoning your identity, the Jews would have quickly lose their status as a damned people, untrusted and hated.
- I guess you got that 'hystery(a)' out of some local comic book. After Napoleon French and Italian Jews, to name just two, were not 'damned and hated'. Of the former's condition after 1808, there was a proverbial expression:'heureux comme un juif en France’. Jews were not 'required' to abandon their identity: they were recognized as a distinct confession with perfect rights to continue to maintain their culture and observances as long as these did not conflict with the laws all French people were obliged to honour. Again, you characterize as a Jewish dilemma what was the major dilemma facing one of four European Jewish realities (Bernard Wasserstein), that of the Jews of eastern Europe up to Russia's borders. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels, the essential goal of pre-war Yiddish-speaking Jews in the east was to migrate to America, not Palestine, and there is historical evidence popular sentiment preferred America as Zion to Palestine, which suffered a net outflow of Jews after WW1. Your picture is patched up from what happened to Jews essentially in Eastern Europe. The survival of Jews was guaranteed by the global diaspora no fascist power could ever reach: they constituted 3.3% of the population of the United States on the eve of WW2, for example, and had successful unthreatened communities all over the world, including the 1,000,000 in Islamic countries. The percentage of the Jewish population annihilated in the Holocaust is roughly proportionate to that of the Irish population Cromwell devastated. Again, your sense that hatred and distrust for Jews was universal just ignores so much regional realities. Take Zeev Jabotinsky's testimony:
'Not only was anti-Semitism absent in Italy then (1898-1900), but in general there was no specific, clear attitude towards Jews, as there was no definite attitude toward bearded people. Years later I came to know that among the members of my most intimate circle there were also two or three Jews. At the time of my studies in Rome, it did not occur to me to ask who they were, and neither did they ask me.' (Vladimir Jabotinsky,Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life, Wayne State University Press, 2015 p.52).
- Note that being Jewish there and in many other places (I know. I grew up in a similar environment where no one advertised their ethnicity) was purely a private matter, not even thought worthy of mentioning or, if in the company of another Jew, a point to establish some ethnic solidarity.
- If you read the biographies of Arthur Koestler and Eric Hobsbawm you will note that both were raised in a city (Vienna) notorious for its virulent anti-Semitism, yet neither of their families had any personal experience of it. Koestler's attitudes about his identity changed radically and despotically when he was blindsided by reading an hysterical Zionist account of the putative outburst of murders, castrations, blindings and rape of Jews in Palestine during the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. The reality was nothing like that. He adopted a myth that led him to espouse Jewish terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
- Your Zionist experience is still different than my experience. I grew up in the beginning of the smartphone generation, and while soldiers 20 years ago saw Palestinian rioters wearing traditional Palestinian clothing, I saw them wearing masks of internet memes and see my face on a popular Arabic post in Facebook, where the rioters would celebrate their "victory" over the occupation forces. I had girls in my battalions get a follow request from a Palestinian from the nearby refugee camp who would go on to ask them for nude pictures. The past is being forgotten and is only preserved in written language, limited in its ability to describe human scenarios and open to interpretation. Your description of my reality feels too poetic. The 14 million people who live in this geopolitical unit are a bunch of scum compared to those who live in Europe. The European roots of this country are being pushed away. Raised on European values, I used to feel bad for that. But the more I spend time all over the country I realize a society should be judged by its current state. I judge Israel's society all the time, out of a desire to make things better. But the judgment that comes from the world doesn't share the same intentions as mine. It feels like the judgement of Israel and Zionism comes to prove one's virtue and not from a real care for the Israelis, the same care that is easily provided to the weak and poor Palestinians. (Can't say half of my comments don't sound like virtue-signaling, but I try to keep that limited to my own experiences).
- In my dreams we are all Canaanites, Jews and Arabs together. I look at a map of Palestine from 1870 and it feels much more authentic than the current map of Israel. Our country was not shaped natrually through human processes in a spesific natural environments, such that will make Megiddo a perfect place for the center of a kingdom. But on the other hand, it proves how much humanity has changed and the model of Israel's development should hint on how societies will develop in the near future. So even though there is not enough respect from the Jewish people to the history of their land, I don't think that the Hasmoneans did. After all, it seems that much of the stories of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites was written to cement a much later reality. Israel, as opposed to the bible and Judaism, is not authentic, but so is the bible as opposed to Israel of ancient times.
- As for the hysteria for Jews, it doesn't come from a comic book. My grandmother was raised by Polish and Bessarabian parents in Paris. These are the stories I recall. One of her early teachers would refuse to pronounce her foreign Polish name, as it was too difficult for a French to do. Maybe the French were racist toward slavic people, it is the early 20th century after all. But when studying math she would get humiliated for knowing the answer. She was told with a dismissive voice "of course you'd know the answer". They also had a neighbor who would avoid looking at them most of the time and in the rest of the time would make sarcastic comments on the background. Again, maybe she is racist towards them pollacks I can't know for sure, but it all changed when their next-door neighbor told them that this woman that lives above them and likes to put her wet laundry above my family's dry laundry just to antagonize, has told Nazi officers about my family's background. This is the reality for my French grandmother. Her family members in Poland were less fortunate, and so were my grandfather's family in Thessaloniki. But it didn't end in the Holocuast, becuase both of my grandfathers were born in Egypt and while one moved to Palestine in 1947, the other stayed with his successful toy company. But in 1956, both he, and the relatives of my other grandfather, were expelled from the country. So hysteria or not, no one wants to enjoy any of the experiences above. Most of my extended family don't live in Israel, and they do just fine, but they all have identity issues. My french cousins don't feel French nor Jewish. They feel "French-Jewish". For them, it is enough to visit Israel every year (and for their father, it is enough to evade tax laws in France by buying apartments in Israel) to be Jewish, but they both seem like they are going to marry non-Jewish men and while I only want them to have happy lives, still I wonder what identity will their grandsons have.
- Zionism has claimed a monopoly on the Jewish people. It is indeed a problem, but here it is seen as a righteous battle that is either fueled by one's belief in YHWH or just for the right to feel part of something. I see it mostly with Russian Jews, many of whom are far from the traditional description of a "Jew", but still they feel connected to these people becuase this is what Israel does to you. It brainwashes you to believe you are in a good place, and with all of its drawbacks, it is still one of the world's best places to live in. There is a common saying in Israel, "Ein Li Eretz Aheret" (I have no other land), and it is true in the minds of many. So deconstruction of these ideas, with respect for the history as we know it (we were murdered, massacred, raped, looted and genocided), are treated with hysterical opposition. This hysterical opposition is enough to blur ones humane morals which are educated in Israel and lead him to enjoy blowing kneecaps on the Gaza border. I won't lie, the first time I hit a human being who hurled a molotov cocktail at me with a rubber bullet or how you like to call it "rubber-coated steal bullet", I smiled, becuase the reality I lived in has corrupted my values and as an authority of my own feelings, I've decided to accept it. Is is the right thing to do? I don't know. But I know that with or without me, kneecaps meet rubber bullets every day. I voted against the annexation of the West Bank in the last elections, that's the most I can do as a citizen. I take action against things aimed towards me, as a secular person living in Israel, but I don't take action to stop Palestinian suffering, that's not my business. All I can do is take action to prevent Israelis from taking action.
