User talk:Nishidani

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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:-

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

Nomination of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for deletion

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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 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.

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.

I have not lived in Israel for many years now, and I am very conscious of my outsider’s perspective. Sometimes people ask me, “what is a Jew?” The answer is the following: a Jew who has anti-Semitic experiences in Berlin in 2008 is different from the Jew who had anti-Semitic experiences in 1940. The Jew of 1940 felt threatened; the Jew of today can think of his own land, of Israel. Today I can say, “either you learn to deal with me, you anti-Semite, or we go our separate ways, period.” That makes an existential difference. (read the whole interview)

Compare Zeev Sternhell

know that when friends of mine and soldiers of mine were killed next to me in the Sinai Campaign and in the Six-Day War, I thought that they were at least killed like human beings. They were not killed by being hunted in the streets. In this sense, Israel for me is not a political matter. It is something far more basic. Far more elemental. It is a return to humanity. A return to living like human beings, because there, in the ghetto, you lost your human element. Your human identity. You stopped being human altogether. You were not a person."Then came the declaration of the state's establishment, in May 1948. Your generation cannot understand the excitement that seized us. It was just four years after the Red Army liberated us, six years after the Nazis liquidated the ghetto. And the transition from that horror, that helplessness, to a Jewish state that wins a war."As a boy of 13, I was very much afraid that the Arabs would slaughter the Jews. There seemed to be only 60,000 Jews(*Odd slip of the translator =650,000 or so, or was it what he read in those years?) and all around millions of Arabs. And then the fact that the army of the Jews fought and won and the state arose - for me that was something beyond all imagination. The very fact that these Jews who had gone to the ghettos, who were hunted in the streets, who had been killed and butchered, were now rising up and creating a state for themselves. I truly saw it as a miracle. It was a historic event informed by an almost metaphysical dimension. Suddenly there are Jews who are cabinet ministers, Jews who are officers. And a passport, uniforms, a flag. Now the Jews have what the goyim have. Now the Jews are like the goyim. They are not dependent on the goyim. They can look after themselves. The establishment of the state was like the creation of the world for me. It transported me to a kind of rapture." "I am not only a Zionist, I am a super-Zionist. For me, Zionism was and remains the right of the Jews to control their fate and their future. I consider the right of human beings to be their own masters a natural right. A right of which the Jews were deprived by history and which Zionism restored to them. That is its deep meaning. And as such, it is indeed a tremendous revolution that touches the lives of each of us'. Ari Shavit,'Amazing grace,' 6 March 2008Haaretz

I think this is utterly true for people of Sternhell's background,. many of whom applied the lesson of their being hunted to what Israel has done to Palestinians esp since 1967- but it cannot be employed honestly by the millions who didn't have that past to run from)Nishidani (talk) 13:20, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

It's always good to be put back into your place, which in my case is that of a semidoct (that's the Romanian adaptation of the Italian euphemistic semidotto, generously allowing for a 'semi'): while I was reading the main bits of the article, I bumped into "procrustian bed". Typo, I thought, and a funny Freudian one: crust, as in crusty-rusty ("went on to squeeze the real Hebrew nation into a religious procrustean bed"). Because, as the French have taught the Carpathian nation, the bandit's name was, of course, Procust(e). No reason to grasseyer more than once. Sorry, I thought you might smile at that. Enjoy the weekend. Arminden (talk) 09:48, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Being 'put back' in one's place is 'always good'? It depends on who's doing the putting I'm sure many Palestinians would like that to be done to them. Being taken down a peg, to mix metaphors, if one flourishes an air of being a 'tall poppy' fits the bill. But people putting others in their place, implies the removalist doesn't like 'upstarts' crowding their social space, or vying for a position in a superior rank in the social hierarchy.

As to Procrustes,- obviously whichever frog, afflicted with rhotacism, introduced 'Procuste' wasn't Parisian. Minds work in funny ways. Reading the above, the first word that came to mind was Prelude. I wondered why, and realized that a classical Greek word for that is πρόκρουμα (prókrouma), formed from the same verb that gave us 'Prokroustēs/Procrustes', and the Preludes are a set of four wonderful poems by T. S. Eliot. I haven't purchased for study the relevant volume of annotations on Eliot's major poems by the textually omniscient Christopher Ricks to be in a position to check if he could, which I expect he would have, link the imagery to the bed of Procrustes that, thanks to your prompting riff, makes me now think it hovers behind several memorable lines of that poet. Compare the otherwise disjointed lines:-

(a) 'When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.' The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

(b) 'His soul stretched tight across the skies.' (Prelude 4)

Taking these as tacit echoes of a Procrustean framework, other lines fall into place, like

(c)The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

later on in the Love Song. The anguish/angst of the early Eliot, the words referring to an overwhelming sense of being crammed, hemmed in, like the protagonist of Kafka's Castle trying to wriggle out of the claustrophobic toils spun by the bureaucrat Klamm whose own name evokes this sense, the early Eliot before he withered up behind the self-encrusting masque of a great man of letters. Must finish painting the 'Persian' shutters. Everyday is a weekend to me, and has been for 45 years, but, you too, have a good one, A.Nishidani (talk) 11:57, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Lieber Freund, I stumbled upon your correspondence with Bolter about Jews in France, and now again (stumbling seems to be my chief activity) over this article by Robert Fisk, recommended by an editor with a user name very close to yours: Tombs that bear witness to Algeria's Jewish tragedy, from 2011. As much as I understand your commiseration for the fate of the Palestinians, I do think that that has bled into your views re. the justification of Jewish attempts of finding their own solutions to the "Jewish Problem", a major one being Zionism. There's enough space for a dialectic approach and the acceptance of contradictory truths, of accepting the premise of good initial problem-solving intentions and subsequent March of Folly-type chain reactions (and I'm not stating inevitability as a given). Many arguably stable modern states have started on extremely shaky feet, most "natural historical enmities" in Central and Western Europe have run their course and are, for now, non-topics. I don't think one can make such ultimate statements as you sometimes do in regard to Israel's "madcap" foundational idea. It was very much an urgent process imposed from outside, with a trial-and-error approach, as shown by the Uganda debate, the PICA projects of Baron de Hirsch in Argentina and elsewhere, the US and Canada proposals - I think there was even one for a Madagascar colony. Using the benefit of hindsight at a point in time where the Zionist project seems to have thoroughly lost its way in many regards, doesn't seem to be the most rigorous and acceptable approach. Just as one more element in thinking about your contra argument: the Immigration Act of 1924 (1921 is actually when the policy started being applied). There's an interesting little novel by Robert Neumann, An den Wassern von Babylon. I don't think anyone has ever called Neumann a Zionist, nor Robert Fisk a polemicist against France on grounds of the grande nation's persistence in not allowing the Dreyfus Affaire to become just an old story collecting dust on the ash heap of history. As one who has grown up watching Jacques Yves Cousteau's amazing documentaries and reading his friend's Frédéric Dumas' Le monde du silence, I was stupidly shocked to learn about his disgusting opportunism under the Vichy regime (here an article, in case that you've missed the by now old story) and his attempts at keeping it hidden (his brother being a Fascist and a major & willing collaborateur was not his fault; however, without applying Sippenhaft, it might be worth looking into possible commonalities in their upbringing, just out of curiosity). Warmest regards along with wishes of less searing hot summer days than lately, Arminden (talk) 12:09, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Now that, sir, will keep me profitably occupied for at least a week or three! But really, I must gently protest your dismissal of the relevance of literature to all this. What is Jewish identity without the Tanakh, and what is Zionism without Der Judenstaat? Everything here goes back to an unLennonesque imagining.Nishidani (talk) 14:28, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Now, I will try to muck up a focused reply on your request for a dialectical approach. It may take some time if only because my computer is in an unheated library, and I write longhand below, in the comfort of a hearthfire.Nishidani (talk) 14:34, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Good Hitchens in heaven, don't even dream of risking a cold for answering to my sleepless thoughts! Arminden (talk) 21:08, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

I'll try to get back on this. I noted while thinking of cooking today, that a dozen odd jars of various salts mined from all over the planet and poised on a side mantelpiece of my chimney, were caked in greasy soot. On examination, it was an oily creosote leaking from a weak join between two ducts in the lateral flue. The mess reminded me I also had to launder a large accumulation of clothes, and within an hour, I noticed the washing machine appeared to be broken since it kept repeating the wash, locked into a manic cycle, which could only be stopped by unplugging it, though the clothes remained shut inside it. I needed to console myself - Saturday, a baker's batch of Cornish pasties would be the ticket. I cooked in succession all of the main ingredients, mince, potatoes, carrot, peas, beans, and went to the pantry for the final touch, onions, only to find myself one short. The cat's behavior suggested she needed worming. My weekly sibling race to do the Melbourne Age's Codeword in under half an hour fell through when the puzzle failed to be emailed. Not so far a day conducive to lucubration, though I did manage the bake-out, fixed the washing machine, and rigged a provisory fix for the creosotic exudation.Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

your commiseration for the fate of the Palestinians, I do think that that has bled into your views re. the justification of Jewish attempts of finding their own solutions to the "Jewish Problem", a major one being Zionism.

Before the Palestinians, there were the Tibetans, and before them, the Australian aborigines, and before them, aged 8, I preferred Hannibal to Scipio Africanus, Hektor to Akhilles. In adolescence that meant I was instinctively intolerant of the slightest whisper of anti-Semitism. The Palestinians are just the latest in the list.

I really must take exception to the use of 'The Jewish problem'. One should never accept the adversary's cracked language pitch: rather one must shift the terms to another green with less spin on it, to use a cricket metaphor. I.e. the so-called Judenfrage, was in fact, as I think Nietzsche argued, a 'European problem', a neurosis at the heart of European civilization which, by the usual semantic ruses, was projected onto Jews, until many of the latter, accepting the abusive term, thought they themselves had to 'fix' a problem which they didn't have, in order to cure the neurotic fantasy of those who invented it. It's rather like a patient on a divan telling the psychoanalyst that he is the problem, and so persuasively, that the Freudian epigone pronounces the patient free of neurosis and seeks treatment in a mental hospital. But it's late, and I have some work to attend to. Till tomorrow Best regards Nishidani (talk) 19:13, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Please note: I'm all to aware of that, and that's exactly why I've placed the term between quotation marks. The Tibetans, Hannibal and Hektor all came down to us as literature. Unlike literature, one's life is very limited in scope and a threat induced by someone else's neurosis is as real as one caused by an objectively logical enmity. If a neurosis was the cause of mobs or the military ending up in killing people of your kin at will from time to time, if quotas were set to limit your kids' access to education, if your own friends "from the other side", if you had them, found nothing wrong in living steeped in a folklore in which "your folks" were the laughing stock (cheap, dirty, conniving, ugly, disgusting, cowardly and so on) and great national literature, prose & poetry, was created on those topoi, it was not a matter of staying above the others' neurosis: it was a matter of physical and mental survival, of elementary self-preservation and parental care to take the "Problem" seriously. It wasn't academic. Constitutions changed nothing, the more so as they were being reneged and rewritten, or simply not applied. One has but one life, it doesn't matter if the threat is state-sponsored and official, half-official, private, or just a habit among the majority. "Perception is reality" doesn't do justice to the phenomenon, but is a facet, too. Anyhow, it's not literature, nor an academic discussion, not a figment of one's nervous imagination - and not something to take lightly. And this all happened in a time when most of the accepted and celebrated leaders and thinkers thought in terms of group identity and nation states. There was recently some attempt at assessing the IQ of all the US presidents based on available sources. Washington, if I remember correctly, was one of the least intelligent ones. Herzl's writings might lead to a similar conclusion. On the other hand, Sharon and Netanyahu managed to use and control the existing system, and when needed to adapt it to their will so brilliantly, that even the most antagonistic analyst must admit their craftiness and yes, intelligence. So what? Is intelligence the appropriate yardstick for assessing the contribution of historical figures? How is it relevant to the justification of historical processes set in motion not by them, but by much larger realities? Marxism has excluded the role of individuals in guiding history in certain directions, while other philosophies have placed all the power of decision-making in the hands of key individuals; the reality is most likely a combination of the two. Trump represents a trend, even if one could hardly find another comparable human specimen to cast in his specific role. I don't believe in the wisdom of the "masses", but there is validity in the conclusions drawn and decisions made by large proportions of any nation (I tried to avoid this word, but 'people' feels too amorphous). All across the world, democracy still is the accepted guiding principle of the liberal camp, for better or worse. Israel is the historical result of a set of realities, of the convictions and work of a very large number of people, mostly Jews, but not only, led by the honest conviction of doing the right thing. While conviction and good intentions can be claimed also by the most criminal national movements, I don't see how one can, in good faith, place historical Zionism among them. If, by using the benefit of hindsight, one can show now, or will be able to do it in a foreseeable future, that it has led to a dead end, possibly a literally dead or deadly end, this still doesn't void and delegitimise the whole project. If there is any value in national existence, nations will always be blamed for this or that historic choice. Like in individuals, unless the choice is knowingly ill-willed, oppressive, going against one's own and the wider norms of the time, I refuse to put it down wholesale, in Bausch und Bogen. One or the other march of folly is always one of the possible marching routes, and enough nations or peoples have disappeared without a trace - with or without a guilt of their own. You suggested in the similar situation of the Armenians that they should try and preserve through cultural memory what they can impossibly save physically, in terms of territory and stones & mortar. Jews have managed that relatively well in the past, Armenians too. The problem is, that's becoming less and less of an option. If the world citizen can do well without a narrow national identity, many others can't, and it's not always only "deplorables", to quote a famous lady. All of Moses Mendelssohns grandchildren had become assimilated Christian Germans. Some can salute the melting pot reality and outcome, but some are desperate when noticing it; and everybody must acknowledge it. Something is lost in diversity and historical depth, something else is gained in reshuffling the deck and removing asperities. But I don't see the world, even the most enlightened parts of it, blaming national self-conservation feelings as such. If so, currently it's a closeted thought. The Communist thinkers might have envisaged the total removal of national identity for the final phase of their project, but even in the "realexistierenden Sozialismus", at least the cultural ethno-national identity was entitled to state support. And since the collapse of 1989, the speed of assimilation everywhere in the current civilisation has only accelerated and this means that the existence as a minority has become less and less of a realistic option. Again, a cosmopolitan citizen of the world will welcome it to a large degree, even while being horrified when universal cultural values are being populistically turned into cheap, synthetic kitsch as part of the process; but forcefully blaming those who don't see this amalgamation as only good, is not very fair and very often not too ingenuous either. And, who knows, maybe slightly unwise, too. As that urban legend about Chou En-lai goes, we might not yet have enough historical perspective to judge the French Revolution. Bon appetit, have a wonderful day - and congratulations for solving so many chores already; those count among the things within our power to solve, check off the list, and feel good and satisfied about. Arminden (talk) 05:29, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

I'll be all over the place like a lunatic's crap because these are only tidbits from spare moments of thinking over your comments. Apologies.

One of the ongoing problems is that innumerable particulars that come to mind re the topic urge any serious response to divagate towards monographic length, engendering in turn reflections by one's interlocutor of similar breadth. This is normal when the issue, as with this one, has such a broad scope. 'Jews'/'antisemitism'. As you may gather, though casting for generalizations, I keep seeing the refractive nitty-gritty that puts the jarring spanner in the works of otherwise neat mechanisms of analysis. This is especially true of anything approaching group classifications, ethnic, religious, cultural etc. My professional work deconstructed the idea of Japanese identity. That mythology was mostly self-defined, in the sense that it arose, as did most Western concepts of identity, by a small deeply literate elite casting about for some spiritual or cultural essence that could, once distilled, define their caste against outsiders (Chine se, Koreans, the Portuguese, Dutch and then Westerners generally) and serve in a later moment to imbue the vast majority of the population, illiterate/semiliterate farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, mountaineers etc who were being frogmarched towards the industrial realities of modernity with a deeply dyed national sense of being all connected, despite pronounced regional fissiparous dissonances. I find the same problem with any identity I study, and therefore with the concept of 'Jews'. What defines them is something Jews endlessly disagree over. Like Englishness, notoriously, each inscribed or self-ascribed member of the class knows what it is but can't find a formulation sufficiently cogent to convince others who share the feeling. In our exchange above, we threw, for laconic heuristic purposes, the shoehorn onto the other (jack)boot, hazarding the tautology that the objects of anti-Semitism are Jews.

Just as in Sartre's classic analysis, the anti-Semite assumes his identity in the moment of affirming he hates Jews, it would follow, from that framework, that Jews become 'Jews' (among many other identities each might have, shopkeeper, German, tradesman, surgeon, politician etc.) rather than anything else when the environment in which they live, work and have their being singles their religion or ethnicity out as the defining characteristic of who they are. Not individuals, but items in a category with its summary laundry list of obnoxious traits) Jewish identity has, and not uniquely, a protean dimension, and, to anticipate, what worries me about Zionism is that it prioritizes loyalty to a political value, to an often foreign country, as one of the key attributes of an authentically Jewish identity.

The (rather Sartrean) premise implicit in our earlier exchange is that the anti-Semite invests the unknown internal Other in his national community, the Jew, with his own neurotic fantasies, that the symptomatic pathology of the anti-Semite reflects only on its subject’s anxieties, and not on the Jewish scapegoat. You rightly gloss this projectionist reading by noting that the victim of such hostile fantasies could not remain unaffected however. From Hegel onwards it has become a truism that the self is socially constituted, much as in biology, the field of nature will compel those individuals within any species to survive that bear genetic variations enabling more viable adaptations to the challenges presented by each niche. Sander Gilman's superlative studies on the medicalization of the Jew amply detail the devastations wrought by anti-Semitic stereotypes on Jews themselves. A large part of Zionist literature denigrates Eastern and Mizrachi Jews for their putative physical weakness or intellectual backwardness (Arthur Ruppin, voluminously, but it is also in Ben-Gurion and many others). Even in that infamously anti-Semitic city of Karl Lueger's Vienna, many Jews, such as Arthur Koestler and Eric Hobsbawm could grow up without encountering anything really smacking of classical anti-Semitism, as I have noted elsewhere. And many prominent Jews expressed distaste for the masses of their 'eastern cousins', identifying their influx as something which damaged the rising standing of the well-educated Jewish community. But I digress.

If one defines oneself in terms of anti-Semitism, one falls into the trap: identity becomes part of the burthen of a social construct one has to shoulder unwillingly. Apart from the consideration that the term itself is so extensive in its denotative range - embracing the occasional snubs experienced in high society or from one's professional peers, exclusion from clubs, obstacles set in one's way as one pursues a career, to the spitting rage of some random passer-by, 'Jew-baiting' right through the diapason that ends in lethal denunciations that lead one to a pogrom, or the ovens. You could indeed map the shading of the spectrum from grey to sanguinary red geographically, the colour thickens as one moves east, towards the Slavic world, and one expects that the difference, almost qualitative, reflects the fact that the theological poison of deicide accusations in Christianity, to which both West and East were heir, was attenuated of its toxicity where the three humanistic waves of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment took root while increasing where Orthodox Christianity remained hegemonic and resisted all three of those elements. Of course other factors were equally crucial, demographic growth, the fiscal role of Jews as intermediaries between townships and peasantry, and the landowning classes, lack of mobility and inclusiveness, the basically agrarian cast of the economies to the East. Germany, caught in the middle, synthesized the industrialism of Western Europe with the toxic anti-Semitism of the East, with results we know: a high civilization reverting to atavistic barbarism.

To synthesize all this as a single phenomenon restricted to Jews, is to overlook that prejudice is everywhere, and many ethnoreligious group could recite long histories of social ostracism, denigration and even genocide, something that has been coming back into fashion in recent decades, with 100 million Christians annually listed as suffering from prejudice, the Rohinga of Burma and the Uyghyrs in China. Many of the things that emerge in accounts of Jewish lives in England, the United States, Canada, Australia, etc., regarding prejudice can, in my memory, be systematically compared to what family members belonging to the ethnoreligious group I grew up in experienced. To illustrate that would involve another long digression. But my mother qualified as a pharmacist in the early 30s and couldn't practice in our district, where Protestants and Methodists dominated business, for 15 years, except as an emergency locum tenens in other areas, or in the distant countyside towns over summer. As a child, stones were thrown at us as we trekked past Protestant schools, with the usual barrage of verses about dumb Micks; my father belonged to 13 clubs, but was excluded from the upper tier of that type of gentlemen's private associations because of the wrong religion/ethnicity, etc.etc.etc. This is all mild, of course compared to the extremes of damaging prejudice in classical, lethal anti-Semitism, but it was more or less identical to what any Jew in the New World would call anti-Semitism in their own experiences. But that prejudice/anti-Semitism doesn't mean that we should conflate the differences (I don't think George Steiner, though prepossessed by the spectre of the Holocaust, would have ever imagined his occasionally brushes with sniffy anti-Semites as on a par with what Paul Celan, Miklós Radnóti, Gertrud Kolmar and thousands of others of his cultural background had experienced in the thick of those European environments where anti-Semitism had an executive potency)* by assuming the minor prejudices and discomforts of life are on a par with, premonitory of, potentially antecedent to, a looming holocaust on our doorstep (though even stating that makes me feel a cautious twinge of reserve: anything is possible, as opposed to probable).

• To illustrate: on several occasions I have been pushed out, barred, denied access to bars and restaurants in Japan on the grounds I was a hakujin(white man) or gaijin. I would never think this entitled me to feel or think that such episodic discrimination put me existentially on a par with Australian POWs in the Pacific theatre of WW2, let alone with (a broader category)Afro-Americans for example.

All this by way of preface to the point I wished to make. Zionism is a self-definition which reverses the European/Jew Herr/Knecht dialectic in its pristine form of the dominus trampling down the underling, marginalizing him out of existence as insignificant, until the Knecht of the story fight back and wrests from the overlord the dignity and autonomy of his own identity. The European Zionist didn't manage that on his homeground: he took on lineaments of the nationalism, ethnocentricity and colonialism of the countries that afflicted them, and cast around for a Western sponsor to have themselves, the crushed Knecht, shifted to a fresh country where the same battle could take place with better odds: where the Knecht could, with a little help from their pseudo-friends (Balfour the anti-Semite), assert a master role that would define them as such against a people who would take on, nolens volens, the role of Knecht that Zionists wished to disabuse themselves of. The 'beauty' of this to the traditional anti-Semitic Herrschaft powers was that they picture themselves as guardian angels of the very people they had bedeviled, by ridding themselves of Jews without paying a cent or a penny, and relieve their own countries of the pressure (a political threat electorally) of great fluxes of immigrant Jews seeking sanctuary or succor in the West.

Transposed to Palestine, Zionism took all of that over, strove to become the dominus, and, in lieu of 'spiriting out of the country' the undesirable indigenous population, finds itself compelled to crush the lifeblood out of the latter's desire to be master in his own home. It is, in that sense (I'm thinking of post-1967) nothing particularly 'Jewish' but preeminently Eurocentric, irreducibly colonial, dispossessive and racist. I speak of the concept, not of those whom infinitely variegated circumstances compelled or led them to set down roots there and, like everyone else in the world, try to have a decent life. In short, I see Palestinians essentially in terms of Jewish history, as indeed like Jewish communities subject to the fantasies of European anti-Semitism, to someone else's neurosis and as such with no grasp on what has driven them to become the victims of a disaporic people’s historic trauma, for which they had no more responsibility than did Jews for the anti-Semitism Europe's obsessions swathed them in. In a simplistic formula, I can't avoid concluding that the implementation of Zionism has proven to be for Palestinians uncannily like what anti-Semitism's consequences were for the Ashkenazi down until WW2. Nishidani (talk) 14:04, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I apologise for not feeling ready to read for several days what I knew would be a deeply thought-through reply, based on your own life experience and a Weltanschauung gained through passionate and vastly more extensive reading than I'll ever be able to master. You've proven my fears to be wrong in one major regard: your reply is by far more concise and less theoretical than I had expected. However, one major issue remains: People act as part of their times and environment. The proto-Zionists and the early Zionists did not have what I already mentioned as the benefit of the hindsight. Their search for a way out of a situation far worse than Celan's after WWII, perilous and not just restrictive, and restrictive in vital, not just minor social ways, was not theoretical, but practical. I have spent some time in trying to research and understand what the attitude of Zionists has been in regard to Arab Palestinians for the first 100 years since the rise of the proto-Zionists such as the Hovevei Zion and up to 1967 (and even after 1967 for those who were not Religious Zionists or Jews driven by other shades of ideological motivation in their will to live in Israel). My impression so far is that in its essence, their motivation was not colonial. It was not against anyone, but for something. It was not based on anti-humanistic reasons, but mainly on practical survival principles and the attempt to use whatever (today often discarded) solutions offered by the progressive streams of thought at their disposal in order to deal with the conflicts arising with the Palestinian Arabs. So I do go back to what I said: Asking from Gaster, Herzl, Ruppin, Berl Katznelson, Henrietta Szold etc., etc. to adopt a view similar to the one you have reached up to a century after their time, from living a life far more free of dangers and restrictions than that the bulk of the Ashkenazi Jews, is not comprehensible (in the meaning of nachvollziehbar) or fair. Nobody, other than the most extreme Marxists, attempted to ignore the reality of the notions of nationality, ethno-religious identity etc. at the time. You mentioned Lennon and Imagine: He didn't even call his song "Let's do it", just "imagine", and what happened is - he was murdered. Reality strikes back. I see Zionism as, for its time, a realistic response to the world. Not a fantasy of colonising and exploiting others (the "Hebrew labour" concept, with all its unintended downsides, was quite central and proves something), but of redressing some very real and major grievances. Not of ruling over others, but of gaining the chance of having a say in one's own present and future. I'm not sure the saying "history will tell" is correct. If a generation takes decisions that serves it and its immediate descendants well, a disastrous repercussion far in the future is hard to blame on the generation who took the initial decision. So yes, history is far from being over, and Israel might turn out ultimately to be the trap Yitzhak Lamdan was warning against in "Masada": the fortress can easily turn into a trap with only death as an exit, by murder or suicide. But that's a poet's approach from 1927, and a view that can hardly be demanded from the doers from the 1880s onwards - and besides, Lamdan voted with his feet and emigrated to Palestine.

While I might well have used many of your arguments already while debating with others and for the sake of getting to the bottom of it, now as in the past, I am at this moment drawing a distinction between not just the regular "masses" wishing for, as you say, the same as every human being would, as opposed to the Zionist ideologues and leaders of the last 50-60 years plus the Revisionists preceding them; but also between the intention and hope of the first 60-some years versus the apparent dead end the project has reached right now. In any case, I see a lot of space for distinctions and nuances, unlike maybe in analysing a game of chess. Things are much more concrete if dealt with directly and in real life. The comfort of using one's mother tongue is by far more real than any concept of patriotism or over-the-top nationalism. The attachment to landscapes, food and smells one grows up among is the identity I do care for, and I wish that my children won't feel obliged by circumstances to give up on all that as I have. My father is convinced that any act of emigration cuts off several years of one's lifespan; in the past it quite certainly did. Not the soaring notions of nation, duty to land & people and so forth motivate me or move my thinking, but much more pragmatic and, I'd think, morally acceptable needs and wishes. I can't possibly put me in the shoes of those early Zionists, nor do I subscribe to some of the outcome of what they've put in motion, but I can very well see how they reached their conclusions and wouldn't like to accuse them of madness, ill-will or even disregard for the needs and interests of the Palestinian Arabs in their time. And then the process takes a dynamic of its own. Each generation had its share of diverging opinions, and it seems legitimate to judge based on the outcome - and I don't think I'm contradicting myself, since it's not about waiting History to draw a line and do the sums, but of looking at one's immediate options. The Mendelssohns' total assimilation within two generations of Moses' fight for Haskala is in many ways a normal outcome and nothing to wail about, except for those who felt at home in the ever narrower confines of their ethno-religious cultural world (again: I'm not talking on behalf of the religious supporters of the Chosen People notion, although Enlightenment would probably teach to let them be and confront them to new ideas through education, not through force). The Bund was swallowed alive by the Soviets and many of its leaders killed, some joined and became part of the repressive regime, and probably a much larger part died in the Holocaust than did among the Palestine & Israel Jews during repeated wars. And, as in your quote from Sternhell that reminded me of Saint-Exupéry's Citadelle, being an active agent in your own fate is of huge value when the alternative is so crushing and dehumanising.

