User talk:Nishidani

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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

Citations[edit]

• Stephen F. Eisenman 'A Small Boy and Israel, Counterpunch 10 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Yuval Abraham, 'Gazans worked in Israeli kibbutzim for decades. Then came Oct. 7,' +972 magazine 6 November 2023
• Anna Morrow, 'Israel’s war is the biggest threat to Jewish peoplehood,' The Forward 8 November 2023
• Erika Solomon, 'Germany’s Stifling of Pro-Palestinian Voices Pits Historical Guilt Against Free Speech,' New York Times 10 November 2023
• Tareq S. Haijaj The stories we don’t know how to tell Mondoweiss 10 November 2023 (Issam Ileywa RIP)
• Linda Dayan, 'Ahmed Wanted Israelis to Listen to Gazans. Then 23 of His Family Members Were Killed,' On the Facebook page 'Across the Wall,' Israelis read personal stories by Gazans in Hebrew, until the last update came in: 'The entire family of this page’s founder has been bombed to death.' The Israeli co-founder of the page now says: 'I don’t know if we’ll be able to build that bridge again Haaretz 2 November 2023
• Raja Shehadeh, 'Israel has long wanted Palestinians out of Gaza – my father saw it firsthand,' The Guardian 20 November 2023

Events point to Israel’s strategy of emptying the north of Gaza of its Palestinian population, with both the massive bombardment that has damaged at least 222,000 residential units, . . .Everything that gave me hope that when violence reaches an unconscionable point and excessive violations of human rights are committed, Israel will be made to stop, is shattered now. I used to have faith that we would be protected by international humanitarian law, or by an outcry from the Israeli public against the excesses of their government – yet at this point I see no hope in either. Nor does it seem that there is hope that Israel will wake up from the delusion that war and violence against the Palestinians and its unassailable military strength will give it peace and security. This leaves us Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories vulnerable and with serious danger for our lives and our future presence in this land.

This article is the best I've read, succint, to the point. Of course as a founder of Al Haq, Shehadah must be dismissed as a terrorist, since Israel regards that and any other Palestinian rights organization as a front for terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Raji Sourani, 'I Live in Gaza. Israel’s Horrific Bombing Campaign Is Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen Before,' Jacobin 7 November 2023

We believe we are on the right side of history and that we are the stones of the valley. Despite the immensity of the challenges we face, people here do not give up.

If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.

• Alison Avigayil Ramer, 'Bassem and Ahed Tamimi are in Israeli prison because they stand for Palestinian freedom,' 19 November 2023.

This is a powerful piece of testimony by an American-Jewish Israeli of what just one pacifist family suffered relentlessly through 13 years of her personal relationship with them, and in particular with Ahed Tamimi , now imprisoned for incitement to terrorism either because she totally blew her cool with an hysterical outburst commending the Hamas murders on the 7th of October before erasing the twitter post or because the usual suspects hacked her account and faked the said post to trap her with a rap and a long jail sentence. The details are on Ahed Tamimi's wiki page, but Ramer's concluding remarks underwrite what the whole historic record attests, and particularly the extreaordinary stoicism of that people under engineered conditions of willed immiseration.Nishidani (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

'If anyone is wondering where the Palestinian Gandhis are, the answer is that they are kidnapped and taken to unknown locations where they are being tortured, sitting in military and administrative detention in Israeli prisons, killed in cold blood on the way home from school, dying of treatable wounds in destroyed hospitals, buried under the rubble of vengeance in Gaza. Despite this, there are many who will continue to grow up in Palestine’s long-standing culture of resistance.The fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people have remained steadfast for so long is a miracle of the human spirit. Extensive anti-Palestinian propaganda perpetuated by Israel and racist mainstream media coverage for decades should not rob humanity of knowing about some of the greatest activists in modern history.'

• 'Israel/OPT: ‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’: Unlawful Israeli strikes illustrate callous disregard for Palestinian lives,' Amnesty International 20 November 2023

In 1900 the Christian population of Palestine was more than double that of the Jewish population (now 1.9%. from that historic 10%) One of its oldest communities survived in Gaza, under Hamas's protection (it had been threatened by Islamic Jihad). That too has come under assault, with the strike on the grounds of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where the Gaza Triad no doubt worshipped.Nishidani (talk) 15:09, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Your list provides informative and thoughtful insights. BTW, did you get a chance to read the article from Oct. 27 by Max Blumenthal, saying there is high probability that many (perhaps even most) of the Israeli civilians (as well as Israeli soldiers) killed on October 7 were killed by so-called 'friendly' fire? It is not my intention to minimize, belittle or trivialize the proven fact that Palestinians killed many Israeli civilians on October 7, but it appears likely the Israeli military has also killed many Israeli civilians (and soldiers) on that day. Your thoughts? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What is remarkable about all these articles (only 1 is RS)

• David Sheen, Ali Abunimah, 'Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says,' Electronic Intifada 16 October 2023.
• Max Blumenthal, 'October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles,' The Greyzone 27 October 2023
• 'A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack,'Mondoweiss 22 October 2023
• Ali Abunimah,“Shoot at everything”: How Israeli pilots killed their own civilians,'Electronic Intifada 11 November 2023

is that they (a) draw directly on numerous reports in the Israeli press that however (b) like these articles themselves, are ignored by the Western mainstream press. So you have a paradox: Israel's press is 'freer' than its Western counterparts in reporting on the conflict, but its political elites (including the IDF) allow themselves a far more restricted set of options than would normally be the case in deliberations on critical situations in Western countries.

Why destroy an entire landscape when the enemy is underground? There is a very simple technological weakness in Hamas's tunnel-system. It needs large numbers of audible generators, detectable by sensors, to induct and circulate fresh air. Any network could be 'neutralized' by destroying the generators, giving those inside the option of surrender or asphixiation.(Trying to think in strictly military terms, as though I were an IDF commander) Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

More remarkable statements

• Jonathan Ofir, Israeli rabbis tell Netanyahu that Israel has a right to bomb Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza,' Mondoweiss 31 October 2023
• Tali Shapiro Jonathan Ofir, Israeli doctors urge the bombing of Gaza hospitals, Mondoweiss 5 November 2023

Nishidani (talk) 23:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Palestinians play a crucial role in the Israeli health system: we comprise 30 percent of the doctors, 30 percent of the nurses, and some 40 percent of the pharmacists, and all of us are being watched these days. The health system has adopted a McCarthyist witch-hunt approach toward all Palestinians. There are many cases of intimidation and persecution against medical personnel: according to civil society coalitions monitoring political persecution at workplaces since the war began, some 20 percent of the reported cases are of medical teams.This is not entirely new. We were always asked to come and do our job, play a crucial role in the health system, but keep our feelings and political views at home. Now, though, things are much worse.Medical personnel are being accused of supporting terror for liking a social media post, or for showing any sympathy with Palestinian pain or suffering. We cannot engage in any intellectual or moral conversation about the war. We are expected to condemn Hamas and join the patriotic Israeli military frenzy, while silently watching our Jewish colleagues cheer for the destruction of hospitals, the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, and the tightening of the blockade.'Ghousoon Bisharat, 'A Palestinian physician in Israel wrestles with her duty in the war: Lina Qasem-Hassan was due to join a medical delegation to Gaza,' +972 magazine 16 November 2023

Honourable men (once upon a time)

After the war, we heard that the first target usually seen by the pilots in the enclosed waterway was the Canberra. By chance, she was painted white, which was taken by the attackers to mean that she was a hospital ship. Without exception, the Argentinian pilots were honourable men, and not one attacked what they thought was a sanctuary for the injured.' Sharkey Ward,Sea Harrier over the Falklands, Cassell (1992) 2000 p.273.

Et cetera

• Elliot Colla, On the History, Meaning, and Power of 'From the River to the Sea,' Mondoweiss 16 November 2023

Useful source for some project on the laundremat linguistics of constantly endeavouring to spin out as antisemitic virtually the whole vocabulary used to describe Israel and thereby, by rendering the topic ineffable, make criticism impossible unless the words and concepts have received a prior seal of official approval by the interested party.Nishidani (talk) 11:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Interview with Max Blumenthal, posted on 17 Nov 2023. He summarizes his article above, and provides additional insights and analysis, not only on the events of Oct. 7-8 but also on more recent military, political, social and cultural trends in Gaza, Israel, the US and Western Europe.

(As a Jewish Israeli-American who has many good [as well as some bad] childhood memories of growing up in Israel and still has a small number of dear family and friends in beautiful Israel, I personally found the part about the increasingly insane, increasingly ethnocidal/ genocidal indoctrination and incitement inside Israeli Jewish society to be particularly disturbing. But this is not surprising, in light of the fact that Israel is an apartheid state, a settler-colonial state.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have many wonderful memories of my time in Israel, and also of the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When enjoying a day off (I chose to work three shifts, from 3.30 am to 7 pm), I hitchhiked and invariably was picked up and given a free ride by taxi-drivers from Gaza, which I visited after talking my way past border guards who insisted I'd risk being murdered by terrorists. My father had been stationed in Gaza in WW2, and left a letter describing his pleasant evenings there).

Over the last few decades, I've come to the conclusion that Israel is caught up in an historical and structural logic, following on from the racial premises of Zionism, which militates against any resolution of its internal contradictions. Forget (in the sense of thinking they are part of the problem) about Palestinians: history has long wiped its arse on them. The problem is essentially what the internal, downspiralling dynamics of its limited options creates for the 'diaspora'. Zionism arose as an aggressive challenge to Jewish diaspora civilization. It took several decades of colonial accomplishments and intensive diplomatic and emotional pressuring to get Jewish communities throughout the world to anneal their vision of Jewishness, in all of its varieties, with the model Israel produced, a muscular, nationalist concept of the 'new Jew'. For readers of Josephus, all this is not 'new'. Rabbinical wisdom drew a lesson from the latter, which has now been forgotten in the tragic euphoria of successive, superficially successful wars. This latest episode, in a world where the mainstream media narrative no longer holds water because everyone, esp. the young, can access alternative media or the work of people like Blumenthal, will tend to give rise to exasperations which Israel and its commentariat will exploit to spin as a 'new' new antisemitism. No doubt antisemitism will indeed be strengthened - most cannot distinguish 'Jews' from Israel precisely because Zionism has insisted on their interchangeability. One can read Zionism, like Christianity, as a 'Jewish' heresy. The latter generated antisemitism, and Zionism itself may paradoxically, in one of those deep ironies beloved of history, produce a similar result for different reasons. But that will not relieve Jews in the diaspora of the difficult choices it must now make - retention of its assimilative humanism which has been the glory of its haskalah heritage, or endorsement, no ifs or buts, of a fierce ethnonationalism as the logic of history drives Israel even further down the path of maximalism. Best wishes 21:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani (talk)

• Jonathan Ofir, Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in Gaza,' 20 November Mondoweiss 2023

Retired Major-General Giora Eiland:

The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as an end but as a means.

The whole article is worth reading for a clue as to the kind of mentality that one often notes among the upper echelons of the IDF.Nishidani (talk) 17:50, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be.