- I want for once that the non-Zionist world will change its tone towards the Zionists, and will allow a better discussion, the same way I want the Israeli government to change the tone towards the Palestinians and the same way I change my tone towards all of those "leftist pro-Palestinian antisemites in Wikipedia" which I've been warned not to even speak to by many of the Israeli users. Recently I was even blamed for being a fifth column for that and another email I received for "collaborating with the enemy" has led me to remove my picture from my Userpage.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 02:58, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
But the judgment that comes from the world doesn't share the same intentions as mine.
- As I implied. I think you need a diaspora experience. Reading newspapers every day, I see in Israeli media every incident, mostly minor, of anti-Semitism, or anything that can be construed as such even if it is no such thing (Bill de Blasio's recent tweet about 2,500 Haredis gathering at a funeral in violation of restrictions on everyone foregathering publically), blown up and discussed intensely in terms of a collective threat to Jews. I read away, imagining the impact of this incessant alarmism - every storm in a teacup exaggerated to look as though on every occasion we are dealing with something like Hurricane Harvey. The ancillary effect is to make all 'goys' in the public domain so reticently fidgety about negative fallback about anything they might say regarding Israel or incidents in which Jews happen to figure that they are reduced to an extreme form of self-policing to ensure they are politically reelectable in terms of PCorrectness for the affected constituency. People who don't toe the line have huge forces marshaled against them to make them disappear politically (Corbyn, regardless of his actual merits as a politician) simply because on a single issue, I/P, they failed to conserve a prudent reticence or pay lip-service to the standard memes. The most disgraceful trend in this fascist intimidation is the extreme harassment meted out to any Jewish person who might 'step out of line' on these topics. I've heard or read of innumerable cases of such threats since I was first told by an academic friend of one instance in the late 1980s.
- In the real world, (excluding the US)this induced paranoid atmosphere is not fed with anything like that alarmism. You have blips, occasional uproars, but there are far too many different problems, ethnic groups, political interests, to cover to allow an obsessive focus on any one community's complaints. In Italy, in the 1980s one used to see regular intelligent coverage, in which a Palestinian and a Jew/Israeli discussed the conflict. In the last 2 decades, Palestinians have disappeared, coverage of their story only emerges in reports of a terrorist event 'in Israel', the International Holocaust Remembrance Day has a lead up for several days, and over a month, every night you get films or documentaries on the holocaust. Israel has been promoted to one of the key countries international reportage covers, from Jerusalem. A huge effort has been made on both public and private channels to showcase Israel in its best colours. Advertising for tourism in Israel is intense. As soon as the covid virus came out, Italian experts from all over the world became regular faces, as well as that of a scientist from an Israeli kibbutz-based pharmaceutical group, who said Israeli had a cutting edge remedy. So the country's image is extremely positive here, with very little negative news. The reality of the occupation and all that implies is a dead issue, though any incident of middle eastern/Arab dysfunctionality gets major coverage. This is true of Europe in general.
- I've been a life-long student of paranoia (indeed my best friend was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic,* something that never got in the way of over two decades of an intensely conflictual (discursively) friendship!), and my impression is that the mechanisms are all in place with regard to Zionism, anti-Semitism (it exists, but nothing like what any reader knows of the atmosphere prior to WW2), Israel etc. In real life, throughout the diaspora, Jewish people participate in the fruits of the most successful epoch in history for themselves and their communities, whatever the mediatic rumour-mill mongers go on harping about. Unlike the circumstances in Israel, they do not have constant prods about threats which are inevitable for a small country most of whose massive defense resources are invested in defending the country from the consequences of an occupation it has refused, politically, to forego dreaming of converting into full annexation and, ineludibly, an apartheid reality. This can worry the edges of diasporic Jews who naturally think Israel's achievement touches an important part of their sense of themselves, but nowhere to the obsessive extent it does with Israeli Jews forced willy-nilly to live in a world which, by its ideological obsession with equating Jewishness with just a patch of biblical territory, cannot live up to its foundational dream without accepting that part of it will be a perennial nightmare because half of the population considers the fulfillment of that dream an incubus.
- As regards your family anecdotes, remember (as you treasure them) that anyone belonging to any ethnic minority in most of the world will tell one endless stories of the amount of prejudice they had to wear from the majority. I heard a motherlode of similar remarks directed at 'abos/boongs, pollacks, 'fairies/freckle punchers', spics, spags, nignogs, wogs, dagos, gooks, sheep shaggers, huns, frogs, slantyeyes, nips, as well as the Oyrish etc.etc., and not only yids (in Australian slang however that was far rarer than the far less hostile rhyming slang 'four-by-two' (a carpenter's measure)'. It too easily forgotten or overlooked in some quarters that anti-Semitism is just the 'accelerated grimace' (Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pt.2 of a universal pathology -prejudice - that affects us all.
- There's far more in the world that ethnicity, politics, and the like. When young, a passion for life's diapason of potential interests and opportunities should take pride of place. We all have several dimensions and one casual nationality should not be allowed, whatever the provocations, to hog the limelight and transform us into monomaniacal worrywarts. Take a leaf out of Daniel Barenboim's book. He's been an Israeli since 1952, has a home in Jerusalem, but also fully lives the many perspectival lives his background and career have allowed him to take on board: though intensely Israeli, the world is his oyster, to the point that he is proud also of having a Palestinian identity.
- And no doctrine has a monopoly on the Jewish people, Zionism, least of all. They fortunately defy definition, despite the best efforts of Nazis, fascists, arseholes of all descriptions, and, on the other side of the spectrum, Zionists themselves, to impose one.
- Best regardsNishidani (talk) 10:17, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
- Just for the record I think it was one of the fathers of Italian psychoanalysis, Cesare Musatti (of Venetian Jewish background by the way), who wrapped up my best mate's 'cure' by declaring to him that while his 'symptoms' fitted the theory of paranoid schizophrenia', the theory simply must be wrong in his case because my friend managed to live a perfectly functional life, was extremely gifted in whatever he tackled, could turn the tables on those who were delegated to analyse him, and be a highly creative artist. He was just 'normal' in a completely different way than most others. And at that, his spiritual 'father' augured his 'son' a confident return to his daily world, free of any anxieties about his being totally different from everyone else. Meaning? Never let your identity be gridlocked or straightjacketed by the stereotypes of a given social mould, psychological profile, cultural taxonomy or tribal classification, no matter how cogent they might appear to be.Nishidani (talk) 17:11, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
- This metaphor has a racy splendor about it, but of course, a compost of a Foucaultian reading of Kant, breaks down, like much of Harari's bolder claims, looks slick the moment you examine its assumptions.
