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

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

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

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

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

'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'^[1]

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

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .' ^[2]

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.^[3]

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

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

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

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’ ^[4]

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

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’^[5]. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.^[6]. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'^[7]

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ^[8]). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

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

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.” ^[9]

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’^[10], 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’^[11]

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

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’ ^[12]

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora ^[13], the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.^[14]

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.^[15]

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands. ^[16]

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.^[17]. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

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

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

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.^[18]. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'^[19]

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

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines ^[20] resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

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

(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' ^[21] Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.^[22][23]

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

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” ^[24]<

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.^[25]

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

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

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

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’ ^[26]

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew^[27] language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’^[28]

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache)^[29]. In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

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

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’ ^[30]

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued. ^[31]

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region^[32] to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war.^[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power^[34]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank^[35][36]. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.^[37]

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.' ^[38]

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

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'^[39]

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

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’ ^[40]

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

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’. ^[41]

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovoked^[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state^[43] on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel^[44]. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. ^[45] One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank. ^[46]

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers^[47] where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions'^[48] Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area.^[49].

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), ^[50], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

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

'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'^[51]

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo).^[52][53] According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.^[54]

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ ^[55]

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'^[56]

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

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

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

Further reading:-

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

The creativity of people under genocide. Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241019170000","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241019170000-Resilience\/Sumud.","replies":[]}}-->

The following sanction now applies to you:

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

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

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

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

Barkeep49 (talk) 18:34, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024183400","author":"Barkeep49","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Barkeep49-20241024183400-Notice_that_you_are_now_subject_to_an_arbitration_enforcement_sanction","replies":["c-Barkeep49-20241024183800-Barkeep49-20241024183400","c-Hydrangeans-20241026012900-Barkeep49-20241024183400"]}}-->

If I had seen this comment from someone who just barely had ECR, I'd have likely indef blocked them (with the first year being a CT sanction if they were eligible). If there is another UNINOLVED admin who would like to discuss something longer, or refer this to AE to discuss a longer sanction, I am open to both of those, but after a bit of thinking this is what I felt appropriate given all the facts at play here. Barkeep49 (talk) 18:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024183800","author":"Barkeep49","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Barkeep49-20241024183800-Barkeep49-20241024183400","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241024184300-Barkeep49-20241024183800"]}}-->

Please see my comment on Barkeep49’s talk page. The point Nishidani makes, with the same cultural joke as an illustration, was made in a peer-reviewed academic journal of high repute. Unfortunately it seems this did not come up easily on google when quickly searched for. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:43, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024184300","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":3,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241024184300-Barkeep49-20241024183800","replies":["c-Barkeep49-20241024185700-Onceinawhile-20241024184300"]}}-->

And my response where I note the peer reviewed journal is using the joke to criticize it as offensive (50+ years ago). Barkeep49 (talk) 18:57, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024185700","author":"Barkeep49","type":"comment","level":4,"id":"c-Barkeep49-20241024185700-Onceinawhile-20241024184300","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241024200000-Barkeep49-20241024185700","c-Nishidani-20241024193200-Barkeep49-20241024185700"]}}-->

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

In short someone emailed you offwiki to weaponize this totally innocuous edit and see to it I am put behind bars and kept there for 3 weeks, if not indeed permabanned. Well, that spell might enable me to finger where in the hell I buried Eric Berne's classic Games People Play to refresh my memory about this kind of social gamesmanship. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024200000","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":5,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241024200000-Barkeep49-20241024185700","replies":["c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100-Nishidani-20241024200000","c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025161900-Nishidani-20241024200000"]}}-->

I contacted Barkeep about this for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted another set of eyes to look at it. As I've said before, I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Second, I was at work, soon to leave, had to stop for an oil change, and now I'm about to sit down for enchiladas with my wife, and my father is coming over to join us, so I didn't have time for all of this this evening. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:51, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024205100","author":"ScottishFinnishRadish","type":"comment","level":6,"id":"c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100-Nishidani-20241024200000","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241027151800-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100","c-Levivich-20241025185900-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100"]}}-->