That is almost identical in tone and content to the drift of Himmler's speech addressing troops who had just mown down about 150 Jews near Minsk in 1941.Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Israel allegedly enforces 'Hannibal Protocol' on Oct. 7, killing festival-goers to prevent their captivity. "'What we’ve seen here is mass Hannibal,' [Israeli] Lt. Col. Nof Erez says on [Israel's] military response to surprise attack at festival, where 364 people were killed." Published by Anadolu Agency, a Turkish news agency.
• Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees, by the Yale Review of International Studies.
• Fool Me Twice. "The tried-and-tested tropes of the post-9/11 and Iraq War eras have been deployed for Israel's war in Gaza. The returns are diminishing."
• Israel's fears, its delusions and its future. Conversation with Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator and analyst who now heads the US-Middle East Project. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Philip Oltermann, Israel-Hamas war opens up German debate over meaning of ‘Never again’ The Guardian 22 November 2023

In Berlin, the city senate is considering pulling funding for the Oyun cultural centre in the German capital’s Neukölln district, after the centre’s directors reportedly refused to cancel a peace vigil by a leftwing Jewish group.

I.e.German hypervigilance against a recrudescence of antisemitism as part of its programmatic if clichéd Vergangenheitsbewältigung has now ironically morphed into a vigilante punishing of Jews who are critical of Israel.Nishidani (talk) 21:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Likewise,Apparently, right under our smog-insensitivized noses, US universities have been hijacked by a phenomenon even more terrifying than Hamas. They form a “woke mind virus factory,” Jack D The outsized place of the U.S. university in the current struggle, Mondoweiss 22 November 2023

• Basic Principles of Humanity, New York Review of Books (18 Nov. 2023). An interview with Human rights expert Sari Bashi, who lives in the West Bank and is the program director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), where she leads the organization’s research. “Willfully impeding the delivery of relief supplies, in particular life-saving fuel, is a war crime.” Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Yoav Haifawi, How Israel undermined the prisoner exchange by widening the definition of ‘security prisoners’ Mondoweiss 7 December 2023

Breaking News Scoop[edit]

Hamas operatives are also trained to fire on IDF soldiers when they see them' Yaakov Lappin, 'Some 10 out of 24 Hamas battalions ‘significantly damaged’,' Jewish News Syndicate 20 November 2023

It's reported than despite the vast IDF bulldozing and uprooting of Gazan agriculture, a patch of strawberries was found by a group of invasive settlers, so the compromised land of the Philistines can once more offer fertile prospects as a promised land for settlers Nishidani (talk) 06:01, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Cutting off foreskins as a military tactic[edit]

Taking a leaf out of battle descriptions of the Israelites against the Philistines in the Bible, the Israeli minister for Telecommunications Shlomo Karhi has apparently called for the circumcision of captured Hamas fighters.(Oren Ziv , Yotam Ronen, Carrying the pain of loss on October 7, these families are pleading for peace, +972 magazine 22 November 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC))[reply]

I don't know the common practice in Gaza, but most Muslim men are circumcised though it isn't compulsory. Zero^talk 12:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I was going to say ... pretty empty, if fucked-up threat ... Iskandar323 (talk) 13:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, of course, we all should know Muslims generally undergo circumcision. That was the point of citing this trash - the unbelievable obtusity of the ignorant who have a voice in shaping perceptions of this war. The 'Philistine' of the 'piece' is the fool who wrote that. See below for another bite from the tsunami of appalling crassness flooding the airwaves.Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Apparently some editorsin here are engaged in a new crime; the keyboard terrorism of documenting suffering that is not IsraeliNishidani (talk) 16:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Forget Sumud. It's been trumped by 'Zionist stoicism'[edit]

Yafa Adar is home.The sub-humans around her are already lying deep underground, their house has probably been turned into rubble by the army of the state of Israel. That’s Jewish, Israeli power.(Yosef Israeli a reporter for Channel 13 cited Canaan Yidor, Israelis celebrate the return of hostage Yaffa Adar, 85, whose stoicism ‘embodies Zionism’, The Times of Israel 25 November 2023 )

It is natural that in a tragedy we connect and respond more instinctively to the fate of those whom we (may) know. Yaffa Adar was originally reported to be from Kfar Aza, where I once worked. I wondered whether I had known her during my stay, while deeply moved by the photo of her in a Hamas jeep being carted off to Gaza as a hostage. The photo of her resigned, apparent ease (almost 'well, I'd better get used to this new episode in my life') will figure as one of the iconic snapshots of the Israeli side of this war. I was really chuffed up to see her safe and sound, while naturally thinking that 10,000 plus 'sub-human' Gaza women and children would not survive to tell their side of the story. Hence the obscenity of the remark above. There are few things, readingwise, more nauseating that reading the infantile outpourings of an extremely jejune nationalism.Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Zionism – An Ideology for the Self-Loathing (27 October 2023). by Roger Harris for CounterPunch. "Yet growing numbers of us [American Jews] still embrace our ancestral identity and, especially in light of current events, wholly renounce its self-loathing antithesis of Zionism. What the Nazis failed to achieve – the obliteration of European Jewish culture – the Zionists are carrying forward. We have a word for that in Yiddish. It’s a shanda, a scandalous embarrassment and shame." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps a cost-benefit analysis would suggest we shouldn't help 'Pally' kids[edit]

• Rhana Natour, 'These Palestinian boys received life-saving surgery in the US. An Israeli airstrike killed them in their home,' The Guardian 28 November 2023

• I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment. We’ve reached a searing milestone: In just five weeks of war, half of 1 percent of Gaza’s population has been killed. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the share of the American population that was killed in all of World War II — over the course of four years. Nicholas Kristoff,'What We Get Wrong About Israel and Gaza,' New York Times 15 November 2023

• Most editors won't have time to read the several good book-length studies of Hamas. But an excellent early study of its dynamics is available on jstor and should be required reading, as a cautionary prophylaxis against swallowing holus-bolus the Hamas=terrorism-and-nothing-else meme that is an article of faith in mainstream reportage, and the default staple of nearly all Israeli newspapers. I refer to Menachem Klein, Hamas in Power, Middle East Journal , Summer 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3 , pp. 442-459 Nishidani (talk) 21:20, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Tareq S. Hajjaj,'‘They shot her son in her arms and forced her to throw his body’: testimonies from the death march on Salah al-Din Street,' Mondoweiss 30 November 2023

The Salah al-Din Trail of Tears or something like that will probably be written some years down the track, when testimonies from masses of survivors of the trek involving over a million individuals are cross-checked. The killing of several dozen local reporters has made the collection of evidence extremely difficult, the systemic bias of giving intense coverage to Jewish victims of Hamas's outrage while only referring to the obvious death march in generic allusions to an abstract mass's plight in a line or two. Some of Hajjaj's material consists of rumours, but the hallucinating experiences of people like the lad with the smashed leg look typical and not unlikely for at least several thousands.Nishidani (talk) 07:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• The Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza: Understanding history. "Zionists say they do not understand why Palestinians take up arms, and that their insurgency is terrorism. Let them read their own history. Where it says Ana put Jana. Where it says Jews put Palestinians, where it says Warsaw put Gaza and where it says Nazis put Zionists. Maybe then they will understand."
• The Israeli perspective–on genocide–dominates our airwaves. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:52, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Inside the Pro-Israel Information War. "Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices." Long-form article by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the saying, 'scum always rises to the surface' is invariably true, but the bags here do appear to follow the rule. Thanks. Nishidani (talk) 06:02, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Israelis aren't seeing the devastating pictures Australians see from the war in Gaza. They're watching a sanitised war (9 December 2023). John Lyons in ABC News (Australia)

• ‘Israel-Hamas War’ Label Obscures Israel’s War on Palestinians (8 December 2023). Gregory Shupak in FAIR. "What the media presents as a war between Israel and an armed Palestinian resistance group is in reality an Israeli war on Palestinians’ physical survival, on their food and clean water supplies, on their homes, healthcare, schools, children and places of worship—a war, in other words, on the Palestinians as a people." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:30, 10 December 2023 (UTC). --- Here are several additional thoughtful and insightful articles by Gregory Shupak on key media aspects of Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, posted over the last 3 years. He also wrote a book about this. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:54, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds (9 December 2023). Julian Borger in The Guardian. "Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than the average in all world conflicts in 20th century, data suggests." Original in Haaretz: "The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing. The IDF chief of staff recently boasted of the army's precise munitions and its ability to reduce harm to noncombatants. But the data shows that in the war on Hamas that principle has been abandoned. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Death and Destruction in Gaza (11 December 2023). By John Mearsheimer. "As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?" ["... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"] Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:31, 12 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yesterday, Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of over a hundred naked Palestinians who were kidnapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, handcuffed, and sitting in the sand, guarded by Israeli soldiers. King wrote that “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza” and that “we must up the tempo”. “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. They are not human beings and not even human animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated,” King said. He ended by repeating Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek genocidal reference: “Eradicate the memory of the Amalek, we will not forget.” Jonathan Ofir, 'I used to think the term ’Judeo-Nazis’ was excessive. I don’t any longer,' Mondoweiss 8 December 2023

Nothing of this surprises me. What does is the moral cowardice of the communities who stand by. Nishidani (talk) 00:13, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are several reasons for the moral cowardice of the wealthy western nations (especially the US, Western Europe, Canada, Australia etc). At least two reasons come to mind: (a) The tremendous power of the pro-Israel lobbies in these countries, and (b) There are very large fossil fuel reserves near the coast of Gaza, and the US strongly prefers that these reserves would be under Israeli control and not under Palestinian control, because if they're in Palestinian hands the Palestinians then could sell (most of) the fossil fuels to China, whereas if these resources are in Israeli hands, the US government could exert enormously powerful pressure on the Israeli gov't to refrain from selling them to China.

Over the last 15 years or so, the US has been gradually shifting its foreign policy (for the US, its 'foreign' policy has always been practically indistinguishable from being a key component of its overall long-horizon economic policy) to focusing on trying to 'compete' with China i.e. to weaken/ hurt/ cripple the Chinese economy as much as possible. This is true for all US administrations regardless of political party affiliation, including both Democunt as well as Republicunt, starting in the last couple of years of the Bush Jr administration and continuing with the administrations of Obama, Trump and now Biden. The numbers don't lie, and the economic numbers are basically almost all that has ever mattered to US (and Chinese, Western European, etc) decision makers. Up until recent years, US GDP was by far the largest on the planet, but in the last few decades China's GDP has been growing faster than the US's and has recently surpassed the US: today China's GDP (PPP) is roughly about $33 Trillion, while US GDP (PPP) is about $27 trillion. That is, from the POV of US decision makers, their top priority, by far, is how to slow - and preferably reverse - the fact that the US has in recent years lost its undisputed global economic dominance to China.

See this, among several other articles and books published in recent years about the geopolitical implications of the vast oil and natural gas reserves near the Gaza shoreline. Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:23, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• The Death of Israel (17 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception."

Well, I think that is a piece of wishful thinking. It is simply wrong-headed to assert that 'Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception'. The 'new' world is dominated by successful settler colonial states that have withstood the usury of time, and indeed thrived, and Israel will be no exception. Of course this latest triumph of Zionism rubbishes the moral force of both the haskalah tradition and the Holocaust, but they too are past their use-by date.Nishidani (talk) 01:18, 21 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• What is wrong with Israelis? (27 December 2023). "Max Blumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering and torture of Palestinians, and proudly broadcasted grotesque war crimes to the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 10:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

None of which is reported abroad. That Gaza is one huge whore, deserving of genocidal rape by missiles carrying the signatures of young Israeli women, is all over Israeli social media, as are euphoric chants by children, rabbinical students and entertainers in army camps mocking the destruction of Palestinian women and children. It's all there, and invisible to readers. Words fail one.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 28 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• More on moral cowardice: Saudis Attempt To Normalize Ties With Israel By Air-Striking Gaza (11 August 2023). By the writers of The Onion.