I read Barenboim's article, There isn't much to disagree, neither there is too much to fundamentally oppose what you are saying. As I've said we all share the same basic understanding of humanity even though I am much less educated and experienced than you. Barenboim states his is a long-term optimist. I am a long-term pessimist. Barenboim will probably not read the news in 2035, but I will, and I will also read them in 2075. The main source of my pessimism is the time I spend with people my age and hearing their opinions becuase they will outlive you, or Barenboin, or my father or the Falafel shop owner. Young Israelis have more access to information than ever, but the way media platforms work cause them to be exposed to what sells the most, and sadly, anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist views sell the most today.
The winds are blowing right. I am being told the rift between left and right in Israel is still not as deep as in the 80s or 90s, when Emil Grunzweig and Rabin were murdered by Zionist terrorists, but when I speak with young people in Israel I see a large difference between older populations. Most of the young Israelis today read their news on Facebook and Instagram. This isn't so problematic, the regular media outlets, Channel 1, 12, 13, Ynet, Walla! and others just post their regular content on Facebook. But the problem is when the new media platforms are used by radicals. I wonder if many people in the West who read about Israel know Yoav Eliassi, known by his stage name "The Shadow". He has 130,000 followers on Instagram and 430,000 on Facebook. Most of his audience are young people. His views are extreme and outrageous, but he is seen as a saint in Israel, because "he speaks his truth". The right-wing is being criticized on media, and therefore many people in the right dismiss the media as leftist. This allows people like Eliassi to rise, because the media in Israel is a free-market and there is a demand for non-leftist media, and Eliassi provides that and uses provocation as a promoter. He is not the only one. Countless others take advantage of the media to spread radical views that wouldn't get a voice on the media because of their extreme manner.
For the younger population, being right-wing is sexy while being left-wing is treason. While the non-Haredi/Arab population of Israel is split roughly 50-50 on democracy versus Jewish nationalism, the younger population have mostly preferred the latter, because it is sexier. This is all a result of the right in Israel trying to stay in power. The Israeli political system has different camps, the Arabs, the far-left (Meretz), the center-left (Labour and the various centrist parties), the right (Likud), the far-right (settler parties) and the Haredim. This fragmented reality forces the Likud to side with radical groups such as the Haredim and the settlers and surrender to their demands. The media criticizes it, so the Likud dismisses the media as leftist. The law system calls out this union's corruption and unlawful actions, so the Likud tries to weaken the law system. Recently the Knesset had a majority against Netanyahu, so the Likud simply closed the Knesset (blaming the coronavirus). Israel is becoming less and less democratic every day.
I have accepted the fact, after 2009, 2013, 2015, 2019a, 2019b, and 2020, that this cannot be dealt with force. The left in Israel opposes violent resistance, such as the killing of Grunzweig or Rabin, but it is very militaristic in its intellectual opposition to the right, using every tool other than a grenade and a pistol against the right. The result is that the right is crushing the left, just like Israel is crushing the Palestinians. And just like Israel defends itself from Western countries, the United Nations and international law, the right defends itself from the media, the legal system and the legislative bodies.
When I was a commander I received 10 of the most undisciplined soldiers. I was enlisted the same day as them so I had no seniority over them. They already had 5 other commanders and knew their job better them me (the area north of Jericho). At first, I wanted to fight them with discipline, but the more I dug into their minds I realize it ain't going to work. I recognized that the army is a broken system and I can't punish people for not submitting to a broken system. Instead, I sympathized with them and did unspeakable things for their sake, things that would put me in jail. The result was amazing, they were faithful and obedient. Not perfect, but better than what they were on day 1. In the meantime I struggled with my commanders. Most of them were self-loving idiots who cared more about their authority than the actual job they came to do. So to them I spoke in a professional manner, I put on a show. I always took responsibility for things I've done and even though I was seen by many as an undisciplined commander, I was also seen as someone with his own mind who understands what is going on. The result? I was tasked with commanding many operations, even though I was a commander of the lowest rank. I was allowed to chose my men and plan my operations. I was invited to my battalion staff meeting and the high-ranked officers wanted to hear what I had to say. I was even offered to take the position of a platoon commander even though I was an NCO. I gave up my values for my soldiers, and I lied to my commanders and disobeyed their orders. The result was I earned their trust.
I belive the same should be applied to solving conflicts in the Middle East. Rather than calling out Zionism or the Palestinians, the international community needs to earn our trust. Threats of BDS and excessive attention to every single thing we do in international spaces aren't earning our trust. The ultimate result is more dead Palestinians and more settlements.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:03, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- My mind works analogically, with the result that nearly all pleas for exceptionalism fall in a deaf ear, or rather, they catch my eye which starts to squint at the fine print to see exactly what privileges of exemption from the civil rules of human conduct are being sought. I watched the Whoopi Goldberg/Sissy Spacek film The Long Walk Home about the Montgomery bus boycott last week. In your perspective, the African-Americans should not have boycotted the bus system which was run by the whiteman's council and obligated them to sit in the back seats: they should have exercised some Palestinian sumud, kept their nose to the grindstone of laborious humiliation, waiting for the northern liberals ('westerners' in your idiom), amongst whom in the fight against US apartheid Jews Jewish Americans played a seminal role, to win or indeed earn the trust of the complacent racist middle class oppressing black people in the South, and gently persuade them over another several decades to be more amenable. The important thing to work on would be, not those black folks' plight, but the anguish and compensative aggression of their masters. I could add a dozen more off the cuff. Israel has made its bug-ridden bed, and must lie on (and about) it. If you go on to the university, ask around for a course on philosophy which parses Hegel's Herr und Knecht dialectic. The whole problem is all there in those brief pages. Nishidani (talk) 11:56, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would advocate making peace with Israel, because it won't be peace on Israel's terms, but on UN terms, which are unfavorable for Israel. They would have a narrow country with half of its population Arab. When Israel will mistreat its Arab population, that would be the time to strike and cause the Zionist entity to collapse. Instead of fueling the paranoic Israel with threats of war, it is better to have them let their guard down. This is the ultimate PLO plan described by rightwingers, that at first they will make peace with Israel and then they will flood it with refugees and win the war. Today the Arab countries with the most influence on Israel are Egypt and Jordan. Israel refrains from doing many things for the sake of those countries. Without peace with Jordan, I believe that the al-Aqsa mosque would've been stormed by Messianic Jews more often. And all of Israel's ceasefires with Gaza were mediated with Egypt. If the Arab world will share interests with Israel, it will be easier for them to pressure Israel to do whatever they desire. Look at what Netanyahu is doing. Seeing that the relations with Europe are not so great, Netanyahu chooses instead of convincing France or the UK that Israel is right, to ally Israel with every single country that wishes to do so. From the Trump administration to third-world dictatorships in Africa, it doesn't matter. What's the point in making peace with Syria, when you can have Saudi Arabia as your friend? Screw em', they don't like us. As long as Israel's allies won't pressure Israel into doing things it doesn't desire, it doesn't need to care about the demands of the rest of the nations. Many Palestinians actually want this, they want to make peace with the Jews as a technical way of getting freedom of movement in their land and have national rights. This way they could get what they want without fighting wars they will lose. They believe with a virtuous smile on their faces that they can redeem the Palestinian nation by having one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 12:53, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- Of course, this cynical use of peace should be used only when real peace is not achievable, which is in 2020 I believe is the situation for many things from secular-Haredi rift to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we can't call draw and make peace, we should win with peace. The less battles, dead bodies and violations of human rights, the better.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:33, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- As earlier, there is just too much there that is not thought through to respond to. I'll just take the first line.