Last not least: Zionism and Israel are latecomers. With the major exception of Yugoslavia, Europe has fought all these fights earlier on and can now climb high up on o plinth and judge. As does the rest of the West. I applaud your attitude towards the Australian Aboriginal peoples, but did Europeans of 100-150 years ago of the intellectual and moral type you do consider yourself a continuation of, have the same approach? Further: did most of the British settlers, those who came as free people or the released convicts, have the luxury of pondering about the morality of starting a farm in the bush and Outback or building around the existing towns? It's a rhetorical question, but a necessary one, as I do see a clear parallel. The British Crown sent them there for imperial interests, while the Zionist leaders had little to gain personally other than a sense of satisfaction; in any case, below the upper levels of leadership I see mainly similarities. Today colonisation of that type wouldn't happen, but the need is also gone. At least until the next refugee crisis, see Nagorno Karabakh now or the Seychelles and Pacific islanders in a few decades' time.

• Anything I might write in response to the above para's content was anticipated by a really first-rate historian 17 years ago, so I will defer to him since I would underwrite almost everything there (without sycophancy).Tony Judt, 'Israel: The Alternative,' New York Review of Books 23 October 2003Nishidani (talk) 17:18, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

It's not an academic dispute. It wasn't about the Nazis' request for Lebensraum when Germany hat huge swaths of open land and all the freedom to develop as it saw fit within its borders. The Ashkenazi Jews, even the most secular ones, still had in the time we're talking about a very strong cultural attachment to and knowledge of biblical history - see the Hashomer Atzair use of the Bible and festivals - so that Palestine was in no way such a remote, unknown place of colonial ambitions, but a relatively logical option. I've mentioned for a reason the Uganda plan, for which Western Zionist leaders with Herzl at the helm could warm up much easier than the East Europen local leaders, who almost chased them out of the Congress. The bad and sometimes bloody outcome of Baron de Hirsch's colonies in Argentina and all the other attempts to move the Jews of Eastern Europe out of harm's way also seem to support the Palestine choice of the Zionist movement. This is trial and error, people trying out their every option, and none, NONE being ideal. I honestly don't understand why you don't agree with this aspect of historical analysis. Retroprojections are not an useful, accepted or fair approach. Nor is remaining at the level of academic debates over general political or philosophical systems when the topic refers to flesh-and-blood people who got organised in order to have a life - one at all, and if possible a more decent one. What I'm mostly lacking is: the alternative solution for the Ashkenazi Jews. For 1882, 1918, 1933-39, 1939-45, 1945-48. Some 70 years of horrific European and Mediterranean history. Palestine's Arabs were not their first concern; nobody has ever expected that of anyone else, ever. Besides, there have been constant attempts, naive, pragmatic, good and less good, but well-intended, of reaching a morally sustainable solution, or as we say in Romanian: to reconcile the goat with the cabbage (and the wolf).

I apologise again, this time for being all over the place, although I do believe to have put into words most of what was on my mind. I thank you for your friendship shown in the effort you've made so far and hope this conversation to be more to you than the effort of yet again compressing into words thoughts that have long solidified in your mind and you don't believe need to be looked at again. Arminden (talk) 16:20, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

No need to apologize, at all. Intelligent conversation is never a matter of effort and I value friendships that are perceptive enough to push arguments wherever they go without undue concern for superficial feelings or courtesies. I'll get round to replying in detail (once my battle to figure out why my stove/heater is dripping creosote - we had an intense 'weather event' and the likelihood is water slanting into the ventilation slats beneath the chimney cap formed pools that made the creosote condense and boil.) I keep, in the meantime, thinking of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish world - in so many, America is the desired destination, Zion. Indeed, Zion for many was America. Zionism, as very much an elitist conception, not the expression of a mass sentiment (except in intensely religious groups). Back for the moment to the anthracitic stench of my kitchen for more tinkering.Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I've had down to this minute too many interruptions in real life to do anything but jot down notes on scraps of paper while attending to numerous things to fix or organize. I had to dismantle my central heating system, and find a shop that had the appropriate insulating cord for the circular plates on the surface which I cook on. Not to speak of unexpected carer duties. I'll have to just work up one note after another for the next few days, so if you will bear with me and be patient, hold off from a reply until I get to the finish. What you write evokes so many things that, to do it justice will require a reply at episodic length. Cheers friend.

There is a marvellous Chinese idiom géxuē sāoyǎng which one often finds in Japanese texts from Meiji onwards in the form kakka sôyô no kan (隔靴掻痒の感) lit. ‘the feeling of scratching an itchy foot with one’s shoe still on’. A sense that while something is annoying, exasperatingly, one cannot quite get to, and rid oneself of, the galling thing that causes one displeasure. This expresses the irritation of early Japanese scholars at the way their Western colleagues described any number of the formers’ local institutions or cultural practices. I sense between the lines just a smidgeon of this. This kind of intertextual implication will emerge in any kind of discourse, therefore, naturally, including my response. Dialectical exchange between friends, teases the respective blindspots and biases out as it strives to find a logical common ground.

In short, you are giving me, to use a somewhat worn heuristic dyad, the emic version, from within the bosom, the Lebenswelt, of those who were raised within the Israeli reading of the nation’s history.And, correspondingly, the sense is that, however someone like myself may strive to capture its vividly lived realities, they are hampered by a certain outsiderliness, corroborated by the way their views are (a) abstract, detached from the inner experience of the historical actors directly involved in Zionism and (b), with regard to the latter, relying on a rather unempathetic retrospective (the harsher term is revisionist) reading of the evidence, one that can comfortably exercise a superior judgment, with a moral edge, because it can benefit from the specious wisdom of hindsight.Retrospective know-alls should remind themselves that any dunce can ratchet up their IQ after the event, and, as Greek tragedy reminds its audiences, we the viewers know more than the protagonists, and had they our aftersight*, tragedy itself would vanish, vanquished by common sense. When, early on in Oedipus Rex, Teiresias prophesies that a doggedly harsh (deinopous) curse will hound and bring the heroic protagonist to heel (418), the pun on his name Oidipous/Shelley’s ‘Swell-foot’ is lost on the king, but not on alert bystanders. It takes him a long time to realize that the name not only reveals the circumstances of his abandonment, but embodies the dénouement of his destiny (a man who gets to ‘know’ (οἶδα/oîda‎) the real meaning of. his swollen (οἰδέω ‎/oidéō) foot’. The future is inscribed in his foot but the hero cannot see it just as, in ideological movements Zionism or Communism or economic rationalism, the future predicated by attachment to the doctrine will not be that envisaged by the majority of the actors, though some certainly, like Teiresias, will have a timely grasp on the probable or ineludible consequences of decisions taken from the outset.

When we were asked to write a term essay on the Prometheus Bound, I disappointed my teacher, a scholar with extensive theatrical interests. While the other students gave a synopsis, and their interpretations, I outran the normal length by some sprawling metres, providing him with a history of interpretations, endeavouring to show how every interpretation of the play from the 19th century onwards told a reader more about the cultural contexts and epochs in which the various scholars were writing, than about what the playwright might have intended, or how its original audiences might have been disposed to respond to it. 'All very interesting, 'N', but I'm curious to know what your reaction is.' I answered along the lines: 'Well, as I suggested in the last few pages, post-WW2 readings will reflect modern concerns with decolonization, American imperialism, multiculturalism, psychoanalysis and the like, none of which were present to Athenians in the 5th century BCE. As a child of the times, whatever I may argue will primarily echo with contemporary concerns. What is more important, surely, is trying to disentangle our modern preconceptions about the world from the text, and, conversely, striving to imagine, by the closest philological attention one can muster, how the original author conceived of the play and the range of responses probably available to people in Athens at that time. As things stand, I could waffle on about my impressions at length, but that wouldn't throw any light on - to the contrary- it might obscure by cognitive anachronisms, what Greeks at that time felt about it'. Some years later, anyone, after the appearance of Hayden White’s great if flawed (and what incisively original contributions to any debate are not flawed?) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe will work history intensely aware of narrative bias, though, to be honest, the epigone tends to use such insights into the rhetorical character of historical narratives to deconstruct what prior historians write, while avoiding any serious meditation on the de te fabula narratur implications of White’s (by no means original) insight. The point of both the anecdote and the reference is that, 99% of our mental life swims in a sea of shifting impressions, where keeping afloat is vexed by the flotsam and jetsam the tides of opinion carry our way, and the competitive thrashing of so many others from the same shipwrecked boat. Few take the trouble to orient themselves by the stars, take the measure of the drift of the tides, and then breaststroke in the one direction where the available probabilities suggest a secure shore might lie where one can gain a foothold and a fixed point of orientation.

History is a bus careering down a several lane highway furnished with many turnoffs. One could elaborate on the metaphor, but let us just say most people in the vehicle can’t be held responsible if the bus does not arrive at its announced destination(s). It is useful always, when dealing with evidence, to bear in mind possible personal connections. It makes history, and even what one does, to the extent that one is an actor, less abstract, more witting. When I sighted West Bank bantustans, for example, I thought of how my outlook might be affected by the fact my paternal grandfather had managed a Remount station in the Boer War and had 300 Zulu workers assisting him. He later used a lot of the phrases picked from his helpers, back at home and in his butcher shop, and my father redeployed them as funny nursery words for his children, before we were at an age to appreciate the more important stories. So was he siding with the indigenous population against the Boer ancestors of the Apartheid regime? No. Aside from being an expert horseman, he was a butcher, a job he hated intensely, and jumped at the opportunity to go to war at the Empire’s expense for an extended holiday. And incidentally, since the remount farm serviced Australian guerilla forces, he unwittingly furnishing natural born killers like Breaker Morant with horses that weould be employed in punitive expeditions to murder innocent people just for the pleasure of it. There may be some influence, via my father, a conservative undemonstrative man, who might have learnt from his dad some stories that influenced his quiet disdain for anything even slightly smacking of racism, a cast of mind shared by my mother, whose background brought her to a similar outlook before she met her future busband. When Harold Blair turned up with a prescription at her pharmacy, she jumped at the opportunity to introduce him to me, not as an ‘aboriginal’ but as a fine tenor. All I am sure of is that the SA connection meant that as children, we all imbibed stories about the Zulu wars, and knew by heart the warrior kinglist that ended with Cetaweyo. finis pt.1 Nishidani (talk) 17:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

• The pun on the 'obscene' sense of the German after, as in the famous Wilamowitz-Nietzsche/Erwin Rohde exchange regarding the Birth of Tragedy.

It’s is not disputed that Zionism is an ideology. Daniel Bell started a debate, in 1962, which foresaw modernity as making this type of thinking obsolete. This persuaded many particularly after Francis Fukuyama, in a headily euphoric pseudo-theoretical expostulation, made a splash and a major talking point in the conversation of the world after the collapse of the Berlin wall in ’89 with his The End of History in 1992. His thesis was that the markets and liberalism had put paid to the lethal ideological pests of the 20th century, and history would endorse democracy and its economic rationality as the only way forward. This assumed that Hegel's logic of history had led to the finale of Bell's prevision, and that we could now assume that we were witnessing the obsequies of ideology, that it had been laid to rest. If you look at studies of nationalism - a topic pioneered by Hans Kohn, (Jews dominated the field, understandably since in Europe they were its major Western victims, and had a survivalist interest in grasping the monster’s nature)- few if any of the standard overviews at that time (Ernest Gellner, Anthony D. Smith, Eric Hobsbawn, and with them, in many essays, Isaiah Berlin) instanced Israel as an example of the genre, or noted the survival there of a flourishing state ideology, one inscribed overtly in its foundational documents in lieu of a constitution. Once more, the country enjoyed an exemption from comparativism, as was fitting for the general assumption that, in anything regarding the Jewish experience or Israel, exceptionalism has been the rule.

Of course the New Historians arose in the 1980s, perhaps in response to Jean-François Lyotard ’s highly influential thesis in his La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979), where narrative knowledge (Geisteswissenschaft) generally, and métarécits of history, legitimatizing stories of nationhood, was declared disempowered as it yielded to the performative efficiency of scientific and economic forms of thinking. Lyotard was more or less celebrating the centennial of Ernest Renan’s Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? But Zionism is somewhat distinctive in being one form of 19th-20th century closed-circuit thinking relatively unaffected by our modern reflex disavowal of ideology. One can see this in the political success of the IHRA’s technically absurd, and unworkable, yet effectively intimidating Working Definition of Antisemitism, which, in practice, is wielded to throttle what began as a Jewish critique of nationalist ideology, namely Anti-Zionism as putatively a fellow traveller of anti-Semitism itself. The consequence is that Zionism, though admitted by its founders to be an ideology (Gideon Shimoni), enjoys a rare dispensation from the modern critique of ideology. Indeed, criticism of Zionism is spun as itself a kind of racist ideology, swarming with enmity against the Jewish people. Once more we are in a semantic switchback territory, in which the logical meaning of mundane terms is inverted in topsy-turvy fashion. We have a deliciously contrived Batesonian double-bind or Catch 22. (Israel is the state of the Jewish people: any discussion of Israel's foreign policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank implies a denialist attitude re Israel itself, and therefore cannot be disentangled from suggestions of hostility to the Jewish people in Israel, and therefore anti-Semitic tout court, against Jews the world over. Infantile in its complex entailment of propositional tantrums. . . but emotively highly effective in the rhetoric that engineers public consensus).

This by way of preface. The name-dropping is thick because there is a tendency, esp. on wikipedia, towards intellectual qualunquismo: anything anyone says is an ‘opinion’, no better or worse than any other. But we have a science of opinion that distinguishes types according to the levels of complexity undergirding them. Thus hearsay recycled by an individual is cognitively ‘inferior’ to an opinion arduously reached by reading and thinking through logically the best evidence for one proposition or another. This doesn’t crown the latter as an objective truth: it merely states that of two opinions, one lends itself to criteria of ongoing verification against the facts that emerge, the other does not, and in so far as this is correct, a mindless meme has numerous functions, psychological, political and sociological, but has little heuristic value in grasping a fundamental nature of an issue compared to the alternative approach. By naming, I cite the framework within which I think, hoping that you, as a reader, will recognize the signposts and deduce that it is not just Nishidani, but a discursive world, his remarks allude to.

So to the gravamen of your exposition. How does it read within the terms of the arguments I’ve just outlined?Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

I have waited for a moment of quiet, of which I have fewer now, that everything around has become so much more quiet (not made for this kind of imposed standstill), and I am now happy that I did so. I have gained various knowledge from your intro, starting from the anecdotal (Breaker Morant) to the more substantial, and I'm most happy about the background it gives me on your own, familial and personal history, as it makes all expressed ideas easier to approach empathically. Now I'm looking forward to see how you will bridge the gap between theoretical considerations, profound as they might be and as consensual as academia ever manages to become, and a practical view of things re Zionism's stated first proposal: moving Jews out of harm's way and on to a place where normal individual and group development would be allowed to exist. The ideology was the infrastructure, the means of getting there, and it expectedly adopted many and varied ideological and practical shapes and forms, from pacifism to fascism. It is this I am most eagerly waiting for to see: if and how you are including in your exposition, from which I am learning a lot in terms of how things can be approached academically (beyond the many immediate learning benefits), that which is for me the fundamental (but huge) question in this whole issue: was the best result intended, were the means applied appropriate in their time and their downside results avoidable, and how can things be fixed now? If they can be fixed at all. I'm always happy to play a game of mental chess as long as I can follow it, good writing gives me the kind of pleasure the means of "immediate gratification" one is mostly offered today don't, but there are these deeper mental hookworms that are hard to get by. Have the best Christmas time this crowned little bug can allow for, and don't ever worry about time, as I don't seem to have a good sense of it, but waiting I am. Arminden (talk) 12:17, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

My apologies. I wrote dozens of pages analyzing your remarks, but have had no time to boil it down. A cousin my age whom I grew up with is dying of a suddenly diagnosed cancer, and my thoughts are elsewhere. Sorry for adding this personal reason. I will get round to responding. Best Nishidani (talk) 12:37, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm terribly, terribly sorry to hear. Forget this. And if I may remind you: I wasn't supposed to apologise, and that certainly goes both ways. Santa has been nasty this year. Lots of strength, enough to pass around, too. Arminden (talk) 15:43, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Dear friend, mea maxima culpa/me a Mexican cowboy as we slurred the Latin at mass to annoy the friars. I’ve kept you unduly waiting,without even suggesting you read in the meantime a text like the one referred to in this podcast. I’d better pull my finger out from local circumstances (apart from that mentioned, numerous Porlockian moments this past week) and try to respond at least piecemeal over the next week.

how you will bridge the gap between theoretical considerations, profound as they might be and as consensual as academia ever manages to become, and a practical view of things re Zionism's stated first proposal: moving Jews out of harm's way and on to a place where normal individual and group development would be allowed to exist.

(A)Ultimately your reserve, then, concerns a perceived dissonance between theory and experience. However much people like myself might contextualize Zionism within the comparativist framework of nationalisms, and demonstrate that, rather than being sui generis, it displays the classic lineaments of both colonial and nationalist ideology, there is, you imply, something exceptional about its peculiar circumstances, namely (again reading between the lines) its practical urgency to place Jews out of harm’s way. the overwhelming bulk of similar ideological movements lack the germinal core of what constitutes Zionism, The contrast between theory and practice ignores the fact that ‘moving Jews out of harm’s way’ is based on a theory, as is the generic concept of ‘Jews’ itself, (as Amos Elon wrote in his biography of Herzl ‘he forged a national representation out of the most disorganized and fractional community on earth’) but I shall touch on that later. To anticipate though, your contrast between theory and experience sounds to be like a tacit opposition between how scholarship understands from all of its varied angles, an historical process, and how Jewish people within the particular realities of that process actually experience it phenomenologically. The former knows the structure and its logic but these things are immaterial to the felt pressed dilemmas those within the fold experience. There is a jarring dyscrasia between what is obvious to those outside the ideological bubble (Amos Elon was an early witness to this for me) and the intense unending discussion of those inside the bubble who, for practical reasons, have trouble taking on board the implications of what has been obvious since at least 1967: self-affirmation as an ethnic state-haven for Jews cannot but lead to apartheid as the dominant cultural code. The realization of Zionism tendentially spells the death of Judaism as it flourished in the haskalah.

There also is an anachronism here, one that reflects what has become the Israeli national narrative. Zionism started up in 1895 by a relatively comfortable European intelligentsia, the immediate occasion being the ominously farcical Dreyfus case. That elite did not find itself imperilled. Their concern was for those ‘others’, the masses of eastern Jews whose situation in the Slavic world and the sociopolitical ramifications of their fugitive influx westwards rang an alarm bell. This comes out clearly in Herzl’s own words, when he spoke of a haven where those of the Pale ’with hooked noses, black and red beards, bow legs’ might find a sanctuary and lead a normal life (Arthur Ruppin of course argued the contrary: aliyah should be reserved for ‘racially pure’ Jews. Jews throughout the non-continental-European world lived a normal life, only quotas made their relocation there slow). Herzl himself – with little knowledge of Judaism let alone Hebrew,- was a powerful, strikingly handsome dandy, unlike Dreyfus who is supposed to have ‘looked Jewish’. Like Chaim Weizmann, David Wolffsohn, Nahum Sokolow and so many other early Western Zionists, he would not have willingly put down permanent roots in the land of Israel Your objection to my adjective ‘madcap’ regarding the conception of the idea ignores the fact that Herzl himself, after first considering a mass conversion to Christianity (a bizarre, horrendously defeatist idea itself), dreamt up Zionism in a feverish state of delirium, one that arguably recycled in oneiric secular nationalist terms the essentially messianic proto-Zionism of Yehudah Alkalai.

For many decades it remained marginal to Jewish life. The majority of orthodox religious authorities regarded it as little more than blasphemy. A mere 1% of Jews subscribed to the idea by 1913, the year in which, as you know, a kangaroo court tried unsuccessfully to convict Menahem Mendel Beilis of ritual child murder. In Bernard Wasserstein’s classification there were 4 circumstantially differentiated Jewish populations over that Euro-Slavic landmass, and the close to 500 pogroms were all restricted to the Russo-Ukrainian east. After WW1 many of these adopted Zionism, understandably, and yet were bewildered by the Arab riots this mass influx engendered, interpreting Palestinian protests at being swamped by immigrants whose presence promised to destroy their own bid for nationhood, as just proof that Arab, no different from Europeans, were anti-Semitic, something that fed fruitfully into Zionist propaganda. They read everything in terms of their European past, something no local Arab could be expected to understand, let alone grasp that Zionism, implicitly, would transform the indigenous victims of a colonizing set of institutions into replicas of the victimizing perpetrators of the antisemitism which drove flocks of Jews to Palestine.

Israel, to be brief, would not have happened without the Holocaust. It was that which became Israel’s conditio sine qua non, not Zionism itself, which deprived of the Shoah,-as inconceivable to the founders as it almost everyone else- would have remained, for the overwhelming majority of Jews, a contingent moment in the vast history of Judaism. The Jewish people have survived and often thrived over 2,600 years in diaspora and will so until the end of human time. Half are now concentrated in a tiny country, Israel, with 70 years of history measured against that plurimillenial record of the diaspora. Israel has not guaranteed in that period the ‘normalcy’ dreamed of by Herzl et co. Its survival has been endlessly spoken of as a battle by a small land to defend itself against a massive, irrational world of unstable regional states, mostly despotic. Israel’s survival has nothing to do with making Jews safe as Zionism foresaw. It makes half of them – the Jewish Israelis – eternally existentially worried, beset by demographic, ‘racial’ and political threats that, though easily micromanaged by a superbly efficient technocratic regional superpower, a condition which Jews in the diaspora do not have to wear, except to the degree that individually or as communities, they feel obliged to identify with that particular society.

In this sense, the foundation of Israel did not exorcise the soi-disant sense of living a precarious haunted existence as a discriminated ‘abnormal’ presence within other states.To the contrary, it ensured that the peculiar identity engendered by classic antisemitism – which, at least in the West could not survive the lesson of the Holocaust – persisted and flourished this time round as a national form of persecution, of being singled out as a pariah. It secured, within one variety of Jewish identity, a perpetuation of a sense of perduring global enmity, even as, in concrete terms, Israel managed to prove a major political success story.* But this is not what I want to get around to. Patience again, my dear friend. I will get there over the next few days, and, in the meantime, my heartfelt augury that you and yours enjoy a brighter, less lugubrious year than the one we have just endured.N.Nishidani (talk) 18:31, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Just while looking up something this morning, I see, as invariably, that my own impression after years of reading this material is one that even some Israelis can concur with.'Gas chambers or not, atomic weapons or not, Netanyahu has embedded Israelis in a world in which they are no more masters of their fate than the Jews of Ghetto Bialystok or Ghetto Lvov, a universe in which the village is always burning and the carving knife is eternally on Israel’s neck. It is a suffocating, essentially anti-Zionist message in which the establishment of the state of Israel has done nothing to change the basic condition of the Jews. It depicts a world of danger and darkness, devoid of light or hope, in which Israel is repeatedly abandoned by its duplicitous friends and unfaithful allies, in which Jews around the world are perennially on the lookout for an upcoming pogrom, in which anti-Semitism has somehow broken out once again as a plague for no rhyme or reason, in which even naive college students on American campuses who support a boycott to protest the occupation are an existential danger, in which the only hope for survival lay in eternal vigilance against external enemies and internal backstabbers. It is a world in which the Final Solution is always on the table, a world of perennial conflict between good and evil, a world in which there is no room for mercy, remorse or weak-kneed illusions of peace. Just as it was back then.' Chemi Shalev,'The IDF General Who Challenged Netanyahu’s Suffocating Holocaust Analogies Haaretz 6 May 2016

No, I haven't forgotten. Every time I sit down to write, something else comes up - yesterday news of my closest (in age) cousin's death, arrived just as I sat down to finish the following initial paragraph, and just after I had read just one more of the endless reports of gratuitous cruelty in the West Bank (Amira Hass,Hagar Shezaf,'The Village Where Palestinians Are Rendered Completely Powerless,' Haaretz 5 January 2021).

I’ve had an uneasy sense that (with our respective aged reversed) in replying I might appear to be rather like John Bold, the young idealist, making life insufferable for the gentle and infinitely more charitable Septimus Harding (in Anthony Trollope'a The Warden) In that novel, the first in the 6 volume Barchester Towers series, a medieval figure, Hiram, leaves the usufruct of his estate to benefit 12 bedesmen, After five centuries, the overwhelming bulk of the estate’s annual income, £800, feathers the living of its decent clerical warden, Harding, who has obtained it by preferment, while a mere 1 shilling sixpence per diem is devolved to each of the 12 aged poor, who nonetheless do enjoy free accommodation and health care on the church grounds. It makes me think of that other foundational document, Balfour’s, which envisaged sponsoring a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, but, most forget, with the cynical rider that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ in that country. In demographic terms, the establishment of that homeland would not prejudice the rights of 90% of the indigenous population, with, as late as 1947 96% of the physical assets of the land. The pursuit of a chimera of historic justice for one migrating people inexorably required the dispossession of another, properly indigenous people whose civic rights would, in some undefined future, be akin to those enjoyed by the Zulu, Sothi and Ndembele in their Bantustan ‘homelands’.

But this was all prefatory to what I wished to focus on: the sense of the 'other' in Zionism, or its absence. Your eloquent remarks essentially come from an intense passionate identity with a collective tradition of suffering, and mention of what in historical context, was the 'other' in the creation narrative is fleeting. Essentially, you argue, they did not know what we know now, about this other. I could muster a dozen pages of arguments, but don't want to go there. In any case, Joel Beinin's 2005 paper (Forgetfulness for Memory: The Limits of the New Israeli History) argued the contrary view cogently, in a brief synthesis of a field we now know about in far more detail. What happened to the other was thoroughly known even in 1948.

But rather than expatiate on that, I wished to explore to what degree a closed ethnic system of identity like Zionism can allow empathy for the other. This is difficult, because Zionism is confused endlessly with 'Jewishness', and the latter category is intrinsically ineffable, unlike Zionism which is a political ideology. I cannot temperamentally or intellectually associate the way people behave with any ethnic or cultural identity, which makes it even harder. Let me illustrate with two anecdotes, to relieve your boredom with my more technical prose.

One of the most linguistically accomplished Japanologists of his generation once took me under his wing, and enabled my work to be published. He was Australian. Some time in our correspondence, he mentioned that at 73 he had decided to do his bar mitzah, and was proud, though not knowing Hebrew, to have mastered the Torah text assigned to him. Later I came across a memoir by a journalist who went to the same school, an elite Protestant college, which recounted how my mentor-friend as a youth, dux of his class, observed a ritual of cruel hazing underway, and, with a quiet authoritative voice (he was a great sportsman and dux of his year) put an end to that college tradition. When I read the passage, having got to know in the meantime that the scholar was Jewish, I nodded thinking, 'Yep. That's S's background shining forth. Any family of that background knows instinctively what cruelty is, even if others fail to see anything other than a customary rite to be endured.' But I immediately checked my conclusion. After all, I thought, it is also consummately in line with a general ethos prized in Australia of a 'fair go'. Which of the two clicked at that moment? Neither and both, but ultimately, there is nothing, I concluded, intrinsically 'Jewish' or 'Australian' in what S. did by intervening to put an end to cruelty: that just exhibited his particular individual character. I recalled similar things from my father's repertoire.

My father was of mixed English-Irish background, culturally, the Irish part dominating. He never taught by moralizing. He just sent subliminal messages by telling anecdotes from his immense repertoire. So one day, at table, when the topic of prejudice came up, he told us of a trip he and some friends made, for a few thousand miles, in the 30s that ended up on a rich outlying agricultural property in Queensland, as guests of the owner, who though he wore a kilt, also had some Chinese ancestry. After dinner, where, having showered and dressed to wash away the day's fatigue and dust, he and his friends had been entertained, with two jackaroos* - wealthy kids from the same Protestant elite college S attended,- they retired to drink port. Dad - always interested in Aborigines - said that, while driving towards the gate to enter the landholding, he was about to get the car to slow down so he could run up and open the gate in its fencing, when he noticed an elder of a group of aborigines camped nearby, who in the meantime had risen and trotted over to open the gate for them. As they passed, (Dad waved to thank him for his courtesy). And he added that he had observed a long scar on the elderly black's cheek. Having said that, he asked his host if ritual cicatrization was still practiced in these late times, and if so, why did they scar the face, when the norm was to open the flesh on the chest?. Before his gentle host could answer, one of the Melbournian jackaroos bragged:'Ah, that old black bastard again. The bugger got in my way the other day as I was riding in from town, so I have the dumb coot a lesson and ran my spur across his dial' (face). This was said triumphantly. The anecdote, or moral lesson ended there, as dad reached for his beer and took a sip.