• Yet more on moral cowardice: ‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (13 October 2023). By the Editorial Board of The Onion. "Some may call us cowards for our decision. To this, we can only say the following: If a coward is a person [IT: or a government] who avoids taking a difficult stance on topics for personal expediency, then “coward” is a badge this editorial board will gladly wear, again and again and again." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• NY Times October 7 hoax exposed (30 December 2023). By Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, who "meticulously debunk a New York Times article purporting to demonstrate that Hamas carried out a policy of sexual assault against Israelis on October 7, and demonstrate that the Times' Jeffrey Gettleman is guilty of journalistic malpractice and serving as a willing tool for the serially mendacious Israeli government." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:33, 31 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That the NYTs article is a pretentious exercise in pseudo-journalism is self-evident, but I don't think Max B is at his best there. That challenge is not meticulous but somewhat offhandish. MB was showing signs of fatigue. Does an amputated breast maintain its shape so that it can be thrown around and juggled like a ball, as was claimed? That is now a meme, and I've yet to see anyone stop to think about it. Only in Picasso's imagination, one would think. I made the 850 mile train trip to Madrid in late 1981 just to catch the inaugural showing in that country of Guernica. There has been a Guernica every day since 7 Oct. The past has no more resonance.Nishidani (talk) 04:40, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Chris Hedges: Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (31 December 2023). By Chris Hedges for ScheerPost. "By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:39, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• The only thing to note is that the relevant provisions of international law can never, in all probability, be interpreted in a way to hinder Zionism's historical mission to utterly disintegrate the indigenous population of Palestine. The present ethnocide will simply lead to a surge in industrial and industrious scholarship that, while confirming the obvious, will inflect neither Israeli opinion, world opinion nor international concepts of justice. The only thing that interests me at this point is to observe to what degree Israel will succeed in convincing the diaspora that all this Germanic thoroughness in wiping away an authentically semitic people is for the good of the Jewish people. In any case, rather than Hedges, see the ever-lucid A. Dirk Moses, More than Genocide: The law occludes the abhorrent violence routinely perpetrated by states in the name of self-defense The Boston Review 14 November 2023Nishidani (talk) 12:30, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply shamed.' Richard Flanagan Question 7, 2023 p.64.

• Mearsheimer today, on his substack: Genocide in Gaza 4 January 2024. Finally he's come round to regarding it as a genocide. He's only saying, more politely, what the ranting Cornishman said days ago. --NSH001 (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, N. I noted in particular

the United States is a liberal democracy that is filled with intellectuals, newspaper editors, policymakers, pundits, and scholars who routinely proclaim their deep commitment to protecting human rights around the world. They tend to be highly vocal when countries commit war crimes, especially if the United States or any of its allies are involved. In the case of Israel’s genocide, however, most of the human rights mavens in the liberal mainstream have said little about Israel’s savage actions in Gaza or the genocidal rhetoric of its leaders. Hopefully, they will explain their disturbing silence at some point. Regardless, history will not be kind to them, as they said hardly a word while their country was complicit in a horrible crime, perpetrated right out in the open for all to see.

Application Instituting Proceedings regarding Israel's genocide lodged by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. pp.59-67 provide clear verbal evidence of genocidal intent by Israel's leaders.Nishidani (talk) 01:44, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• The best overview I am familiar with now is Seth Ackerman, There was an Iron Wall in Gaza Jacobin

This explained the anomalies in the attacks that I noted within the first two days, if the hypothesis of a rift within Hamas between the political and military wings, which led to a radical change in the battle orders by Sinyar et al., in the last three hours to include attacks on civilians, proves to be correct. Note that the rape, mutilation etc charges that were used to orchestrate Israel's case for retributive genocide against this collective of 'animals' are eerily reminiscent of, almost a replica of the testimonies about the Israeli assault on Palestinians at the Massacre of Deir Yassin in 48. Nishidani (talk) 01:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• How Israel's war on Gaza exposed Zionism as a genocidal cult (11 January 2024). By Joseph Massad in Middle East Eye. "The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fit this description." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Gaza and New York (Nov/Dec 2023). By Alexander Zevin in New Left Review. "America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?" Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:45, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• ‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths (13 January 2024). By Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem, for The Guardian. "Meir Baruchin, who was fired and jailed for criticising the military, says that many who agree with him are afraid to go public." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:38, 14 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• A Critical Look at The New York Times' Weaponization of Rape in Service of Israeli Propaganda (14 January 2024). By Randa Abdel-Fattah in the Institute for Palestine Studies. "The fact is that Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.   This is the sobering reality Palestinians face. The racism that animates hyper-attention over crimes imagined to have been committed against Israelis is the same racism that desensitizes people to crimes actually committed against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Several recent reports by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate:

• Traumatizing the public into compliance w/official Israeli, US lies
• NYT atrocity propaganda continues to collapse
• Blockbuster Israeli report exposes Oct 7 friendly fire orders
• Max Blumenthal confronts State Dept on genocide support
• Life in Jerusalem under Israel's military dictatorship
• Israeli victims' families denounce NY Times 'Hamas rape' report

Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:06, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Jewish Scholars vs. Jewish Donors on Antisemitism (22 January 2024). By Peter Beinart for The Beinart Notebook. "... But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out."

• A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name (22 Jan 2024). By Brad Pierce for The Wayward Rabbler. "The IDF is Accused of Causing Mass Civilian Casualties on 10/7." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:37, 24 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity (29 January 2024), The New York Times. By Balakrishnan Rajagopal, with photos and accompanying text by Yaqeen Baker. Dr. Rajagopal is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Ms. Baker’s home was destroyed in the war in Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:22, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role? (31 January 2024). By Aaron Rabinowitz for Haaretz. "The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props." Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Thomas Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda (6 February 2024). Jim Naureckas for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well if Friedman and his likes are now going mainstream with vermin tropes for the adversarial 'Other' (Theodor Adorno has a good early analysis of insect metaphors for despised ethnic groups, in The Authoritarian Personality (1951) - it was a serious element in antisemitic caricatures, vide Kafka for the most egregious example) I guess I'd better make a wiki page on the history of this variety of subhuman stereotype as it has developed in Israeli discourse on Palestinians.Nishidani (talk) 01:03, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• AIPAC of Lies (6 February 2024). By Arvin Alaigh for The Baffler. "The pro-Israel lobby brooks no dissent on Capitol Hill ... The Israeli government is losing the battle of public opinion across the world, and increasingly, in the United States ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Energy firms face legal threat over Israeli licences to drill for gas off Gaza (15 Feb 2024). By Dania Akkad for Middle East Eye. "Rights groups say exploration licences handed to companies in first weeks of war encroach on Palestinian waters and may amount to the war crime of pillaging." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:24, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite news to me. An insider privy to these things told me a good while back that the Gazan fields' resources were already being pilfered from by some lateral intrusions. Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation (16 Feb. 2024). Irfan Galaria, The Los Angeles Times.

• IDF Sent in Handcuffed Prisoner to Evacuate Hospital, Then Killed Him When He Left (14 Feb 2024). Kavita Chekuru, The Intercept. "The young man, bound by zip-tie cuffs, delivered his Israeli captors’ message but was shot as he tried to walk out of the hospital gate."

With regard to this item, scruple demands that I ask myself whether or not this young man might have been murdered by a Palestinian militant, in retaliation for acting as an Israeli messenger. Unlikely, but one never knows. All one has learnt from this war is that Israeli culture has never absorbed any moral lesson from the holocaust, except that moral sentiments are trash, a dangerous weakness in one's chutzpah armour or amour-propre. The real sum of the Palestinian dead has now reached roughly 38,000. Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Israeli soldiers post distressing content out of Gaza (22 Feb 2024). CNN. "Israeli soldiers are taking to platforms like TikTok to document their destruction of infrastructure in Gaza -- with many adding what they consider as a comedic twist to their content." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Israeli necropolitics and the pursuit of health justice in Palestine (Received 30 December 2023, Accepted 2 January 2024). Layth Hanbali, Edwin Jit Leung Kwong, Amy Neilson, James Smith, Sali Hafez, Rasha Khoury. BMJ Global Health, a prestigious peer reviewed academic journal. This particular paper is probably more of an editorial, it was not commissioned for external review but was internally peer reviewed. Some key sections:

"The horrific scale of Israel’s latest attacks validates the concerns and calls raised in our editorial: namely that Israel’s ongoing military violence in Gaza is an extension of the longstanding, systemic violence intrinsic to the Israeli state’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine. Connections can be clearly traced between the exploitation and dispossession of people, land and resources that defined European colonial violence, ongoing neocolonial exploitation worldwide, and every aspect of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine today. We reaffirm our unwavering commitment to actions that expose and challenge sites of exploitative and extractive power and violence. People’s health, lives and freedoms are at risk…

"Attempts to dehistoricise and decontextualise the present encourage us to ignore the many ways in which the Israeli state dictates both life and death for the Palestinian people, either through the fast violence of aerial bombardments, or what Berlant referred to as ‘slow death’: visible in the progressive dispossession of Palestinians who are crammed into ever-shrinking spaces, the denial of life-sustaining necessities and services, the destruction of livelihoods, repeated physical assaults and disablement, mass incarceration, extensive restrictions on movement (including to seek healthcare), and now ethnic cleansing in Gaza executed by mustering Palestinians through a dystopian grid of ever-shifting, supposedly ‘safe zones…

"The recognition of the systematic nature of this violence, and the pervasiveness of Israeli state control over almost every aspect of the everyday lives of Palestinians, made the philosopher Achille Mbembé declare that: ‘The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’. It is the power to dictate the terms of life and death, and ultimately who lives and who dies. Repeatedly framing Palestinian violence as a provocation and Israeli violence as a response is a product of ignorance to the necropower exercised by the Israeli state. Necropower and necropolitics are enabled in places that Achille Mbembé termed ‘death-worlds’, where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ that enable a precarious form of survival in perpetual proximity to death. Within this world, there is gross indifference to Palestinian suffering and extreme obfuscation of the horrors of Israeli necropolitics.

• Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections, Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024 (19 Feb 2024). Zeina Jamaluddine, Zhixi Chen, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Shatha Elnakib, Gregory Barnsley, Fiona Majorin, Hannah Tong, Tak Igusa, Oona MR Campbell, Paul B. Spiegel, Francesco Checchi and the Gaza Health Impact Projections Working Group. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"Executive Summary

"Overall

"The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has heavily affected civilians in both the Gaza Strip and Israel. Residents of Gaza are now mostly displaced from their homes and living in overcrowded conditions with insufficient access to water, sanitation and food, and health services have been considerably disrupted. So, to inform humanitarian and other decision-makers working on the Gaza crisis, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University have initiated a project to estimate the potential public health impact of the crisis under different future trajectories of its evolution. The first set of projections covers a six-month period from 7 February to 6 August 2024. The projections will be periodically updated until May 2024. The projections are not predictions of what will happen in Gaza but provide a range of projections of what could happen under three distinct scenarios: 1) an immediate permanent ceasefire; 2) status quo (a continuation of conditions experienced from October 2023 till mid-January); and 3) a further escalation of the conflict.