If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would advocate making peace with Israel
- That is a factual error but one that lets slip your POV, that ‘Israel’ has been Palestine since the year dot. Israel did not exist in 1947 so no Arab leader could make peace with it. The 9 Arab countries directly concerned with the issue for cultural, political and religious leaders had their votes trounced by votes from 13 South American and Caribbean countries with no connection whatsoever to Palestine. What you should have written was:
If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would have accepted giving up to 30% of the population of Palestine - almost all recent immigrants from Europe - 56% of the land, allowing them political control over a territory of which they owned 6% of the property, and I would have told my Arab brothers that, despite being 66% of the population, and owning or working 94% of the land, they should forsake their land, wealth and livelihoods in order to make life comfortable for European refugees. This deal of a lifetime is ‘’unfavourable’ to Israel!
- Of course, the Arab leader in question would be arguing this politically impossible proposition knowing full well that the United States and European countries consistently refused to allow large scale Jewish refugee immigration into their countries, before and after the Holocaust. The problem they created or abetted, was something Palestinians would have to pay for, perhaps with the connivance of some jolly Arab leader with a yen for political suicide.
- I could respond to the rest (Jordan is not interested in Palestinians. Its politics are grounded on the geostrategic necessities of preserving its monarchy against a large Palestinian population in its own territory. Egypt is not interested in Palestinians: the vicious thug ruling it is interested only in cutting a deal with Israel on the gas reserves in Gaza’s offshore waters, which technically are Palestinian property etc.,etc. Arguing like this is pointless, except over a beer in a pub, when the day after, one gets on with real life once the hangover is gone.
- Stop worrying. You've got a career to prepare for, perhaps university studies, and the future is a great unknown. You mentioned that your own generation thinks with FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram and don't give a fuck for serious history. In short, that modern Israeli identity, very much like that everywhere, is based on social media contacts. Knowledge can be a burden, freighted with the sadness of insight. Ultimately, if pursued, it pays back its suitor or sutler. For to master a subject requires solitude, while familiarity leads one to a sense of gratitude for the masters who illuminated one's way, and the product is an unmanufactured, inexpensive happiness out of kilter with the packaged variety one is expected to take on board as a consumer. In sociological terms, there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of people one knows through such virtual media, and well-being and, I might add, using one's intelligence creatively. A good family, a handful of serious friends, and a leisure to pursue with curiosity what the best of mankind has thought, or thinks, painted, composed or invented, far outweighs any prospects of a return on investment from one's time-consuming absorption in the dispersive flutter of post modern media and their technologies of mass distraction. If I may make a suggestion, put these mega political and identitarian worries on the back burner and burrow away, while on duty, into learning to read the physical landscape and its history as read by geographers, botanists, historians (prior to this tragedy) That you do so shows in some excellent topical edits you've made. Then, well, graduate in a subject that energizes your curiosity. One only knows who one is, if one is lucky, decades down the track, not in early youth, so identity as the search for national respect, is a waste of time, too messy. Respect, if it is worth anything, is, ultimately, self-respect (self-integrity), not something won from others. Nishidani (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- I talk hypothetically of course. If I were an Arab leader I were an Arab leader, not a recently released soldier from Tel Aviv. The point is that the Arabs chose war. They lost, no one can deny that. The problem is insisting on keeping the war going. I kindly ask the Palestinians to stop their war because it ain't bringing them anywhere. This request wouldn't be necessary if a pro-Two State solution government was in office. I cant take responsibility for my government actions because I've already voted against it three times in one year. The Palestinians are strangled in occupation and Israel is strangled in Democracy. While the anti-Netanyahu camp wants to end this with legal tools, the right wants to change the rules and give up basic democratic values. Maybe this is a good time for the Palestinians to do what Israel doesn't and state their refusal to continue to live under occupation. I dream about thinking outside the box, demanding Israel to annex all of the West Bank and provide citizenship to all Palestinians. Or otherwise have Israeli Arabs build outposts with Israeli flags in the West Bank. Challenge the Israeli occupation without blood. Confuse the enemy. Make the Israelis tilt their head and think about who they are really, just like Israel did to them when it sat on the side when Hamas and Fatah fought over Gaza in 2007.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 23:43, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
- Demanding territory back and reparations is too obvious. Instead of proving to the world Israel is mistreating them, prove to the Israelis they are mistreating them. When Palestinians harrass the Israeli civilian sector, it doesn't work. --Bolter21 (talk to me) 00:10, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
- Stav, you have consistently walked past every statement that asks you to think something through. Conversation worthy of the name is not a pastime: that was the innovation Socrates introduced. Zionism, like any other ethnic, national or collective system of 'thinking' -slavophilism, fascism, falangism, peronism, commumism, Maoism, is an ideology - the only one that, in the West, still has street credibility. An ideology is a straightjacket and its exponents don't need to think - their thinking has been done for them. So in walking past my analogy to raise another point, all you did was throw a standard gambit fished out from the 'answer goys' queries about Israel' texstbook or supermarket, taking off the shelf the Abba Eban option:'The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. You didn't even have to dust it off: since it is in constant circulation. When I translated what it effectively would mean:-
If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would have accepted giving up to 30% of the population of Palestine - almost all recent immigrants from Europe - 56% of the land, allowing them political control over a territory of which they owned 6% of the property, and I would have told my Arab brothers that, despite being 66% of the population, and owning or working 94% of the land, they should forsake their land, wealth and livelihoods in order to make life comfortable for European refugees. This deal of a lifetime is 'unfavourable’ to Israel!
- You ignore that implication because to understand anything in history requires empathy, to put yourself in someone's boots. All ideologies train the peoples they are targeted to indoctrinate with (a)hypersensitivity to grievances affecting the ingroup, and conversely (b) obtuseness about the same grievances one might happen to observe with or indeed inflict on, anyone in the vast outgroup. My mother whenever, witnessing some tragedy hitting others, would utter:'There but for the grace of God go I.' The ideological reaction is:'They got what was coming'; 'they asked for it'; 'It's their fault'. Its most refined form was the Golda Meir gambit, which your prose also echoes with:'’We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.'*
- A Zionist is raised, like all citizens in any ideologically swamped culture or society, to parrot memes, or tailor elegant variations on the standard clichés produced to 'manufacture consent'. To talk to one is like meeting someone who, when one poses a question, replies in such a manner one realizes the person is a medium, the conversation a séance, and the medium is channeling dictums of the dead, memorized from some standard script worked out before hand to cover any imaginable inquiry. So it's pointless my countering your gambit pawning the countermove of citing Arab Peace Initiative, repeated in the 2007 Arab League summit as a countermove. Despite the fact that these initiatives illustrate that Abba Eban's dictum reflected what Israel does, you'd talk your way past the analogy.