This is different from the other story in that one acted to stop violence, while my father told a story of observing violent racial contempt displayed by a well-heeled scion of the Melbournian establishment against a man who had been dispossessed of everything but who had maintained his dignity, and his respect for 'whites' even after the latest assault, and he told it to a purpose - to impress silently on his children an aspect of what evil is. However much I examine - with lots of other details about the background of each, S's behaviour and my father's indirect lesson, all I come up with is not some ethnic or cultural motivation - but the distinctive personal character of the two men, irreducible to larger sociological forces. People who might have shared, in each case, a 'Jewish' background like S's, or an Irish background like my father's, could have, with a different character, either connived in the college brutality or not noticed anything odd about the jackaroo's booting an 'abo'. Ultimately, I don't care for any tribal narrative, and consider them dangerous for the way they tend to coerce an intense irrational solidarity towards members of the in-group while eliding empathy for those beyond the specific ethnic pale. This, again, is by way of preface. I must really find the time to write more cogently of the reflections your remarks generated. Patience (if you are still reading).Nishidani (talk) 15:39, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

• Often the urban elites sent their sons for a period to work as jackaroos so that they could get experience in the rough outback that would serve them with the right element of tacit redneck toughness for dominating otherwise polite prissy members in boardrooms. Presumably, learning to beat up 'abos' gave on an advantage when dealing with metropolitan unionists or staff in one's mansion.

Dear Nishi, I am truly sorry to hear about your loss - and must marvel at the way you manage to return in such moments to this somewhat weird dialog, sometimes a two-way monologue, that probably sums up a good chunk of the reason why we've spent so much time and energy on Wikipedia (not that I'd start comparing my input with yours; mine is sometimes of a practically-minded nature, but often, as of lately, more of a compulsive and escapist type). I will try and come back to you tomorrow, sorry, but I'm far from being in shape right now. I hope this year will start making amends for its older brother, although what is lost cannot be replaced. Stay well, riding the wave, and promise not to change. Arminden (talk) 00:42, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Dear A,

Not a day goes by here where I don't spend an hour or so mulling how to reply and keep up my end of the bargain. It's such an extraordinary complex subject that addressing your ideas decently demands a focused concision, rather than my usual blowhard divagativeness. As we edit here we always do so as all sorts of real life circumstances press around, and, apart from a series of minor disasters or difficulties recently, also one's thinking gets entrammeled by passing contingent things that relentless reorientate the framework of one's thoughts. As I henpecked myself to write back over the last week, I read Barchester Towers and that made me think in terms of the way Victorian discourse handled the crises of the time; recent events on Capitol Hill prompted me to recast an answer in terms of the history of civilization and mass delusions (which began 'In the beginning was the Lie, and the Lie was fleshened out, and dwelt within us'); then, catching a film (The Man Who Knew Infinity) - a topic I learnt about reading a half century ago Hardy and CP Snow's accounts,- and observing that the real facts were respun according to one of the standard tear-jerking-then-euphoric-grit-succeeding-storylines (identical to say Men of Honor, I began to orientate the same content in terms of an analysis of the power of imagination to skew historical complexities into a narrative of tragedy and triumph. That film also made me think - in the way it simplifies the Ramanujan-Hardy relationship as one between pure intuition and dry logical procedures - of a minor part of our own dialogue wavers between the two, etc.etc. Ah, my dentist's appointment looms in 10 minutes. . . So, for the moment, I really appreciate the opportunity your request for a conversation gives to thresh out things in the background of my thinking that inflect the way I approach these topics. We can pick this up again any time. I do hope whatever hovers there in your personal difficulties sorts itself out, with patience, or stoical tenacity or whatever is required, and that you and yours do manage to carve out some peace and a decent reprise of normality in these woeful times. Best Nishidani (talk) 10:06, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

And by the way, I won't tell stories if their effect is to cause worries. In my family tradition, death is always the occasion for jokes told against the deceased, recalling the comical foibles they, like all of us, were prey to. This ritual, used even in Church when a few take the lectern and tell funny tales about the dearly departed, can upset priests officiating who don't share that background. By convention, the deceased's family must provide beer and food afterwards, until breakfast the next day, as the death is celebrated by boozy storytelling gauged for its laughter value. Sometimes this is difficult. I found my father dead on the morning we were about to attend an uncle's funeral, and couldn't spoil my uncle's funeral by revealing the fact. That night I attended the party. Everyone knew, a nod was enough. His turn would come but the evening was for the uncle. Weeping on such occasions is frowned on as bad form (in the sense that no lachrymose outburst of sympathy can do justice to the immediate family's grief, and is therefore an indelicate presumption or provocation) My cousin, when told of his situation, knocked back chemotherapy saying he had had a 'good run' and spent his last month telling funny stories to all of his visitors. The medical team was perplexed that a secondary symptom induced a quadriplegic paralysis, and seven doctors walked in and asked him if they could examine him and discuss the matter. Typically he quipped: 'Strewth! If I needed to listen to seven quacks (n2) I could have asked the nurses to wheel me down to that duckpond nearby!' In grief, an English proverb runs, 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb'. Stay well. Nishidani (talk) 18:50, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

In the meantime, it might interest you to listen to this, about growing up Jewish in Ames. Nishidani (talk) 12:05, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

The point is normalcy in diaspora, embodied by the figure of the guy sitting next to Norton Mezvinsky . During the intense conversation, it seems all of these worries between interviewer and the distinguished 'Jewish' subject go over his head. Their friendship since childhood has nothing to do with any idea of respective collective identities. One has mates, or girlfriends, and this 'ethnic' aspect, so troubling the loud discourse of public anxiety, is off the radar. It never figures. If asked, he replied ' normal'. He can't grasp the difference, and his pal, Norton, living with knowledge of that discursive complexity, confirms that (from memory 36 minutes in), in growing up, it simply did not resonate as an 'us'/'them' issue, even though in his private life Judaism took on an important dimension. I have known personally, and could cite many instances of this in similar interviews (one with Frank Meyer, a Florida identity, for example, where since it is a Jewish oral history project, he tells his life story almost ignoring that aspect of his life, and his narrative is constantly interrupted by the interviewer's prompts to focus on this dimension. Your remarks about the lure of a vision of accomplished normalcy as the dominant raison d'être speaks to one constituency - and. undoubtedly, being among one's kind in an ethnic state, with a language proper to that identity, achieves this (putting aside the cost to the evicted 'other'). On another plane, it does no such thing, I would argue, because the conflictuality of the past just assumes a different, yet equally aggravating aspect: Israel as the warrant for Jewish Vergangenheitsbewältigung doesn't appear to be successful in mastering the past, so much as endlessly reminding one of that aspect, while rigorously eliding the past of the other neighbor in, as I alluded somewhere around wiki, a zero-sum game of competitive remembrance.Nishidani (talk) 12:47, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

My dilatoriness would test the patience of Job, and in any case I realize just now that in fixing a problem with my computer and making a backup, I wiped out a key file of notes on this!. Rather than inflict a short monograph (I even ended rereading the Nicomachean Ethics against Deuteronomy to sort the deep past issues out - but that is way over the line of a conversation), based solely on facts and the inferences they permit, I'll wrap my side of this up by the briefest synthesis possible.

In your exposition, you make a strong emotional case for "us" which I annotated at every point by the missing corollary, "them?" (Palestinians). Our argument should not be about Israel or its legitimacy, or in spending time to 'lift and drop a question on your plate' over issues of its legitimacy. As Walter Laqueur rightly wrote, Zionism completed its mission in '48 and has no other raison d'etre after that date. It is 1967 that changes all - the desire, having started with a population base of 5% in 1900, and a land title ownership of 6% in 1948, having gained 78% of the territory for just 30% of the population, to press on, rather than content oneself with the massive riches secured, in a way that immiserates what is now 50% of the I/P population, by consigning it to something like 13% of its original landscape, and much less of its resources in a hovelled congeries of bantustans or ghettos. That is not 'history': it is the ongoing structural logic of choices Israel keeps making, that have absolutely nothing to do with securing a safe haven for persecuted Jews, since half of them are and will certainly remain, much safer elsewhere. After 1967, in my view, Zionism proceeded to systematically, if unwittingly, tear apart the whole emotional and historical narrative driving its appeal: you cannot hijack the longue duréè of diasporic exile and the Holocaust to underwrite a process of eviction, immiseration and exile for another people in Gaza and the West Bank without emptying it of its innately convincing moral energy. In assuming the role post 1967 of victimizer - for that is what theft, a stasi-like surveillance, the endless torment of the Kafkian machinery of bureaucratic harassment, and relentless settlement amounts to - the whole groundwork of historical complaint is incinerated, Jewish history, and the sensibility it nurtured, is gutted, for a few decades of glory and a couple of square miles of extra land. This consummate idiocy is beautifully captured by Henryk Broder in his tale Tagar and the Teepee Family, of an American family with only the vaguest awareness of Judaism and of their Jewish roots uprooting themselves from the Midwest to hunker down behind barb wire in bunkerlike apartments in the heart of Hebron, and embracing the ghetto by choice, ending up in endless neurosis, while, with several hundred others, paralyzing for several decades the right to 'normalcy' of 200,000 of "them" in the same city - the Palestinian 'Nazis' who, in this hallucinated worldview, victimize them. When I for one read otherwise powerful pleas to grasp the 'hauntedness' of exile as warrant for Israel of the kind you outline, I can't avoid recalling to mind numerous stories like this - where so many existentially secure Jews have gone 'over the border' and elected to live dangerously (ostensibly ad maiorem Yahweh gloriam,- not to speak of the millions of life experiences inflected with suffering as the collateral damage of this post 1967 enterprise. Late Zionism has strangled all of the otherwise unspeakable pathos of Jewish history by refusing to hearken to the lessons learnt over millennia, and so powerfully evidenced in the way, with the haskalah, Jewish diasporic genius embellished European civilization and flourished in the vanguard of its most humanistic reaches.

Well, that's a somewhat nasty way to 'wrap up' a conversation, which you in particular don't deserve and shouldn't take personally. Perhaps it's jus that, with a lot of work lost by shuffling files, I'm trying to tell myself to desist. In any case, I hope you and yours have managed to get those injections, allowing you to get prophylactically insured against this insidious pandemic in time to enjoy a return to normalcy - I imagine the Mediterranean beaches I used to laze on during my sojourn there - this coming summer. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani,

(A)And I am truly sorry for disappearing like an asshole. But a lethargic asshole, living on autopilot, and not a well-functioning one. I didn't dare to come back and read what you wrote. I was afraid of an impossible communication, of a hurting sense of unbridgeable and senselessness. I tried to focus my thoughts during walks, and usually had to put them away, as they put me down in a time when this isn't needed. It wasn't fair, and I know that very well, I was just hoping you won't pay much attention to it. I was wrong.

I've always had contradictory feelings about my role in this conversation. The more intimate one's engagement with history, the deeper one's sense of tragedy, and, in a case like this of, a raw outsider dealing with a very decent citizen - I presume that we are comradely friends in this discursive adventure -of another country, the potential for adventitious harm or know-all condescension is ever present. I reflect that that while for me religion for example is a delusional system, most of the people I know or love happen to embrace a creed. I don't talk about my views, unless prompted. If prompted I take a text or a doctrine and, well, either construe a different meaning than the canonical one all are familiar with, or tease the idea apart (without vehemence). It's never upset my relationships. Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, as the saying goes, with the caution that 'veritas' is a dialogic/elenchic goal: no one has it in their pocket. Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(B)What you wrote, putting it all in a nutshell, was a great relief on one side, and a cause for disappointment on the other. Relief, because almost every word you've written could very well have come from me. And disappointment, because it's obvious that I haven't managed to put my point across.

Everything one turns over is like a bezeled gem, one facet catches one's attention, till a glitter on a contiguous slant leads to other reflections.Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(C)I thought my messages to you and maybe the way I've contributed to I/P articles so far had created a clearer picture of me. I don't identify easily. Not with national narratives and identities, nor with ideologies. It's only a few basic positions I'm holding at present, which I can be sure won't change with time. I believe a good move is one that creates the biggest amount of satisfaction and peace, since happiness is overrated, among people as a whole. I'm anything but tribal. So far, I came to believe that people are best off in the company of other people of a common attitude, which more often than not has to do with a common cultural and social background. Not ethnicity. That becomes difficult when certain deeply engrained ways in one's family and social environment is insular and makes it close to impossible to find friends and start a family outside that bubble, which might be defined ethnically, or in many other ways - social and cultural islands appear in many contexts, some create remarkable individuals, but seldom happy ones. Expats, people who had multiple socialisations in different countries, enrich their own society, but will always be on its margin, as they will usually both have a hard time accepting the consensus, what is considered "common sense" by the others, and will also be perceived as something of an outsider, even in those cases where they'll become honoured members of the community and even its leaders.

It may be my 'on the spectrum' temperament: a tendency to dwell on details and forget the person whose remarks reminded me of them. When I lectured, I actually lost all awareness of the people listening -often my voice dropped and I ended up lecturing myself. Bad habit, or congenital character defect. But in the Wordsworthian aftermaths, all the contextual atmosphere takes over my recall of such occasions, and then I start to perceive the interlocutor. What you wrote, in any case, was unnecessary. You, it hardly need be said, have a highly individualized voice and tone, no one could mistake for a cypher of tribalisms etc.

When you state: 'people are best off in the company of other people of a common attitude, which more often than not has to do with a common cultural and social background,' however, I demur. I accept the Aristotelian premise of course - it is self-evident - that man is a politikon zôon, an 'animal with a social life within a polis'. But that does not translate into 'best off in the company of like-minded people with a shared culture'. The Greek case is exemplary: democracy was endless competitive rivenness, and its heroes were almost invariably anomalies to the common ethos cementing such an ethnos: Odysseus-who 'got to grasp the minds of men the world over' in his restless expatriation; Akhilles -who faced down Agamemnon and the authority of his royal sceptre and, as his name suggests etymologically (Gregory Nagy) 'caused grief to the people' (laos); Oedipus, whose 'crime' was known to all but himself, and whose dogged persistence in searching for the truth in the face of a popular cover-up of silence led to his own illumination, and undoing; or, to be gender-fair, Antigone, who died out of loyalty to a principle of sibling love in defiance of autocratic statism in Hegel's great reading, etc. As to your second point re expats - the lesson of modernity, already present throughout history, is that distinctive cultural styles emerge from dissonant individuals, those sensitive to anomalies in the given order - art, music and literature in their creative peaks always break with a canonical order- all most all of the creative spirits of Greece and Rome were outsiders, provincials, not centralists ensconced in the metropolitan heartland. 'Commonsense'? I'm reminded of Keynes's quip that the obviousness of commonsense is a residue of something that, in the past, was just marginal piece of thinking, or more pregnantly, of Nietzsche's trenchant aperçu that public opinion is only testimony to the lack of a private opinion, one an individual doesn't repeat from hearsay, but thinks through and up on the merits of their own experience. Yes, you could say that my pseud's corner recitative of epigrammatic contraria dishonours some commonsensical vox populi with a certain arch sniffiness. I'll disagree: I think the gutters have told me as many truths as those I've clipped from the ivory towers. My experience tells me that there is no such thing as 'normalcy,' that 'commonsense' gets it right less than half the time, and is sheer hand-me-down baloney for the rest. Societies that strive for sanity do so by a vitalizing acceptance of difference, dissonance: the mutual regard of our fellows with whom we beg to differ on the basis that we are all 'odd' to each other, and must not only tolerate difference, but hail it as the spice of real civility. If proof of all this were needed, take the haskalah wherein the emergence of men and women from the sterile ghettos of oppression, internal and external, flushed Europe with a dazzling outpouring of genius, in good part because the peculiar doubleness of diasporic life, its coruscating mix of marginalization and inclusion within the bosom of another society, was a recipe for creativity. Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(D)I'm straying a bit, but not much. I can subscribe to all you've written in your last post. I'm not subscribing to other, previous things you wrote. I didn't read much, so I'm easily faulted by others quoting facts which I don't know, but I did think about these topics quite a bit. Herzl was a mediocre writer and seemingly not the smartest altogether, but he did hit a nerve. One can always counter with Dieter Hildebrandt's coprophagic "piece of advice", "Millionen Fliegen können nicht irren", or by counting the small number of people who voted with their feet and did spend their money on a train ticket to Basel in 1892, but that's irrelevant. If you read only books from one end of the spectrum, they'll only push one agenda. I've tried to cover all bases, and it seems to me that yes, few European Jews in their right mid-class mind contemplated moving to an Ottoman backwater, among thorns and camels, as it was. But many did eventually pin their hopes on maybe something good coming out of it. And with good reason for the times they were living in. I have little problem with the Afrikaners, non-native Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc.: they didn't take off from Holland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Russia, whatever, to kill Indians or Aborigines. Most of them had little to regret, other than being uprooted, which is no fun, believe me. The Jews who left "the old country" weren't different, in their majority. So the madcap tag and the lunatic Herzl, that's where we disagree. I know that it's an urban myth, but that wise statement attributed to Zhou Enlai about two centuries not allowing enough perspective as to make a value judgement on the French Revolution can be a valid point, but it mustn't. The fact that Israel seems to be running headlong into a dead-end street doesn't mean that it's been a mad idea from the get go. White Australia seems to have won the bet, the Boers haven't; not sure it was clear from the start, nor did many of the first Aussies come by choice, while the Boers did, and quite well prepared at that. A recent BBC programme discussed a study on how many people are needed to lead a revolution to success: 3% of the population. No more. Preferably non-violent. Romanians are very proud of the 1989 "revolution", but I doubt there were even 3% involved, going out in the streets and all. That's how it always works. You need 3%, but 3% who have a good idea and at least a large chunk of the population eventually supporting them - from their homes, from their armchairs, with a donation, a bit of lobbying, a story told among the family. The rest is done by the 3% who open the way. There is always a thorough selection of which of the many 3% factions out there the majority will follow, and as much as I don't believe in the intrinsic wisdom of the masses, democracy, in the sense of a majority choosing a way, does have a justification. Given the human nature, it still might be the best justification available. If it leads to disaster, it wasn't by choice and intention and certainly not "plain for everyone to see". I do apply this to catastrophic decisions such as Nazism and Bolshevik Communism, too. Surely not as a blanket excuse and pardon, but as a way of understanding processes.

(a)'Millionen Fliegen können nicht irren.' (b) 'contemplated moving to an Ottoman backwater, among thorns and camels'.

To gather all your metaphors in one bundle, I might respond with Anthony Trollope's 'We strain at our gnats, but we swallow our camels with ease'.(Doctor Thorne (1858) OUP 1983 p.293)

for the times they were living in. I have little problem with the Afrikaners, non-native Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc.: they didn't take off from Holland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Russia, whatever, to kill Indians or Aborigines.

Tony Judt answered that talking point, I think definitively. Israel came far too late to the colonial table. But its place is assured among the nations: it just has to catch up with the others and divest itself, as European nations did, of the colonial mentality and practices. There is another possibility, not to be discounted: in the global crisis, for 'advanced' nations to take on board the Israeli anomaly of anachronistic colonialism and revamp it as the answer to the critical issues of immigration, the control of internal dissidence, policing George Bush's new world ordure. That is quite possible. I often feel like I've been time-machined back into the Weimar period, with all of the intervening 'lessons of history' erased from collective consciousness.

the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel’s ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal “foreigners,” has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge. . .The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.'

By the way, the Kiwis are different: they were fought to a standstill, and the invaders had to negotiate a treaty. My family has been in Australia since 1836 - and descendants of the pioneering generation cleared the land by shooting or poisoning aborigines, whatever an archival fool like Keith Windshuttle concludes.

There is an unspeakable complacency in that remark attributed to Zhou Enlai, a profound thoughtlessness (almost certainly, if he did say that, as a Marxist thoroughly trained in its dialectical interpretations of historical processes, he would have been referring to 1968). The meaning, for a Marxist, of the events of 1789 was dogmatically fixed, unlike recent events. It's complacent too because, well, would anyone say 'we don't know the historic meaning of the Holocaust, it's too early to tell?' Framed thus, the insipidity of the construal of his remark leaps out.

The fact that Israel seems to be running headlong into a dead-end street doesn't mean that it's been a mad idea from the get go.

I'm not talking, to repeat, about Israel, but its colonial ambitions. If the aim of Zionism was to allow Jews to lead a 'normal' life, that has been rendered possible since 1948. People like yourself and Bolter et al., can pursue your lives, dreams in an atmosphere of relative normalcy, except for the fact that post 1967, the country has taken on board a completely stupid project (implicit in the underbelly of Zionist thinking), i.e. Eretz Israel That colonial project, just for an extra patch of land, puts Israelis in the situation of American soldiers in Vietnam. There, much of the trauma they came away with arose from living on base, icecream, hamburgers, TV shows from home, Budweiser, goggling at Raquel Welch's buoyantly sumptuous tits as Bob Hope cracked jokes, plenty of 'skirt' in the streets, and then, orders would come, and in a jiffy you would find yourself plunked down by helicopter in a leech-infested infernal booby-trapped tropical jungle with the locals firing mortars at you. Survive that, and you'd be whipped back to the hamburgers and whipped cream, and be allowed to hallucinate you were in some extension of California. This rapid switch from that place out there, and a persuasive charade of normalcy back here created a neurosis, not unlike, if far more devastating, what Israelis, in their far safer IDF tours of the territories, experience. None of that need be the case. In the end run hybris has its costs, and one of them is the core concept of living normally. Sure, it's tolerable. After all, this relative normalcy is nothing like what they have to put up with in the insane ghettos they are penned up in. And, after all, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity (to fuck off, and have to be forced to do so, even if they're Nazareth Israelis out on a picnic, as happened the other day).*Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

• again today. The loutish jerk, a thug from Havat Zvi, near Jibiya, an outpost with a definitive demolition order since February last year, is even in Israeli terms an illegal presence there. We all get tangled up in the big picture: but, mein Freund, Der Teufel steckt im Detail.

(E)Talking figures: I thought I had given an answer to that, but I see now that I haven't sent it. I felt tired through and through and "stored" it, about a month ago. It's here below, under the dotted line. I honestly don't think those you've quoted stand up to scrutiny.

(F)I see the decent side of Israel like the legendary rider who managed to jump on a tiger or lion, is holding on as hell, but doesn't know how to get out of the situation. This doesn't cover those driven by religion, nationalism, narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness, you call it, and who do seem to have reached a critical mass, at least among the electorate. Those are leading the dead-end race I mentioned. The lion riders I can understand much better. Being humanistically inclined doesn't mean to be blind to reality. I understand and truly regret that you've been bullied for some real or perceived Irishness. I know about "No Irish need apply". But how many of your immediate family, one or two generations up the family tree, have been, in their lifetime, expelled from university, job, house, and - here comes the quantum leap - heard the threats, clear and loud through the window, "we'll finish them off; the young, pretty one, we have a better use for" and then got away from being killed, but just, while friends and acquaintances a few streets away didn't? How much do you know about the state turning against you, not just a bunch of hooligans you can dismiss? Because I'm not talking of beatings, being spit on etc., that's run of the mill stuff. I don't know if you came across Mihail Sebastian's Journal and related works. I highly recommend it. For tribal people, the us and them is clear. When your choices are of a different nature, the analysis goes deeper and the results and rationally correct decisions can look twisted and skewed, going against the "common sense". That's what makes his experience universal and moving. And made him despair. I've lived through very different times, when the lid was on and only seldom slightly lifted, and I was never taught to separate people into "them" and "us" other than in cultural terms, and have taken deep dives in every direction. I am not a priori afraid, distant or incurious. With me you're preaching to the choir. But I do know a Jewish Israeli who was told in high school by a male Arab friend of hers "You're my friend, but when the war comes I'll kill you." And that was a serious guy, he didn't joke around. That's hard to forget. I'm not talking about seeing anti-Semitism or old foes where there are none, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their fear of one specific sheriff, even in Guatemala, I'm talking about a type of mentality and toughness. The Jews have produced their fair share of Meir Lanskys and other gangsters, but for the majority they don't constitute heroes and models.

how many of your immediate family, one or two generations up the family tree, have been, in their lifetime, expelled from university, job, house, and - here comes the quantum leap - heard the threats, clear and loud through the window, "we'll finish them off; the young, pretty one, we have a better use for" and then got away from being killed, but just, while friends and acquaintances a few streets away didn't? How much do you know about the state turning against you, not just a bunch of hooligans you can dismiss?

None. But that, arguably doesn't apply to most Jews historically either. It certainly applies to those (many) who had a specific experience of life in, in particular, parts of Eastern Europe at one time. I grew up with many Jews who had absolutely no such family experience in their background, and though they were quite familiar with the facts, they lacked the sense of collective persecution you hint at. It does not constitute the collective identity of all Jews - I know the granddaughter of a woman who was forced to prostitute herself at Auschwitz, and later went crazy. The daughter is perfectly at home in the country she was born in. On a kibbutz I worked at, Americans were smoking dope, and the kibbutzniks warned them repeatedly this was unacceptable - their own children might start imitating the practice. The Americans persisted. A final warning came. The kibbutz was scheduled to be raided the night before, but before they gave the police the go-ahead, a final deliberation, out of scruple, was made. There a young man, whose parents had survived WW2 as Czechoslovaks, made a speech that stopped the council from giving the green light. A speech more or less along the lines:'Are we ready for this? Asking police, in military drag, leather boots perhaps, accompanied by snapping Alsatians at 2 am. to burst into rooms hosting these foreigners working on our kibbutz, roust up everyone, push them out, frisk them, forage among their personal effects, and take away the few who smoke dope here?' The echo of the past resonated and the order was cancelled. He wore in his being a sense of the past, of analogy. However, the analogy doesn't work with Arabs. Every night, several to a dozen of such operations are carried out in the territories, and have been so for 5 decades, and most Palestinians know what it must have been to be Jewish and haunted by relentless thugs. It's all minutely documented but falls under the radar of Israeli historical sensibility. I've always thought being Palestinian in the territories is analogous to being a Jew in central Europe in the decade of terror leading up to but not including events after Wannsee. And precisely because reading deeply about those decades was formative for me, I remain bewildered by what has happened in the post-1967 period, unless I take on board the idea that the forging of an ethos of unique grievance and exceptionalism is so powerful in its effects that history has no informative power to moderate one's outlook through the obvious analogies that arise between past and present.Nishidani (talk) 18:35, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

I do know a Jewish Israeli who was told in high school by a male Arab friend of hers "You're my friend, but when the war comes I'll kill you." . .I'm talking about a type of mentality and toughness. The Jews have produced their fair share of Meir Lanskys and other gangsters, but for the majority they don't constitute heroes and models.'

No. That is cheap. Rather like my quoting Unit 101's Meir Har-Zion's anecdote about the heroics of his mates when they infiltrated al-Burj on 31 August 1953 to insinuate some stupid prejudice about Israelis:

‘The wide, dry riverbed glitters in the moonlight. We advance, carefully, along the mountain slope. Several houses can be seen. Bushes and shrubbery sway in the breeze, casting their shadows on the ground. In the distance we can see three lights and hear the sounds of Arab music coming out of the homes immersed in darkness. . Soon, the silence will be shattered by bullets, explosions, and the screams of those who are now sleeping peacefully. We advance quickly and enter one of the houses "Mann Haatha?" (Arabic for "Who's there?") We leap towards the voices. Fearing and trembling, two Arabs are standing up against the wall of the building. They try to escape. I open fire. An ear piercing scream fills the air. One man falls to the ground, while his friend continues to run. Now we must act we have no time to lose. We make our way from house to house as the Arabs scramble about in confusion. Machine guns rattle, their noise mixed with a terrible howling. We reach the main thoroughfare of the camp. The mob of fleeing Arabs grows larger. The other group attacks from the opposite direction. The thunder of hand grenades echoes in the distance. We receive an order to retreat. The attack has come to an end.

On the following morning, the headlines will read: "The refugee camp of Al-Burj near Gaza was attacked. The camp has been serving as a base for infiltrators into Israeli territory. 'Twenty people were killed and another twenty were wounded."

A telephone line blocks our way. We cut it and continue. A narrow path leads along the slope of a hill. The column marches forward in silence. Stop! A few rocks roll down the hill. I catch sight of a man surveying the silence. I cock my rifle. Gibly crawls over to me, "Har, for God's sake, a knife!!" His clenched teeth glitter in the dark and his whole body is tight, his mind alert, "For God's sake," . . . I put my tommy down and unsheath my machete. We crawl towards the lone figure as he begins to sing a trilled Arab tune. Soon the singing will turn into a death moan. I am shaking, every muscle in my body is tense. This is my first experience with this type of weapon. Will I be able to do it?

We draw closer. There he stands, only a few meters in front of us. We leap. Gibly grabs him and I plunge the knife deep into his back. The blood pours over his striped cotton shirt. With not a second to lose, I react instinctively and stab him again. The body groans, struggles and then becomes quiet and still.