"The projections are based on a range of publicly available data from the current and past Gaza crises, data from similar crises, and peer-reviewed published research into excess death estimates and take into account the limitations and biases of different data sources. Where data is limited or unavailable, the projections draw on consultations with experts. These projections are designed to help humanitarian organisations, governments, and other actors plan their response to the crisis and take sound, evidence-based decisions. Ultimately, the hope is that they will make some contribution to saving lives.

"Over the next six months we project that, in the absence of epidemics, 6,550 excess deaths would occur under the ceasefire scenario, climbing to 58,260 under the status quo scenario and 74,290 under the escalation scenario. Over the same period and with the occurrence of epidemics, our projections rise to 11,580, 66,720, and 85,750, respectively. All projections feature 95% uncertainty intervals as shown in the Summary Table below.

"Under the ceasefire scenario, the projections suggest that infectious diseases would be the main cause of excess deaths, with 1,520 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 6,550 including epidemics. Traumatic injuries followed by infectious diseases would be the main causes of excess deaths in both the status quo (53,450 traumatic injuries; 2,120 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 10,590 including epidemics) and escalation scenarios (68,650 traumatic injuries; 2,720 total infectious disease excess deaths without epidemics and 14,180 including epidemics).

"Our projections indicate that even in the best-case ceasefire scenario, thousands of excess deaths would continue to occur, mainly due to the time it would take to improve water, sanitation and shelter conditions, reduce malnutrition, and restore functioning healthcare services in Gaza. While the total number of estimated excess deaths from maternal and neonatal causes are relatively small (100-330 excess deaths), every loss of a mother has severe consequences for family health and wellbeing. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) were the primary cause of death in Gaza in 2022, and the conflict has aggravated these conditions (1,680-2,680 excess deaths) via heavily disrupted specialised health services and impeded access to treatment and medications.

• thanks. I wouldn't have otherwise caught that, which is clinically scientific and ventures rational scenarios, all of which translate into a statement that Israeli and American decision-makers are now familiar with the likely lethal consequences of the three options available. Sara Roy, with Jean-Pierre Filiu and Finkelstein the 3 world authorities on the Strip, spoke a year ago, before oCT 7 of Israel's longterm planned catastrophe'.Nishidani (talk) 23:33, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• 'Shocking, unsustainable and desperate' conditions across Gaza, Security Council hears (22 Feb 2024). UN News. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Shielding (the) US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 (23 February 2024). Bryce Greene, in Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. "... Indeed, IDF responsibility for Israeli deaths has been a repeated topic of discussion in the Israeli press, accompanied by demands for investigations. But the most US readers have gotten from their own press about the issue is a dismissive piece from the Washington Post about October 7 “truthers.” ... How many Israeli civilians were actually killed by Hamas, and how many by Israel? Was the Al Aqsa Flood a terrorist attack designed to kill as many civilians as possible? These are important questions that have yet to be conclusively and independently answered, but the Washington Post seems to want to dissuade people from even asking them. In evoking the specter of Holocaust denial, Dwoskin and the Post are not defending the truth, but attempting to protect readers from it." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:38, 26 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Were the four main Hamas leaders in Gaza endowed with an intelligent grasp of the wider forces of the modern international order, they would offer to place themselves in the hands of the ICJ to be put on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity, a position Hamas outlined some years ago as their readiness to be prosecuted abroad were such a trial to allow similar measures against Israeli leaders. Since the measure they took in attacking Israel foreseeably enabled the genocide of their own people underway, a cost they must have calculated, they should in theory accept that this kind of personal commitment to their own symbolic 'martyrdom' in a court of law is the one step that could sway world opinion to insist that Israel stop the war. Unfortunately, this won't happen. Nishidani (talk) 00:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I read quite a few years ago that 15% of American kids go to bed feeling hungry, something that I recall to mind while reading Israeli debates on whether or not children under 4 (but not over that age limit) should be provided with food currently. Ralph Nadar has now made the point more cogently.

Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. Ralph Nader, What the Mass Media Needs to Cover Re: Israel/Gaza Conflict CounterPunch 26 February 2024

Yes, Hunger in the United States is a serious problem. Other major socio-economic problems include (but are not limited to) Homelessness in the United States, serious Crime in the United States (including gun violence), the largest known prison population in the world, the fact that annually tens of thousands of families declare bankruptcy because they are unable to pay their exorbitant medical bills, a relatively weak social safety net, a government with legislative and executive branches that for many decades have been to a very large extent captured by wealthy special interests/ Inverted totalitarianism, as well as other serious socio-economic ills.

Thanks for the article by Ralph Nader, it is informative and thought-provoking. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Extraordinary charges of bias emerge against NYTimes reporter Anat Schwartz (25 Feb. 2024). By James North for Mondoweiss. "New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence in the October 7 attack. The paper must explain why it broke its own rules by hiring a clearly biased writer who endorsed racist and violent rhetoric toward Palestinians."

Like Chalmers Johnson - one of the most thoughtful and insightful thinkers on US imperialism - said many years ago (slightly paraphrasing from my rusty memory): Don't read the New York Times to find out the truth, read the New York Times to find out the lies. (I don't think this is invariably true, but it is frequently true.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• As Journalists Are Murdered in Gaza Their Counterparts Lose Jobs in America (27 February 2024). Steven Thrasher for Literary Hub. "Steven W. Thrasher Wonders Who’s Left to “Afflict the Comfortable”." Ijon Tichy (talk) 09:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation (15 March 2024). Long-form article by Arun Gupta, Counterpunch. " ... But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:59, 17 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've already read both. I said from the outset that the horrendous massacre of several hundred civilians in one day would be spun in spectacularly lurid terms, when the mere facts were sufficient to freeze one's blood. Some years down the line, the actual facts and statistics, and contexts of each tragedy or act of violence will finally emerge. But the template of cooked babies, stabbed children, bayoneted vaginas, slashed-off breasts etc.etc.etc., has predictably won the day and will remain functional for the time frame that is important, the war, both on the ground, and in the media. The 130 odd hostages are prime time news: the 7000 Palestinians who languish in prisons, 3,000 alone seized from their families after 7 Oct as bartering material in future negotations, -tortured and uncharged, are in Palestinian terms, hostages, seized predominantly for political reasons, but the semantic distinction between 'hostage' and 'arrested suspect' means there too, the battle of misrepresentation has been won. All of these reports and counter-reports conjure up for me an image of a frigate armed with 40 36-pounder long guns engaging with a dhow defending itself with a handful of jezails. Nishidani (talk) 19:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• War on Gaza: Torture, executions, babies left to die, sexual abuse ... These are Israel’s crimes (15 March 2024). Jonathan Cook for the Middle East Eye. "Why is the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?"

• Israel detains 20 more Palestinians in West Bank, bringing total arrests since 7 Oct to 7,605 (16 March 2024). Middle East Monitor.

• UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links (8 March 2024). The Times of Israel, article by Reuters and TOI staff. "The UN agency for Palestinian refugees says some employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October 7 attacks." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:44, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• What Israeli soldiers' display of Palestinian women's lingerie reveals about the Zionist psyche (14 March 2024). Shereen Hindawi-Wyatt, Middle East Eye. "Israeli soldiers' brazen intrusion into displaced or murdered Palestinians' romantic and sexual lives is a terrifying indication of the occupiers' capacity to violate with impunity." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:59, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Censorship is a crucial complement of genocide (20 March 2024). Somdeep Sen, Al Jazeera.

• What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (19 March 2024). Noah Lanard in Mother Jones. "A former Israeli peace negotiator says the president’s response has “failed to meet even the lowest of low expectations.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:48, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Establishment Papers Fell Short in Coverage of Genocide Charges (21 March 2024). Lara-Nour Walton, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Establishment media in the US were slow to cover South Africa’s “epochal intervention” in the ICJ—initially providing the public with thin to no reporting on the case. While the quantity of coverage did eventually increase, it skewed pro-Israel, even after the court in January found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and ordered Tel Aviv to comply with international law."

• Flour Massacre Called ‘Aid-Related Deaths’ -— Rather Than Part of Israel’s Engineered Famine (22 March 2024). Robin Andersen, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.     Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Chris Hedges, A Genocide Foretold, 30 March 2024. A pretty comprehensive survey of the horror. --NSH001 (talk) 06:59, 31 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's better than a lot of the things that he's written in the past (not citable because it is self-published), and quite powerful, simply because he sticks to the factual details, which being appalling, are worth more than a lot of emotional outbursts. Another item today illustrates the point.

The number of trucks crossing into Gaza rose slightly to about 190 a day – less than half the peacetime daily total. Israeli inspectors were still turning back 20 to 25 each day, NBC News reported, citing an Egyptian aid official, on grounds as arbitrary as the wooden pallets bearing the food not being exactly the right dimensions. Israel has banned Unrwa, the main UN relief agency in the region, from using the crossing.' Julian Borger, Toby Helm, Lorenzo Tondo, Quique Kierszenbaum Israel alone? Allies’ fears grow over conduct – and legality – of war in Gaza The Guardian 31 March 2024

Banning UNWRA as well, which has the only large organization on the ground with a proven distribution network, has suicidal consequences, just as the emergence of clan gangs taking over the control of the little food airdropped because Israel shoots to kill the local police who traditionally maintained order on the grounds that they are employed by Hamas and therefore terrorists (not in international law) is a recipé for even more violence, inside the world of the starving survivors itself. Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 31 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud (25 March 2024). The Grayzone.   "Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Israeli lawyer at the center of the campaign accusing Hamas of systematic sexual violence on October 7, now stands accused by Israeli media of scamming donors and spreading misinformation. The allegations appeared just days after Elkayam-Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize."

• UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want (4 April 2024). Dave Lindorff, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).   "The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.   Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.   It was “nonbinding,” they said.   The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’” —- and let no one contradict her.   That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision."