- The essence of Zionist attitudes was set forth by Jabotinsky. We have to smash Palestinians' desire, identical to ours, for a homeland, and successively humiliate them until they crumble before the fait accompli. Once we are masters, we can talk with them, and compromise a bit.
There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future . .My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. . .Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home,of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuseto admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. . .We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "no" and withdraw from Zionism....Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims,watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.
- So, really a country that wittingly embarked on the occupation, on a systematic policy of humiliation of a captive people and the plundering of its residual stock of lifemeans (Lebensnotwendigkeiten in the German phrase), renounces its right to respect, as it airily discards any serious claims that anti-Semitism is a problem. For sensitivity to being the object of systemic ethnic enmity is either a general principle, or it is nothing. One cannot refine one's antennae to flutter at every gust of intolerance of Jews in the diaspora, and yet behave exactly as anti-Semites do,-smearing, harassing, robbing, engaging in Kristallnacht bombing operations at the slightest fizzle of a pseudorocket in the Negev, saying it's different because Palestinians are not 'Jews' and therefore there is no moral problem in treating them like shit. The IDF finds the occupation useful because the whole population of each generation's youth gets practical training in being insensitive (be as sensitive to humiliating Palestinians as one is to seeing a Jew anywhere wronged, is life-threatening). Doing military service there means become complicit in humiliation, and not feeling ashamed, since the victims are to blame, and indeed, we are the victims because the Arabs forced all this onto us.
- So, the conversation is pointless.
- In the film Michael Collins, the protagonist, (Liam Neeson) at one point on the ship over to England, says:'I hate them for making hate necessary'. Well the scriptwriter obviously got that from Meir Golda, and there's some point in the bridge between the two narratives since the Irgun, which essentially established the ground rules of how to 'handle' Arabs used the IRA tactics in the Irish War of Independence as a promptbook for wearing down the British in Mandatory Palestine. Don't be offended. My side of life is short. I prefer intensity, therefore, rather than leisurely divagations to 'kill time' or engage in 'playing', which is what time quite rightly is intent on doing with people of my age.:)Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
- My mind works analogically, with the result that nearly all pleas for exceptionalism fall in a deaf ear, or rather, they catch my eye which starts to squint at the fine print to see exactly what privileges of exemption from the civil rules of human conduct are being sought. I watched the Whoopi Goldberg/Sissy Spacek film The Long Walk Home about the Montgomery bus boycott last week. In your perspective, the African-Americans should not have boycotted the bus system which was run by the whiteman's council and obligated them to sit in the back seats: they should have exercised some Palestinian sumud, kept their nose to the grindstone of laborious humiliation, waiting for the northern liberals ('westerners' in your idiom), amongst whom in the fight against US apartheid Jews Jewish Americans played a seminal role, to win or indeed earn the trust of the complacent racist middle class oppressing black people in the South, and gently persuade them over another several decades to be more amenable. The important thing to work on would be, not those black folks' plight, but the anguish and compensative aggression of their masters. I could add a dozen more off the cuff. Israel has made its bug-ridden bed, and must lie on (and about) it. If you go on to the university, ask around for a course on philosophy which parses Hegel's Herr und Knecht dialectic. The whole problem is all there in those brief pages. Nishidani (talk) 11:56, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
- During the discussion, I had a nostalgic flashback to a 2001 animation video which I've long forgotten. I believe it shaped my world views more than anything I've ever read. Need some time to process that. Since I struggle to keep up with the discussion (dafuq is "suitor or sutler", "kilter", "flutter", "burner" etc.). You keep telling me to stop worrying about nationalist ideas. Truth is I am mostly playing here. I have no national identity, or rather, my national identity is subjected to the person I am addressing. I'll end the discussion here as I devote my attention to Well of Harod, which postpones the planned work on Tel Hashash.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 08:50, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
Lego for you
You have been awarded this Lego artwork in recognition of this fine edit summary. Bishonen | tålk 20:50, 3 May 2020 (UTC).
Blast from the past
It was embarasing seeing Khazars listed on my long-forgotten ETVP examples subpage, given the poor state of the citations there. Anyway, you might wish to cast your ancient eyes over it. The cites are now much better, and I fixed a bunch of cite errors, but there are still a dozen or so left, which you might be able to help fix. BTW, some of the very clever wiki-geeks have introduced some new harv/sfn error messages and error categories, according to which what you and I have been calling "cite errors" are now "no target" errors, a better term in my view, so I propose to use that instead from now on.
The article has been heavily edited since you last looked at it, another reason for drawing it to your attention.
Best wishes, and take care, NSH001 (talk) 11:23, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
- Busy now, just one consultation cost me 3.5 hrs, damn it, and must finish the Wadi Qana article. But thanks for fixing the errors and redmarking things to check out. I can't see any material change to the content of substance, so it's just a matter of house-keeping, and I'll get round to it (when I've washed the floor under my desk!). You too, keep safe.Nishidani (talk) 15:36, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
- No rush on Khazars. A couple of points on Wadi Qana:
- I fixed the no-target errors you created on ARIJ|2013, using the standard date disambiguation technique. But another approach you might consider, and which I recommend, is to use something like
ARIJ: Deir Istiya|2013
for the "a" version andARIJ: Immatin|2013
for the "b" version. This is more meaningful for our readers, and is also "safer" for my script to handle. You can see this technique being used, for example, on Indigenous Australians – if there is no year involved, it's pretty much the only way of doing it. (This time I took the quick and easy method, to reduce the risk of treading on someone's toes with an edit conflict.) - The biblio is sorted alphabetically on the title if there is no author and no editor, for the simple reason that the title is what is displayed first by the CS!/2 templates in the absence of any author or editor. Trying to sort on anything else would be arbitrary, and not clear to our readers. One possibility might be to get the Lua module that processes the cite templates to allow a new parameter that specifies which field is displayed first, but that would need to be properly thought through and discussed, and it may not be possible to get consensus to do it. In any case, it would be a major effort.