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

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

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

You see, though that was not your intention, that is how any number of literate readers, were this to occur in a social setting or a novel, might read it for context and tone, as socially inept and offensive. Just as my innocuous illustration was interpreted. Since this has happened several times in the past, - admin unawareness of how language works, leading to sanctions - I have lost faith in my future as a contributor to wikipedia because of eight fatuous complaints in a year one has achieved its end. I read it as the instauration of a wokish Miranda warning to the effect that from now on in, 'anything I write can and may be used against me in arbitration,' if it can somehow lend itself to raising suspicions of a possible infringement of our strict laws on courtesy. So I clearly cannot work here, suspension ended, with this sort of Gordian knot of surveillance hanging over my head, with the scissors in the hands of admins who have, in my view, at times snipped before reading closely and checking with their peers. On the other hand, I don't yield up a natural right certainly when thuggish off-wiki sites have increasingly pressured wikipedia (lately here) to raise the temperature and target editors like myself. Unless I get permabanned, I will retain and assert my right to edit here, if infrequently. but to avoid supplying anyone here with excuses to keep up the harassment I experience, I will exercise that right by no longer exchanging a single word on talk pages when, and if, I do feel inclined to add something. That will stop admins from these embarrassing wastages of everyone's time, since my voice will disappear, as many no doubt want, but my right to continue to influence article content will remain intact. Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241027151800","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":7,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241027151800-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100","replies":[]}}-->

I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Or less. That would be another option. Levivich (talk) 18:59, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025185900","author":"Levivich","type":"comment","level":7,"id":"c-Levivich-20241025185900-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241024205100","replies":[]}}-->

Topic bans apply to your user and talk spaces, so if you'll have to wait until the topic ban expires to continue the discussion and provide page numbers. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:19, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025161900","author":"ScottishFinnishRadish","type":"comment","level":6,"id":"c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025161900-Nishidani-20241024200000","replies":["c-Nableezy-20241025164300-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025161900"]}}-->

lol yall wild. Nish, if this is enough to say fuck this place for good I get it, feel similarly tbh. nableezy - 16:43, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025164300","author":"Nableezy","type":"comment","level":7,"id":"c-Nableezy-20241025164300-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025161900","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241025174100-Nableezy-20241025164300"]}}-->

@ScottishFinnishRadish: this[1] was wholly unnecessary, and unreasonably provocative. Very disappointing behavior. Onceinawhile (talk) 17:41, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025174100","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":8,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241025174100-Nableezy-20241025164300","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241025180500-Onceinawhile-20241025174100"]}}-->

I see you are heavily involved in ARBPIA topics. Did you disclose this to Barkeep when you contacted them regarding this matter? Onceinawhile (talk) 18:05, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025180500","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":9,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241025180500-Onceinawhile-20241025174100","replies":["c-Selfstudier-20241025180700-Onceinawhile-20241025180500","c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025182000-Onceinawhile-20241025180500","c-Barkeep49-20241025194500-Onceinawhile-20241025180500"]}}-->

Hand in glove. Just leave it. Selfstudier (talk) 18:07, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025180700","author":"Selfstudier","type":"comment","level":10,"id":"c-Selfstudier-20241025180700-Onceinawhile-20241025180500","replies":[]}}-->

You may want to look at those edits, rather than the summary. This may provide some helpful context. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:20, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025182000","author":"ScottishFinnishRadish","type":"comment","level":10,"id":"c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025182000-Onceinawhile-20241025180500","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241025183600-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025182000"]}}-->

Thanks. Would you mind letting us know what exactly was the original concern you raised with Barkeep? Onceinawhile (talk) 18:36, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025183600","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":11,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241025183600-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025182000","replies":["c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025184000-Onceinawhile-20241025183600"]}}-->

That an unnecessarily inflammatory comment had been made on an article talk page by an editor warned for unnecessarily inflammatory comments. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:40, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025184000","author":"ScottishFinnishRadish","type":"comment","level":12,"id":"c-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025184000-Onceinawhile-20241025183600","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241025191500-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025184000"]}}-->

And, now that per User talk:Barkeep49#Nishidani comment, it has been shown that there was nothing inflammatory about it, how has your view changed? Onceinawhile (talk) 19:15, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025191500","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":13,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241025191500-ScottishFinnishRadish-20241025184000","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241025192600-Onceinawhile-20241025191500"]}}-->