• Israel's toxic legacy: White phosphorus bombs on south Lebanon (25 March 2024). Justin Salhani for Al Jazeera.   " ... Driving out civilians, burning down their agricultural lands, poisoning their soil and water, destroying their homes, dropping cluster munitions, and paralysing the local economy are part of what they say are efforts to make south Lebanon uninhabitable today, tomorrow and long into the future.   “The target is to create a wasteland in the south,” Baalbaki said.   “It’s to break the link between the people and their ties to the ground, their nature, their trees. The target is to tell them that this is an inhospitable area and to leave it.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:31, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Hostages are having their legs amputated from being zip-tied by all 4 limbs for months; they're being forced to defecate in diapers & fed through straws (4 April 2024). "Those are Gazan hostages at Israel's Sde Teiman "concentration camp" ..." A series of 7 tweets, based on investigative reports in Haaretz. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Alas, this (nothing new in terms of prisoner treatment) is only the tip of the iceberg. I can't and wouldn't read tweets on principle. Here, there is nothing 'chirpy' to be tweeted about.Nishidani (talk) 13:19, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I respect your decision to refrain from reading tweets on principle. Would you care to share which principle you are alluding to? In the past, I have seen some people objecting to the format/ style of tweets because of the 280 character limitation on the length of each individual tweet. But this limitation has been increased last year to 4,000 characters. Many world-class scholars and investigative reporters tweet extensively and frequently including essay-length tweets, e.g. Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Jonathan Cook, and thousands of others in many important topics/ subjects (including but certainly not limited to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

For example, here is a recent insightful essay by Norman Finkelstein, posted on twitter (last I checked, this essay was unavailable on Finkelstein's personal blog on Substack): ISRAEL’S MORAL DILEMMA (April 5, 2024). Regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:33, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, one more proof I'm an ignarunt effwit. For years the computer I worked on could never visualise any link to a twitter site, and I was amazed on clicking on the link in this revarnished computer, that I could access NF's post there. But the principle will still obtain. I've never had a smartphone, nor a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account because my observation on those who do is that, generally, they spend an inordinate amount of time on browsing those media, and, at this burntout end of a smokey life, I value time: every day must be free, unconstrained by disturbances or distractions, of being sucked up into the blogosphere. Working wikipedia for a few hours is trying enough. I find even simple sentences, my own included (when, rarely, they emerge as just simple statements) question-begging so I prefer to spend my time foraging in books or jstor article on any number of topics. That said, I'm glad to have read NK's note there: I think those of us who have closely followed the several wars, know that the Kitchen Car incident was old hat, unique only in that it drew exclamations and outrage, whereas scores of such incidents of the type (a) a misile collapses an apartment block (b) survivors, with neighbours' help, emerge dazed and (c) ambulances arrive and (d) the ambulances are shot up, are so commonplace (as he illustrates from 2014 - I still recall those two) that it is only remarkable that (other than Finkelstein's 2017 book) there seems to be no scholarly interest in connecting the dots, and writing a comprehensive analysis of such 'incidents' over the last 18 years to elicit the military logic behind it. Certainly this war abounds in such cases. Hegel wrote that 'die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug'. The owl in this case probably flies no more, exhausted by the futility of causing a late flap after each war, only to see the identical tragedy and the identical abuses, identical bullshitting memes of self-exculpation, renew themselves regardless Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• The government is also attempting to cut the very budgets dedicated to the development of Palestinian citizens. The war is estimated to have cost Israel nearly $60 billion in the first three months — an expense so extreme that the Moody’s rating agency recently downgraded Israel’s credit rating.In an effort to minimize further economic damage, Israel has increased its deficit and is pushing major budget cuts through parliament. These include cuts across the board, but the board isn’t flat. Reductions to funding directed to Palestinian citizens are slated to be three times higher than the rest — 15 percent compared with 5 percent. Through these budget cuts the Palestinians in Israel are effectively paying a disproportionate cost of the war against fellow Palestinians. Raghad Jaraisy and Ofer Dagan, A Special Anguish Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel New York Times 23 February 2024

• The U.S. threat of a “new Opium War against China” found in the pages of the US Air Force’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. (1 December 2023). By the editors of Monthly Review. "Fearful of losing its imperial hegemony over the world economy due to the rise of China as a major economic power, the United States is seeking to translate its military ascendancy into renewed economic domination, resulting in unparalleled dangers for humanity as a whole." Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Another Major War in 2024? (21 December 2023). By Michael Klare for TomDispatch. "The U.S. and China at Year’s End - Still Treading on the Precipice." Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:44, 22 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Contrasting Strategies of the US and China (27 December 2023). by Roger Harris in CounterPunch. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:27, 28 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm prepared, I guess, having picked up for 3AU$ at a country recycling bookshop the other day Neville Shute's On the Beach, with Rowland's original jacket intact, in what was the third reprint, and read it yesterday.Nishidani (talk) 03:28, 23 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hahaha. What did you think about the book? Hope you liked it. I like the film based on the novel, I bought the DVD many ago and have been re-watching it every few years. The full film is also freely available on YouTube. Hope you will enjoy the film.

My cat and I are now fixing to go on our customary evening walk. On our walks, he freely and happily walks or runs by my side without a harness or leash. He sends his love to his Granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:37, 23 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, having read Shute's Round the Bend a week earlier, which I really enjoyed because his flatness of style was nicely compensated for by an engineer's precision of technical detail in the description of planes, I found it a dutiful read rather than a page-turner. Naturally enough, because I saw the film 60 years ago and in so far as there was a plot, it held no surprises. And, since my purpose here is just living the landscape, I was struck by his failure to capture its beauties, or even sight them. I have delighted relatives in Europe by showing them photos of breakfast on the verandah here, where we are joined by king parrots who perch on the table and eat cashew nuts from one's hand, while magpies await their turn, and a pair of satin bowerbirds vie with currawong, topknot pigeons, butcherbirds and galahs to assert their ascendency over the backyard garden. The best Shute could do was make something of the merits of a fly over a spinner in fishing for rainbow trout on the Jamieson.

It's interesting that in a small upcountry town like this, with no more than 2,600 people, one can pick up off the shelves things like The New Yorker. I bought the October edition this morning and read something thematically linked to what is alluded to above. I.e.

Trump recently made an appearance in which - even as he was calling Biden "cognitively impaired" - he suggested that we were headed toward "World War Two".' p.10

It's great that you have a companionable walking cat. I raised mine (temperamentally I'm a dog person) as a canine, and so for 17 years it walked, ran, responded to whistles etc, as dogs would. The autistic kitten we saved several years back now responds similarly, but limits her excursions to waiting for me at dusk halfway down the bottom of the incline that leads up to my villa, and then racing me back home when I return from my evening sundowner in the local bar. Give her an avuncular caress. I don't mind the extinction of man. It will give the world time to get back on its evolutionary feet. There are 1 million invertebrates in Australia, and only about 15% have been classified till now, most of them disappearing under climate and anthropo-obscenic changes. 'Full many a March fly is born to swarm unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.'Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 23 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Why the US is the Warring State in Israel (8 February 2024). by Stephen Reyna for Counterpunch. "The point at issue here is a general one. The are many states that participate in wars -provide troops or supply weapons and funding. Currently, Israel is one; Ukraine another. But they are not warring states useless they supply the sufficient conditions for the violence to occur. Rather, they are useful idiots in another state’s designs; in this case, US global supremacy. The importance of this position is twofold ..." Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Imperialism, Lenin, and US Wars Abroad (3 Feb 2024). By Rob Urie for The Journal of Belligerent Pontification. "Liberals, the American left, and yours truly, perceive current US actions with respect to the Israelis in Gaza to be ‘fascist,’ in the sense of committing a racist genocide against the Palestinians. However, the Israelis plan an economic benefit from exiling Palestinians from Israel. They want the land for additional Israeli settlements, and possibly oil and gas extraction from the sea just off the coast of Gaza. The Americans want business for the MIC, a place to land and refuel fighter jets, control of the wider Middle East, and continued American domination of the world." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:14, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I enjoy reading about your travel and outdoor experiences as well as your various interactions with domestic and wild animals. And thanks for your reference to the beautiful, moving Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Moreover, my cat sends a big thank-you to his beloved granpa Nishidani for all the pets and caresses you sent him, he enjoyed them. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Our (the U.S.'s) Real National Security Budget -- $2 Trillion, Here We Come (14 March 2024). Andrew Cockburn, Spoils of War. Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:18, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Notes from the Editors (2 April 2024). Monthly Review. A discussion of the extremely belligerent, war-mongering, dangerous views of Richard N. Haass.   "On the Chinese front, the United States, Haass insisted, must declare that it is willing, ready, able, and committed to go to war with China over Taiwan (Haass, “A World in Disarray?”; Richard Haass, “What Friends Owe Friends,” Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2023)."     "Israel’s full-scale assault on Gaza, Haass explained to the Wall Street Journal, is a major foreign policy disaster for the United States, but one in which Washington simply has no choice but to back “Netanyahu and his colleagues” at all costs, supporting Israel’s “one-state nonsolution” with its no-holds-barred war on Hamas and the continued movement of settlers into the West Bank. “They [the Israeli forces] are causing an awful lot of civilian casualties and deaths in the process,” Haass acknowledged, while indicating that this “is a separate conversation,” one with which he has no intention of engaging. After Hamas is “degraded” — it cannot, he said, be destroyed — Gaza will have to be ruled by Israel directly with continued U.S. backing. There is no viable regime change strategy, no real endgame, only the sheer exercise of force, viewed as necessary to maintain Israel as a “democratic Jewish state.”" Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, after his first meeting with Netanyahu, Bill Clinton laughed to his advisors that it would appear Netanyahu, even nearly 30 years ago, though that his country, Israel was the 'superpower' not the US, and Haass more or less states that the U.S. dog has no option other than to yield and be wagged by its tail. I 'like' Haass's aside that genocide is 'another conversation' (as we approach 40,000 dead and 75,000 wounded). In any case, I like the sobriety of Patrick Wintour. See for example,

When Biden assumed the US presidency he recruited a team of prodigious foreign policy talent, perhaps the most venerated ensemble of such experts in modern US history. They were given a clear mission: to rebuild US alliances, repair America’s damaged reputation abroad and prepare for the challenge in the South China Sea. The Palestinian issue had not been a White House priority but at best something to be managed. . .Biden misread how Israeli society had changed over the last two decades, and consequently how best to influence Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attacks. Biden “lives with an Israel in his head which probably never existed and certainly doesn’t exist today,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator in peace talks with Palestinian leaders. Patrick Wintour, The new world disorder: how the Gaza war disrupted international relations The Guardian 6 April 2024

So like the 1960s, with Robert McNamara's 'best and brightest', we drift into war, under the flag of outstanding 'intelligence'.

My own quote for the day is the following, after the total material and physical structure of Gaza's most sophisticated hospital, al-Shifa, was gutted, with all of its medical technology destroyed. The oversdeer of the two-week long raid stated that it killed 200 Hamas militants, without a single civilian casualty and that this kind of 'surgical' (as opposed to medical) operation will be

'one that ‘will be studied at top military academies like West Point in the U.S. and Sandhurst in the U.K. as the "gold standard for urban warfare". (Aya Batrawy, Omar El Qattaa, Here's what we found after Israel's raid on Al-Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital NPR 6 April 2024)

I.e.while obliterating a structure with 800 beds serving 250,000 patients, and 17,000 surgical operations conducted every year, shooting up all of its computers, and scanners, generators and operating equipment and spaces, had no civilian casualty though 21 patients alone died, along with the chief engineer of the maintenance department, the head of pharmaceuticals and a reconstructive surgeon (killed with his mother (also a doctor)). Nishidani (talk) 16:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be some sort of competition out there from within the highest echelons of the Ministry of Silly Talks. Rear Admiral John Kirby when asked, after the Kitchen Workers massacre, whether the U.S. should organize a protective force for aid workers, replied that there was no need for that because already “Israeli Defense Forces were providing that protection.” He's only 61 so the sort of condition that might afflict someone of my age can't explain it.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• US Economic Decline and Rise of Greater Eurasia (30 March 2024). Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen. "MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, just to comment on what you just said, that there’s a new Cold War underway, and the United States has started it against China, and again, because it’s against China, it’s against Russia, and because it’s against Russia, it’s against Europe. So there has to be a recognition that does Europe really want to be a part of this new Cold War, or does it want to have a different direction? That’s really what we’re talking about." Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:53, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've been a long-time admirer of Hudson's work, particularly on finance and the history of money. But this is a gross simplification of a very complex multipolar world. and despite the palmary role the U.S. has played in undermining the very principles of democracy it formerly appealed to in exercising its postwar imperial role, the other two empires have and will arrogate to themselves the right to do whatever they think necessary to consolidate their own neo-imperial ambitions, which in their case happen to coincide with a decided ethnocentric tradition.Nishidani (talk) 13:16, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please self revert this revert, which is currently under talk page discussion (which you have not participated in). And please refrain from accusing me of POV edit (this is the second time you have done so) Longhornsg (talk) 22:54, 20 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Normally in the morning, one breakfasts, has a shit, does a crossword puzzle, while of course thinking over bad edits one has reverted to reply duly with the caffeine etc., kicks in. I was about to jot a note when youi rushed here to protest. But I reverted you, apart from the general excisionist approach on lame pretextual grounds, because in the talk discussion just underway, you asserted no connection in sources with historic apartheid, and, when another editor pointed out one existed (*I.e. you stuffed up, you then dismissed that perfectly academic source saying you disagreed with it. That kind of frivolousness and disattentiveness bodes ill.Nishidani (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This piece is an interesting conceptual voyage that immediate got me thinking of your learned self. I suspect it is likely to contain something of interest for most people in its currents. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks indeed for that excellent essay link,Iskander. I speedread it given circs butwill have to eventually print it out to make a more comprehensive study of it.CheersNishidani (talk) 02:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've often mentioned over the years the sense of deja vu this particular conflict invariably induces in someone like myself,coming from an Irish background. I now see Mark Levene has set forth the striking analogies in his'Words matter, lives matter more' in Journal of Genocide Research. Sorry I can't provide you with a link from this laptop which does not seem to allow me to copy and paste. It's not coincidental that the Irgun learnt from the IRA, the only difference being the Irgun were the colonial invaders whereas the IRA, like Hamas, were indigenousNishidani (talk) 13:03, 1 February 2024 (UTC).[reply]