- I fixed the no-target errors you created on ARIJ|2013, using the standard date disambiguation technique. But another approach you might consider, and which I recommend, is to use something like
- --NSH001 (talk) 08:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
- Okay chief, I'll try to remember and comply, and will adjust at Wadi Qana. I must admit to a sense of complacency, i.e. just throwing in harv/sfn knowing that, if I screw up, there's a lynx eyed cluey guardian angel looking over my shoulder. But that's unfair. I should pull my finger out.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- Out of where? Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 01:05, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- Unfamiliar with the idiom?, referring to what in unpolite circles is called a 'freckle' or, in an older jargon, one's 'acre'. On the walls of Pompei I'm sure some archaeologist will find in the future a graffito to the effect:oportuit evellere digitum e podice, though shorn of context that might sound offensive to others:)Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- I figured as much, though I thought I’d confirm. I chuckled while asking, I’ll admit. As far as ancient Roman graffiti goes, I can’t think of any current such examples that mirror that specifically, but the truth is generally stranger than fiction when it comes to ancient graffito. One of the more recent graduate students at my university recently finished their dissertation on graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it’s rather enlightening. Just the sheer extent of it, and the fact that people used it to leave messages to each other, in the manner of an e-mail, is fantastic. (Also, thanks for including a little Latin for a budding Latinist). Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 21:27, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- I hope the dissertation included my favorite graffito from that area:'futuitur cunnus pillosus multo melius quam glaber eadem continet vaporem et eadam vellit mentulam.' I first learnt about that when I read the anecdote by A. D. Hope about how he tried to attract the attention of Christopher Brennan an extraordinary philologist with a prodigious memory and promising poet until Downunder, drink and despair got the better of him and he lingered on, a fabulous untalkative toper, in Sydney. Hope visited one of his boozing haunts, waited until Brennan went to the dunny to relieve his bladder and, sidling up, whipped out his own marriage tackle to feign taking a leak and, meanwhile, scrawled the first part of that graffito on the toilet wall. Brennan, still 'siphoning the python', splashing the boots', 'shaking hands with the wife's best friend', or 'pointing Percy at the porcelain' etc., as Barry McKenzie might say, glanced at the first part, which Hope by the way got wrong, (futuitur cunnus pilosus multo melius quam glaber ), took Hope's pencil and completed the graffito flawlessly.
- To master the classics compels even the prurient to add a large extra wing onto the memory mansion where all the rough bawdy can be stocked. As my classics maestro told us on the morning he eased the class into a discussion of farting and filth in Greek poetry, one just has to get a handle on the exuberant obscenity of classical cultures to get anywhere, and he reminded us (this was before the Aristophanes scholar Jeffrey Henderson came out with The Maculate Muse and Amy Richlin published The Gardens of Priapus) that the best work on classical obscenity to date was by a Dutch woman with a doctorate in theology.Nishidani (talk) 22:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- I figured as much, though I thought I’d confirm. I chuckled while asking, I’ll admit. As far as ancient Roman graffiti goes, I can’t think of any current such examples that mirror that specifically, but the truth is generally stranger than fiction when it comes to ancient graffito. One of the more recent graduate students at my university recently finished their dissertation on graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it’s rather enlightening. Just the sheer extent of it, and the fact that people used it to leave messages to each other, in the manner of an e-mail, is fantastic. (Also, thanks for including a little Latin for a budding Latinist). Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 21:27, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- Unfamiliar with the idiom?, referring to what in unpolite circles is called a 'freckle' or, in an older jargon, one's 'acre'. On the walls of Pompei I'm sure some archaeologist will find in the future a graffito to the effect:oportuit evellere digitum e podice, though shorn of context that might sound offensive to others:)Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- Out of where? Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 01:05, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- Okay chief, I'll try to remember and comply, and will adjust at Wadi Qana. I must admit to a sense of complacency, i.e. just throwing in harv/sfn knowing that, if I screw up, there's a lynx eyed cluey guardian angel looking over my shoulder. But that's unfair. I should pull my finger out.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- No rush on Khazars. A couple of points on Wadi Qana:
Hmm
After all that work, I've just noticed that we also have a Book of Esther!
--NSH001 (talk) 19:14, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- We have 3 esther pages, one on the name, the second re the book, and this re the personage. This invites confusion. I'd conflate 2 and 3 ideally. There is an enormous amount of scholarship on The Book of Esther however, and there would be room for a person page, mainly literally analysis of the figure. I haven't raised the problem, because I just prefer content over technical arguments about merging or not. None of the pages is satisfactory, as usual, and for the moment it seems easier to handle the quiet Esther personage page. Thanks as always for your invaluable corrections.Nishidani (talk) 19:22, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
- Ah, please forgive my being stupid, I should have seen the hatnote at the top. My mind was preoccupied with other matters, but that's no excuse. Still can't believe I missed it. BTW, thanks for the amusement I gain from time to time while looking at your talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 04:53, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
May 2020
You seem to not understand WP:BRD. It means that if after you added some information it is removed by another editor, you are the one who should seek consensus for its addition on the talkpage.
In addition, it seems you are involved in an edit war. Please desist or risk being reported and drawing the shorter straw.
I am of course referring to Wadi Qana. Debresser (talk) 06:53, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
- You seem not to understand that reverting, esp. someone with 14 years of wiki work, is not an arbitrary right. Any revert at this level requires policy compliance. You once wrote:
- When you were sanctioned several days ago, you made an extenuating plead for a reduction of the terms of your penalty for edit-warring to the 3R limit Your week ban and here.
- Since you asked me not to comment on your page, I refrained from doing what you do here. But it would appear that the whole episode recapitulated a characteristic attitude which has been on evidence since at least 2011, something admins won't have the time to check, let alone remember.
- If I am blocked, I don't appeal on principle. If you are blocked, you haggle. And the pattern of demanding a reduction of the sanction is identical.
- Your 9 year record consists of repeated problems with the following pattern:
- (a) violating a rule and then when sanctioned
- (b) pleading for a reduction of the sentence which, after an immense amount of haggling,(the gist of which is that admins don’t understand you: they keep trying to extort a realization from you that you were in fault) in which you keep replying that your intentions were right hence your refusal to admit to simply error you too were at fault, and the drift is
- (c)okay, pretty please, gimme a break
- (d) admins relent because it appears you might have,well, finally rephrased an admission you could have been more attentive, and undertake to mend your ways.
- In our several board confrontations over the years, I have called this a WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT manner, an inability apparently to understand what other people tell you because you are dead certain you know what you think, and that is what people who disagree with you must understand.
- What happened with admins in May 2020 was identical to what occurred throughout mid-late 2011. The lesson hasn't been learnt. To help you see this, examine the following:-
- warned for uncollaborate editing (2011: here); (2011:2 blocked for 31 hours here,(2011 September 1 (3 blocked for 48 hours here; (2011 September 5 here; unblocked with reduced time.2011:3 here 27 October 2011 here; unblocked with bans by Gwen Gale.5 November 2011 here; blocked for 1 month here, and unblocked under appeal again time served one week.
- In 9 years nothing has changed. I didn't add this from my notes to the May 2020 case because I have better things to do (like picking aphids off tomato plants when they resist prophylactic dosing of the tomatoes with copper sulphate), and don't consider it part of m,y wiki work to indulge in trivial pursuits of other editors. You more or less got off the last days of the rap by promising to be more careful with 3R and then jumped to use it against me, in a manner that shows lack of concentration, perhaps mental fatigue, because your 3 reverts were incomprehensible and visibly created page flaws, left uncorrected. So in the future, if you persist in breaking a rule or running it to its limits, only when caught to plead mitigating circumstances, someone will eventually notice that you have been doing this repeatedly for nine years, and your otherwise useful contributions to this encyclopedia will suffer severer sanctions than they have earned so far, because the original pattern, which can be amply documented further, will finally be brought to admins' attention.Nishidani (talk) 09:21, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
- This is not the place to review my conduct. Nor do I agree with your view of it. This is where I posted regarding your conduct, which in this case is in violation of WP:BRD and WP:EDITWAR. Nuff said. Since you don't leave me a choice, I'll report you, and we'll see how other editors review your conduct. Debresser (talk) 13:03, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
- Well, be careful per WP:BoomerangNishidani (talk) 13:07, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
- Right off of of a block for edit-warring after reporting somebody you were edit-warring with you do it again lol? Wow, ballsy is right. nableezy - 17:40, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
- This is not the place to review my conduct. Nor do I agree with your view of it. This is where I posted regarding your conduct, which in this case is in violation of WP:BRD and WP:EDITWAR. Nuff said. Since you don't leave me a choice, I'll report you, and we'll see how other editors review your conduct. Debresser (talk) 13:03, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Notice of edit warring noticeboard discussion
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you.