(G) That was mainly about the old country. Now, Palestine. The perceived tiger. How often did you see somebody killed with wooden boards with nails and metal bars just a few feet away from you? Vendetta. Very common, along with "honour killings". And being told by a smiling acquaintance "ah, that's nothing, in my town me and my uncle would be in the thick of it, every other week or so, here, a knife scar on my arm, there's another one on my back, that was trickier. It's allowed by custom, until the sheikh or mukhtar says "Stop!". Then, if you don't, your family is banned from the village. This guy was banned and he drove through, this is a main road, not much choice. They recognised him. Bad luck." Further down the same road, just days apart, demonstrators against too many honour killings. Immerhin. And the experience from Jordan, where the police officer was practicing his English small-talk skills while his colleagues were beating a loud guy from the station's lockup cell to a pulp, and then handcuffed him to the heating pipe next to the officer, crouching and bleeding from the head. "And how did you enjoy Petra?" They slowly start changing the laws, officially showing less leniency towards honour killings and vendettas. This among the tribe, not outside of it. Not read in Zionist propaganda papers, but lived, seen, smelled by myself. And towards the "other"? The suicide bombings and eye-to-eye stabbings are not adventure literature. Did you try to imagine what could push you to do it yourself? I've tried and I did kind of manage, but not really. What am I trying to say? Not my cultural and social bunch. As a whole. Individuals? No problem, one can exit one's shell, follow one's instinct and character, re-socialise or even find a way among the tribals to stay a step aside. I can imagine friendship, marriage, anything. That's easy, especially, as you wrote, in "America", which can be anywhere in the West. In the "tribal territories", hardly. The jackals would eat you up, every drop of your energy, and brandmark your common children. I'm not in favour of any tribe. None. They're scary, with their Confederate flags in the Capitol, sidelocks in the wind, beards full of conviction, suit and tie in the national colours. But at least keeping the tribes a bit apart still sounds like a better proposition than not. Each among its own borders. And Zeus, please keep me out of it, anyway. But there's less and less space for that. Somebody was comparing it with a pendulum movement, right now the Orbans, Trumps, Netantyahus etc. are just the arms of the clock indicating how far the pendulum is been pushing in one direction, after we've had our turn a number of decades ago. If correct, that at least means it's going to turn again. Insh'allah.

I believe you when you cite these personal experiences. For every item, I can supply large amounts of detailed papers by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem, Breaking the Silence and a dozen other organizations which document precisely this order of savagery as standard practice by Israel occupational troops. And a very substantial number of cases concern children in detention. If these personal experiences inform your views about Palestinians, what impact would my reading of that documentary record of similar brutality have on me, were I allow the knowledge to overwhelm me and seduce me to make invidious caricatures of the group, some of whose members regularly do such things? Nishidani (talk) 21:15, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(H)So yes, the validity of a political movement can change over time. Its goals too. Aung San Suu Kyi looked better in 2010 than in 2017, Obama in Cairo better than later on. No madcap there, just evolution, and far too many smart people haven't foreseen it, as to point out the few who maybe have. Sometimes even the latter based it on the wrong premises - God's wrath & justice, Marx's analysis of class struggle, the "will of the people" and so forth.

That just tempts me to write an article Analysts who foresaw what would happen in Palestine. It would be wide-ranging, from Jabotinsky and Toynbee onwards. A lot of history is predictable from some large decision: the consequences of George Bush's invasion of Iraq is just the most notorious case . the aftermath was widely and accurately predicted.Nishidani (talk) 22:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(1)So far, the Jews of Israel have fared by far better in terms of fatalities than those who remained in Europe in the 1930s, the Nakba with precursor and aftermath has been less bloody than the Indian Partition and the events between Turks and Greeks in 1914-1920s. Not a good comparison, it never is, and I would prefer nobody had suffered. And that I could have an omelette every day and the hens could still keep their eggs unbroken.

So far, the Jews of Israel have fared by far better in terms of fatalities than those who remained in Europe in the 1930s

That sentence's analytical incoherence (failure to construe the nature of the analogy) surprises me. You are letting yourself down. (So far, the Jews of the United States. Australia, Canada, England, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Norway have fared far better in terms of casualties than those in Israel) etc. (2) The Palestinians of Jordan have fared by far better in terms of fatalities than those who remained in the West Bank and Gaza. 13,000 disappeared down the memory hole in 1948.Nishidani (talk) 22:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(J)What now? What's to be had? Jews to the sea? (8 million would make quite a raft of the Medusa.) A two-state solution? A one-state solution? The Iranian bomb? If I'll ever catch Santa coming down the chimney, I'd say go for the one-state solution. But only then. If anyone could push it through, forced evacuation and all (yeah, sure), the two-state solution with compensations and massive economic help. If I catch Santa a second time, I'd have a go at Peres's plan-from-the-drawer, with a tripartite economic confederation including Jordan, plus a commission of historians to work out binding guidelines for school manuals in all three "cantons", the Kniefall von Warschau all over again and all over the place, and instead of ACs an angel flapping next to each citizen in July and August, on national insurance costs. Actually, I will keep on hoping for that.

'Jews to the sea' is hard to beat as a meme of sheer silliness. Its rhetorical popularity and 50 years of media replaying as opposed to the numerous declarations from political and rabbinical authorities over that period calling for the genocide of Palestinians. When Ovadia Yosef chants similar nonsense, the hullabaloo blows over in a few days. You should know that better than I not to allow one's thinking to get caught up in the trammels of the empty clichés that proliferate in this area.Nishidani (talk) 22:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

No decent, rational outcome is possible, since there is no solution. It will be more of the same. I guess Israelis can live with that. But if one wanted to be practical, one could suggest desisting with massive land theft and start paying damages at market value for all of the land seized and settled since 1967. I.e. put the occupation on a sound footing of acceptable modern market practices.Nishidani (talk) 22:53, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(K)For now, I'll try to get my focus back again and get ahead with life, which I haven't for the last 11 months. I hope to learn a bit from you, including the gardening and cooking. Also dealing with death is such a forgotten art, and what you told me is beyond remarkable. And in the meantime I'll try not to make too many gaffes, such as recently, when I made a joke about Rapture with a German acquaintance who wasn't just Protestant, but a bit on the Evangelical Freikirchler side too. Not great. Humour can be deadly.

My azalea, planted in memory of my wife, looked like imitating her, rather than blooming. Crushed chestnut bark fertilizer has done wonders, and it has begun to bloom. I'll refrain, out of concern for your own health, to making culinary suggestions. Whenever I want to worry my local Italian friends, and stir them with intimations I may not be 'normal' (well, that's stating the obvious) I mention that a couple of weeks ago, rather bored by the usual sugo recipe, I whipped one up from whatever leftover ingredients lay in the fridge. I.e. spaghetti with crushed cauliflower and tuna sauce. (I survived the experience without indigestion or palatal backflips, but I certainly would not suggest imitation of my experiments in weird concoctions).Nishidani (talk) 22:53, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(L)I am truly sorry for the month-long hiding in my underground lair and the disappointment I have caused. Have a great time on the Insel der Glückseligen Down Under! Kind regards [signing below the "archive bit"]

---

(M)I can see that you are a passionate humanist, cultural philosopher and debater. In theoretical terms I might not subscribe to any idea, theory or principle opposed to yours: the world we would both love to see our close ones live in is pretty much one and the same. The world I have experienced though, and the experience of others who have passed it on to me in plausible renderings of the past or of contemporary aspects I haven't seen myself, seems very far from yours. Maybe because Communist Romania was, unlike Australia, a place where not X or Y, this group of goons or that, was against you; but the system, those in power. The regime was rotten, it seemed to be endlessly powerful and everlasting, oppressive by definition and intention, and impossible to change from within. And "you" meant everyone, even the apparatchiks, who knew perfectly well that they needed to save themselves over the ultimate finishing line, to end like Dzerzhinsky rather than Beria. Ceauşescu was very good at his game, but ultimately lost big during extra time. The staircase window of our Bucharest house had a crack from the American bombing of the city in 1944 (in the 80s!), and our nanny had bitter-funny memories from the other Great War; there was a visible and palpable continuity between the eras of that century I still am mentally an inhabitant of. I'm not at all passionate about Zionism as you suggest, nor do I think to have, as you much more elegantly put it, an intensely passionate identity with a collective tradition of suffering. Unless thoroughly missing to understand myself by now, that's not me. I am however hugely impressed by the achievements of those who came to Ottoman and British Palestine and in a few short decades, either moved by Zionism or not at all, have totally beaten the odds. And I am more inclined to believe that the initiators of the project honestly believed to be doing two interconnected things: to be serving in a decent and morally defendable way a "people" defined not much differently than any European would have defined his own at the time, from which each individual leader chose a segment to identify with and a whole lot more to dissociate from, in order to, yes, take it out of harm's way; and to experiment with one's own ideas of progress and, for some, even utopia.

I am however hugely impressed by the achievements of those who came to Ottoman and British Palestine and in a few short decades, either moved by Zionism or not at all, have totally beaten the odds.

That is technically a variant on the 'making the desert bloom' meme, which is actually the object of an interesting old article (Alan George, '"Making the Desert Bloom" A Myth Examined,' Journal of Palestine Studies 8:2 (Winter, 1979), pp.88-100, provides all the data). What Palestinians did with their landscape in places like (Battir etc. (I mentioned the massive citrus groves in the area of Jaffa which accounted for 80% of Mandatory Palestine's foreign export income) without the substantial foreign funding available to their Jewish competitors, is ignored, though not by the British who recognized that the Jews had access to money, the fellahin had to do without, and they nonetheless managed to cultivate most of the arable land in Palestine. Nishidani (talk) 23:18, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

(N)The Zionist enterprise was not targeted at exploiting the natives. The way of acquiring land was by purchase, often paying twice - to the absentee owner like the Sursuqs, and a second time to the tenant farmers who were actually living on that piece of land. The 96% of the physical assets of the land in Arab property in 1947 must be a mistake: the Sultan, as the embodiment of the Ottoman State, owned the by far largest part of the land, and the Brits didn't change much about it, except for taking over that largest piece of real estate in the name of the government. I'm probably confusing here physical assets with real estate, but am I? The WP article on the Naqba offers the figures of 711,000 Palestinian refugees outside Israel, and an estimated of 160,000 remaining in Israel, internal refugees included. The demographic history of Palestine puts the Jewish population there at 630,000. So a ratio of 87:63 before the 1947-49 war. Keeping in mind the socio-economic background of the two communities, it makes no sense to imagine that the Jews, comprising roughly 40% of the population in the part of Palestine that would be 1949 Israel, had only managed to create through work or acquire a mere 4% (100-96=4, not 6) of the physical assets of the places they were living in. It takes so much spinning and massaging the numbers to get there, that it beats even Ceauşescu's 5-Year-Plan final rapports to the Central Committee, in which Socialist Romania beat the US & USSR taken together (as a joke, but a very accurate one in describing the tendency in the 80s).

'Reply to E and N.

I don’t think we should quarrel over figures, when they are a matter of the consensual historical record. Walid Khalidi’s Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution in Journal of Palestine Studies , Autumn, 1997, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp.5-21, however much one might find his rhetorical language distasteful (I don’t), puts the factual record straight.

In the years 1932-43, the vast continent of the United States had received 170,883 Jews, while the minuscule Palestine had received 232,524 during the same period.p.9. Even the non-Nazi pre-Allied powers pressed for internal political reasons to dump Jews onto the Arabs.

• The area of Palestine covered 27 million dunams
• The population by December 1946 was 1,972,000:
• 1,364,000 Palestinians
• 608,000 Jews.
• The UN Partition plan foresaw a Palestinian state with 818,000 Palestinians and less than 10,000 Jews.
• The Jewish state would have about 499,000 Jews (the remainder were in the Jerusalem enclave) and about 438,000 Palestinians
• The Jerusalem enclave would have 105,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Jews.
• On the eve of partition Jews, 33% of the population, owned 1,820,000 dunams, (-7%) of Palestine, but were to receive 15,000,000 dunams, 55.5% of the land, an expone ntial ninefold increase
• Within the foreseen Israeli area state. The highest estimate of land in Jewish title amounts to 1,678,000 dunams (11.2%) percent.
• Of the cultivable 7,500,000 dunams within the proposed Israel, 1,500,000 was under Jewish ownership.The rest,80%, was under Palestinian cultivation.
• The 12,000,000 dunams assigned to Palestinians (66% of the population ‘awarded" 44% of the land 1% was owned by Jews.
• The international enclave of Jerusalem amounted to 187,000 dunams of which a mere , 12,500 dunams was in Jewish hands.
• Citrus production, which accounted for 80% of the economy’s export income was almost totally owned and run by Palestinians, but the area where it was based was assigned to Jews. That with Chaim Weizmann, closing a winking eye at his neighbourly friends, the al-Banna family's interests, the core of it was seized by Jewish troops without a fight.
• Haifa, its petroleum epicenter, though demographically divided 50/50 was assigned to Israel
• Jaffa Palestine’s one port, was isolated from the agricultural lands that supported much of its income.Nishidani (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
• The upper waters of the Jordan, on which any future states’ viability was pinioned, was given to Israel
• Lake Tiberias with its rich fishing industry, entirely in Palestinian hands, was consigned to the Jewish state.
• The only airport in the country fell within the boundaries of the Jewish state.

As Chaim Weizmann told Roosevelt in 1944, a Jewish state could never emerge if the precondition was a consensual agreement with the Arabs.Nishidani (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

(O)The same article offers for 1890 the numbers: Jews - 43k, Arabs - 489k, totalling 532k. Half a million. That's less than sparse. (Today there are some 14 million between Jordan and Med; environmentally speaking a bit too many, but it could be managed if.) No natural riches worth talking about, no pull factor for anyone. To empires Palestine did have the value of a strategic corridor between the continents, but to the population this has never been anything than a headache. The local elite was so thin that any kind of budding Western-style thought of nationhood had to remain a topic for salon discussions among the time's 1%. No Nablus burgher had anything in common with the Negev Bedouin, not even much with Jerusalem's Husseinis, Nashashibis, Khalilis and Khalidis. As much as I don't put into the same pot Ashkenazi numbers with, say, Yemenite Jews, I don't see much reason for adding those numbers of Arab-speaking subjects from the eyalets between Akka and Aqaba into one category. They wouldn't have, and they actually didn't. Different times, a different sense of identity. The light came from Damascus and Beirut, also Cairo for some. Don't forget, back then the Alsacians and Saarlanders hadn't fully figured out where they belong either. Arminden (talk) 09:06, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Jeez pal. That note on your page wasn't a prompt. I saw a mindless bot note which suggested a series of puns, and indulged myself. Tutto qua. If any of my remarks cause you personal grief, or give you the impression I'm targeting you as a passionate Zionist, then I deserve more than the 'six of the best' (caught out at boarding school for some graver infraction, we were summarily thwacked by a 'gat' on the outstretched hands. A gat was a piece of flexible metal swathed in rubber and then sewn with a rectangular leather coverlet, and six was the limit allowed for our supervisors. Of course, kids are cunning: we turned it into a competition, awarding £5 at term end to whoever managed the highest score of beatings. It also helped to train us all not to wince under pain, on the hypothesis that this only added to the pleasure of the men who handed out punishment.) My apologies if I read that way. And by all means don't feel under any obligation to keep up the conversation. Most conversations shouldn't aim to persuade others, as much as to fish up and endow with clarity what seethes beneath the horizons of our self-awareness - an exercise in the discursive illustration of Freud's wo Es war, soll Ich werden. Only when that is done, can one measure the propositional grammar of one's thought against the hard syntax of reality.

A morning of house maintenance has denied me the cappuccino input, always during a morning stroll, and leisure to read over your text, which I however will start to atrtend to, after I've done some work on the Semien article. Stay well and safe in the mean(Covid)time.Nishidani (talk) 11:42, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

No worries, mate. (Other that it prompted me to pretend that I can speak Aussie English, and that's a big worry). If ideas that have been brewing in my head for a long time get a chance to exit, they burst out. It has happened to me, too when I've let off some cursory comments or jokes on topics I was familiar with, but on which I had formed an opinion strongly tending to one side of the ongoing match, which I wrongly presumed to be the consensual one in a given group, and got showered with unexpected remarks. This is indeed one of those topics where perception is reality, so going about it the same way one would solve a chess problem doesn't really cut it. History has always been a messy business, when it runs you or other human beings into a wall you have the obligation to act, but judging the more remote past is not an exact science. I'll try to close the computer now for a few moments to have a bite and go to the grocer's. Have a great day and enjoy hanging upside down from this fast-spinning blue bedlam ball, Arminden (talk) 08:21, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Slight correction. That should be, stricto sensu, 'no wuz, mate'*, and thus transcribed, Robert's a close relative = Bob's your uncle:). I don't rush important conversations, and indeed, when I get caught up in sheer hallucinating longueurs of humpty-dumpty flimflam, as recently, ahem, the things that interest me get sacrificed - replies here, or rewriting the totally erratic Kingdom of Semien article and its sister pieces Gudit (how a 'legendary figure' can have a floruit is beyond me!). I caught the above on a teabreak and have to finish building a stone wall for my vegetable patch and the cement will dry if I don't rush, but here's a bit of dialect from my translations of the omnia opera of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, that illustrates my dialect, and, in a way, underwrites my basic perception of the world (and therefore the way I read the I/P conflict). No wuz, I will get back to you properly over the weekend. Cheers, pal.

(*just a note on 'mate'. All consonant finals in Strine tend to be silent, with the tongue poised at the right point on palate or teeth but refraining from hitting home to complete the sound. 'may(t)'. If the 't' is pronounced, in 'mate', it becomes emphatic with a slight menacing nuance of remonstration etc.)

No.1394 Le bbestie der paradiso terrestre. (19/12/1834)

Prima d'Adamo, senza dubbio arcuno
Er ceto de le bbestie de llà ffori
Fascéveno una vita da siggnori
Senza dipenne un cazzo da ggnisuno.

Ggnente cucchieri, ggnente cacciatori,
Nò mmascelli, nò bbòtte, nò ddiggiuno.
E rriguardo ar parlà, pparlava oggnuno
Come parleno adesso li dottori.

Venuto però Adamo a ffà er padrone,
Ecchete l'archibbusci e la mazzola,
Le carrozze e 'r zughillo der bastone.

E cquello è stato er primo tempo in cui
L'omo levò a le bbestie la parola
Pe pparlà ssolo e avé rraggione lui.

No. 1394 The animals in paradise on earth (27/2/2001)

Long befor Adam, there ain’ a shadda’ra dout,
The class uv anamuls, way oudduv a gum’ment’s reach,
Lived the life a Riley, n’ getten by was a peach,
Wiff no bosses ta wirk ya like a fucken rouseabout.

There woddnt no coachies or hunters way back then;
No butchers, no bashens, or waiten roun’ f’ra feed.
An, as fa speaken’, the lodduv’em, ev’ry last breed,
Spoke like boffins do now, jus’ like learnèd men.

But then Adam bowled up ta take over the reins
An muskets an whips turned up oudda the blue,
Along with coaches n’ cudgels fa spadderen brains.

An that was the very first time wearby man
Robbed anamuls a speech, so onli he coud chew
The cud an pud’em all down wif tha voyse a reasan.

Notes:Shadda = shadow; oudduv = out of; wiff=with; rouseabout = cheap gofer kind of labourer, esp. in shearing sheds on outback stations;  life of Riley= easy, 'cushy' (comfortable) life; woddnt =were not; coachie;  coachman (notorious for careering through streets and running over dogs, cats and even poor people);fra = for a; lodduv =lot of; boffin =any recognized expert esp. with a scientific cast of mind; bowl up = turn up, appear; oudda =out of;  Spadder ‘spatter’;  wearby = 'Whereby' though it sounds to many as ‘literary’, is actually used (ungrammatically) quite frequently in dialect, and is not as intrusive as it would at first sight appear to be; chew the cud= ruminate, think about, mull over a problem; pud 'em all down= put them all down, 'put down' playing on the two primary meanings of 'put someone back in their place'/'kill an animal' (to put one out of its misery);voyse a reasan = voice of reason.Nishidani (talk) 13:59, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

It's hard to hold back a smile thinking of the exchange of messages. Zero: That friend of yours went overboard. He's losing it. You: Right away, hold your horses, to the rescue! Regards, Arminden (talk) 23:15, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Zero? God is above friendship,-one either prays in quiet awe supplicating Him for information only the Omniscient is privy to, or quavers in fear as His eye examines one's work on earth, and while Yahweh does admit to getting pissed off, I think the Tanakh only mentions a mere mortal like Jonah going overboard (and, thanks to that, part of the imagery of one of my favourite books, Pinocchio, was born). Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 23:23, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Talking of Yahweh, if you do have the time & patience, here's a lecture I've bumped into, of a professor not lacking a good sense of humour who holds a rather irreverent opinion on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5o6UO0yxRg . Pinocchio is quite wonderful, but did you come across Buratino? The author, of Tolstoy & Turgenev descent, did a great recycling job, and as a child his book charmed me more than Collodi's. Who knows, maybe the illustrations were funnier and more suspenseful than the other book's. Just one more link in the chain from Pinocchio back to Jonah, and maybe Ugarit's and Babylon's sea monsters. Except that the older ones were far from well-behaved and happy to serve as useful submarines. Cheers. Arminden (talk) 01:05, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for Yaakov Malkin's lecture. Rather than irreverent, it's commonsensical, and at times illuminating, though his distinction between the historical truth (in continuous flux and subject to change) as opposed to the enduring character of poetic truth skews his presumed source quite a bit (Aristotle's Poetics). As anyone should know, the message of any literary text is as mutable and labile as our interpretations of historical events.

No, I've never read Buratino: As to Collodi's illustrations, that very much depends which edition you read. The first printed edition came out with a set of paintings by Enrico Mazzanti who set the tone, followed by numerous other artists (Carlo Chiostri, Attilio Mussino,Sergio Tofano down to Alberto Longoni (pittore)|Alberto Longoni and many others who gave their own iconographic twists to Mazzanti's visual inauguration of the figure. Disney's film version in turn now influences artists who design illustrations for reprints. I know a bit about this became my closest friend here, till his death, with whom I discussed the book over several years, produced a wonderful set of 36 illustrations in oil, that were quickly snapped up and also reproduced them in an edition, with a brief overview of Collodi's important early illustrators. His approach was thematically psychoanalytical, mine stems from a belief that that short fable is a synopsis of Western literature. But that is another story. Cheers, pal.Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Not sure the Soviet illustrator can rise to mythical and philosophical heights, but he was woderful for me. And, as I can see, not just. I had no idea who he was, but Google sei Dank, I found out his name: Aminadav Moiseevich Kanevsky. He seems to have his own fan club. Here a few links. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9][10] [11][12] [13] [14] [15] [16]. A bit of a Russian answer to the original Disney. Reminds me of Kästner's illustrator, Walter Trier, who was of course more modern and refined: [17]. Both apparently naive, as they should be, lively and cheeky. Trier could also make fun of himself. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 22:48, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, knew nothing of these two, both showing the brio of solid craftsmanship. The thing is, the first illustrator sets the standard, or, when we come across such classics, the illustrator’s work in that particular edition tends to impress us and set the standard by which we judge later versions. Heinrich Hoffmann's sketches for his psychotic Struwwelpeter (Hoffman's case is uncannily similar to Moritz Schreber of Schrebergarten fame, whose Hoffmanlike attitudes to child rearing produced the emblematic case of his tragic son Daniel Paul Schreber, still remembered because of Freud's fascinating monograph), Rackham’s illustrations for the Grimm Brothers’ Tales, Edmund Dulac’s for Hans Christian Andersen etc., in my case. You’ve triggered off a line of memories and reflections my time today can little afford (a temptation I must resist) but Trier’s cover for Kästner's Emil und die Detektive is strikingly reminiscent of Edward Hopper Nighthawks (and makes me wonder whether Hopper was influenced by it (the English version came out a decade before Hopper’s masterpiece). That in turn makes me think of the less abstractly existential/metaphysical picture of a street scene, like Emilio Longoni’s Riflessioni di un affamato, ( which always recalls Degas’s L'Absinthe, which my wife hung on our lower bedroom wall (Of course causing me to pun ‘Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder’?) next to Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Toilette. . . . Ah, but I have some long reading to do by the hearth this cold afternoon.Nishidani (talk) 13:04, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Malkin skewing his source might well be the reason why he never made it into Wikipedia. Serves him right. Arminden (talk) 21:42, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

That's a bit harsh but perhaps my use of the verb was misleading. I meant that behind the rough distinction he draws in a goodhumoured public talk - much needed in an area riddled/raddled with taboos - an arsehole like myself would be reminded of the deep source for the opposition between 'history' and 'poetry', the former dealing with particulars (from which one learns little -have a lower index of causal relationships) the latter with universals. So the concept of 'truth' differs between the two, or functions differently: history ascertaining facts, poetry by striving to embody human acts in a plotted structure approximates more to what the highest discipline, philosophy does. Well actually it's more complex than that, but one can hear the echo of this classic distinction between his words. When all of us talk, 99% of what we say is a kind of ventriloquism of the immense flotsam of déjà dits, only the originals are so lost to public memory or so thoroughly sublimed into the commonsensical body of even learned discourse that we presume we are speaking for ourselves. Hence Pinocchio the liar: meant to dangle on strings, he tries to escape the destiny inscribed in him by his maker, and of course, in part 1, ends up swinging from a noose. And then . . . What is poetry if not an attempt to 'fiddle' (being musical) a tone and choice of words that strikes the choral ear as antiphonal to the standard somnolent sonorities of groupchant/think? Skewing sources has never stopped people from having wiki bios. Do a random read of any politico's bio. Nishidani (talk) 22:28, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Poor me, I was confident that I'd made it transparent that I mean it as a joke. Anyway, Malkin's main subject is rhetoric, so leaving a strong impression with the public through jokes, hyperboles and simplified dichotomies is what he knows best. He was on an ethno-cultural crusade, trying to prop up or establish a non-theistic, organised branch of Judaism and I've read that his daughter has become a "rabbi" in this movement. At least he's more honest than proponents of other -isms, who pretend they weren't a cult. And I see now that my Alzbacher's or whatever it's called is progressing nicely: he not only does have an enWiki article (Yaakov Malkin), but I retouched a few pedantic details in it. Arminden (talk) 22:06, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Sorry for coming over as the raw pedantic prawn. Interesting guy, to judge by the enwiki bio. I note some problems of undersourcing there, and the fact that if you link and follow his rabbi daughter's enwiki bio (Sivan Malkin Maas), there her father is stated to be 'Reuven' not Yaakov (and is not linked). This is the sort of stuff a native hand that can read up the Hebrew sources rapidly might sort out. A lot of religious people are technically atheists, so it's refreshing to see a similar development over there.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Look who's talking, nobody catches up with me on pedantry. The problem with Humanistic Judaism is that you can probably put the entire worldwide community on a tour bus or two and send them to visit the tomb of a single, minor wonder-working hasidic rabbi at his yortzeit, and they'll all follow the example of the Bavarian Wetterfrosch (RIP). Arminden (talk) 20:02, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

That's very good as a comic boutade, though exuberantly hyperbolic. Of course, it's your home patch: 99% of Jews I have been acquainted with know (an extremely small sample) or knew nothing of the Talmud or Judaism as a very intricate set of religious protocols, and none would, I'm sure, have had the slightest interest in miracle workers, any more than even most devout Catholics would take seriously people like Ivan Dragičević of Our Lady of Medjugorje fame. I'd be more than comfortable as a neighbor with people whose views on Jews differ as radically as the Hasidic rov like Yaakov Shapiro, Israel Shahak, Gilad Atzmon or Sivan Malkin Maas, Géza Vermes or Ignác Goldziher. Mentioning the latter, I recalled the edit I made to his page, which in turn reminded me of a French monk who told me how he had learnt how to pray when visiting a Turkish imam. His wife said the latter was in prayer: Waiting, he could witness the intensity of the imam's manner of devotion, and later spoke admiringly to the imam of his practice. The imam told him that, if the priest happened to find him in prayer, he could join him in the room quietly, and pray as a Catholic in the same space. I have strong views about the delusionary aspects of religion, but they never get in the way of a sense of fellow feeling with adherents whose outlook, whatever the dogmatic straightjacket, remains intensely curious, and open, to people who disagree, even radically, with them. Tolerance, old bean, tolerance, even for decent minorities like the one you mock (with tongue in cheek). Historically, most believers, while identifying themselves with a 'faith', know very little of what its sacerdotal exponents espouse or believe or dwell on with doctrinal obsessiveness in finicky scholastic pilpul sessions, and this goes for Jews as it does for Muslims, or Buddhists, or whoever. Those Jewish humanists are a minority who reflect mainstream historical realities.Nishidani (talk) 11:23, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

I sincerely hope that tolerance isn't my week spot, or at least not a major one. The problem is that many of the "deeply faithful" are imposing their ways on others. I'm sure they would say the same about me, with the difference that I would never try to dictate to anyone to positively have abortions, marry only at the town hall and dispose of their dead only through cremation, strip down and run around in beachwear, drink alcohol, experiment with the entire range of sexual identities, eat pork at every meal, let their most intimate portraits be taken, and so on and so forth. Ah yes, and then go around and enforce it all, with both legal and vigilante means.