Didier Fassin,The Rhetoric of Denial: Contribution to an Archive of the Debate about Mass Violence in Gaza, Journal of Genocide Research, (5 February 2024) referring to the German genocide of the Herero, analyses its three stages, and argues for a similar three phases in the Israeli genocide/ethnocide of the Palestinian people.Nishidani (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Despite the shared diasporic experience, there was one important difference. The Jews developed their communal life around the synagogue, and the attendant privileging of abstemious scholarship as the primrose path to survival in partibus infidelium. The Irish expatriate communities pinioned their fellowship around the institution of the pub where mastery in yarning and inventing improbable stories, given that no on felt there was much point in remembering the grief of dispossession, helped one's rise on the social ladder,(until one felloff it, pissed as a newt).Nishidani (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Despite trying desperately hard to retire, much like Finkelstein, you've been dragged back into the fray haven't you? Part inability to keep one's eyes off the news with all the historical echoes bouncing around the brain, and part, presumably, that slightly addictive element that Wikipedia has to it for certain personalities when they espy errancy. Iskandar323 (talk) 13:57, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Mentioning some minor kibitzer like me in the same breath as Finkelstein only diminishes the latter while grotesquely inflating myself. I don't actually follow the 'news' since there is little that is new in the recurring recitation of the same memes about this conflict - it is newsworthy if an Israeli is taken hostage or killed, and each gets massive personalised coverage: it is not newsworthy if day after day children and youths, so far 116 individual cases, are shot dead by Israeli snipers from a safe distance in the West Bank. Apparently the several thousand WB Palestinians whose families have seen the disappearance into the holding pens of the IDF's carceral system of administrative detention, don't experience the kind of noteworthy grief the families of those taken hostage in Gaza undergo, though in essence we are dealing with the same issue - holding a people hostage. Fortunately, the net does allow one to go beyond this skewing travesty with all its racist assumptions about significant human beings, versus those troublesome others. That is why students, who have no yet been socialized into the cognitivce status quo because they are adept at exploring topic far more broadly that their parents who just absorb mainstreamlined news, are one of the few bodies exhibiting residual signs of life in a deadening and deadly, lethally deadly world. And, in its own distinctive manner, wikipedia's design, and its, until now at least, relative immunity to lobbied or sentimental selectiveness of the facts, has a role of honour, and if helping it is taxing, it is a tithing of our increasingly short time well worth paying-Nishidani (talk) 08:21, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I'm looking for a source and thought you/your talk page watchers would be a better first stop than WP:RX. The source is:

Salman Abu Sitta, "Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present", Between the Lines, 15-19 March 2003.

That's all the information I have about it. I saw it cited exactly like that in Pappe's 2006 Ethnic Cleansing book, p. 273 n. 35. I have no idea what Between the Lines is and I cannot seem to find that publication (there is a 2007 book with a similar name but it doesn't appear to be the right source), or anything written by Abu Sitta with that title ("Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present"), or anything on Google scholar with that title. When I search Google web for that exact phrase with quotes, the only place I find is in Pappe's 2006 book.

There is of course another Abu Sitta article from 2003 that is often cited, which is this one, but that has a different title ("Traces of Poison"), is in a different publication (al-Ahram Weekly), and a different date, 27 Feb-3 Mar, 2003.

Did Pappe just mis-cite the 2003 Abu Sitta article? Or is there another Abu Sitta article that was published a couple of weeks after "Trace of Poison"? I suspect it may be that it was written in another language (I presume Arabic but maybe something else), and the title Pappe used in his citation is his own English translation, and that's why I'm not finding it. Anybody have any ideas here? If not, I'll ask at RX. Thanks, Levivich (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Levivich, apologies for following you here (I'll fully admit that I was curious what you were up to). The "2007 book with a similar name" that you mentioned seems to actually be pretty relevant. Here's what the foreword of the 2007 book Between the Lines says: This book contains a selection of articles from Between the Lines (BTL), a political journal first published soon after the eruption of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000. BTL was published on a regular basis from Ramallah and Jerusalem until September 2003, when it was forced to stop due to difficulties in its material circumstances. Note 1 (attached to that quote) says this: Between the Lines was cofounded and coedited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad in November 2000. From its inception, it was produced on a volunteer basis, with great help provided by our writers and a circle of individuals and organizations who likewise believed in its mission. It ceased publishing as a consequence of its accumulated debt. This review of the book contains some more information about the journal's history. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the journal digitized anywhere (the review says that the journal was mailed to readers around the world—perhaps it was never available online). Malerisch (talk) 15:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It turns out that this journal is present on WorldCat, and there is a website linked: www.between-lines.org. Internet Archive has saved this website, but I was only able to see articles up to February 2003 (so close). There are some sources that cite this website on Google Books and on Google Scholar. Malerisch (talk) 16:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Malerisch: Hey you can follow me anywhere with research skills like that! Thanks, I think you've solved this riddle. Unfortunately, it looks like Between-Lines.org stopped updating their archives in Feb 2003 (doesn't it figure!), as even as of Oct 2003, their archives page only had archives going up to Feb 2003 [1]. I bet Zero is right and this was just a reprint of the March 2003 article in Al-Ahram Weekly. What are the chances he wrote two articles about the same thing in two different publications in the same month? Idk, but I appreciate you hunting this down! Maybe you can help me find my mind next? I seem to have lost it recently... Levivich (talk) 19:30, 31 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies to you Lev, and joining you in expressing deep thanks to Malerisch for their timely and insightful response.My access to the internet, since I don't have a laptop or one of those smartphoney thingamijigs is somewhat restricted by continual travelling.(even the police in Seymour detained me, if gently, when they found me enjoying a night walk at 3.30 a.m. Apparently, old men with backpacks sauntering around empty streets looking for a petrol pump and all night cafe where one might intercept trucks at dawn and hitch a ride to a busless destination is thougbt indicative of an altzheimer's condition these days).Nishidani (talk) 02:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In recent weeks, Norman Finkelstein on his blog has been providing additional context and insights into Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:28, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks indeed. I try to avoid checking his blog frequently, and do so only once a month. I refrain because he anticipates most of what I would think, and reading him before I thought things out myself would be economical, but an inducement to mental laziness. It is very rare to encounter a brilliant mind informed by a moral passion which however never muddles the lucid analysis of the facts. There have been two Holocaust voices that stand out, that, formerly, of Elie Wiesel and that of Norman Finkelstein. One made a fortune out of it, the other had his career destroyed and his life ghettoized because he absorbed in the marrow of his being the experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz and elsewhere of his parents, and drew a general, not an ethnic, lesson for how to read history, all history and empathize with its silenced victims.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Norman Finkelstein, exactly because of the reasons you have so beautifully articulated.

I was going to write more about both Elie Wiesel (a sellout) and Finkelstein, but my cat is persistently demanding my attention, he is ready for his dinner followed by our customary evening walk in our neighborhood. He sends his love to his granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-

‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)

A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.

This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.

I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.

I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I am now deeply moved to learn that Yesh Din’s Ziv Stahl, a Kfar Aza resident who survived the massacre, publicly opposed revenge and spoke of the tragic plight Palestinians were suffering over the border. Orly Noy Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 magazine 25 October 2023.

• Coincidence as usual. I make an edit about the destruction of bakeries in Gaza, then return to my reading, totally unconnected to any wiki interest, and immediately come across this note re de Gaulle in his first stay in Poland after WW1. ‘Notre civilisation tient à peu de chose, dit-il, toutes les beautés, toutes les commodités, toutes les richesses dont elle est fière auraient vite disparu sous la lame de fureur des masses désespérées . .Il ne peux oublier ces ‘’interminables files de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants hagards attendant des heures à la porte du boulanger municipal le morceau de pain noir hebdomadaire’’ Max Gallo, De Gaulle, Robert Laffont 1998 volume 1 p.172.

Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024. "A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine." --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:23, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, in 1948 the sacking of West Jerusalem enabled notable collections of books and manuscripts on Palestine to be plundered as war booty and shifted to the emergent libraries of Israel. That has continued sequentially in 1967, in 1982-5 (Palestine Research Center) etc., and now most thoroughly in the meticulous bombing of everything in the Gaza Strip smacking of higher learning institutions from Universities down, to the core archives, now scattered to the wind and little better than toilet paper for those having to keep clean in the midst of the estimated 50,000 tons of shit now flooding the streets.Nishidani (talk) 01:10, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Israel's Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza's Heritage Sites (8 February 2024). By Hesper Cane for Sidewalls magazine. "Once a testament to a rich cultural history, Gaza now lays in ruin, rubble, and debris, with more than 200 heritage sites damaged and destroyed." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:01, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems (8 Feb 2024). By Chandni Desai for The Conversation. "Scholars say Israel is intentionally destroying education and cultural institutions in Gaza." Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Most of these sources (including several further above added recently) appear in 'marginal' sources and therefore, whatever their cogency, 'fly under the radar,' and, if mentioned more broadly at all, can be dismissed as just catering to a cantankerous fringe. As my father once said to me, as a realist with a deep understanding of how things get done outside the hefty world of voluminous theories, 'It's not what you know that counts, but who you know.' In the lazily contrafactual world of the mainstream 'commonsensical' representation of geopolitics, even the turbulent impetus of the obvious barely stirs more than a rapid ripple on the serene surfaces of our acclimatised complacencies. For at least a century it has been understood,'in the proper quarters', that under the institutional arrangements of democracy, that the classical three estates can be suborned by the fourth Estate, with its massive powers of persuasion, be that a matter of a totalitarian 'engineering of souls' or the 'democratic' manufacturing of consensus as theorised by Lippmann (and quickly picked up by Bernays). Zionism won through with its febrile, to me hysterical, vision of a solution to the non-issue of the so-called 'Jewish Question' by mass expatriation to an Arab country, by an intense reticular working at every venue, at any opportunity, of Jewish communities to win them over to the 1dea of a distinctive 'Jewish' politics, corresponding to the antisemitic politics of their adversaries. Despite understanding the reverence, infle tdx by the retrospective' post-holocaust assessment of Herzl as a profoundly, uncannily percipient 'realist', a reading of his biographies and the extraordinary figure that emerges from his diaries, has never altered my earlier view that he was cast in the Elmer Gantry mode, a snake oil chandler. Time and again in entry after entry recounting meetings and sketching politics of networking, I at least see his figure pacing feverishly up and down his rooms, just a few steps from his near neighbour Freud's home, as, well, Chaplinesque, twirling and retwirling the ball of his thoughts to spin a yarn that would globalise his own narcissistic self-inflation and allow him to have the secular Jewish world at his messianic fingertips. Oops, I meant to respond simply by suggesting you follow recent contributions to the Journal of Genocide Research where the majority of people who actually know their history have now no hesitation in calling a spade a fucking shovel. I must rush. My siblings sill be back from their walk and if they find me out of bed, ignoring my Covid exhaustions, they'll go ballistic which, contextually, means refusing to serve me any more of my daily ration of dim simsNishidani (talk) 04:47, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wishing you a quick and full recovery from your Covid exhaustions, and hoping you will continue to enjoy plenty of dim sim. Regretfully I have not yet had a chance to enjoy dim sim, looks like they are delicious based on articles and videos online. In the past I enjoyed a variety of tasty dim sum from various restaurants in California, including in lovely Chinatown, San Francisco. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It was a lapse into the most complacent narcissistic vulgarity to even allude to the minor discomfort of Covid, a trivial sense of slight fatigue every time I'd read any of 50 pages of the many engrossing books I am reading through during this idle sojourn in a Lucky Country. I thought as much catching sight of a brilliant cartoon in today's Age picturing a mass of people huddled in a tight corner of a barb-wire-topped, walled in area, otherwise in its length and breadth stacked with smoking rubble. Emblazoned on the walls were signs reading'No Exit', while a megaphone sited on a corner above blared:'In our efforts to minimize civilian casualties, would 1.4 million of you please move to a safe zone.(The Age 14 February 2024 p.25)