Shavuot
I don't know how you got to the Shavuot page and I don't care, but please don't bring hostility from the IP conflict to a different area. Templates are color coded and a holiday that is celebrated by 700 people should not change how millions celebrate it and remove the color coding. Sir Joseph (talk) 20:49, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
- I've restored your insinuation that somehow I tracked you to indulge, I guess, in some obscure gusto (guasto?) in reverting your edits. Perhaps on posting, you realized that I almost certainly would have noticed your exchange with Nableezy on his talk page, one of course I have bookmarked. (Or perhaps you recalled that we have a mutual agreement not to post on each other's pages). That made me bookmark the page since it was, I gathered, one subject to IP pov pushing, something I control, like Nableezy. So there was no conspiracy. The rest of your remarks are not worth rebutting. You think one should not mention that Shavuot is not only a Jewish holiday, but also a Samaritan one, and sneer at the latter because their numbers, once near a a half to a full million in antiquity, now just 900 or so, small coin compared to the only people who count, the 16 million Jews. I find that contemptuous, a disturbing echo of a long line of rabbinical prejudice dating back to the Mishnah branding them as Cuthites as cowardly converts from the true faith or mere heretics. Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
- In any case, be a good fellow and don't post on this page. If you want to reply jot a note on your own page, which I haven't bookmarked and don't read.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
- Aftermath. Just for the record, what followed, which has nothing to do with the editor above, was the usual dumb revert on another page I contributed to, dumb in the sense that the edit summary is nonsense betraying a total ignorance of the topic by asserting the Samaritan religion is a small, umm,... offshoot of Judaism!!!,hahaha, um wow!!, as youngsters exclaim. That looks like an adventurous desire to go public and declare one knows little of Judaism's history and even less of that of a kindred faith.
- The Samaritan religion preceded the formation of what we now understand as Judaism, since the split occurred among the preceding Israelitic groups prior to both. The Samaritans were in all probability the major ethnic majority in Palestine during most of the latter half of the Ist millennium BCE. Yet, they are utterly invisible, despite the historiographic reality, because, um, uninformed editors think the only indigenous people there were Jews before the Romans are said to have exiled them. All our historical articles are distorted by this unilateral focus on one ethnos, and the suppression of the other, as occurred, typically, last night.
- The informal ban on my trying to improve articles on Judaism, that suffer deeply from a superficial knowledge due to the apparent fixations of many who edit them, indifferent to what the scholarly record itself within that tradition documents. It happened with this edit a year ago, at Jewish religious clothing, for unknown, indecipherable non-policy reasons, and no amount of gentle persuasion of the editors approving the excision could restore the matter. Content dispute. Nah,WP:IDONTLIKEIT, and the scholarly record be stuffed. Worse still, the corrections added to clear errors were erased, allowing the errors to remain. But no: 'noli nostra tangere' is the rule there. Throwing cogently topic-relevant academic treatises out because you dislike their content, or so resolutely disinformed that such documentation disconcerts one’s self-complacent acquiescence in nescience, is tantamount to editorial book burning. But you can get away with it here.
- The I/P area's toxicity can be summed up as follows: it has a conflictual continuity because two groups exist, those who desire the full factual and scholarly record to be set forth in articles, and those who insist that a lot of information must be repressed. One generally shows an encyclopedic passion, the other evinces a bureaucratic surveillance of articles designed not to construct them but simply monitor the content to assess whether its ethnoreligionationalist slant is favourable or not.Nishidani (talk) 05:49, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
- You make valuable edits, which are usually well-sourced. If your first edits in the field of Judaism articles weren't appreciated, that doesn't mean that other edits will not be appreciated. Please do try something else. In short, don't take it personal, because it wasn't. Debresser (talk) 18:32, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
- On a side-note, you are obviously not retired any more. You might want to update the banner on your user page. Debresser (talk) 18:33, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
- 'Usually' should be, the adverb is a concession to modesty, 'nearly always'. I'm sipping a gin and tonic now that this evening's film The Man with the Iron Fists has been dutifully watched to the end, and I must admit that your revert - the bone of contention - was nowhere as discomforting as my present sense of having wasted one and a half hours under the false impression that, if Russell Crowe was starring, the film must be worth watching. I know from experience your frequent reverts of my work are not based on any specific knowledge of the details at stake, but on a certain suspicion that, here and there, on Judaism or IP articles, my motives are suspect. Otherwise your erasures of harmless corrections or additions, as I provide, are not comprehensible,
- Let me illustrate. I saw Shavuot was subject to some IP anonymous POV pushing, from Nableezy's page. I read it and noted the error: to state that this is a Jewish holiday is perfectly correct. To add that it is Samaritan holiday also is perfectly factually correct, and to clarify, adding two academic sources written by scholars with a great knowledge of that community, is also appropriate.
- These additions were true (no one can contest them), perfectly sourced to eminent authorities on the Samaritans, and, since the topic is Shavuot, indisputably on topic.
- You just chucked two excellent book references out, and the Samaritan baby with the barfwater, with the edit summary the stress on a small offshoot of Judaism is completely undue.
- When I saw that, I had a flashback memory to the mid 90s, when, after waiting over a decade for it, the second volume of Anthony Grafton's Joseph Scaliger appeared. Grafton is one of the most erudite minds of the modern world, with an impeccable eye for details, such that, on my copy, I don't have a leaf noting errata. But I remember that in reading it, he made one odd remark. Checking my copy I see now that he wrote that in the second edition of his work on ancient chronologies, Scaliger 'clearly distinguished between two deviant forms of Judaism that still flourished in Scaliger's day: the Samaritan religion . .and the.. Karaite religion' (Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 11 Historical Chronology, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993 pp.413-414). Why did that strike me as odd?
- First the word 'deviant' was an extremely rare indelicacy. But, to what degree can one classify Samaritans as part of Judaism (were that so, Christianity comes under the Judaic fold, since rabbinical texts occasionally branded both as minim)? I reacted the way I did because in reading Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History in my impressionable adolescence, he always spoke of the Samaritans and the Jews. If Judaism is the religion of Jews, one which often has considered them as having left the fold of Judaism, how one call the Samaritans part of Judaism, except by historical carelessness and anachronism? After all, the Samaritan perspective is that they represent the old quintessential Israelitic people as represented in the Torah, whereas Judaism, they maintain, is a later reelaboration of that archaic faith.