I am very happy that Malkin and his fellow Don Quixotes have created an alternative to the traditional types of Judaism, I'm just sorry they're not getting more traction. It doesn't matter that a majority among Jews de facto feels the same way as Malkin does, if that majority's perception of religion is that "it should be traditional". The voice of Malkin & Co. is needed, but it's too weak. It's not my crusade anyway, but it's one worthwhile fighting. When I'm making fun it's not mockery, maybe my type of humour, coming from a darker place, leaves the wrong impression with too many people who're coming from a different place and attitude. Anyhow, cultural Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do exist, but to such different degrees that it hurts. For me, the more the merrier.

Of course, from sufi trance, to a Tarkowsky experience, to facing nature, anything that can lift you above the daily treadmill and condition is most welcome, otherwise we'd be no more than hamsters running inside their wheel. There's no disagreement between you and me on this one, and in most cases there isn't.

I was silly enough to find myself caught up in another Kulturkampf with an editor who went systematically through German Wiki's articles on castellology and translated articles one by one and word for word to English, starting with their titles, even when those terms simply don't exist in English. The titles/terms, the structure and logic, even the references are German. He doesn't want to admit that that's not a valid option, and suggested as a compromise that even if the terms don't exist, there are dozens of examples around Europe for each category, so there better be a term for them in English (like Monsieur Jourdain, who was making prose without knowing it, the poor castles were exemplifying German Burgenkunde systematics without having the properly worded self-conscience). I might be willing to accept that globalisation can end up touching on languages and national cultures, but this self-assure attitude, and the lack of understanding that what creates the approach to reality in every one language is deeply connected to a specific, organic local culture, and that that very specific approach and logic, mirrored in the lexical reality of the language, cannot be bent to fit a fundamentally different, foreign language, simply kills me. It so happens that one of the terms, Wasserburg, has a perfect equivalent in French, chateau d'eau, but the one is a castle, while the other is a water tower. Why should English have the term "water castle" if its native speakers have chosen, over plenty of centuries and opportunities, not to have it? And if one forces it upon them, why should they adopt the German meaning rather than the French one? Maybe it's me. I have invested too much personal, intellectual and emotional energy into entering the spirit of Romanian and German, to a lesser degree English and decreasingly so other languages, to take it in a more laissez-faire manner. But I found myself, again, appalled by the attitude of "my culture is a good enough approach wherever I go, let the world adapt to it, why should I?" (See here and here). Arminden (talk) 22:21, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

I wrote extensively on the dangerous of treating lexemes in one's native language as unique mirrors of some local worldview in a book published in 1986. But I won't go into that here. I know what you means though by the pleasure of the untranslatable and idiosyncratic local inflections of culture. The thing about that is, though, that only those who know more than one enjoy the difference. No quarrel. You mention hamsters. After writing this morning, I went out for a cappuccino and, on a long stretch of a smoothly paved footpath, no one around, enjoyed the air. After 50 yards my eye looked up from a dictionary I was glancing at, at I saw a small worm humping along under the sun, like a trekker lost in the desert, straight forward. To the right were holm oaks, to the left a shady treed children's playgarden. No, on the little chap resolutely ventured like a solitary avatar of some earthwormy light brigade- it seemed by colour and shape half a Lumbricus terrestris and half a detached Pine processionary not yet flashing its hair - hunching and stretching towards the bend in the road 20 metres on unaware salvation lay only to its left or right. I got it to wriggle onto a page of my book, and took it sideways to the comfort of the trees, thinking. We don't need really anything to make a civilized world-moral systems, religious codes, doctrinal etiquetting: things fuck up simply because of some inbred bias towards disattention. Must be late over there. Sleep well.Nishidani (talk) 22:45, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

That's a lovely story, fluff, morning light, moral and all. Too bad I didn't read it before going to bed. Don't know how I made that mess before finally taking the horizontal position, I'm hardly ever touching alcohol, not my thing, but there's a threshold of mental fatigue that works the same way. Now I saw the South Hebron Hills kids arrest video. It's a rotten place, rotten to the bone. Good I'm not there, I wouldn't be able to hold my temper and would get into trouble.

Single lexemes raised to the rank of barometres of eternal national innate philosophical wisdom are one thing, whereas the specific inner workings of an entire language as a mirror of a culture's approach to the world is, I think, a pretty much valid angle. On the former: Constantin Noica has been an important lecture for anyone trying to "resist through culture" in 1980s Romania, and it did take quite some time till it dawned on me how much of his thinking was still permeated by the fascist Weltanschauung of his youth. This doesn't take anything away from the value of observing for instance which loanwords were adopted from which language, and how they were received and changed by Romanians, the Turkish words with mockery and a "good riddance" feeling; the German with a need for precision and for mainly technical terms, but not without a touch of amusement; the French with self-abandoning cultural reverence; and the Italian with a sense of fun, melodic joy and a touch of little-brother-respect. Hard to un-convince me now, I'm afraid. Have a great evening my friend. Arminden (talk) 09:50, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

For a minute there, I thought you must have expunged my rushed midnight note out of annoyance at some careless innuendo seeded inadvertently there. So I put in a Joycean phonecall to Edenville and asked for advice, and my own early mentor Nietzsche rapped me over the knuckles gruffly whispering that I'd forgotten a remark of his:'Sie lehrt gut lesen, das heisst langsam, tief, rück- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, mit offen gelassenen Thüren, mit zarten Fingern und Augen lessen.' So I fine-tuned my inner specs, calling on Spinoza to lend a crafmasterly hand, and reread the context, concluding that an augury to 'Sleep well' certainly could have been taken as a deftly snide insinuation, esp. given the preceding reflection on disattention, that you are not alert to what happens about you. One's first instinct is to brush that off, reflecting:'No, that's not what I meant' (T. S. Eliot's Prufrock). After all, I noted your long remarks and thought, 'Jeezus, must be sitting up very late over there, given the time difference. Here it is already the witching hour'(somewhere in Hamlet 3.2), and wished you a good night. Tutto qua? Well no. As Heidegger, plagiarizing Fichte, once wrote: we don't speak - language speaks through us, and, therefore, often gets the better of us, trumping our intentions with unwitting resonances that are, ineludibly, embedded in the deeper sinews of syntax and the subtle brawn of muscled words. That implication, nolens volens, rests there, even though I was not aware of it at the time. One must not quibble, deny responsibility for, or brush off as a misreading, what, on close inspection, an interlocutor may reasonable overhear as audible in the undergrowth of one's remarks. After all, Nietzsche led me to Heraclitus who then entranced my adolescence with his dazzling aphorisms - one in particular, permit the Greek because I love it -τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται (other men are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep' (Charles Kahn)). How presumptuous, even dismissively overbearing, my words about disattentiveness and 'sleep well' may seem to be in this retropensive light.

So, the lesson your revert taught me, or rather the reminder in it, was not a 'mess', To the contrary. Perhaps I may be, even in my apologia, twisting other motivations, drawing the water of your sluice to my own quixotically babbling mill. Whatever, it kickstarted what might otherwise have been a dull morning, and confirmation of how misinterpretations like this can arise came quick, as I went on my morning walkabout for the grail of a cappuccino. An old friend drove by, clamped on his brakes, jumped out and gave me a copy of his just published book on my township's vernacular history. I sat down at my bar, and read breezily through the first 80 pages, my eyes lighting on an anecdote about a character of the township, called 'Job'. Given to nudging a demijohn of wine most days, he'd toddle home and, sitting on his doorstep, take out a box of matches (prosperi) and strike each one. Those that sparked into flames, he'd snuff and put in his pocket as good ones. Those that failed to catch fire he'd chuck away. This was so comical I immediately told it to my tobacconists, who dismissed it as an urban legend. So I checked with a restaurateuse next door, all of them living around this same square as Job. She laughed, and said the tobacconists would dismiss the story as a sheer fabrication because their family name was etymologically similar to the word for a match, prospero. I only know them by their first names, and thus realized I'd made a gaffe, even if the linguistic point and its potential psychological reverberations were extremely arcane. But that is how that highly specific culture's conversation and its intimately nuanced sensitivities works. My life is one string of coincidences.Nishidani (talk) 12:20, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Now that I think of it the case against me is even stronger. One of the saddest observations in Heraclitus (who however may have approved of the lesson in the dictum, being aristocratic) runs: πᾶν γὰρ ἑρπετὸν πληγῇ νέμεται (Every creature is driven to pasture by blows). Now the word for creature or beast here (herpeton derives from one of the words for 'go', but exquisitely shades into subtle semantic nuances, for such particular senses as conveying the movement of a tear slipping down a cheek, or for any snakelike wriggling or wobbly movement (it's linked etymologically to 'serpent' and 'herpes' (shingles)), and is used of insects, so then of that wee worm I noted wriggling up the centre of that broad pathway. That too must have been at the back of my mind.

Though I have reservations of a kind, I do know that there is a great truth at the heart of the idea you mention that 'the specific inner workings of an entire language as a mirror of a culture's approach to the world'. Marina Tsvetaeva made the point in a line that is untranslatable: Иные вещи на ином языке не мысляться: 'there are 'some'(inye) things that cannot be thought in an 'other' (inom) language'. The problem of purifying a language by stripping it of foreign loanwords however was best captured by Theodor Adorno's apophthegm which I quote higher up on this page. Nations that embark on this creepily treat such putatively alien words as the 'Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache).

These reflections bear on what one does here. We have this Randian idea of objective language, and best practice exhorts us to pare things down to a limpidly knackered neutrality. Yes, that is an aim, but language fights against it, and, I can't rid myself of a tendency to read out, even in the most austerely technical prose mastered by many here, a tacit profile of the person writing. I not rarely twig with my semantic antennae to a current of arch venom seething quietly under exquisitely clinical comments. It doesn't worry me or affect my responses or edits to any great degree. I know I may err. There is no trace of a problem of that order in our conversation. And you should feel no need (Hebron etc) to ever think I require attestations of your humanity. My apologies again. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 13:12, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

By the way, a query prompted by reading your remarks on Noica. He was an intimate friend of Mircea Eliade, whose works influenced me greatly esp. in writing a Master's thesis. Soon after when Eliade's diaries were published in French, I realized in reading one of his abrupt notes about an encounter with Julius Evola, that he not only had been a fascist, but remained one throughout his teaching career at Chicago and encoded fascist thinking cryptically even in great books like that on Shamanism, causing me to radically revise my way of reading him. I've always wondered what his novels are like in Romanian, the one entitled I think Hooligans, for example? Nishidani (talk) 16:22, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi. Weird day. I couldn't move away from the computer last night and truly overdid. I was probably in a state close to sleepwalking. It's half stunning, half amusing what an interesting set of deep considerations (yours) came out of a very silly mistake (mine) - I got confused twice, between week and weak, which wouldn't ever happen in a "sober" state of mind, and in the process I erased something I didn't even read, I have no idea when or how. There's a problem when a dialog takes such gargantuan proportions, I'm having a hard time reaching the end (scrolling down isn't an option), so the small tricks I'm using must have misfired. Sorry. And when I checked if you had added something, I bumped into the very last entry on the page, which wasn't yours, but I thought it was. That took me to the nasty arrest scene. When I was about that age, eleven or so, a neighbour I had never seen before grabbed me while I was playing with the bricks of a collapsing garden wall, not thinking I was doing any harm, then dragged me to his house and called the "militia", the police. A citizen's arrest, so to say. The wall had been crumbling for decades due to a large tree growing next to it and through it, and didn't serve much of a purpose anyway. I can till now still remember how my heart went wild, how weird, deeply scary and unneeded it felt. So I don't need to try hard or to wish to prove anything in order to empathise. The word "rotten" came up like an air bubble, as in an associative game, with no interposed thought. When food starts rotting on your shelf, you throw it out, maggots, mold and all; in this case it's grown too wide, I can't see how it can be "thrown out" and don't know how to wrap my head around it either.

I haven't read Hooligans, but was in awe about his short stories. A Big Man and a few others have haunted me for a long time. I have always loved the idea of parallel worlds, of subjective realities unfolding, strong and alive, and he wrote in terribly simple, matter-of-fact words about doors opening, like in 1001 Nights or Wilhelm Hauff's Dwarf Nose, but in a hormone-laden, young adult kind of way. We hadn't had much contact to fantastic realism in communism, and this was material from the 40s, very early. Much of it felt raw, some even unfinished, his language was often not clean and flowing, as if he were thinking in foreign languages, which robbed him of a certain flow, words seemed put together from different vocabularies that don't mix well, but the way he thought and felt was impressive and hard to resist. This was I think in mid-1990, I didn't yet know anything about his fascist side, and I would probably have tried to compartimentalise it anyway. A French left-wing intellectual came to Bucharest in the 1930s and joined a friend in a literary cafe, where he found Eliade himself or other intellectuals from among the Iron Legion sympathisers and ideologists, having chats and deep discussions with fellow intellectuals from the liberal and communist camps. He was appalled and asked his friend, how can you even sit next to those? The typical Bucharest answer came with total nonchalance: we're just friends! Many of them ended up dead or imprisoned during the next two decades, but this is one of the most representative dialogues for what that part of Bucharest represents. Words and thoughts as an elegant game, intellect is flaunted and enjoyed, feelings are admired but controlled as not to fall into the widespread kitsch, which is the hallmark that separates the elites from the plebs. It's the others who take the ideas seriously, follow up on them, kill for them and/or make fortunes in the process. The interbellum was very much still alive in the 1980s, far beyond just nostalgia, since it had been the last period when thoughts and movement had been free and Romania had seemed to be on its way to somewhere. Not that it had felt that way to everybody who had lived back then, but there could be no comparison to the present, which was a paralysed wasteland of emasculated subjects. Those times have launched people like Brâncuşi, Eliade, Ionesco and Cioran, it felt hard to believe that we were living in the same country. That is what Eliade's short stories, mostly of the fantastic genre, meant for me when I found them, in a horribly copy-edited edition printed on miserable recycled paper, rushed out onto the market and, as it proved, with the last pages missing, about half a year after the Great Change they still like to call "the Revolution". The book itself was a time travel and a jump behind the mirror, and I felt grateful to him. But Hooligans, no, I haven't read yet. Arminden (talk) 00:05, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

That rings like a laconic synopsis of vol.2 of Olivia Manning 's The Balkan Trilogy, set in Bucharest just before WW2. I flipped through my copy (Penguin 1981 1 vol.edition: of the second book entitled The Spoilt City pp.289-585) and noticed the following passage underscored:-

What brings you here?,'Inchcape asked.

'The Iron Guard.'

He eyed her with his irritated humour: "You mean that collection of neurotics and nonentities who trailed past the window just now? Don't tell me they frightened you?'

Harriet said:'The Nazis began as a collection of neurotics and nonentities.'

'So they did!' said Inchcape, smiling as though she must be joking.'But in Rumania fascism is just a sort of game.'

It wasn't a game in 1937 when Jewish students were thrown out of the University windows. '

Another lockdown here, so I'm tempted to reread it, after 4 decades. Thanks for the impressions re Eliade.Nishidani (talk) 09:23, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

My pleasure. It's a book that eerily combines Romania and Palestine, with some Greece and Syria dropped in. The Iron Guard is, as far as I understood it, the only fascist movement that combined ultra-nationalism with Christian mysticism. Romania always prides itself on being the exception to all rules. Politically, that's more often than not to its detriment. The Legion was anti-Balkanic, militaristic and ascetic. Very much against the grain. It reminds me of the German "but he built the Autobahns!" and the Italian "in his time the trains came on time!". The Romanian Leader was a good looking man, very physical and not a good speaker, none of whose grandparents were Romanian (the Guard, or Legion, would always find ways to deny that). In a way, a typical case of a convert who becomes more Catholic than the Pope. I enjoyed reading Manning, you learn as much about bourgeois Britain's view of the world as you do about those places themselves. It's a nice exercise in counterfactual history to imagine the Mandate continuing for another 30 years, better accepted and with a pacifying effect. And Disney making the movie. Arminden (talk) 10:37, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Pretty hard to figure out how Christian mysticism sits comfortably with hanging sundry Jews up on meat hooks, as happened in 1941 in Bucharest. But perhaps that was more Antonescu's approach. Even that idea was poached from Italy. Right about converts. In my own Irish-Australian background, the traditional Micks were very wary of converts: they tended to take things literally, to hold out and be unbending before the messiness of practical solutions.Nishidani (talk) 13:50, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

There is a line of Legionnaire defence that Zelea Codreanu had been killed in 1938 by the government, which is true, and that a "dirty" faction had taken over by 1941. They blame it on the press, agents provocateurs, poorly vetted members, whoever. It is true that Codreanu was more in the business of political assassinations, with the assassins allowing arrest and transforming the trials, held before sympathetic judges, into triumphs. This was the "purity" they proclaimed, religiously inspired, but never really lived up to, beside of being extremely un-Jesus-like, actually antithetic to him.

I bumped into this, while looking for something totally different. Then I looked it up and found more details and two photos on the topic. It reminded me of the issue we touched on, of whether Palestine was or not a valid refuge target in the longue durée view of things, and my stance that without the privilege of hindsight the answer wasn't available to even those smarter than Herzl. In the best known film from the relative post-Stalin "thaw" years in Romania, an activist is asked why he went along with the excesses of the 50s while pushing for the big national projects. His answer was that at some historical junctions, doing is the first imperative. That at those moments one doesn't have the privilege of weighing all the pros and cons (besides of the fact, I would add, that even major, game-changing future developments cannot be predicted). The only case of an important Jewish voice I'me aware of, even mentioning Palestine as a possible national trap, is Yitzhak Lamdan, a poet, who wrote "Masada" in 1926 (I've mentioned him earlier). I can't find the poem in a European translation, I also only know about it second-hand, but the case seems clear; still, being a poet, he thought in symbols and the idea was fight, survive, or die trying. Lamdan had went through the Russian civil war and had lost a brother, an encounter with death on a huge scale, while Herzl's generation acted after experiencing (or just reading about) general persecution of a persistent, but less than lethal level, peppered with local acts of deadly barbarism. Helmut Kohl went head-first, no second thoughts allowed, into reunification. Not everybody living in the two 1990 German states benefited in their lifetime, but there aren't many voices blaming him (yet?) for pushing it through. They gave up on any type of claim towards their neighbours to the east, made huge mistakes in disbanding and taking apart almost everything in the former GDR, but apart from those directly affected, it's yet another case of "it could have been done batter, but good human projects, especially large ones, always have faults in the way they're executed, but hallelujah for it being done". Who knows if it will become the root cause for another great catastrophe in 50 or 100 years from the event, at it might well come that way, but I can fully support the decision as it was taken back then. Some thoughts seem too great to be wrong, as you noticed yourself with Eliade. Ultimate discernment is only the gift of the gods, and not even of most of those, judging by what their human creators from Ur, Greece, old Israel (Job), India and so forth had them do & regret doing. Arminden (talk) 11:02, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

I'll get back (Sunday lunch here). I didn't have much regard for Kohl, but realized he'd stepped out of the framework of normal politics, into serious history, in making a call to convert 1 on 1 the useless East German mark into its valuable western currency sibling, the deutschmark proper. That meant taking on board as huge amount of debt, something that traditionally, and later, ever recalling Weimar inflation, dickheads like Wolfgang Schäuble would madly oppose in the EU, making us lose a decade. As to the analogies, well I'll argue they don't fit: first because I'm only interested in the careering of Zionism's train towards wreckage after 1967. In the earlier period one must distinguish an elite absolutely lucidly aware that the project would inevitably destroy the indigenous society and its population, as urgent masses of immigrants who generally knew nothing of what the planning would involve. I can understand the latter - they weren't privy to what their leaders knew. 1967 is a watershed because, by then, it was obvious that extending into a Greater Israel would repeat, with careful planning, the displacements and degradation, the economic and educational prospects of a neighbouring people that, as the statistics note, was well poised to kick off on its own feet. The 'casual' and ostensibly 'unintended byblows' of 'inadvertent collateral effects' of early Zionism were no long such, after that date, but deliberate. You mentioned being arrested at 10 for playing with bricks. Incidents like that still occur every other day 'over there': probably 1 in 2 children there have grown up being handcuffed and detained. I've read things like this every day for over a decade. they're them, but the bureaucratic soldierly culture that carries these 'security' practices out cannot but inflect Jewish Israelis with a self-defensive disattention that undercuts the otherwise extremely impressive achievements of their forefathers. We can forget: history won't. (No need to dwell on this, A.) Nishidani (talk) 11:48, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

ps.All of read of Lamdam's 'Masada' are these excerpts: Yitzhak Lamdan and Ruth Finer Mintz. In the Hot Wind: Excerpts from "Massada" Poetry 92:4 July 1958, pp. 217-219 Nishidani (talk) 17:59, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Poetry Foundation

I hope you had a great Sunday. Is kangaroo meat any good for steaks? It must be out of the question right now anyway, after those horrible wildfires. I once went to a restaurant in Ghent specialised in "exotic meats", but chose ostrich. Well, if 67+ is the topic, we have nothing to argue about! Your remarks on the "madcap project" and intellectually less-than-impressive Herr Herzl Tivadar (üdvözlöm uram!) made me think that you are dismissing the whole project right from the start as obviously wrong, crazy, and criminal at worst. I remembered my own Story of the Bricks only as a reaction to that nasty event with the kids picking akoub and being arrested and traumatised on the instigation of the settlers. Only Romanian curses seem appropriate enough for the latter and their backers, English ones won't do. Tolerance and all (I do remember your advice). I only have one single issue, but a very limited one: as you noticed, I am curious about what archaeology can show, prove, and disprove (myths if possible, setting right the record, that does attract me). What I have noticed ad nauseam is the fate of unprotected sites in underdeveloped, poor and insufficiently regulated regions. A peace with scientific cooperation agreements dealing with these concerns would make me even happier than I'd be anyway if a separate Palestine would come about. And dreaming on, an utopia like Finland, where an ethnically Finnish politician can't get a government position w/o speaking Swedish, although Swedes aren't a huge group in the country, would be nice. With town signs mentioning the place names in all the languages used by current inhabitants making up over 20% of the population, as common in Transylvania (probably following EU guidelines). That would leave Huldra not fully, but partially jobless. Wishing you a great evening, a happy Arminden (talk) 10:54, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks pal. Sunday? A coldsnap made my morning walk even more pleasurable, following the birdsong that, woken by an early spring, 'tuned a landscape' as 'glittering streets cobble a drizzly blue.' There's something of a beachcomber instinct, toying with words that float up in response to one's daily scansion of the experienced world.

The metropolitan Aussie chucked out kangaroo meat for dogs when I grew up, until the influx of numerous immigrants of multiple culinary interests harvested the wisdom of drovers and began to carve steaks from them. The kangaroo, apart from some small species, is not endangered, and, in the predatorial logic of a grazier economy 'culls' were frequent because they foraged on lands scarce with grass that the market thought should be reserved for traditional varieties of livestock. Delicious, and less fatty than Kobe beef.

Archaeology can't prove or disprove much, can it? The Samaria region was non-Jewish for most of the relevant phase of ancient history, in having a Samaritan majority, whose virtual extinction we owe to the Byzantine bigots. Yet, since the dyadic 'Judea and Samaria' rhetoric conflates the two, taking Samaria as the residue of the 'Davidic' (pre-Jewish stricto sensu) northern kingdom whose epopea was rewoven into the Babylonian recension of the Tanakh centuries later as part of a 'Jewish' narrative, that means that, given the strong commonalities of shared rites, Samaritan mikva'ot can be taken to attest to a 'Jewish' presence (though of course they do in the sense that the Samaritans borrowed that infrastructure from the Hasmonian Jews, perhaps from the time of John Hyrcanus, as you undoubtedly know. There are lots of little things like that that niggle - Israeli archaeologists are extremely sophisticated about this of course, but these arcane research results don't appear to influence the general retroactive reading of the past to suit contemporary interests. Simon Schama batons up the overture of his The Story of the Jews with an excursus on the Elephantine community, meaning thereby to underscore as a basso ostinato the great diversity in cultural practices within history. We tend to think of this as characteristic of the 'diaspora', but I see no reason why there should not have been notable variations of a similar order in ancient Palestine proper - what we have as it stands narrative-wise is a Judea-centric recasting of historical events and legends-many of them probably reshaping elements of a quite distinct Israelitic cultural complex up north, and then an immense amount of Babylonian interpretation. I occasionally wonder to what degree the rift between a Galilean Jew like Jesus and the Judeacentric sacerdotal class down south stems in part from marked regional differences in Jewish life at that time (he being, if he existed, raised within a stone's throw of a Graecocentric place like Sepphoris) The simplistic popular story circulating these days is tedious: the past is a different country, and far more exciting in its complexities than a straight politicized narrative would allow.