The only unnecessary and extremely inflammatory comment made here was this remark by Barkeep who directly accused me of antisemitism by saying I was responsible for mentioning a joke that weaponized antisemitism (I see a joke weaponizing antisemtism). That reading borders on the illiterate. You endorse this egregious misprision. This is a failure of the most elementary reading skills. Since you both are highly literate, the only explanation that comes to me is that such a judgment reflects a personal impression over the last several months that there is something antisemitic, hard to pin down, but there, in Nishidani, and when I posted an utterly innocuous statement, confirmation bias kicked in, I'm sure unwittingly, but that is not a rational judgment based on evidence (that I am responsible for spreading antisemitic ideas) that would stand up in any court of opinion. I tried to be courteous in my dialogue with Barkeep but the door was shut in the face of evidence that his judgment was deeply flawed, and you second this closure. I'm not quite surprised. It's been in the air since that foreign lobby persuaded arbcom to allow one of its spokesmen to make a case against me, and, with the four subsequent cases, two by socks, something like this was on the books (the 'no smoke without fire' syndrome). Well, I'm fucked if I am going to continue to volunteer contributions for an organization that has now registered me, via admin fiat, as antisemitic, after 18 years in which this kind of repeated sockpuppet-type trashing of my work was dismissed dozens of times in an appropriate tribunal. Nishidani (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025192600","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":14,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241025192600-Onceinawhile-20241025191500","replies":["c-Nableezy-20241025193700-Nishidani-20241025192600"]}}-->

ding. Why some admins think they should be handing out sanctions without any complaint or giving the person, with over a decade of contributions to this project, the chance at explaining themselves is something I fail to understand. I actually think Barkeep is generally a great admin so I’m a bit baffled at this sequence tbh. Especially when the basis for the sanction was nearly instantaneously proven false. nableezy - 19:37, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025193700","author":"Nableezy","type":"comment","level":15,"id":"c-Nableezy-20241025193700-Nishidani-20241025192600","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241025194400-Nableezy-20241025193700"]}}-->

It goes without saying that both are fine admins, dedicated and conscientious. That is why this profound misreading is disturbing. I suspect that the burden, which I would never have the guts to take on, of having to read vast reams of often inane prose in complaints or on talk pages, dulls the edges of concentration at times. I know that happens because that is what has always worried me about having to read so much uninformed argufying on IP talk pages, that the resolute attention in the face of tedious repetitiveness risks desensitizing me, so that the payback of actually getting articles written in full scholarly attire looks like a bad investment.Nishidani (talk) 19:44, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025194400","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":16,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241025194400-Nableezy-20241025193700","replies":["c-Nableezy-20241025200200-Nishidani-20241025194400"]}}-->

Meh on both. nableezy - 20:02, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025200200","author":"Nableezy","type":"comment","level":17,"id":"c-Nableezy-20241025200200-Nishidani-20241025194400","replies":[]}}-->

@Onceinawhile SFR is active in this topic area not because they are WP:INVOLVED in a Wikipedia sense of the word but because they are an administrator attempting to uphold behavioral expectations. So they reached out to me in an administrator to administrator capacity, despite the fact that we often disagree on the right outcome in our discussions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (I normally am for milder or even no sanction than what SFR supports). And that noticeboard was, until this incident, where I had limited my activity in this topic area. This includes times where SFR has reached out about specific incidents and I've declined to take action. Hopefully that better explains the context in which SFR contacted me. Barkeep49 (talk) 19:45, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241025194500","author":"Barkeep49","type":"comment","level":10,"id":"c-Barkeep49-20241025194500-Onceinawhile-20241025180500","replies":[]}}-->

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

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

I quoted this, prefaced by the words:'The point was put with great lucidity by Sir Stephen Sedley in the brilliant essay I cite just above this.' and discussed it, on my talk page, when dealing with a query about a wikipedia editor whose behaviour was, in my view, antisemitic 6 years ago. Not a peep or boo from anyone. Nothing problematic. How times have changed. I don't mind the fact that Sir Stephen can retell an anecdote which gets both a laugh from his readers while inculcating a deep lesson, but I on wikipedia am sanctioned if I paraphrase it to the same purpose. What is a moral reminder by a great jurist is 'inflammatory language' for a wiki peon. I don't mind the offensiveness of this insult to my moral probity in these matters. I'm used to it. But how the trigger-finger now itches to shoot anyone who dares tread on this ground whose zones of what is discursively permissible are narrowed day by day, now even on wikipedia even with a light joke. My block log is thus crammed with just one more example of being punished because an admin didn’t read up, or ask around, and no doubt the usual reports asking for another sanction on the usual spurious grounds will have further 'evidence' to lead me to Galgenweg. Well, as the previous section says, sumud. Nishidani (talk) 19:32, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024193200","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":5,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241024193200-Barkeep49-20241024185700","replies":["c-Barkeep49-20241024201100-Nishidani-20241024193200"]}}-->