- So in bluntly reverting me without asking me what could have been a legitimate question on the talk page, you were in good company, Anthony Grafton's, but only on the pages quoted. Later Grafton tells us that what Scaliger subsequently discovered (also through correspondence with the thriving Samaritan community in Cairo in the 1580s) - a theoretical smack in the face of European collectivist anti-Semitic hostilities by the way - was that there was no one 'Judaism', or rather, that, since ancient times, Judaism was not one religion, but exhibited a wide spectrum of variations. What the Jewish tradition held about calculating festival dates differed notably from Samaritan calculations: the same festival could be celebrated with a month's difference in the timing. The Qumran Essenes even had a harder time, since, they couldn't observe the new crescent moon with any facility, hence Arminden's edit tonight.
- All ancient history is conjectural reconstruction but there is a significant vein of scholarship which considers that Judaism as we understand it today arose from a conflation of Israelitic and diaspora pre-modern era traditions, the Samaritans cleaving to a more primitive form (note their insistence on a priesthood retained the more archaic elements) while Judaism crystalised by keeping much of the earlier shared tradition, under revision, in a far broader vision determined by the intense deliberative writing and rewritings of a democracy of learned meritocratic scholars, the rabbis. That single distinction in comparative historical sociology is an almost certain index of a transition from the archaic tribal to urban societies. In this light, to subordinate Samaritans to the later Judaic synthesis might be true, or it might be religious point-scoring by one party in a dispute.
- Rather than revert me as you insistently do, automatically, in my 'Jewish topic' edits almost invariably, you really should consider that there are gentlemanly options, like, at least every now and again, simply placing a query on the talk page to understand where I am coming from (aside of course from my notorious anti-Semitic, racist, bigoted hatreds, as they are rumoured to be) technically. It's past midnight and I must read a detective novel about an aboriginal detective called Napoleon Bonaparte. The point is for the last few decades scholars are far more careful about distinguishing Samaritans and Jews, and not subscribing to the orthodox Jewish account of their origins. See Ingrid Hjelm's The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000 generally.Nishidani (talk) 22:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
- Much as I read your reply with genuine interest and an open mind, there was not much information about Judaism and Samaritanism in it that I wasn't already aware of. Please believe me that I am aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relation to Judaism, or perhaps I should say the shared origins of Judaism and Samaritanism, that I reverted out of WP:UNDUE considerations only, and that by no means was my decision to revert made automatically based on the identity of the editor. Debresser (talk) 14:04, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- You may be aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relations to Judaism, Dovid. The problem is, contemporary scholarship is not. The historical nexus is utterly obscure. Of course, one can trust the narrative within the rabbinical tradition as reflecting an historic truth, but that is a partisan viewpoint, and the point of my excursus was simply to underline that, whereas you consider Samaritanism an offshoot of Judaism a significant body of academic work challenges this traditionalist view. So the edit-summary was a personal siding with one of several viewpoints, and as such, not a proper warrant to excise the innocuous, neutral and sourced text I added.Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- Whoops, I only read as far as the first part when I had to rush and fix a leaking water main. If the origins are, as you concede from a common root, then clearly neither one nor the other is an 'offshoot' (there are serious scholars who regard Judaism as an outgrowth of the Israelitic tradition as embodied by Samaritan lore, lore and practice). As to Undue, no. To note that is like saying that on the article Easter, it would be undue in the lead to note that it has an overlap with the Jewish Passover. A large part of the rituals of Christianity are, historically, those practiced for over a millennium by the early Church's lineal descendant, Catholicism, which however, as we scrupulously uphold in these articles, does not allow us to write up these articles where numerous denominations have similar liturgies as though the latter were undue in the lead, since they are 'offshoots' of Catholicism.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- This is actually not the first time this issue has come up. There have been other articles where editors tried to add "Samaritans" or "Karaites" and were reverted for this reason (WP:UNDUE). If you feel strongly about this, you might try to propose a general change at WP:JUDAISM or some other forum. Debresser (talk) 18:28, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- Whoops, I only read as far as the first part when I had to rush and fix a leaking water main. If the origins are, as you concede from a common root, then clearly neither one nor the other is an 'offshoot' (there are serious scholars who regard Judaism as an outgrowth of the Israelitic tradition as embodied by Samaritan lore, lore and practice). As to Undue, no. To note that is like saying that on the article Easter, it would be undue in the lead to note that it has an overlap with the Jewish Passover. A large part of the rituals of Christianity are, historically, those practiced for over a millennium by the early Church's lineal descendant, Catholicism, which however, as we scrupulously uphold in these articles, does not allow us to write up these articles where numerous denominations have similar liturgies as though the latter were undue in the lead, since they are 'offshoots' of Catholicism.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- You may be aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relations to Judaism, Dovid. The problem is, contemporary scholarship is not. The historical nexus is utterly obscure. Of course, one can trust the narrative within the rabbinical tradition as reflecting an historic truth, but that is a partisan viewpoint, and the point of my excursus was simply to underline that, whereas you consider Samaritanism an offshoot of Judaism a significant body of academic work challenges this traditionalist view. So the edit-summary was a personal siding with one of several viewpoints, and as such, not a proper warrant to excise the innocuous, neutral and sourced text I added.Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- Much as I read your reply with genuine interest and an open mind, there was not much information about Judaism and Samaritanism in it that I wasn't already aware of. Please believe me that I am aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relation to Judaism, or perhaps I should say the shared origins of Judaism and Samaritanism, that I reverted out of WP:UNDUE considerations only, and that by no means was my decision to revert made automatically based on the identity of the editor. Debresser (talk) 14:04, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- Rather than revert me as you insistently do, automatically, in my 'Jewish topic' edits almost invariably, you really should consider that there are gentlemanly options, like, at least every now and again, simply placing a query on the talk page to understand where I am coming from (aside of course from my notorious anti-Semitic, racist, bigoted hatreds, as they are rumoured to be) technically. It's past midnight and I must read a detective novel about an aboriginal detective called Napoleon Bonaparte. The point is for the last few decades scholars are far more careful about distinguishing Samaritans and Jews, and not subscribing to the orthodox Jewish account of their origins. See Ingrid Hjelm's The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000 generally.Nishidani (talk) 22:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
- Ethno-religious exclusivism has no place on Wikipedia. That there are precedents among a number of editors for eliminating any note to the marvelous internal rifts and variety of historic Judaism so that we get a neat image of unruptured unity doesn't interest me. Every edit is judged on its merits, and if there is some rule that Judaism articles must not be despoiled by noting the internal diversity of its traditions, or analogies with culturally contiguous faiths well, numbers are what count here, not scholarship, and, well, let the articles languish in this complacent dream of oneness. I've better things to do.
- Uh, we've finished here, Dovid, and should return to the standard courtesy of not editing each other's talk pages.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
- In any case, be a good fellow and don't post on this page. If you want to reply jot a note on your own page, which I haven't bookmarked and don't read.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 4 June 2020 (UTC)