I share your worry about 'unprotected sites in underdeveloped, poor and insufficiently regulated regions'. If however, one (a) dedevelops those regions according to ethnicity - dedevelopment as a strategy has been closely documented by Sara Roy (b) hammers home incessantly to the resident population that anything smacking of antiquity is up for grabs as part of Israeli state land and potentially invaluable for Israel's Jewish history, and sealed off from use by Palestinians (c) and a strained labour market incentivates digs by the unemployed to flog whatever they find on the Jerusalem market an d (d) denies Palestinian archaeologists any participation in digs (e) while ferreting out a huge amount of material from the West Bank into Israeli collections and museums against the Geneva Conventions, you get a perfect formula for putting that collective patrimony at risk. In the area I live in, Roman remains are there, under virtually every foot of ground (Italy is said to have half of the world's archaeological heritage) riches lie hidden. Most people are unnerved about this fearing that, if the authorities learn of what is on their land, they will not be allowed to build on it. A wealthy well-educated person I know asked me to read an extensive Latin epitaph on a metre and a half block. Before I could do so, he had second thoughts and cemented it almost totally hidden under an imposing monastery wall. There are elaborate mosaics walled off in the cantine of several houses I know of. Not to speak of the endemic problem of tombaroli. I know it's as complex over where you are, but all of the sensible practical solutions one might think up come up hard against the wall of the overriding interest in securing proof of Jewish habitation 2000 years ago, as if the historical facts weren't enough. This can be so obsessive that even blowing up the cavern housing of pastoral communities in the SH hills and places like Susya, whose lifestyle indubitably can allow us to grasp more of what non-sedentary communities in high antiquity might have been like, progresses, as the landscape is transformed into European style strip-housing complexes. I can still remember the pre-1967 landscape, dazzling in its resonance of a very ancient world. Fining up here, and I made up a batch of Cornish pasties to last a few nights. A friend tells me he has Netflix and is programming a few days for poaching films so we can battle through the latest lockdown. Cheers, Nishidani (talk) 13:09, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

ps. I haven't followed in detail Australia's wildfires (too painful for a bush soul like myself), but I don't think it would affect the market for kangaroo steaks. They come from the less wooded hinterlands mainly and are sufficiently fleet of foot in any case to outrun, at around 40 mph at top speed, which is better than folks can do fleeing wildfires along bush tracks. I remember seeing a great red lope majestically at competitive speed as our train ran through the middle Nullabor back in the early 60s. It's the little bush wallaby, koalas and wombat populations that get wiped out. Nishidani (talk) 19:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

There's a great new find, I see, announced this morning. Read avidly. But it was noticeable that even Haaretz declared in its title that the finds were located in Israel's Judean Desert caves, though we are dealing with West Bank (technically Palestinian territory) sites like Wadi Murabba'at. The only place those scroll fragments can be analysed is in Israel of course. One might object, Jewish heritage. But a biblical scroll in Greek is arguably as much 'Christian' heritage. The basket, under international law, cannot be technically exported to an Israeli museum. Had there been cooperation, as at so many sites, these things would have be transferred to an appropriate museum in the West Bank, and not just formally 'looted' by Israel. For technically, that is looting - though of course most of the museums in the West were stocked historically by similar predatory seizures abroad. But let's call this a 'basket case' realistically.Nishidani (talk) 09:37, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

I have read about it. Please, don't fall into the reflex of automatically making such remarks, not you too. The occupation does a lot of horrible things, but it's not everywhere. If I understood it right, all the new findings are from the Cave of Horror, which is a good 2 km inside Israel. Also, the Bible fragments were Jewish, as the name of God was written in Hebrew each time. One can tease modern Jewish zealots by pointing out that the fighters of Bar Kokhba had reached the same point as the Jews of Alexandria some 400 years earlier, i.e. they needed a Greek translation in order to be able read the Hebrew Bible, but both the context (Jewish rebels caught up in a cave, with a Roman military camp on the plateau above cutting any chance of escape, which lead to the horrors from the cave's name), and Hebrew Bible, not New Testament mss., with the name of God written in Hebrew, make it clearly a Jewish finding. The basket is from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, nothing to do with modern nationalities. I am aware of a museum for all the major West Bank and Gaza mosaics purposefully set up at the Inn of the Good Samaritan on the West Bank, and of the only obvious artifacts dicovered on the West Bank currently on display at the Israel Museum being the Dead Sea Scrolls: some were bought by Israel, and those at the Rockefeller Museum in 1967 were disintegrating at a fast pace. They had survived in the desert, but not in rainy Jerusalem, and certainly not after being sandwiched between glass plates, and glued together with adhesive tape for decades. The Rockefeller Museum is wonderful for what it is, a 1930s institution almost frozen in time, with a great building and collection. But not a modern, technically up-to-date museum. This apart from the Jewish heritage aspect. I am very much aware of how little is done in Israel for the conservation and tourist use of non-Jewish sites, such as the battlefield at Hattin, the Muslim khans and the Umayyad "desert castle" at Khirbet el-Minya (the one at Sinnabris is far less well preserved), but that's another matter. In every Arab country I can think of, including Palestine, so much is destroyed by looters and uncontrolled development, not to mention intentional destruction, that it hurts me even more. In Jordan I've seen the contrast between Petra, which is handled like a jewel, although recently they've allowed for the first time for concrete buildings (restaurants and such) to be built in the centre, and a wonderfully preserved desert castle near Amman, where the clan chief of a family counting among its members a former prime minister, has taken over a big chunk of the site and has built there his kitschy mansion, with a small pond and all, decorated with ancient stones. The Italian archaeologists who excavated the site have probably filled up the wadi with tears while observing it. Or all those Palestinians, Arab Israelis and Jordanians who have no idea about their archaeological heritage. So let's keep apart what doesn't really belong together: what's being done to the living people, and what's being done to the ancient relics. Sorry if I got carried away again, this is a subject that does bother me quite a bit. But there's enough left to dig out, in the Middle East as in Italy, as you said. Israelis as a whole are often completely blind to whatever is not Jewish-related, but the approach is more Western and the education level is better. The people on the Arab side who are well educated, progressive, open-minded, are too few to make enough of a difference. I wish they could take over and give the tone, I can't tell you how happy I am about each encounter, including with emigrants in Europe. Of course cooperation would be the best, but it's hard to see it happen for a long time to come. In Israel the blockheads are growing in number and power, and on the Arab side the "Spring" didn't go anywhere. So let's enjoy the natural spring and forget about it, it's too depressing. Arminden (talk) 02:34, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Rap over the supercilious knuckles gratefully taken. Thanks for the correction (though the article did suggest that part of the material was within the WB. No excuses: I began to check maps, and then an email arrived from a friend writing on the philosophical dimension of 'pseudos' who asked for some editorial oversight, and I rushed things). As to the Tanakh's ethnicity, it is so integral a part of Western (Christian) tradition, a slight tingle of annoyance sometimes niggles me when descriptions like this assume a proprietorial nuance. Homer is, in short, not just Greece's cultural heritage etc. Still, to adopt my friend's topic, my blunder had me speaking from pseuds' corner. As to the destruction in Arab countries by looting, (a) Italy is on a par and ( b) the most devastating looting is consequential on the systematic Western destruction of the Arab state system. Where states have remained intact because they have managed to keep on the victorious side of the western imperial system's great game, the from Maghreb to Egypt, with Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc., the damage has been limited to normal levels. Iran is the exception.

What happened in Petra happens also in Jerusalem, where planning or deplanning is wholly under Israeli control. It's very embarrassing to Christians I have accompanied around several such sites. It is easy to remark on the contrasts - lavishing funded 'Jewish' infrastructure to highlight that feature, and the immense difficulties experienced in improving Christian and Arab sites. You suggest this neglect is due to some Arab backwardness of Palestinians. Well, remember, in 1967 Palestinian youths had a far higher level of secondary school attendance than their Israeli peers. Under the occupation, as &150 billion plus in US funding flowed in, funding dried up, all sorts of restrictions were applied, etc. I won't go into the details of what Palestinian entrepreneurs have told me of the immense difficulties raised up by Israeli bureaucracy everywhere from Beit Sahour to Bethlehem to Nazareth to Qasr al-Yahud in developing facilities and historic properties to cater for the theoretically vast Christian tourist trade potential there. Looking at the facts on the ground, the glaring contrasts, without factoring in the intricate histories behind that patent dyscrasia, is flawed. But, ugh, forget it. You know this all better than I. Cheers A. And thanks. I need an eye on me to save me from my own forgetfulness or ignorance.Nishidani (talk) 19:54, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

You are right, the findings were part of a greater effort which covers both sides of the desert, this cave happens to be in Israel. 2019 the archaeologists arrived at a cave near Qumran where they did find traces of typical Qumran jars, cloth wrappings, and even crumbles of parchment w/o writing, but the goods were gone. Almost counting as the 12th Qumran cave, but not really. This as just one of several instances where the nest was empty already.

My main issue is with people who do have a formal education, but it doesn't really show. Collecting graduation diplomas is a cheap exercise. My most idiotic fellow high school student, who produced involuntary jokes by just breathing, has studied math, diplomacy, and is doing quite well, thank you very much, but never got a bit smarter - not at the human interaction level, nor intellectually. Just has a good magnetic tape inside, energy and ambition. That's his personal problem, elsewhere it's the educational institution. Learning by heart, frontal instruction, authoritarianism, in-built propaganda, learning as a means to make it financially, overspecialising, lack of horizon... Shall I continue? Any education system can have some of these shortcomings, but I've come across more products of such "education industries" in some places and periods than in others. The spread of intelligence and stupidity are the most democratic social feature I can think of, the problem starts with molding the potential into thinking adults with a wider horizon and plenty of curiosity. There are societies producing over long periods of time great professionals in a range of subjects, at home, profiting from that in every regard; and there are those who are hardly ever in their history getting there. The Muslim world had a mind boggling stretch of several golden centuries. Romania had a brilliant time during the interbellum. All those lagging behind now are complaining that "we have (often mistaken for: are) geniuses, look how far our countrymen make it once abroad!", forgetting that "abroad" doesn't mean carrying your "national character" and fully completed socialisation like a backpack to a place which, by chance or imperial theft, can offer better chances, but becoming a different social person in the process of adapting to the new place. So no, I can't change the way I think about certain places in terms of what I see written, put forward, said, enjoyed there by people with diplomas. To add to your list: Turkey wasn't much colonised either, nor did anyone succeed it with Afghanistan, or Ethiopia for most of its history. I'm still hoping for a good book dealing with what did stop Muslim culture from keeping at least some of its initial momentum. An amazingly lucid and courageous Jordanian lady, I'm ashamed of not remembering her name, stood behind the 2002 Arab Human Development Report. One of its findings was that "The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa'moun's time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year." Of course, you won't find much about that in the WP article on the topic - just general langue de bois platitudes. And blaming it all on Western colonisation doesn't hold water in my view. None of the non-Western states or cultures who have managed to stay independent are offering good arguments. Now the West is decreasing and others are rising, the hope being that it won't be such a zero-sum game this time around as it's been to a large degree during European expansion. Anyway, back to pre-67 WB: it was part of Jordan, and I've seen a lot of Jordan, people and places. I was hugely impressed and surprised by much, but also shocked by plenty. The upper class, including the royal family, are thoroughly Westernised via British influence on many levels, and I never had the feeling there's much to regret about that. If anything, they've managed to filter out and support the best from the local tradition. In my opinion, the tiger they are riding are the Muslim Brotherhood (an import from independent Egypt) and a people still fighting with poverty. But Jordan at some point, maybe still, was heading the charts of higher education in the Arab world, with universities springing up in the most unexpected corners of the country. But the result was still far from visible.

Of course I'm embarrassed when I catch myself generalising, it always gives me an uneasy feeling. But I can't suppress what I see and think when facing reality first-hand. I'm not a hater, nor a despiser. I'd love to see things improve everywhere, dialogue becoming easy, people who have a truth I need to learn offering it in an acceptable way that doesn't diminish it nor me, provincialism pulling back, bigotry dwindling (and not just hiding behind a mask). Once one doesn't need to own something and defend it aggressively in order to have access to it, much of property becomes pretty much irrelevant. And I don't mean communism. But we're not on the way there, so why even think of it. That leaves one voting with his feet for the lesser evil, and the definition of that always changes when you thought you've figured it out. Have a great time N, Italy is maybe the best place to enjoy without trying to fix it. Arminden (talk) 00:28, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Far (let's say, a million miles) be it from me to play the European-imperialism-is-to-blame card for every woe of modern countries not integrated successively into the modern world system. But your overview of Arab countries is dangerous. Imagine an historian making a generalization about the stagnation (other than philoprogenitive demographics) of Jewish populations, especially in the Pale, for several hundred years or even more broadly the extreme scarcity of contributions to civilization for almost 2 millennia, (compared to the gloriously disproportionate role people of that background have played for the last two centuries). The capacity was there: it never flourished, ergo they. . . No. The peculiar conditions of diasporic life, not set by the Jews themselves, are fundamental to understanding that stagnation, just as the overwhelming violence of European imperialism contributed to the breakdown or stasis of so many states (the extraordinary systematic dedevelopment of a competitive India by British colonialism is laid out in excruciatingly embarrassing detail by Shashi Tharoor in his 2017 book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.) Read in succession the complacent histories of the modern world by a beetlingly confident Paul Johnson or Niall Ferguson that all the rapine, theft and wholesale murder (admitted) that underwrote this expansion was to good effect, against say Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Millenium (1995) or Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa, (1991) and dozens of other minute area histories (the Congo under Leopold), and such generalizations about some abstract characteristic or tendency in peoples or cultures that leads to stagnation begin to crumble.

Seeing can be defective unless the eyes glaze the features of the observed landscape with their historical resonances. You certainly have few peers here for your home landscape in that regard. Travel within Australia and you see broken down communities of overweight, flyblown alcoholics as often as not. It feeds into white prejudice. Few recall that every early colonialist or visiting painter remarked on the superb muscled fitness and elegance of their stature. 80% of the population was disappeared as millions poured in, in good part scrawny, filthy convicts and the outcasts of slums and Ireland's dumped excess of starvelings. The contrast now between the tourist family in their caravans, living the good life in the suburbs on $100,000 and the denizens of outback shanties or metropolitan ghettoes, is striking. So 'the abos' just can't adapt and make something of themselves, like the rest of us. A good number of great anthropologists like David McKnight (perhaps the last person to speak one of the most fascinating languages on earth before the whiteman's alcohol devastated that minute culture) are aware of the logic. I don't think pushing for everyone on the planet to eat hamburgers, and drive cars with the just marginal fact that to achieve this 6,000 cultures and languages, sparely recorded, disappear is much to boast of, as does Ferguson, who for example, thinks it a major improvement that logging in native areas and shooting them led to one tribe reduced to throwing themselves as beggars on the outrskirts of a South American jungle town. 'They can now eat, living of charity, without a struggle for survival!' That is how I read your remarks above. The Greeks were fortunate in having a word theôrein, whose semantic range ran from 'seeing', 'inquiring of an oracle', 'being a spectator at an event' to 'contemplation'. Aristotle's ideal 'theoretical life' was the interrogative contemplation of the existent, abstract yet empirical. What one sees has an intricate story, and appearances are deceptive, as indeed all generalizations are. So I beg to differ. Bigotry is not a provincial symptom - its rise was enhanced by the metropolitanization of the world.Nishidani (talk) 15:36, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Wait, I obviously keep on not communicating properly. There's nothing wrong about noticing who has contributed and when to the less debatable elements of "progress" in both human thinking and practical solving of problems, anywhere from conflict solving, social contracts and organisation, to health and medicine, arts, and inquiry of the natural world. It is a given that Jews didn't contribute much for close to two millennia, as it is that the Muslim world had a golden era that came to an end after a few good centuries. I'm a great fan of Aboriginal art, colours and shapes, and I was happy to see Cathy Freeman win her medals, I'm listening to authentic world music quite a bit, but I won't pretend that I set it on the same level as the best of Bach and Beethoven. I have formed a taste in films with Kurosawa as much as with Tarkovsky and Fellini, and I love Abbas Kiarostami. (Ozu wasn't available in Romania, but I caught up with him in Germany.) I'm also very aware of Saint-Exupéry's story of the Turkish astronomer who was only taken seriously once he changed from shalwar trousers and fez into a suit. What I mean is quite obvious: from inheriting all the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, of fading Babylon and Egypt, and taking it so much further for centuries, the Arab-speaking world then stagnated in so many fields that it came to the situation reported by Rima Khalaf (now I found her!) in 2002. Btw, her stance on Israeli apartheid doesn't play any part whatsoever in how I see her in this context, if I knew in more detail what she said on that topic I'd be able to see if that doesn't make me appreciate her even more. Or not, it doesn't matter. So take her word for it, not mine. And she surely didn't work alone. The decadence and fall of the Roman Empire has been discussed, dissected, and explained in dozens of ways, the Americans have been trying to learn from it how to postpone their own decline, why should the same phenomenon be taboo when it is easily observed in the history of the Arab world, and maybe even of the Muslim world - there you can correct me re. the late history of Muslim India, of which I know far too little. No such process comes overnight, it takes many factors and causes. Hülegü Khan rang the death knell of Baghdad and ravaged Iraq, Timur Lenk had far less left to destroy, but the downward march had started even before the Mongols. Too much fear of touching on this subject, and it's fascinating. Once academia withdraws, populists and propagandists (is there a difference?) fill up the vacuum, and that's bad.

Why can one call Trumpism backward, anti-scientific, a dangerous regress, and not use similar words when dealing with Arab world representatives? Why does "Prussia" always get "militaristic" added to it, but Ba'athism doesn't? I'm a huge fan of Mahfouz, but at the time he received his Nobel Prize, in Egypt some 90% of women had went through female genital mutilation of the worst, "pharaonic" type. So almost all, Christian Copts included, with a small urban elite escaping the butchery. I'm not out to get anyone, but facts are facts. I'm nobody's friend & admirer by ways of ethnicity or other social markers; only by ways of human connection, communication and respect. And I won't respect barbarism and backwardness anywhere - not in Europe, not in the Middle East, not in America, nowhere. The mantle of limitless "respect for cultural tradition" is valid for self-isolating peoples like some Andamani or Amazon tribes, but not for anyone living under a modern government.

How does Aristotle help me grasp and accept honour killings? Or blood feuds, whether based on Sicilian vendetta, Albanian Kanun, or whatever they call it in Palestine? I couldn't finish reading Broken April by Ismail Kadare, I didn't appreciate it as a piece of literature (maybe the translation did play a part, but not the largest one), I couldn't stand the dryness of the prose and the inhuman surrender to a murderous tradition it was soaked in. And then one day it played out right next to me. No amount of philosophy can remove that impression.

I am very much aware of the peaks of Arab culture, as I am of the Romanian ones, to which I have better access. But those few can't remove the bad taste left in my mouth by bumping into the translated Protocols and the Saddam oeuvre all over the place in downtown Amman not that many years ago, or the open cult of Antonescu in Romania since 1990. Numbers of simple Jordanians letting me know Hitler was "gudd, gudd!" the minute they heard I'm coming from Germany didn't make me believe they're genocidal. But they did convince me that they didn't get out of school having a history education worth talking of. Confirmed by a lovely 12 or 13-years-old boy who blushed when practicing his English, who gave me the same line on uncle Adolf, quoting his teacher. If a country needs that to keep its citizens in line, something is deeply wrong. Why even go through the effort of explaining them that all Semites were nicely queued up in front of the ovens in uncle Adolf's plan, when the basics weren't there. Or that due to "Hittler, gudd!" Germany had suffered its worst destruction since the Thirty Years' War, but this time much more self-inflicted, and there is no good reason a thinking German should enjoy being greeted that way. Nobody needs to remind me of fundamentalist rabbis competing in fatwas with the ayatollahs and Torquemadas, that's no news to me. Understanding a phenomenon in one environment has nothing to do with it appearing in similar or different shapes in others as well. But there's a minefield out there once one is perceived as a participant, not to say combatant, in "the conflict", I/P, or whatever it's called.

Here, on WP, I came across a Palestinian who had studied medical ethics, no less, who wouldn't allow the perpetrator of the Dolphinarium discotheque massacre to be called a terrorist. He insisted that Palestinians, since being under occupation, had every "right to use any mean to restore their homes and country." That's where our conversation ended. The terrorist mocked the kids lining up and then killed 16 teenagers, the majority girls, plus four men in their 20s and one of 32. Most of them fresh off the boat, so to say.

I've been threatened by really dangerous looking Kach members, and had my encounter with a pompous Hamas representative when I went to Hebron and Kiryat Arba soon after the Goldstein massacre, so I do think that I know both sides quite well. So no lack of "proper horizon" or terms of comparison. And I've had my wonderful moments too with people on both sides of that damn divide. I've had the ambition to understand the whole. I don't think I have. Just got quite sick and scared of it all. Trying to be a good citizen of the world, of some ethical world that doesn't much exist, often failing, sometimes succeeding, and not always being able to say which time is which. Arminden (talk) 22:07, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

My dear friend, any strong ethical sense is bound to invite an unbalancing stress, - get over it, with detachment, and one keeps what is precious intact. Injustice, the allocative disequilibrium in all spheres of life, reflects the hard zero-sum game of all human associations outside the close fold of kinship, and even there . . . Ethics ultimately comes down, not to the 'other', but souci de soi. I was tempted to write 'self-respect' but that only opens up a can of worms: in some cultural milieus, self-respect works out as killing people (where honour codes prevail over an indwelling sense of who one is, or might be, or tries to be, once the tribal overlay and instinctive drives are domesticated to reflectiveness). But exploring the concept of Selbstsorge as Michael Foucault analysed it (nothing to do with Stirnerian or so-called ethical or rational egoism would take us into rather complex waters, where for this conversation, are best paddled in, rather than taking a tower dive into. Your note did prompt me to discern another one of my congenital defects or biases. I've always preferred avoiding absorption in civilizations of great breadth - China, the Islamic world, India, etc., rather taking empathetically to small worlds - classical Greece, (before it rose to imperial sway under Hellenism). Japan, Italy. and, of course here, Palestine. They have a manageable, hands-on immediate human dimension. The greater the sprawl, the stronger the temptation to generalize, which to me is anathema, even with regard to those societies I've studied in depth. Even now if you asked me what I think of, say, Australians, or Italians, I'd have no way of answering because though I know what people generally think of re such collectives, all I see is individuals and differences between them as marked as are those qualities that look like common traits and tempt one to generalize.

I have been intensely busy today, but hope to address some points above tomorrow, if I can get through the task regarding the concept of 'pseudos' a friend asked me to look at. Best Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

By the way, can you have a squiz, throw a shufti, take a dekko, at the Achille Mbembe talkpage?. It lacks any mention of the anti-Semitism accusation, and though the German wiki article handles it in great depth, the English page certainly requires a succinct summary of the incident, evidence, and aftermath. I imagine it could be done in three or four lines, with the sourcing already available in the German wiki. But, this is only a suggestion. I don't want to barge in asking for to waste time on it.Nishidani (talk) 17:51, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Dear N, I'll take your advice to heart. Sorry for being atypically brief, but my computer has just crashed and typing on the phone is not such a pleasure. The crash is not a big deal, but I'll go back to Mbembe tomorrow. I don't like to write about something I only know of from third-hand comments, as several of the German sources seem to be, but I'll try to keep it simple and put in something neutral. Have a good, quiet night for now. Arminden (talk) 22:38, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

I felt guilty about throwing that your way. I'd heard a disconcerting radio report and read the NYTs article last year, and knew little. Still, I managed to wrest a half an hour from a busy day again (me busy? that'd make people who know me laugh) and get a skeleton thing done: one could write loads given the coverage, even the German wiki looks thin. But my impression is that one should furnish a BLP page section on a sensitive topic like that with a good clickable bibliography in a familiar language. Now I've read up, I can easily recognize the hinterland -Michel Foucault,Giorgio Agamben,Cornelius Castoriadis etc., (aside from Franz Fanon) behind his approach - that stuff's fairly indigestible at first sight even to many of the cultured people who read it. Once you get politicians skimming over clips of that kind of material, or hearing what their secretaries write up from brief phone call and rundschau tidbits, to make a response, you are only going to get nonsensical tit-tatting. (Add one secondary or tertiary evaluation then you have to get his response, and the response of friends, and the way then the alt-right or ministers reacted, in an eternal gossip chain of unfocused effluvia.

I shouldn't feel sorry about the computer, but I do (sometimes those crashes liberate one's time). There's no hurry on Mbembe, but I'm confident you're the right bloke for rapidly dipping into the maelstrom the incident stirred and catching the essence. Best Nishidani (talk) 09:19, 22 March 2021 (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.

Calling spades shovels

I don't know how much you keep track of the goings on, you certainly know about the so called "outposts", illegal both in international and in Israeli law. So there was first a "regularization bill" to make them legal and this has fallen by the wayside but no matter, there is the slower process whereby everyone pretends that they were set up on private Palestinian property "in good faith" and they get "legalized" one at a time in that manner. But having seen Trump's plan wither away and himself about to leave the scene, this is too slow for these particular settlers who have now hit upon a rebranding of themselves as "Young settlements" and are now trying to get everything legalized in a rush while there might still be a chance to do so. Of course it is of little relevance since the youngsters will only grow up into adult settlements and remain illegal internationally.Selfstudier (talk) 11:39, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I hadn't heard of that one. The Chinese logicians spoke of a rectification of names, which however is a far more complex issue than the name itself suggests. Brand names are marketing devices, though selling this one amounts to little more than a shabby ploy to steal land without regard to prior ownership or market value. I wouldn't, as an outsider, mind Israel taking over the whole of historic Palestine, so long as it was prepared to pay the contemporary market value of the physical assets, along the lines followed by Israel's fundamental model for creating the nation, i.e.,the Louisiana or Alaska Purchases, though there it was a matter of empires buying and selling assets regardless of the indigenous populations, whereas in the I/P area,.. there's that little complication of the identity of the local population with its legal or international title. and Palestinians have proven, historically, to be far too attached generally to their land to evaluate it on a commercial basis.Nishidani (talk) 13:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

	Merry Christmas Nishidani
	Hi Nishidani, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year, Thank you for all your contributions to Wikipedia,    –Davey2010Talk 20:01, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Talk page guideline

Hi it seem that by this edit [18] you violated WP:TALKHEADPOV Specifically:

Don't address other users in a heading: Headings invite all users to comment. Headings may be about specific edits but not specifically about the user. (Some exceptions are made at administrative noticeboards, where reporting problems by name is normal.)

Please fix it.Thanks --13:05, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Look, every other edit of yours I seem to happen on has a spurious edit summary, and the last one was particularly gross: pretending that there was a source falsification when none existed. It is obvious that you didn't do your homework: of three sources you read the first, and jumped at the impression the text was flawed, whereas had you read the accompanying second and third reference to the same text you would have realized it was correct as a view attributed to the New York Times. That is either sheer laziness, or POV pushing, and, as usual, causes serious editors to waste their time. This is particularly reprehensible because you ignored the revert motivation I made and restored the defective text you wanted to showcase. Of course I will slightly alter the header, but something like that is needed to wake up editors who persist in not focusing.Nishidani (talk) 13:44, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

West Bank bantustans

Please strike your comments today about editors at Talk:West Bank bantustans. Levivich ^harass/_hound 15:53, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't harass people and never have, on line or in real life i.e.,I don't resort on principle to using a microscope to parse everything said in a discussion to tease out potentially 'incriminating' spoors that, at some distant tribunal, might lead one or two to suspect that some extreme sensitivity to honour has been deliberately rubbed up the wrong way. If editors paid as much attention to the logical and material substance of arguments, as several do to pettifogging over perceived hurts, even such innocuous generalizations as my own would not be read that way. Concretely clarify to me whose point of view, Israel's or the Palestinians', is violated when one mechanically, as so many editors do, mentions MPOV as disrupted? I've asked several times. No one will clarify. Is calling Palestinian territories 'Bantustans' not neutral with regard to Israel, the occupying power that fragments them, or is is not neutral with regard to Palestinians in those 'enclaves'. Clarify that here, and I might reconsider. No one else seems to give this crucial question any consideration, and that refusal to respond may well engender some light 'frustration'. Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

I will not discuss article content with an editor who relentlessly insults other editors. The following comments of yours at Talk:West Bank bantustans are just from the last week, but you have been making comments like this for months (e.g., my Nov 27 request here at your talk page at #Comment on edits not editors).

1. Jan 2: "That is extremely muddled thinking, that shows no familiarity with the article's documentation. You are describing a future situation as a 'de facto' reality, for Chrissake. Read WP:CRYSTALBALL and try to get some handle on orderly rational focused analysis." [19]
2. Jan 3: "Nope. Once more you are not reading or remembering the sources, or even grasping my points. ... Alas, sigh. But this is Wikipedia, where numbers count, and an impressionable glance at chat, not familiarity with the scholarly complexities." [20]
3. Jan 4: "Point proven. You don't understand the terms you use, and you don't grasp that this, apart from the obtuse disregard for English usage, violates WP:Crystal." [21]
4. Jan 5: "I.e. you don't understand the meaning of the legal terminology you cited, and apparently didn't even bother to check it on Wikipedia itself. The future doesn't exist in reality, exception in some temporal implications of physics theories and comic books." and "... a majority voting for the proposed name change on some vague assertion of NPOV while totally ignoring or failing to answer the crux ... and the actual editors of the page familiar with the topic's sources, and having extensive textual evidence ..." [22]
5. Jan 7: "Just to remind editors how really thorough POV whitewashing occurs, the (ostensibly) corresponding, sister article in Hebrew has actually zero references to the extremely well documented thinking about the Bantustan model which we have here. Great job there! Absolutely NPOV - in the sense it is being used here: never refer to the actual facts." [23] [24]
6. Jan 8: "The contrafactual reading has consensus, but then again, as recent events remind us, people don't focus on reality and the meaning of terms." [25]
7. Jan 8: "The majority refusal to accept 'enclavization' however boils down to either unfamiliarity with the subject, or POV voting for a political result favourable to one of the two parties in the dispute ... I'm a realist. While I've been arguing 'enclave' uninflected is a gross violation of NPOV, I have been convinced nonetheless from the outset that, as so very often, political calculation of the crucial national interest will determine the outcome, as it has. Few actually edit this hotspot area, but touch the national interest of that country, and masses turn up and the serious arguments are buried. I've watched this going on for 14 years." [26]
8. At this point, I wrote the above message here on your talk page, after which you posted on the article talk page: "The silence on this is another distrubing elephant in the room of this talk page" [27], which seems to be a continuation of the above.
9. And also "Editors should be able to explain what they have in mind when flagwaving a policy like NPOV, i.e. not neutral regarding entity? So far there is a studied silence it, it's all nodnod, winkwink. So, to repeat, an explanation is required of a policy endlessly flagged, but not specified as to its contextual referent. I'm patient. Levivich?" [28]

Please fix your comments. Levivich ^harass/_hound 18:57, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I see (I can't see anything a normal person with a normal adult ability to engage in difficult discussions should find wounding there. Yes, there is probably some 'stuff' that just might allow anyone with malice aforethought who do muck a drama at AE, to rid Wikipedia of another troublesomely constructive editor in an area where a bare several editors are constructive while dozens, quick to complain, do little more than tweak, revert, argue incomprehensibly ('muddled thinking' is a precise description of the comments, and I analysed exactly why, linguistically, the editor in question was confused. At AE you will quote the term, and ignore the substance of my refutation, which can't be talked around, since it is logically indisputable that 'de facto' cannot refer to a future reality,etc.etc.etc.) This list strikes me as just a formal preliminary: the second stage of a double-barreled punishment process, begun with the denunciation of Oncenawhile, and to be followed up by a report to AE against myself, in both cases for documenting the scholarly treatment of an argument that should not be covered in the terms the academic literature uses. You are asking me to spend hours discussing and redacting my comments? No. I really have real life commitments that scarcely allow me to parry pettifogging for days and days. I've made a list of a 11 people who would jump at the opportunity to push the complaint, so the odds are you'd win this gambit. I don't think I'll even trouble to defend myself. My defence is in the quality of the articles I write or rather, that, I never complain of the silliness of this place, but simply add content most of the time, and 99& of its sticks not from any merit on my part, but because I read and paraphrase what authoritative scholars say, and don't give a flying fuck for the consequences.Nishidani (talk) 23:24, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

The only thing I ever ask of you, and I've been asking for over two years now, is that you stop being so mean to other editors. It's not a big ask. Hundreds of thousands of editors over 20 years have had no problem editing without being mean to other editors. I don't know why you do it, and I don't know how to get you to stop. Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:47, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

'Mean'? The word you've chosen always has a Dickensian edge to my ear. I give away a tenth of my pension to the poor every month, just as I tithe what knowledge I have or garner in daily reading so that a broader public, via Wikipedia, can, without troubling to work, familiarize themselves with what the finest minds - those whom we paraphrasing peons owe our debts - think about whatever topic is being described. Only a fool or someone with personality problems would think that doing this has some egoistical return. There, in self-defense against a horrible epithet flung my way to pin me on the wall as 'disruptive', you've forced me to say things I'd prefer not be known. And I am not an exception: the several editors who have dedicated years of hard offline reading to get a balanced perspective on two parties in this 'toxic' area, and not just revert, tweak, or thoughtlessly opinionize, have perhaps even a longer history of 'harassment' on and offline, than myself. The immediate antecedent here is the disgraceful way several people have jumped at a chance to use Wikipedia's pettifoggery about niceness to get at one really erudite gentleman whose precise contributions to this place and general kindness in the face of real stalking harassment should be a model for everyone. There's where this mania for formalizing etiquette gets you (one) - the loss of all perspective and the devastation of the most elementary criteria of decency.