That kind of image cannot but remind one of Raphael Eitan's now eerily prophetic remark back in April 1983:

'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scuttle around like cockroaches in a bottle.'

That image, I then recalled, reemerged in October 2023 as the Israeli counter invasion got underway, in cartoons like this.('Palestinians as cockroaches' cartoon should prompt boycott of antisemitism conference' CJPME 16 October 2023)

Checking Norman Finkelstein's website later, I noted a recent blog on the incipient invasion of Rafah, a scenario alluded to in the Age's cartoon. He writes:

'The serial ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, to culminate with the expulsion of 1.4 million people trapped in Rafah (half of them children) to either al-Musawi, a forlorn desert area the size of Los Angeles Airport, or into the Egyptian Sinai, reminded me of something my late mother said to me about her experience during the Nazi Holocaust.'It was not a war. It was an extermination. We were like coacmroaches, scurrying this way or that, whenever the light shone on us.'

(By way of balance the Age also carried a half-page reflection by Ramona Koval, former host of the ABC's Book Show, whingeing/complaining of how deeply uncomfortable Australian Jews now feel, in the midst of 'overbearing cultural enforcers' and pro-Palestinian activists). I shook my head, realising how, like myself mentioning my bout with Covid, a sense of shame should cut in and tell us at least to shut up, rather than indulge, as there, in the obscenity, contextually, of likening one's suburban anxieties about status-harm through association with an eternally victimized Israel and identitarian discomfort to what a German Jew would have felt reading Der Sturmer in the 1930s. Nishidani (talk) 07:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see that Israel's Kan TV channel is reporting an interview with a functionary of Mossad's assassination bureau, in which he states only Gazan children under 4 have a right to be fed, since everyone over that age is guilty of supporting Hamas.Nishidani (talk) 08:33, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Smoke and Mirrors: How Israeli Agitprop Lies Become Fact (15 March 2024). Daniel Beaumont, Counterpunch. "That coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the US mass media is distorted by a bias in favor of Israel is hardly news to people more or less in command of their faculties. But events since October 7 have brought to light examples that go well beyond the usual daily distortions to outright lying—lies that rival those of the WMD fabrications used to justify the US invasion of Iraq." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:35, 17 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• The United Kingdom: Zionism's covert nerve center (5 March 2024). Kit Klarenberg, The Cradle. "Britain's century-long commitment to Zionism and collaboration with Israel today plays a frequently overlooked role in perpetuating the oppression and genocide against Palestinians." Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:12, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Words Besides ‘Genocide’ U.S. News Outlets Use To Describe Genocide (7 March 2024). The Onion. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:25, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

These three sources would be unacceptable in wiki terms, however interesting or even compelling. It is of course obvious to anyone who analyses these things with detachment but rigour, that Israel is intentionally engaged in a programme of what we would normally call genocide. But what counts is the judgment of an international court of law - as Israel knows- and proving intent there remains difficult for the technical reasons outlined by A. Dirk Moses, Norman Finkelstein and many others, given the leeway for ambiguity created by the adoption of Lemkin's published definition (as opposed to his posthumous reasoning in his Nachlass (1959)).

This however is no longer the case with the induced famine Israel is carefully engineering, as was pointed out in the Guardian yesterday. The mounting factual evidence for deliberate starvation of the whole population to achieve its ends is so cogent, and the fact that Israel has formally underwritten the legal protocols that determine starvation as an instrument of war is a war crime, that, were this to come to a trial in an international court, the possibility of a not-guilty verdict for Israel is highly improbable. That is the Achilles heel, for while 'genocide' can be equivocated, the consensus of the best scientific work from such neutral bodies as World Health Organization, Insecurity Insight and so many other authoritative bodies is that 100% of the population is starving, in territory occupied and controlled by Israel. Rather than make gestures towards ameliorating the access to food, even if only to keep Gazans on the famous 1,600 calory per diem 'formaldehydization' formula set forth after 2007, Israel's response is to persist with its restrictions while mustering a formidible team of specialists in international law specifically to counter that eventual accusation. In the meantime, 21% of households are carrying someone who has been historically disabled by this decades-long regime of occupational control, and half the children there have bodies eating their own residual bodyfat and muscle protein to eke by day by day. It took two years to convince Western leaders that the Nazis were engaged in a Holocaust, and the same lag in the face of diffidence will apply here.Nishidani (talk) 09:32, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

But in the meantime let us rejoice:

• (1)Amichai Friedman, the chief rabbi of the IDF’s Nahal Brigade base. In a video from early November, Friedman proclaimed that the month since the October 7 massacre had been “the happiest month of my life since I was born. The people of Israel rise in stature, rise in rank, we finally find out who we are … We are telling the world what good, and justice, and morality, and values are, and therefore we will shut down evil, and eradicate Hamas, and eradicate the enemies, and destroy everyone.”
• (2) And Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf proclaimed that the events following on 7 October testified to: “A holy nation, the virtue of nations, the lion cub of Judah, awakened from his long slumber to claim his inheritance.” Meron Rapoport, The Israeli public is dispirited. So why is the right euphoric? +972 magazine 20 March 2024

Hamas has sure made a lot of Israeli religious people exultantly happy. Rapoport gives several other examples of this messianic exhilaration at the spectacle of genocide. Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 21 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It seems the designated role of these particular religious figures in Israeli society is to communicate the daily Two Minutes Hate. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:15, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• The War Biosphere: A Lecture by Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah (23 March 2024). Posted by Internationalist 360°. By Ghassan Abu-Sittah.   "... One of the most significant phenomena that alters the war biosphere is the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which Israeli hospitals are complaining about when treating Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza. One of the causes for the bacteria to transform from antibiotic-susceptible to antibiotic-resistant is the heavy metals present in weapons, like cobalt, selenium, and tungsten. The external coating of artillery shells contains these heavy metals. When these shells explode, they release these metals into the environment which induces genetic changes in bacteria leading them to evolve into antibiotic-resistant strains. Effective antibiotics for common bacterial infections cost around $5 per bottle. However, treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria requires specialized medications, with a single dose costing $300." Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:19, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanksindeed. I have been thinking much of Raul Hilberg recently. At this point, the only focus must be on getting the dry (if bloody) facts rights - the numbers killed, the technology of their deaths, the way the machinery works, the hard science of genocide.This kind of thing as well. Les Roberts,The Science Is Clear. Over 30,000 People Have Died in Gaza,' Time Magazine 15 March 2024Nishidani (talk) 23:08, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo (talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a matter of curiosity, what are you thanking me for?Nishidani (talk) 01:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just for reference, the "Thank you" is baked into Template:AE-notice as well as all the other standard noticeboard "required notification" templates. Personally I think it comes off a little condescending, but it's been that way since 2007. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 01:35, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Now that could be a new tagline: Wikipedia: a little condescending since 2007. Levivich (talk) 20:05, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I guess, whatever the outcome over there, that I owe it, at least to myself, to spend some time writing up why these misprisions occur.I.e, how someone in good faith can see something and find it repugnant while others, equally in good faith, have no such impression. Nishidani (talk)

When I read over a half century ago what Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia, with trenchant pithiness, something to the effect that 'to say we when one means I is one of the most recondite of insults,' I took the apophthegm to heart as a ruling guideline in life. Distracted at one point into the massive literature on ethnic identity, it assumed even greater cogency. What was nationalism, not only in its formal ideology but in the public language shaped under its muscled authority, if not a discursive mode where this core distinction was utterly lost, as its spokesmen made the most varied claims about what being part of an ethnic, cultural or political community entailed, for everyone captured up into its defining set. The 'we-ness' component trumped any trace of individualism. Before being oneself, one was one of us, and owed obeisance to the communal substrates' definition of who anyone in their ranks was,basically.Being some-one meant being primarily a member of a someone-else-ish national or ethnic group. One was defined by groupthink before one could even learn to find and articulate one's own voice.

Adorno's point held particular force for me because, reading widely in modern European history, and especially after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre's classic postwar text, Reflexions sur la question juive,the 'Jews' emerged as the outstanding example of what can happen when Others presume to define a minority community in their midst, otherwise as thoroughly acculturated as anyone else in a country, and by dominating as a we what they supposedly were, lay the bedrock for their eventual extermination, through sheer discursive carelessness over the longue durée.