Yes. A known Jewish jurist warning Jewish MPs to not be hypersensitive is a rather different context than you using it to score try to convince someone you are correct on a Wikipedia talk page. This is indeed how something which can be thought provoking in one context is unconstructive or unnecessarily inflammatory language in another context. And good news - I intentionally did not add to your block log choosing instead a rather short topic ban. Barkeep49 (talk) 20:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024201100","author":"Barkeep49","type":"comment","level":6,"id":"c-Barkeep49-20241024201100-Nishidani-20241024193200","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241024203000-Barkeep49-20241024201100"]}}-->

What you are saying is that a Jew can tell a self-critical Jewish joke to another Jew. If a non-Jew repeats that joke (to a Jew or not), they are being inflammatory (and many would say 'antisemitic'). In other words, no non-Jew may intrude on an infra-Jewish conversation without being inflammatory. The world is, admittedly, a lunatic asylum run according to Rafferty's rules, unlike the physical universe, but I try to maintain my sanity by trusting in logical analysis and the moral parity of all humna beings. You are in your rights to disagree, but your statement is not underwritten by any awareness of the principles of coherence. I say that without enmity.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024203000","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":7,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241024203000-Barkeep49-20241024201100","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241024203500-Nishidani-20241024203000"]}}-->

See User talk:Barkeep49#Nishidani comment. I apologize for the parallel discussion. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:35, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024203500","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":8,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241024203500-Nishidani-20241024203000","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241024204700-Onceinawhile-20241024203500"]}}-->

I appreciate this Once, but please don't worry about this here. I'll be off-wiki for three weeks, that's all. Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024204700","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":9,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241024204700-Onceinawhile-20241024203500","replies":["c-Onceinawhile-20241024205900-Nishidani-20241024204700"]}}-->

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

Onceinawhile (talk) 20:59, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024205900","author":"Onceinawhile","type":"comment","level":10,"id":"c-Onceinawhile-20241024205900-Nishidani-20241024204700","replies":["c-Nishidani-20241024230400-Onceinawhile-20241024205900"]}}-->

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

Wikipedia is increasingly, administratively, a tired humourless place, shorn of all of the delicacies of style like irony, where passionate ignorance gets a podium and the rules require that one take everything seriously. And if you don’t, and tell a joke, the surveillance of wokist minds will haul you over the coals for being ‘inflammatory’ even if they themselves don’t believe in anything other than the instrumental ('weaponised') opportunism presented by a joke to lay that kind of fatuous insinuation. Who gives a fuck? I think I’ll drop Georges Dumézil for bedtime reading and dip back into Legman’s magisterial anthology of limericks:) And now to bed. I don't think anyone in the Western world can feel entitled to any sentiment like unfairness or grievance - whatever occurs in the bitching banter of midget pissing matches we call the 'mainstream' reportage that we discuss to edit anything, - and that is all the more true of my response here,enjoying rather the farce in comical misreadings like the above. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 23:04, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241024230400","author":"Nishidani","type":"comment","level":11,"id":"c-Nishidani-20241024230400-Onceinawhile-20241024205900","replies":[]}}-->

(Talk page watcher) A bad call, administratively, especially because of doubling down on the block despite getting further information about the Jewish history of the mentioned folklore. Perplexing decisions resulting in an outcome without justifications that hold up under scrutiny. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 01:29, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241026012900","author":"Hydrangeans","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Hydrangeans-20241026012900-Barkeep49-20241024183400","replies":[]}}-->

story · music · places

-- Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:56, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241026075600","author":"Gerda Arendt","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Gerda_Arendt-20241026075600-song_without_words","replies":[]}}-->

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 04:28, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241027042800","author":"WeatherWriter","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-WeatherWriter-20241027042800-Administrator_Noticeboard_Notice_(October_2024)","replies":["c-WeatherWriter-20241027042800-WeatherWriter-20241027042800"],"displayName":"Weather Event Writer"}}-->

• Just a note, I am not accusing you of anything. The AN/I notice is that a media article has accused you of violating Wikipedia guidelines, and this media article was mentioned at AN/I. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 04:28, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"20241027042800","author":"WeatherWriter","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-WeatherWriter-20241027042800-WeatherWriter-20241027042800","replies":[],"displayName":"Weather Event Writer"}}-->