I am sure you cannot not know that several organizations have gone public declaring that they intend to fix this area of Wikipedia by assailing with smears editors who don't show love for their political cause. But this manipulative intent is not, apparently, something that raises your distaste, or fits your criterion of social 'meannness'. Yeah, I dislike waffling, fuzzy illogic, and the abuse of precise language, and if I sight people who come up with opinions that are nonsensical, I will often state that fact. I learnt to respect teachers who do that, because only by doing that, rather than endlessly worrying about their students' 'sensitivities', do they manage to get us, students all, to reach beyond our adolescent frivolousness or blind amour propre or passionate dedication to some vague cause, by inculcating us with the sense that respect for knowledge is the goal. That requires (a) humility, because to learn the lesson you must acquire a sense that there are and always will be people who know more than you do (b) a subjugation of a natural, if embarrassing, self-protective instinct to be loved, admired or recognized to an objective benchmark where self-regard must always readjust itself according to external criteria relating to integrity - bridling one's subjective biases, so that one's understanding is ever more closely harnessed to the facticity of the world and its logical forms. The cause of civilization is not advanced by slipshod thinking: that is why social media are not civilizing, and the more we prioritize, on Wikipedia, securing an environment where everybody must calibrate their behavior to make the vast anonymous world of contributors, with all of their mixed motivations, feel 'good' and comfortable, even when we egregiously goof off (as with that horrible de facto example), the stronger the tendency of this place will be to drift away from its extraordinary ambition to be a universal encyclopedia of global enlightenment. If one thinks enlightenment is not hard won, -that knowledge itself comes invariably from learning the ropes in the school of hard knocks - then little in the way of illuminating articles will ever be written. If some soapy chimera of creating a 'social playground' is more important, where the slightest lapse from euphemisms gets the alarm-bells ringing, and committees sitting to ply a mixture of anodyne, and punishment to restore order, then we are creating a kindergarten, one seething with childish games of manipulation and point-scoring. Thanks for the insult that I am mean. Even casual remarks like that can tell me something.Nishidani (talk) 10:39, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Actually, Lev, I'm in your debt for that remark. In my experience, few things are more productive to thinking than an insult. That is why I find it difficult to feel offense at a gratuitous jab like that punched my way. It elevated my noon walk under a cloudy sky with drizzling weather into a very interesting (to me) set of reflections I might not otherwise have made, all flowing from the temporal notation in your remark 'I've been asking for over two years now, is that you stop being so mean to other editors.' I'll share them here if I can get time to write them up by this evening. Regards Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

To anticipate, the starting point was

'That's wot my sentiments is. I can't abear a meanness. I'm afore the public, I'm to be heerd on at the bar of the Little Helephant, and no Gov'ner o' mine mustn't go and do what's mean.' Game Chicken in Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848) Penguin 1970 p.899.

What do we mean by 'mean'. Well, not miserly, close-fisted, certainly. No, you bridled at my describing, with a reasoned analysis, another editor's failure to understand what de facto means as an example of 'muddled thinking'. This, you are suggesting, is a personal attack rather than a statement of fact. You're wrong, unless you can prove that the analysis I made is defective. That would mean that you would have to show that 'de facto' can be used to describe a situation that does not yet exist. You don't do that. You simply say in describing his thinking as muddled, I am mean, and being mean is a violation of wiki etiquette. In other words, it would be reasonable to infer that when following, or monitoring, I/P pages, it is not the quality of the arguments, or the cogency of the content that draws your particular attention, but rather the nuances of potential offense in the minutiae of the language interlocutors use.

'Mean' in the sense you employ the word, is classified as one of the slight, sublimated forms of cruelty, a social failing, much as its other sense of tightfistedness is - putting one's obsession with money over and above the needs of people one might, as part of one's social world, help out without any real damage to one's pocket. I have, you argue, a chronic trait of being mean/cruel to other editors. It is fascinating to me that you say you have studied my edits for two years and find this a notable characteristic of my work here. What topic do I concentrate on? Israel/Palestine, but specifically on what occurs in the territories occupied by Israel. There one cannot avoid finding an abundance of examples that would outrage anyone sensitive to meanness. I won't make a 1000-diff long string of illustrations from the Israeli press. Suffice it to click on this this, or this etc., while bearing in mind that this handful is the tip of the iceberg since 49,000 houses in that territory have been bulldozed and their families rendered homeless, in the last five decades, and, virtually everyone in the world outside of a certain nationalistic mindset would instinctly consider such acts as, at a minimum, 'mean'.

I don't know how you would regard them. I do know now that you consider that the term most people would use to describe that reality for you is equally applicable to someone like myself who remonstrates at another editor's incoherence while arguing on the internet. The acts out there in reality are not sanctionable - they are, in Israel's spin of the law, legal. My picayune remonstration here merits, I think you are implying, a report to the authorities for an eventual sanction.

When I try to grasp what I find difficult to understand in terms of the psychology of people engaged in these acts, I have over the years looked to anthropology, using Natan Sznaider's point of departure in a seminal article over two decades ago that analysed the 'relationship between an assumed increased sensitivity to physical pain and the emergence of liberal society.'

He wrote:

This involved a revolution in sensibility. It contained a new aversion to pain, to be avoided at all cost. Pain was considered evil and happiness the absence of pain. Humanitarian efforts in every field of reform during the last two centuries were mostly concerned with the abolition of pain. These efforts were composed initially of the fight against cruelty, understood as the unjustifiable affliction of pain.' Natan Sznaider, Cruelty in Socio-Historical Perspective International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1996 pp.331-354 Nishidani (talk) 21:23, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

So there are two distinct, but interrelated, realities. One is the objective reality of what occurs in, say, the West Bank as titrated through reliable sources and paraphrased into our articles, and the styles of negotiation between editors in conflict over how to represent neutrally that reality. The policy of NPOV advises one to be detached, however monstrous the reality, so that, even in this case, both the victimizer and the victim are described with due care not to prejudice the point of view of either the persons who sympathise with the rationale of the ostensible persecutor, or the persons who empathize with the plight of those who suffer from the actions of the party which exercises a preponderanc of power. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

One advantage I will certainly admit pro-Israeli editors have, with regard to situations like this, compared to editors who detail Palestinian history under occupation, is that probably it is markedly easier for the former to be utterly detached from the cruelty or meanness of the occupation, and therefore edit, tweak and argue with more equanimity than say editors who unfortunately grew up as heirs, witting or otherwise, to modern Western civilization's sensitivization to the pain others suffer. I suspect that my occasional, actually in terms of edit counts overall, rare expressions of irritation, frustration and impatience with what I consider heedless opinionizing in this delicate area of Wikipedia are, technically, signs of an inability to wholly neutralize my outlook in accord with the Olympian austerity of wiki social policy in its narrowest reading. Admittedly, however, if people like myself could read this material, day by day, for decades with that ideal nonchalance to grief and gratuitously inflicted suffering, then the articles we have, however inadequate, would never have been written. No branch of knowledge in the humanities has ever advanced anywhere without some native passion, fervid curiosity or bewilderment at human nature's weirder ways stirring the minds and hearts of those who embrace such fields of history and society and culture. Sorry for the length. If Wikipedia thinks it is better off without people with this kind of nature who fail to reengineer their souls to the strictest values of perfect detachment such that their language never betrays unease or on occasions causes murmurs of anxiety in other editors, well, stiff cheddar, Nish. ps. I took this edit of yours to be 'mean' because it endorses a filer. I can't surely be the only one who can spot the obvious. Nishidani (talk) 22:37, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Sharon

Hombre, would you mind awfully rejigging your efn Sharon material so we can get shot of the old Haaretz stuff. Afaics, everything is available in scholarly sourcing so we can do without them, I think. If there is something not covered, let me know and I will hunt it down in a journal or a book. Levivich is correct that there is also material in Peteet 2017.Selfstudier (talk) 16:21, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

I've been doing that in draft form in the few hours available to me these last two days, actually. And supplying several new book sources. The whole conversation is available in Primor's German book of 2003, but Eldar has points not covered there. I work slowly, since I have no POV to push but that of ascertaining the fact5ual record.Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

In your own time, amigo, miles to go before we sleep.Selfstudier (talk) 22:27, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Of course, I'v e no problem with anyone editing anywhere any section according to their own lights. I kept up efn notes because given the page was under attack, I thought all the used evidence should be outlined in notes. In my experience, most people don't read many sources, indeed they don't familiarize themselves with the topic: they draw an opinion from their impressions of the lead and perhaps some quick perusal of the text, particularly in a complex article like this. Obviously, now that an irrefutably Israeli-driven POV title has been settled on, one task that remains is to conserve the information in those notes by laconic paraphrase, avoiding all temptations to gut them and the article to make out some tertium quid. Nishidani (talk) 09:57, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Pro memoria re I/P sourcing

Netanyahu – the same one, of course – prodded David Radler more than 30 years ago to engineer the newspaper’s acquisition by Conrad Black and his Canadian Hollinger group, who promptly turned The Post from a widely-respected and quoted newspaper to a right-wing rag of no importance, as it remained during most of their 14 years of ownership.' Chemi Shalev, 'Farewell to Haaretz and All Its Readers – but Especially American Jews,' Haaretz 21 December 2020 Nishidani (talk) 10:18, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

(1)In this respect, the examination of the crime of apartheid will probably have to be taken into consideration, particularly in view of the recent reports by the Israeli associations Yesh Din and B'Tselem, which concluded that there was a crime of apartheid attributable to the Israeli authorities, taking into account all the characteristics of the occupation policy, which systematically discriminates between Israeli settlers and the Palestinian population.Some reflections on the International Criminal Court decision on its territorial jurisdiction in Palestine.' François Dubuisson (professeur de droit à l'Université libre de Bruxelles) 'The ICC decision to investigate war crimes in Palestine has huge symbolic significance and will likely consider the crime of apartheid, given recent reports.Mondoweiss 6 February 2021

Perhaps wishful thinking, but law is the only medium whereby this quagmire can be pumped clean of its neurotic muck.Nishidani (talk) 18:17, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

(2)Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on brand, called it “pure antisemitism.” “The court established to prevent atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people,” Netanyahu proclaimed, “is now targeting the one state of the Jewish people.” With predictable righteous indignation, Netanyahu went on to accuse the ICC of “outrageously claiming that when Jews live in our own homeland, this is a war crime. . .The ICC’s decision is not final. Ms. Bensouda is leaving in the summer and it is unclear if she can pursue an investigation until then, or if her successor will. But in the coming months, Israel will need to reconcile the fact that, rightly or wrongly, it has refused to cooperate with the ICC and refrained from presenting its case at all. This means that Israel cannot appeal the decision, but can only urge a proxy to do so on its behalf. You can claim hypocrisy, travesty and miscarriage of justice while staying out of the fray, but only to very limited effect” Alon Pinkas, (Israeli diplomat,political analyst and Fox television pundit) 'Don’t Dismiss the ICC Ruling on Israel, but Don’t Blow It Out of Proportion Either,' Haaretz 7 February 2021

(3) 'The International Criminal Court on Friday determined that it has jurisdiction over the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, despite Israel’s insistence to the contrary, opening the way for an inquiry into allegations of Israeli, and Palestinian, war crimes in the region. . .Dealing a severe diplomatic blow to Israel, the court ruled that for its purposes, Palestine qualified as the state on the territory where the events in question occurred and defined the territorial jurisdiction as extending to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The ruling was not unanimous, with one of the three judges, Péter Kovács, presenting a dissenting opinion, disputing the notion that the court has jurisdiction in this case.'Isabel Kershner,'I.C.C. Rules It Has Jurisdiction to Examine Possible Israel War Crimes,' New York Times 5 February

Increasingly Brazen Israel Begins Building Settlements In The U.S.

Increasingly Bold Israel Begins Building Settlements In Downtown Albuquerque.

"In a move that shocked and angered city residents, including families that have called the area home for centuries, an increasingly bold Israel announced Tuesday that ..."

This is yet another informative and fast-breaking news article from The Onion. -- Warm regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:22, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Actually, apart from the skit, I'm always refreshed by news of the increase in Israelis moving to the US, Europe, Germany, anywhere since it is in the natural logic of history, demographics and topological constraints, that Jews will continue their ancient tradition of emigrating out over the world from the far too narrow confines of that tormented land. It's not, in my view, healthy to be locked up in that situation, and caught up in a hypernationalism that is not congenial to the general thrust of Jewish history. In the short term this will have a negative side, - inter-Israeli marriages in this new diaspora are notably the norm, compared with the practice in Jewish populations generally, and a lot of the usual patriotic cant plays into an ethnic conversation that, in the diaspora, has been far more open and flexible to reason. But, in short, the ideal greeting in this phenomenon for those embarking on a broader horizon should be: 'welcome ab(r)oard!' Nishidani (talk) 12:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, the usual serendipity. I was catching up on some reading this morning and caught this remark from Avraham Burg

'For this reason he is convinced that Jews in Israel can learn from Jews in the Diaspora. “When I look at the [people attending] non-Orthodox synagogues in the United States, I think that they didn’t grow up the way I did, but that is where the next corpus of the Jewish people was created,” he explains. “Instead of sending our [Israeli] children in large numbers to the death camps, they should be sent on Birthright trips to the Jewish communities [abroad].' Ravit Hecht,  'A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?,' Haaretz 2 January 2021

One of the uses of reading widely is to decentre the egotistic thrust always complicit in trying to think for oneself. One discovers that almost everything one slowly works out has been thought by others. Almost everything that Burg states here confirms my own conclusions, and I was particularly delighted to see the clever way he turned Ahad Ha'am's famous view on its head in asserting the diaspora should be the spiritual centre of Israeliness. Nishidani (talk) 10:36, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Yes, I agree with your insights, based at least on my own personal experience. And I have great respect and admiration for Avraham Burg. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:00, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Appreciation

"Appreciation of Your Articulation"

Your articulated prose and well-crafted verbage, may be lost to those who don't know Burbage; You've mastered the art with style and finesse, and are worlds apart from those who know less. Reading your words is time well spent, despite the turds who express discontent. They simply don't know what each word means, because their highest plateau is a hill of beans. For fun, an articulate video you might enjoy. Atsme 💬 📧 15:56, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah! Finally the tedium of wiki broken by a bit of wit. What can I say? Thanks, of course, but. . . um . . .

Like flecks on sequent waves, like frail sea-foam,

Thoughts crest the pulsing folds of our fleshed brain

And flicker in instant triumph, till each comb

Falls to the tow of silence as memories wane.

Time flows in dumps and billows: on each surge

Men in their millions mill into the light,

Ride out their sun-glanced moment and then merge

Back with the smattery suck of vacuous night.

The babbling child prates into quipping youth,

Youth to discursive manhood’s wordy prime,

Till, sputtering syllables past a single tooth,

Age ebbs out on the wrinkled neap of Time.

Though Time’s scythe may well let these verses stand,

Tongues change in time, till none Will understand.Nishidani (talk) 16:27, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Deep Analysis of Israeli Politics

Some great, penetrating insights into the increasingly complex and convoluted Israeli political system. (Suggest to increase playback speed to 1.5 times the normal speed, to save time listening.) -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:46, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I've often wished to read more of Shir Hever's work than I've managed so this was a nice surprise. Mind you, I don't follow almost any political talk - in Italy they excel in it. 15 hours of daily discussion, at a low rule of thumb calculation - sometimes consisting of three hour long debates, on politics and recently the Covid problem - has long been a feature of television here. Meaning, the more intractable a chaotic system is, the more you talk around it, when the essential data for a year can be summed up in five minutes. And in any case, that kind of TV has to compete with bookshelves, and invariably loses out.

As usual, incapable of following advice, I listened with my slow ear, on the grounds that Nietzsche's advice about the art of slow reading should have aural ramifications. Thanks, and pat the whilom pups for me. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:20, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Peel Commission

Based on the new archive material released in 2017 https://www.paljourneys.org/sites/default/files/The_Secret_Testimony_to_the_Peel_Commission_Part_I-_Underbelly_of_Empire.pdf (Part 1). There's a Part 2 as well https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jps.2020.49.2.8?journalCode=rpal20. Worth a read.Selfstudier (talk) 16:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks. One of the problems of recent history is that what is obvious (between the lines or the heavy silences, will only be known as archives are released, long after the content's power to make people see reality has been defused, and their potential for disrupting the thrust of immediate geopolitical interests diverted. It is obvious all the discursive pussyfooting over peace negotiations that shambles along has but one purpose - get more land without forking out a cent towards its real estate value. It's long been the business dream of the century,88% of a whole country taken without paying for the market value of even a square kilometre.Nishidani (talk) 16:10, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Laugh a minute

Hahaha

Well, on reading that '“There is something mistaken about using the first sense of the word because no one is actively entering and occupying now,” he said, adding that in the military sense Israel had already taken over the West Bank and there was no ongoing military campaign to seize control of the territory.' I was surprised to learn that editors of the Hebrew wiki don't trouble themselves to read their local press or tune in to catch the daily video reports on how folks visiting the West Bank to have a nice picnic can be chased back to Israel by dumb kids in military fatigues when the settlers complain that these Israeli intruders, perfectly fluent in Hebrew, failed the bloodtest that would otherwise give them a right to have a barbeque in God's own country. First Covid restricted movements, now you have to have a DNA warrant to validate where you can move in that landscape.Nishidani (talk) 01:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Your disruptive activity at RfC

Is there a reason you chose to put your long-form, frivolous complaints about the RfC in the "Votes" section when the instructions explicitly asked for conversation in the section below to keep it organized? Wikieditor19920 (talk) 17:27, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

pings

You can go to preferences -> notifications and near the bottom can mute users so that they cant ping you. Ive found it useful. nableezy - 23:30, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't mind being pinged in principle. I take exception to being pinged on a page I follow, esp. by people demanding constant attention for their tedious and un believably dull comments. I regard it as noise disturbance, practiced by almost no one in my regard except the chap I've referred to. I don't see why I should be compelled by that discourtesy to block out quite a few editors who, from time to time, ask me for input. My mother was on call 24 hours a day in her pharmacy, I can't live up to that old and noble tradition, but in a collaborative project like this, one should strive to be available to anyone who seriously seeks some advice.Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, you can block pings from any specific user was what I meant, not in general. nableezy - 23:41, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

なるほど (naru hodo: 'I see' in Japanese). Dumb me. I got into a drinking competition in three different louche bars tonight (there's a very able chap here who has been vaccinated who is teaching me how to get round the 6 o'clock lockdown rules). Will try that when I have a tot, a morning hair of the dog that bit me, tomorrow. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 23:46, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Must need a gin and tonic together with a cup of tea. I tried that, writing (a)Wikieditor19920, then User:Wikieditor19920, then User:Wikieditor19920, which all came up as redlinks. Will any of these function? Borry for the sother.Nishidani (talk) 08:14, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Just Wikieditor19920 and then select the name from the drop down list. nableezy - 13:44, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

It was a tremendous intellectual tussle but I finally managed to work it out in 5 sweaty minutes. Thanks for your shortcut advice. Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Accusations of disruptive editing

Here, per usual, you made an accusation of "disruptive editing." Please provide the specific reason why these edits are "disruptive" or we can resolve this at WP:AE to get to the bottom of these incessant personal attacks. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 01:00, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Ignoring a talk page consensus is disruptive editing. nableezy - 01:12, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Nableezy Point to a specific and recent consensus that was "violated" by any one of my edits. Nor is there any such "consensus-required" limit on this talk page. No, the fact that you disagree with an edit does not make it "disruptive," that's a specific accusation that you need to back up rather than casually throwing around the moment you disagree with another editor. Now's your opportunity to do so.

And while you're here, Nableezy, did you in any way solicit, on or off wiki, Nishidani to make this edit and restore your revert, after you yourself had to undo it due to the 1RR restriction? Wikieditor19920 (talk) 01:19, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

lol no. The recent consensus is where myself, Nishidani, and Jr8825 all explicitly disagree to your removal of the source earlier, along with Selfstudier who initially put the source in. That is 4-1, with not one single person agreeing with the incredibly inane idea that Peteet is not a reliable secondary source. If you try doing that again I will absolutely go to AE. I already asked an admin if that sequence is worthy a report and seems like it may well be. Editing against a talk page consensus is disruptive editing, regardless of a consensus required provision being there or not. Stop doing it. nableezy - 02:07, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Nableezy Not only are you lying on this talk page, you are also lying to an admin who openly told you they haven't reviewed the context of the situation, only your framing of it. There was no "consensus." I raised an issue with a source, and you refused to substantively respond and reinserted it as a knee-jerk reaction.

Your antics in this topic area are tiresome, and you've gotten away with it for far too long. Your taunting/belligerent responses create a toxic editing environment for anyone who doesn't fully agree with you, you edit war, you claim consensus in ongoing discussions and deny the existence of consensus when you are outnumbered, you file frivolous reports, you fight over talk page headings and formatting to try and make your points the most visible -- It is astonishing you are permitted to still maintain a presence in the IP area. The same goes for Nishidani, who repeatedly attacks others in endless screeds or talk page summaries.

If this keeps up, I will file an AE report, and then we can have the full context presented there. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 04:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Your repeated abuse on editors and calls for their expulsion from the I/P area eerily echo what activist web sites are pushing for. 'Endless screeds'? If that is how you view the desultory but ongoing dialogue with friends here who disagree with me over the heart of the kind of conflict we cover here, you are not obliged to read them. These exchanges show that while disagreements can be profound, they can be explored with gentlewomanly vigour, without the usual hysterical suspiciousness and hostilities public argufying displays. With people like Bolter or Arminden, one doesn't have to go through the artificial antics of formally assuming good faith, because the question never arises: the quality of their contributions shows the temper of their minds and, I assume, their characters, and our exchanges are conducive to underlining the fact that in this 'toxic' area, it is possible to beg to differ and yet maintain very amicable relations).

It is 28 February. The month is so called after an Osco-Umbrian dialect term, that of the Sabines borrowed into Latin with the sense of 'means of expiation' (febbrua), and is synonymous with 'purgation'. I.e., it marks the season where ritually important areas and places like houses are cleansed for the new year. In ancient Rome, among other things, they cast salted roasted spelt: in Japan they still celebrate similar rites at Setsubun, tossing soybeans out the door (mamemaki), while inviting the bustling devils and demons who have sponged on the site over winter to cordially fuck off and allow good fortune to reenter. So, it is an opportune day, on the eve of spring, for you to disappear from this page, and stay off it. If you are meditating vengeance at AE I suggest the Ides of March. So, goodbye.鬼は外! 福は内!. Nishidani (talk) 10:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

No, I and every other person on that talk page has substantively replied to your asinine assertion that Julie Peteet writing in Anthropological Quarterly is not a reliable secondary source. Every single person who has commented on that page has disagreed with said asinine assertion. And yet, he persisted. And yes, editing against consensus is disruptive. Do it again and see what happens. Feel free to go to AE, would honestly love to see that. nableezy - 13:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Kong

Does this edit have anything to do with reality? Johnuniq (talk) 04:18, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Stone the flamen crows, old bean! Had I read that when I got up a few hours ago, it would have made even more easeful the passage of yesterday's dinner through that other less-than-wholesome cavity! Next some Chinese wikieditor will be retaliating by glossing the Chinese bio of Charles Dicken(d)s as 'Mr Prepuces'/or more literally, 'Chip off the old cock'. With that precedent we can note that Chaucer is Mr.Cobbler,(and Michael Schumacher as Mr Shoemaker), Cicero as Mr Chick-pea, Plato as ‘broad’(brow), either of the George Bushes as ‘President Shrub'), Frank Knopfelmacher as Mr. Buttonmaker, or Adam Smith as Mr. Earth Metalworker!

Of course, 孔 ‎kǒng was just a clan name and did mean 'fissure', then more broadly 'aperture/hole' in ancient Chinese, but why stop there? In archaic Chinese, the earliest graphs suggest it was a pictogram conjoining (丿 piě, a downstroke+ 子 zǐ ‎(child‎), and thus perhaps a representation of a newborn child's skull where the cranial bones had not quite melded, leaving a gap. In that sense, if one accepts that reading, 'Kong' could be glossed as Mr. Fontanelle. Or in another traditional deciphering (Bernhard Karlgren, Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese, 1923 no.206 p.86) the hole (燕窩:yànwō) where swifts (Aerodramus fuciphagus) placed their nestlings (子). Looks like Confucius ends up in the soup with that angle, since those nesting holes are a delicacy in Chinese cuisine.

So, chum, your admin burdens will have to take on those weighted shoulders another fardel, figuring out whether a technically correct gloss on a name should be permitted on Wikipedia. I don't envy you! Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Morning walk, reciting Prufrock, a cappuccino and a toasted ham sandwich have brought me to my senses. Sorry for being frivolous. I'll do the necessary edit. Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I.e.(this and here) As Auden wrote in The Quest,

'Fresh addenda are published every day.

To the encyclopedia of the Way,'

a particularly apt citation, since Auden was evidently there (and in section XIV) himself alluding to Arthur Waley's 1934 translation of a Chinese classic The Way and Its Power (Dàodé Jīng), where the Way is a naturalistic critique of Confucianism.Nishidani (talk) 13:29, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Breathtaking, thank you. I was hoping you would say something simple like it's rubbish so I could look important but nothing here is simple! Johnuniq (talk) 00:12, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Breathtaking? Lemme reach for another gasper, and add that there is, as Walker notes, a curious item in Sima Qian's biographical entry on Confucius, which states that his given name Qiū (hillock:丘) was chosen in part because his skull was out of whack. Sima Qian remains one of the world’s greatest historians, but this marginal notice is neglected. Perhaps, connecting the dots, it might betray some reading of an obscure tradition that read his family name kǒng as redolent of the oracle bone graph's apparent depiction of a fontanelle. Master Fontanelle, or should we say, given his regal dominance of Chinese thinking, King ‎Kǒng(孔). But, that would be stretching a point, dotty thinking by yours truly.Nishidani (talk) 12:20, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

never seen an editor

Oh old man, you forget names of yore like Amorouso and Jaakobou. This isnt a new thing, its just much louder and annoying now. nableezy - 15:59, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Stop picking on me for being senile. As the Old Possum overheard some bird tweet, 'humus beans cannot bear too much reality TV'. I was tempted to report this raghead ragging at AE for the nasty innuendo that I suffer from Old timers disease so that you'd get permabanned, until I realized that the evidence runs in your flavor, um, favour. G'nite Nab, (sighed his nibs, when snubbed).Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Memorable compliments

made my day, and night:)Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

PA at AN

Hi Nishidani. I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading [29] is calling an editor stupid, and that's a personal attack. Editors who disagree with you don't deserve to be talked to that way. Please strike it, and don't write things like that in the future. Thanks, Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:18, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Pretty sure there are plenty of admins in that thread who can deal with a PA if there actually is one. nableezy - 04:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Creating work for admins would not be productive; better for the author to fix it. Re "if there actually is one": is what I quoted a PA in your view? Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:45, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Not especially no. Context being a thing, and the beginning of the diff being ignored (Since there is no way one can get from what I wrote to what you inferred). nableezy - 16:07, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I am sympathetic to the view that people should be nice. However, your request would have more merit if you also addressed the comment that Nishidani replied to. That comment was an absurd put-down totally unrelated to what Nishidani had written. Is it ok for someone (the other editor) to post insults that appear to be intended to deflect points made (aka troll)? Johnuniq (talk) 06:32, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Levivich. Don't be so predictable. People who actually have done the overwhelming bulk of constructive work in building some respectability for I/P articles have over the decades dealt with more sockpuppets than most wikipedians. One dryly puts up with weeks and months of polite WP:AGF with the usual blow-ins, even though one is dead certain one is addressing another toxic disruptive sockmater's (sic) puppet (as almost always emerges). All this as one (a) waits for proof and (b) observes how people who share the sockma(s)ter's POV, back or support the newbie. Do I really need to construe for you Jayron's jack-in-the box leap from dry comment to snide personal insult, with its pathetic implication that wiki can do without a lot of people like me, but not without him. I rarely see a form of prose that shoots its own assumptions, in attack, in the foot. If you want to be helpful in these things, sometimes just ignoring obviously ridiculous trivia, both the provocation and its reaction, is the best move. I've nothing against Jayron - I don't hold grudges, and we all have our moments and completely miss the mark. He did, going ballistic at my suggestion that those disruptive arseholes be given the flick pass (fuck'em) in no uncertain terms.Nishidani (talk) 08:12, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm shocked that Nishidani insulted another editor's intelligence. Levivich, I for one think we should give Nishidani a pass here because this behavior is so out of the ordinary for them. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 13:29, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I told you not to comment on this page some time ago. Last warning.Nishidani (talk) 13:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

John, don't excuse chronic incivility. When you enable, you become part of the problem. Levivich ^harass/_hound 15:33, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

::::::Persisting in your inability to construe a straight piece of English? The 'John' here was not enabling some 'chronic incivility' (that's your private beef, and I have long assumed you want to act on it) on my part. In writing:-

I for one think we should give Nishidani a pass here because this behavior is so out of the ordinary for them.

'John' is making a feeble effort at being ironical. That rhetorical implication I note is not subjective, for the editor in question has over the past month repeatedly claimed that my behaviour is characteristically uncivil.

Nishidani, ... You've demonstrated no ability to follow basic talk page decorum ... Just know that AE will be sought as a remedy if you keep insulting other editors. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 16:58, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

You keep misreading tone and ignoring context. 'Keep on' means the verb following becomes frequentative. If he now writes 'this (insulting) behavior is so out of the ordinary for them (Nishidani), you have irony.

If you still have difficulty grasping the obvious, click on the link to irony and read the page.Nishidani (talk) 18:58, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I thought that coming after wikieditor's edit, Levivich was addressing him, and not Johnuniq. My error. I've been rapped over the knuckles more than once by Johnuniq over a decade. He calls things as he sees them, regardless of personal likes and dislikes. That's why if he tells me to pull my finger out, I take him seriously and trust his judgment, as opposed to that of many others who invariably come down on the side of the other party to a dispute with me. Now to business.Nishidani (talk) 20:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

When you play hall monitor while ignoring any context, you become part of the problem. nableezy - 16:05, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Asking an editor to strike an uncivil comment isn't playing hall monitor, it's being a responsible member of this community. Join me. Levivich ^harass/_hound 17:01, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Implying that others are not responsible members of this community can best be classified as what exactly? I think it begins with a personal and ends with attack, but Im not all that sensitive tbh. nableezy - 17:08, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

"Enabling by deflection" is when, in response to Editor A raising a concern about a comment Editor B made, Editors C and D intercede and raise concerns about Editor E and maybe also Editor A, thereby deflecting the focus off of Editor B and Editor B's comment, or perhaps even attempting to excuse or normalize Editor B's comment by demonstrating that someone else said something as bad or worse. Eventually, Editor A tires and goes away, leaving the original concern unaddressed. Editor B doesn't change their behavior, thinking that Editors C and D's equivocation means that what Editor B said was OK in the first place. And thus, Editor B is enabled to continue posting comments suggesting that other editors who disagree with him are stupid. How are we to address civility concerns when editors will enable by deflection, even in response something as mild as a user talk page post saying "please strike"? Levivich ^harass/_hound 18:46, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

You seem to misunderstand my position here entirely. I am directly saying I see no problem with what Editor B wrote, given the context, and that what I think is the problem is Editor A interceding on behalf of somebody who is perfectly capable of raising any concern he has with Editor B's comment that was directed at him and no Editor A. And the problem that I do see is this "hall monitor" activity of trying to police a discussion that they were not involved in and had nothing to do with them. If Jayron took offense to that comment he could say so. He apparently has not. But, and being totally serious here, do you think implying that because I do not have the same view as you on incivility that means I am not a responsible member of this community? Isn't it a personal attack to insinuate that I am not a responsible member of this community? nableezy - 20:32, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

"Join me" referred to "asking an editor to strike an uncivil comment", not to "being a responsible member of this community". I don't care if Jayron took offense, and I'm not raising anything on anyone else's behalf. I took offense, and I raise it on my own behalf (as before, as always). Levivich ^harass/_hound 23:41, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

if you say so lol. I dont quite get how one takes offense at a comment directed a third person, but its a whole new world in 2021. nableezy - 00:01, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

You've never heard "an affront to justice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere"? This of course wasn't anywhere near "affront to justice"-level, but same basic principle applies. I'm not going to only ask editors to be civil towards me, I'm going to ask editors to be civil towards everyone. Or to put it another way: Nishidani chooses to call another editor stupid; I choose to ask him not to; others choose to criticize me for asking him not to and defend Nishidani for calling another editor stupid. We're all exercising free speech. See also MeatballWiki:DefendEachOther. Levivich ^harass/_hound 00:07, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I really dont think youre MLK in this story. nableezy - 21:06, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

(Here ya go, another screed that your cosmonauts will note, as a new geographic feature, called 'The Great Wall of Porcelain prose') I don’t believe for a minute what you say about your Martin Lutherish motivation (‘"an affront to justice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere"?) for harassing me with frequent piddling complaints about my ostensible abuse of other editors. I’m entitled to that reading of your persistent niggling. You nag away, piling up pseudo-evidence and coming to my page to ‘warn’ me to mend my atrocious ways, while regularly ignoring ridiculously WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT bludgeoning of editors elsewhere (The new anti-harassment nonsense does state that bad faith arguments' are part of the problem). As I wrote earlier:

I find that the concentration level on wiki skyrockets generally when one discusses people's editing behavior in the denunciation forums - words with a subjective nuance, a hurtful tone. It is understandable biologically - man is a social animal of a species that spends a large amount of its time chatting, and grooming. In line with its Randian objectivist principles, Wikipedia nurtures as an ideal impersonality exclusively concentrated on (a) detecting sources of information out there, evaluating its merits case by case, and crafting that material by accurate factual paraphrase into articles. The rider is, don't interpret the editor.It's one of those Ibsenish fictions we are all obliged to take on board. Fine, but what is lost in practice is that (b) one inevitably must interpret the flaws that emerge when editors misread, don't consult, skew or ignore the sources. Those who confuse these two levels, often take to some administrative forum for sanctions people who engage in the latter as doing so because they are intent on abusing the former guideline (Nov 2021)

Two editors told you that Jayron's remark was offensive. You ignored that remark, and focused on my response. Had you a disinterested concern for not having other people offended, you would have told Jayron he was out of line, and, that done, you would have acquired the right to direct a reprimand also my way. As it stands, you tacitly backed an admin's irritated personalizing boutade against me, and went for my jugular for having the audacity to respond to him. Elitism. Worse still, you keep repeating that my remark branded Jayron as 'stupid': that is a crass distortion. His remarks were in the protasis-apodosis mode -'if..then' - a form that, in logic, has an efficient value in propositional explorations. but in wiki discourse, absolves those technically of any accusation they attacked people. 'No, what I said was hypothetical...' Since the intent of J's remarks was to tell me to piss off, and was based on inexplicable inferences from my post, I didn't use a rhetorical ruse. I called a spade a spade. He had misread my remark and replied to it illogically.

You 'monitor' me, and I don't think this peculiar obsession you have with my ostensible roguish ill-manners speaks of sensitivity to 'justice' as much as animadversion for my I/P work. I think I am entitled to read your interest in me as Javertian in a minor key. Generally I don't like monitors, and for a good historic reason. I saw an unfortunate but strong, brawny deaf-mute boy at our school pummelling the life out of a boy two years younger than him, and responding to the younger boy's weeping, I went down the stairs -everybody else just watched - and grabbed the puncher in a headlock, somewhat anguished that I had to use this recourse, because I knew that the victimizer had on occasion been teased by louts and was justly offended as often as not. The boy being pummelled wasn't one of that handful of shitheads. In any case, the only thing to do was to paralyse the deaf-mute in a harmless, but strong headlock, so I could drag him out of the mêlée and then calm him down. He tried to bite my left nipple off. I senior monitor passed, grabbed me and hauled me upstairs saying he was going to report me. So I grabbed him by the collar, and, though he was much taller than me, lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the wall, yelling angrily that he'd, yes, misread the situation. He wouldn't believe me. Fortunately a friar hearing the hullabaloo came and had overheard my rapid fire spitting reconstruction of what happened:('You fucking dickhead. S . .was bashing a kid. I intervened and stopped him, without hurting him. . .'), didn't object to my vituperative language, but took me aside and listened closely, and noting the blood on my shirt, examined the wound and called a doctor. I was given a week off, stitches, a tetanus injection and thanked. So monitor me as you like, but don't tell me about some fucking principle of justice you're extremely sensitive to, that I supposedly violated, and thus personally offended you who feel instinctively motivated to step in whenever the planet's miseries are compounded.

Writing this I remember that passage in Kafka's Amerika. Karl Roßmann, a lift-operator, finds an acquaintance in serious trouble, dead drunk, and, after trying all sorts of things to help him without leaving his post, finally calls another lift-attendant to replace him for a few minutes. On returning, his absence is noted, and though he protests that he'd earlier filled in for a full two hours for the boy he asked to replace him for a moment (Ich habe ihn doch auch zwei Stunden lang während des größten Verkehrs vertreten) he gets fired, the other boy retained. Later the episode is summed up:

'It had come to pass far more quickly than he had reason to expect, for after all he'd really done his best working there for two months, and undoubtedly much better than a lot of the other young boys. But clearly such things were never taken into consideration anywhere on earth, either in Europe or America when a decision had to be made, but rather judgment was passed on the basis of the first words, spoken in rage, that spilled out of the mouth of the person delivering the verdict. (Es war allerdings schneller gegangen, als er gedacht hatte, denn schließlich hatte er doch zwei Monate gedient, so gut er konnte, und gewiß besser als mancher andere Junge. Aber auf solche Dinge wird eben im entscheidenden Augenblick offenbar in keinem Weltteil, weder in Europa noch in Amerika, Rücksicht genommen, sondern es wird so entschieden, wie einem in der ersten Wut das Urteil aus dem Munde fährt.)(Arminden, please step in and fix this atrocious version of a prose master.!

That passage should be pinned up on the wall of all of the etiquette-fixated fusspots, wikinursury nannies and assorted brownnosing snifffarts who succumb to the temptation to think this is a medium for feely-goody chat and inimitable social form rather than for hard-nosed, lynx-eyed, encyclopedically constructive yakka.Nishidani (talk) 13:27, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Hold your horses, Levivich old son. You need a remedial lesson at this point in how to construe the plain English of a conversation exchange. But stretching my legs and buying a pizza is the priority for the next hour.Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

A lesson on how to read, rather than allow one's antipathies to get the better of a set of texts.

Evidence.

• (Exhibit A) That ideal solution gives sockpuppets enormous room to jam Wikipedia by eating up serious editors' time. If, rather than mass revert, one were obliged to scrupulously examine the merits of each particular edit (dozens), committed wikipedians who have other things to do would be sucked into a timesink, with the sockpuppet chuckling. Fuck'em. Revert everything, and whatever is left over to be fixed, will eventually be fixed. Zero tolerance.Nishidani (talk) 18:35, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

The solution offered was Jayron's. I called it ideal, but noted how, in practice, it could lead to abuse, by allowing sockmasters to game wiki, and wage an attrition on serious editors' worktime. There is no nuance of hostility to Jayron, or his proposal, just a banausic note on an unforeseen possible implication were it applied rigorously.

Within 8 minutes the riposte from Jayron was

• (Exhibit B)If you don't want to make Wikipedia better, no one is forcing you to do so. You aren't being paid, no one really needs you here. If you aren't here to improve things, at the very least, just stay out of the way of people that are trying to do so. --Jayron32 18:43, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

• (Exhibit C) Since there is no way one can get from what I wrote to what you inferred, I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading. Nishidani (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

B cannot be objecting to 'fuck'em'(sockpuppets). For our euphuism ‘fuck’ reappears when Jayron closed the thread using it himself ('Unfuckingbelievable')

I noticed B and ignored it for an hour, - no quick on the trigger anger there. Then I reflected. No: a response is due. Admins should not be allowed to get away with a broad and gratuitous insult. esp. if their language gives the impression that they imagine themselves as denizens in a world apart from us content peons, as if,- it is my inference from his language, they seem to assume they are on a rang in some wiki hierarchy, and the hoi polloi are, unlike themselves, dispensable. Ergo, C.Nishidani (talk) 20:40, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

What you have done,Levivich,is ignore B, and assert that, thus decontextualized, C is damning evidence for some character trait of my editing, chronic incivility. To prove your case you would be required to show where my text supplies the warrant for the following inferences or innuendoes Jayron made on reading it:

• (1) 'If you don't want to make Wikipedia better, no one is forcing you to do so.'

I.e. where in what I wrote is there an indication I don't want to improve wiki?

• (2) 'You aren't being paid'

On what evidence does he base his insinuation that somehow I am disgruntled at not being paid for my edits?

• (3) 'no one really needs you here'

Where did this admin get it into his head that he can speak for the entire community which, with Olympian authority, he assumes contains not a single editor who really gives a fuck whether I, for one, help out or disappear?

It is true that no one is indispensable here. It is also true that each editor makes a difference. It is not indispensable that someone like myself change these 9,848 tidbytes) into the 90,568 bytes article we now have in just 7 edits. But the difference remains - between cheap casual dumping of bits and pieces and something with comprehensive depth and coverage of a very difficult topic.

• (4) If you aren't here to improve things, at the very least, just stay out of the way of people that are trying to do so.

Where in my first post is there any evidence for the inference I don't collaborate to improve edits.

The implication of the protasis ia 'Nishidani in that remark looks as if he is not here to improve things'; the advice in the apodosis is: 'piss off. I and others here, unlike you, are trying to improve the encyclopedia.

Unless you can give logical and textual warrant for this series of out of left field attacks, you don't have a case. If anything, you are just taking sides and repeating your usual refrain than I'm an uncivil arsehole, whose work you monitor to prove that theorem (no doubt for eventual administrative action).

I would have already moved on, forgotten this piddling hairsplitting tiff, had you not thought it deserved scrutiny. So while citing Jayron here, I have absolutely no desire to blame him. In my view, it was just a momentary lapse, and probably,(I don't know him from a bar of soap) doesn't represent his very productive approach and contributions to this encyclopedia.Nishidani (talk) 21:10, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

We'll all be fired soon, lol. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262966/wikipedia-harassment-new-universal-code-of-conduct-policy Selfstudier (talk) 23:52, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Poor buggers. Still, as one scans that tripe, one does note that two surprising things are included(a)'bad faith arguments' and (b) 'deliberately introducing biased, false, inaccurate, or inappropriate content” to Wikipedia.' Use such criteria and one would end up potentially criminalizing the editing of most I/P area editors of one particular POV. That's how silly these attempts to nanny-engineer a social media nursery atmosphere as a priority and formal precondition for writing a PhD level content encyclopedia can get.Nishidani (talk) 09:27, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

harassing me with frequent piddling complaints about my ostensible abuse of other editors is really not a defensible characterization of our interactions of late. Let's review the facts:

• In November 2020 at #Comment on edits not editors, I wrote "Please do not use article talk pages to comment on editors as you did here: [1] [2] [3] [4]. Article talk page comments should be restricted to addressing only content, without addressing other editors' behavior/knowledge/competence/etc."
• Here's what you wrote that prompted me to write that message:
  • Most editors commenting negatively here have no record, as far as I can see, of writing in-depth articles on the basis of the scholarly documentation. [30]
  • Most of the above is specious nitpicking that, to illustrate, reveals you have little practical grasp on what writing historical articles involves ... Nearly every point you mucked up above shows unfamiliarity with hands on construction of complex articles. [31]
  • I see now [Editor1] and [Editor2] are now teaming to revert stuff out. When you can't argue a point, that's the violent option, create an edit-warring atmosphere and then shout WP:Battleground. It's what socks do, and several are on this page. [32]
  • :Whoever you may be, to judge by this edit you shouldn't be editing here. Editors who rewrite text without reading the source are on extremely dangerous ground. ... You're lucky I don't report people. [33]
• In January 2021 at #West Bank bantustans, I wrote "Please strike your comments today about editors at Talk:West Bank bantustans."
• Here's what you wrote that prompted me to write that message:
  • That is extremely muddled thinking, that shows no familiarity with the article's documentation ... Read WP:CRYSTALBALL and try to get some handle on orderly rational focused analysis. [34]
  • Once more you are not reading or remembering the sources, or even grasping my points. ... Alas, sigh. But this is Wikipedia, where numbers count, and an impressionable glance at chat, not familiarity with the scholarly complexities. [35]
  • Point proven. You don't understand the terms you use, and you don't grasp that this, apart from the obtuse disregard for English usage, violates WP:Crystal. [36]
  • I.e. you don't understand the meaning of the legal terminology you cited, and apparently didn't even bother to check it on Wikipedia itself. and a majority voting for the proposed name change on some vague assertion of NPOV while totally ignoring or failing to answer the crux ... and the actual editors of the page familiar with the topic's sources, and having extensive textual evidence ... [37]
  • Just to remind editors how really thorough POV whitewashing occurs, the (ostensibly) corresponding, sister article in Hebrew has actually zero references to the extremely well documented thinking about the Bantustan model which we have here. Great job there! Absolutely NPOV - in the sense it is being used here: never refer to the actual facts. [38] [39]
  • The contrafactual reading has consensus, but then again, as recent events remind us, people don't focus on reality and the meaning of terms. [40]
  • The majority refusal to accept 'enclavization' however boils down to either unfamiliarity with the subject, or POV voting for a political result favourable to one of the two parties in the dispute ... I'm a realist. While I've been arguing 'enclave' uninflected is a gross violation of NPOV, I have been convinced nonetheless from the outset that, as so very often, political calculation of the crucial national interest will determine the outcome, as it has. Few actually edit this hotspot area, but touch the national interest of that country, and masses turn up and the serious arguments are buried. I've watched this going on for 14 years. [41]
• Here, in March 2021, I wrote "Hi Nishidani. I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading [42] is calling an editor stupid, and that's a personal attack. Editors who disagree with you don't deserve to be talked to that way. Please strike it, and don't write things like that in the future. Thanks, Levivich"

What I'm writing is far less frequent and far more polite than what you're writing. The November and January diffs were all from Talk:Palestinian enclaves, which I walked away from in part so I didn't have to read these insults that you were frequently writing. But now I'm back because I've read yet another one of your insults, this time at WP:AN. I don't hunt after you, but I can't seem to escape your incivility! If you choose to use your voice to insult our colleagues, I will choose to use my voice to ask you to stop. And I find it both amusing and sad that after throwing insult after insult after insult upon other editors, you (and some others) react so defensively to a polite request to strike. Levivich ^harass/_hound 19:32, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

I really wish you would put that level of effort in to dealing with the root of the problem here, that being editors who do things like this or this. Deal with the garbage that people who are trying to write an encyclopedia deal with and then maybe youll see a nicer place. Though I will grant you one thing, Nishidani would do well to make some of his comments less personal, if only to remove the go to method to remove him and his contributions when his interlocutors cant on any policy basis. nableezy - 21:15, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

French needed!

Could I ask you to look over the Guerin-quote on Monastery of Saint Theodosius? I have a feeling that my "google.translate"-French could be improved.. Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Hm. Just as I started to feel a frog in my throat and wondered about the Covid status of the wonderful Egyptian cook who made it for me! Yeah, late here, but I'll do that tomorrow (not in four years). Cheers H.Nishidani (talk) 22:57, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Hang on, the notes have two extended quotes from Guerin there. Which one?Nishidani (talk) 11:52, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

The 1863 one, starting with "The remains of the monastery of St. Theodosius ..." and ending with "....another way to their country", (all of that quote is from "google.translate"), cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:11, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Okay, I'll fix it tamorrah, if needed (ad break tweak. Watching Guess Who's Coming to Dinner tonight)Nishidani (talk) 21:13, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

South Hebron Hills again

I thought it was bad enough already, but take a look at this: <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-children-arrested-sparks-outrage>.

Watching that video must be unbearable for any parent of small children.

--NSH001 (talk) 08:31, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

These last few days it seems to be unending, [43]. Just look at the expression on the faces of these guys in Sheikh Jarrah: [44], Huldra (talk) 20:48, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Huldra. Your links don't work, but these ones do: B'Tselem on Alyan family near Mitzpe Yair and Sheikh Jarrah. --NSH001 (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, User:NSH001, I linked wrongly, using a "," in the middle of the link. Huldra (talk) 22:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

If you want to know what those folks in Havat Maon and similar places get up to see David Dean Shulman's Dark Hope (2007). Why 2 millennia of Jewish historical testimony to what contempt for the 'other' means should be cancelled for a few patches of carpetbagged desert in the WB is beyond me. Under these conditions, it is tempting to think that Israeli identity is inversely proportional to what we all should admire in Jewish history.Nishidani (talk) 21:12, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Look at the Gamaliel II-article; years ago it included things like "Rabbi Gamaliel’s overriding philosophy was: Whoever has mercy on other people, Heaven will have mercy upon him; whoever does not have mercy on other people, Heaven will not have mercy upon him."[45] Now it says "So long as thou thyself art compassionate God will show thee mercy; but if thou hast no compassion, God will show thee no mercy". I guess it is better to cloak it in old language; as if it has absolutely no relevance to people living today, Huldra (talk) 21:57, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

It is always (hermeneutically) dangerous to cite old texts like that as if the literal appearance of the wording contained a generalization. The mitzvot of halachic law are hedged by numerous cautions and context-specific clarifications in the subsequent commentaries where, as often as not, the general principle's application is qualified in terms of the religious status of the persons concerned. Thus mercy, for example, can be in good conscience defined as not obligatory if the person is not Jewish, or doesn't belong to the peoples classified under the Noahide laws. The haskalah secularists and some reforming Jewish rabbinical schools reelaborated these so that they would apply, regardless of 'race', 'religion' etc., but that is a minority position.Nishidani (talk) 10:51, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Ugh, I did not know this (that it possible wasn't "valid" for people not Jewish); I normally "don't do" religion; I'll think I'll return to that....Huldra (talk) 22:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I should clarify that what, say, Gamaliel meant (general or particular precisely) isn't known. It could well be that he asserted this as a general principle. What we do know is that in the centuries that followed, commentaries began to hedge and particularize it. The greater the ascendency of an 'orthodox' textual awareness, the more restrictive such principles tend to become in a specific religious environment. I'm sure most modern Jews, on coming across such quotations, take them as a general guideline. The same argument could be made for many other well-known quotations from foundational religious figures. Think for example of the behavior of Jesus in the incident of the Syrophoenician woman recounted in Matthew 15:21-28, which shows him embarrassed: he was preaching as a Jew to Jews, until that non-Jewish woman's desperation put him into intense difficulty, which he resolved by extending his healing powers beyond the fold. But in thus crossing ethnic borders, he suffered a crisis, and fled.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Just a small question, as I landed here only by chance: I never dwelt much on the subject, but I thought the Noahide laws cover all Gentile humanity, not just some peoples. The enWiki article also defines them this way. Did I miss something? I know the related Muslim concept of the "Peoples of the Book" only offer dhimmi protection to monotheists, but that's another matter. It does connect nicely to the question of "where did the spouses of Adam & Eve's children come from", and the contorted ways religion tries to answer it. Fun makes the world go round. Arminden (talk) 12:30, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for picking me up on that, A. I was thinking of the halakhic judgement (599) obliging Jews to exterminate the Amalekites, who in the myth certainly descend from Noah. They technically would have come under the Noahide dispensation but, perhaps because of stories that they were capable of transmogrification into animal species, treated as outside the pale of humanity, as they still are, in terms of those glosses taught in Yitzhar and some other West Bank yeshivot which equate their descendants with Palestinians, ergo . . I've struck it out, but I'd be curious to know how that mitzvah sits with Noahide principles. Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Israel Shahak cites the following from the Sefer ha-Chinuch for his view that in the Jewish religious tradition ethical values like 'mercy', respect for one's fellow man, etc., always refers to Jews, whilst the nature of the value changes if the person is a non-Jew:

And at the root of this religious obligation is that we should not do any act of mercy except to the people who know God and worship Him; and when we refrain from doing merciful deeds to the rest of mankind and do so only to the former, we are being tested that the main part of love and mercy to them is because they follow the religion of God, blessed be He. Behold, with this intention our reward [from God] when we withhold mercy from the others is equal to that for doing [merciful deeds] to members of our own people.Israel Shahak, Jewish History,Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London, 1994, pp-95-96

Of course, one should handle such medieval sources with care. It is not as if the said work, ascribed to Aharon HaLevi was papal writ. Things are much more complex, and this reflects a strict orthodox viewpoint whose 'niceties' were probably unknown or ineffectual in the larger world. Certainly in the diaspora, that kind of strong reading would be disowned by most rabbis and their congregations. But it does illustrate the ongoing tension between universal and particularistic values in Judaic tradition, and the kind of declension of tradition which can be an enabler of the perplexingly nonchalant brutality one observes in the occupied territories.Nishidani (talk) 15:36, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Brigading?

Hi Nishidani, I just read your post on the Nabeezy ANI case. Are you saying there are external webpages which direct people here to edit Israel-Palestine articles? --Boynamedsue (talk) 19:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but we don't satisfy their urge for visibility by linking to them. It's known to the relevant administrative bodies. Leave it at that.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

By the way, in editing around here, don't assume of course that people who disagree with you about these issues are necessarily connected to that racket. Most of the I/P editors I disagree with over the issues have been around far longer than that outfit and appear to work, like the rest of us, off their own bat. Take editors strictly in terms of what they do, in terms of quality of sourcing and respect for policy.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally, that creep had a "conference" lately, one of the speakers was a guy from "Dishonest Reporting". He talked about how Syria was "raining bombs over Israel" (more or less in those words): that got me going "Huh??"

When did Syria last bomb Israel? Did I miss something? I cannot remember any, at least since BA took over, in 2000. Is my memory faulty? (Israel has of course bombed Syria plenty of times these last decades; funnily he never mentioned that), Huldra (talk) 21:39, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

The ratio is around 1 (Syria)/150 (Israel) in Israel's favour, from memory. Don't waste your time following that crap. It's to concede, if you take trash seriously, a victory to people screaming for attention, to one's own detriment. The background story of what is still going on up there (Wiederholungszwang)was revealed by Moshe Dayan in an interview in, I think, 1975.Nishidani (talk) 21:57, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

oh yes, I do know (pretty much!) what is/was going on; it still astonish me that people tell lies so easily...and nobody corrects them :( Huldra (talk) 22:20, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Come now, everybody up there knows, surely, the memorable Ibsenian line:Tar De livsløgnen fra et gjennomsnittsmenneske, så tar De lykken fra ham med det samme.Nishidani (talk) 22:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Btw, when was that one time? I think I missed it? Huldra (talk) 23:28, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

It wasn't a Syrian strike technically, that one, but a Hezbollah drone (all from memory, no time to check). The picture up there is unilateral airstrikes by Israel for its own perceived geopolitical interests. It's interesting technically, a unilateral war.Nishidani (talk) 08:53, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Your User Page

You should remove "This user is no longer active on Wikipedia." from your user page-you are active--Steamboat2020 (talk) 20:12, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

As others have neutrally pointed out more than once - I don't get it, either.