In the slumbering toils of this late bespoke Woke world, itself the retarded offspring of an era of codifying politically correctness, the vast plain of the sayable is increasingly hemmed in, allotments staked out, taboo lines of no trespass roped off, by constituencies sharing little more than a common grievance over the way the parliament of language misrepresents them.Any discussion or remarks touching on the Jewish world furnishes no exception, and indeed perhaps presents an extreme instance of the pathologies one discerns more generally in identitarian debates, for which it provides, moreover a template for ethnic grievance strategies in recent decades. Perhaps arbitrarily I'd take 1967-1969 as marking a dividing line, when sensitivities underwent a radical shift. The former date refers to the fear and subsequent triumphant euphoria widespread in the diaspora at the outcome of the Six Days War. The latter alludes to the deserved success of Philip Roth's wonderfully vulgar, inimitably comical Portnoy's Complaint.

in the postwar era down to this juncture, people in the diaspora could grow up, as witness the autobiographical remarks of people like Norton Mezvinsky, Robert Manne and Ramona Koval alluded go in a prior section, completely unaware of any social interest in let alone antipathy to, the fact that one's background was Jewish. That was a private matter, one could even frequent Christian schools, and in so far as one had a national identity it was as an American, Australian etc. An engagement with Israel, let alone the holocaust was, in these early decades, very low key. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I enjoyed reading your poem. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted your original prose comment into that infernal machine and asked it to rewrite it as a poem, and this is what it came out with (with only minor tweaks by me):

I like yours much better. But damn, is that good or what, from a computer? It understood what you were saying, and frankly, is capable of writing better poetry than probably like 99%+ of fluent English speakers. The computer's choice of monorhyming quintains surprised me. Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it. Levivich (talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You should try going through some old archives to find some real gems. Can read about one of them at our electronic paper of record (the Signpost is really no competition tbh), ANI. nableezy - 20:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So now we can say, "Back in my day, we didn't have AI to write angry ballads for us, we had to write them ourselves!" To which someone like Ben Franklin would reply, "Oh yeah? Try doing that with ink and a feather!" And I have to admit, it must have been very difficult to write an angry letter using something as delicate as a feather. I would have broken a lot of feathers. But if you wind the clock back further, I bet it was very satisfying to write out an angry letter using clay tablets and chisels. Especially when using bold for emphasis. You could probably tell a lot just by looking at how a message was chiseled, like, "Wow, he was really angry when he wrote this, look how deep the cuts are in this tablet!" Levivich (talk) 20:44, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll try to get my pedantic mania offloaded or reined in into a footnote. Our Sumerian bard working off his furor poeticus would have dashed off his melodious ire on a soft clay tablet, wielding with deft speed a reed quill (Akkadian qantuppi, or something like that. I can't open another page on this laptop to check simultaneously as I write here).Chiselling came much later (though not financially) when imperial orderx commanded monumental narratives to be inscribed on rockfaces. Does anyone write good poetry in anger? Most early ancient poetry was composed in the style still preserved in the practice of Osip Mandelshtam, as his wife Nadezhda describes it, pacing up and down or along a street, murmuring various syllable and word combinations, until line after line the poem shapes itself in memory and, only then, is it written down or, as anciently, was recited and often committed to memory on the spot by the listeners. There's not much place for useless emotions like anger in these traditional modes, as anyone who has attended extempore bardic competitions in provincial Italian villages can attsst. Two or more oral poets stand before an audience, a theme is selected by lot, one takes it up, say 'war', and slowly but fluently produces two quatrains (abab) with tercets to round it off. The next poet must reply on theme by say praising by contrast its antithesis, playing off the ideas of his earlier rival,and this seemingly effortless to and fro can go one for hours. The sheer pleasure of technical challenges, the extraordinary level of concentration required to do this doesn't leave room for silly distemper, ire or anger,even were that the topical issue, as it is in the Iliad(mËnis).

Thanks indeed for that, Lev, a fascinating experiment that sent the mind milling, and set my day's mental menu as I trekked out with my sister for a long fast midday walk through the Moonah bushland foreshore off Anglesea. Coincidentally, it picked up a thread in an ongoing argument I'd had a year or so ago, with an Italian mate, an electronic engineer who ingeniously salvaged five decades of work on file when my computer crashed. As I think you have argued around here A1 is increasingly making editing wikipedia, let alone any form of discursive work (legal,academic, political etc ) ostensibly otiose, since fluent neutral content looks like it can be generated in seconds through merely posing the right request to a machine.

My counterargument consisted in several excursuses on language at its most intense, poetry, with the suggestion that A1 can't write poetry, as opposed to reformulating a universe of topical prosaic information with formidibly correct grammar. As I walked along that foreshore,eyes half distracted by the curves of the combers and a steady glance rightwards from time to time for brownsnakes (both of us being keen observers of reptiles), three phrases in particular came to mind as I wondered whether an algorithm would ever be capable of generating their dazzling imagery with the inimitable music instinct in each:('comme à travers une fêlure dans un paroi lisse, une fine craquelure, quelque chose se glisse doucement.' Nathalie Sarraute; (para thina paraphloisboio thalassẽs(Homer evoking the sound of crashing waves along a duned beach);('là dove'l sol tace,'Dante writing of a place 'where the sun falls silent')). This by way of a prefatory context setting, but it's time for a fag...Nishidani (talk) 05:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The A1 machine can, it seems, reconstrue prose in a rhymed format, but while quite competent, maintains its prosaic character. At least, this is my impression of what I see so far. Prose is like a school uniform, it's language dressed into a uniform communicative code. Poetry is always, in sartorial terms, harlequin. Prose strives to get a rational line of argument over, poetry's rationality is addressed not primarily to a public constituency: It is an individual's wrestling dialogue with language itself, and the terms are not pitched in terms of discursive clarity, but rather higher criteria of metaphor,analogy, musicality,in a register of resonant ambiguity that resists 'closure', i.e., discursive dumbing down to a simple straightforward statement. A1 I assume has an inbuilt mathematicized design to privilege the reduction of a vast linguistic and discursive data base to a coherent, grammatical set of clear statements. That is diametrically opposed to what poetry does. Poetry's concept of meanings is plural -the deliberative interplay of otherwise distinct planes suddenly in dialogue because of the poet's unexpected juxtaposition of things we normally do not think off as in any way related. A very large volume of the greatest poetry is intertextual, yielding up its subtle semantic secrets only as one twigs to some implicit allusion to some other poem. A minimal reading of the games alive in Robert Frost's otherwise straightforward,'The road not taken' would take at least 20 pages of close annotation and construal. Dinner.Nishidani (talk) 09:30, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To illustrate using bathos, by some of the jokes in my doggerel. (antisemitic) 'innuendoes' is written with an approximation to an old vernaculsr's phonetics, inyourendoes (the smear is like someone shoving it one's a***), or rumourous(guff) comes out as rumerus, because we thus become the noisy targets of 'rumour',who we are is effectively what we are rumoured to be. Perhaps I should cut to the chase and outline why 'dumbgoyim' came to my mind, out of Roth, not Hitler, as far as I can reconstruct my memories. By the way, the Wiki article on the WW2 soldiers' song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball is incomplete, also metrically weak. As recited by our father when we were kids, and he was there, the first line ran: 'Hitler has only one brass ball, ' and Goebbels was distorted to Joeballs. The quatrain was capped with a closing 'Pass the pisspot, Jerry/Mary!'Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When the 'animalistic' atrocities' by terrorists broke out on October 7, it didn't take more than a few minutes to imagine what would occur. A total and utter devastation of the Gaza Strip, massive civilian casualties, and a war to take control and command of the terms of tbe ensuing narrative of the conflict. When Yoav Gallant, was it, spoke of all Palestinians being 'animals' and zoomorphic imagery flooded Israel dehumanizing them, I recalled a list I had drawn up over a decade ago systematically documenting all the terms used by prominent Israelis referring to Palestinians as, when not a subspecies, a kind of two legged animal, or vermin, lice, etc. But I refrained from making n article on this, until some weeks ago when the situation became unambiguously genocidal. So much information about stereotypes reiterated in the Israeli press or social conversation were never covered and should be known. I happened to see the discussion about Bret Stephens while working on this animal imagery. He was being adduced as an RS on Hamas, widely reviled as 'animals' or 'vermin'. He was on record as defining Ashkenazi, a group to which he belongs, as showing superior intelligence or superior thinking abilities compared to non-Ashkenazim (goyim), He was known to strongly resent (and justifiably) once being called a 'bedbug', a vile analogy that, in dismissing him as an insect, smacked of the Nazi rhetoric of 'infestation'. He was arguing that the lifeline of UNWRA, without whose aid 80% of Gaza's Palestinians would face famine, instead of chronic stunting anaemia, should be cut. If he couldn't connect the obvious dots here, his resentment at being called derisorily a 'bedbug' and the widespread use in Israeli of similar terms for the Palestinians, asserting the superiority of Ashkenazim while calling for a systemic measure that would foreseeably reduce another people to famine, that he was incoherently treating his non-Jewish readership as 'dumb', ergo, when edit conflicts failed to get my more articulated argument about his dubiousness as an RS on Palestinians, the laconic 'dumb goyim', more Philip Roth given my reading interests,than Hitler. And certainly a phrasing, as Zero's link, incisively showed, quite at home in certain quarters of Israeli conversation. If one finds, and absorbs an abiding lesson from, the Nazi rhetoric of animals and insect infestation as applied to Jews, the lesson should be applied to all such reevocative analogies, regardless of ethnicity. This is just for the record and can I hope be dropped.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In any case any one word, esp.from the primary emotions, like 'anger,' 'jealousy' is just the tip of a semantic and subsemantic affective iceberg. I was reminded of this rereading Patrick O'Brien's Post Captain yesterday. Stephen Maturin is being described as lost in thought.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashes into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols (cymbals,N?) inadequate. Because common to disparate situations-admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.p.470

But I'd prefer to examine further the issue of A1 and whether or not its remarkable success with prose could ever be extended to the qualitatively difference medium of poetry. Goodnight, Lev, and thanks for a trenchant prompt that made me day, and will continue to do so in the following weeks as I reflect on it.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

On viewing people as animals, I can't help recalling a brilliant sonnet by Belli, a little of which I struggled to get over into my own dialect. Dialect cannot be euphemised,it can only be rendered by a dialect with a parallel status No 1394

Long before Adam, there ain't a shadda ra dout,

The clarse of anamuls, way oudduv'a gum'ment's reach,

Lived the life a Riley,n' getting by wuz a peach

With no bosses ta work ya like a fucken rouseabout.

There woddn't no coachies or hun'ers way back then,

No butchers,no bashens, or hangen round f'ra feed . . .

An, as fa speaken, the lodduv'em, evri last breed,

Spoke like boffins do now, jus' like learnéd men.

But then Adam bowled up and took over the reins,

An muskets an' wips turned up oudda the blu,

Along with coachies n' cudgels fa spadderen brayns.

An that was the very furst accayshun whereby man

Robbed anamuls a their speech, and then used it to screw

'Em with the power of reasun, as only speech can.Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I did 2279 of thosesonnets too fast for revision, so every time I pick one up it screams for improving tweaks. I.e. Rob is also 'knock off'/or 'nick which picks up the bashings/knocks and blows,'spattering brains' handed out to animals earlier. 'chew the cud' ruminate/think' (so animals readjusted to animulls, where 'mulls'( an anima which thinks) is audibly tacit)

An that wuz the very first time whereby man

Nocked words owda anamulls, so he alone cud chew

The cud, n' pud'em all down with tha voice a reason.Nishidani (talk) 03:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

which reminds me,

Had I but world enough and time,

I'd pull my finger out and write

A piece on the Jewish art of rhyme

In the dialect of Rome, to cure the blight

Of neglect that topic suffers here:

More ignorance than prejudice explains the lack

In coverage. We'd do well to lend an ear

To the verse of Crescenzo Del Monte, a crack

Acolyte of Belli's native tongue, who sought

To versify the Jewish world of Rome

In his shrewd ghettoed idiom and caught

So much that Belli missed or left alone

For very few have roots so deep, if fraught,

Than Roman Jews to call that city home.Nishidani (talk) 04:01, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for those translations! Are these the world's first Romanesco-to-Brogue translations? :-) It works wonderfully, though, for conveying the vernacular. I am in awe of people like Belli who can write thousands of sonnets.

Unfortunately so far I haven't come across a reliable source for the "brass balls" variation though it's all over the internet in non-RS sources, but nothing suitable for adding to the Wikipedia article that I've been able to find. "Joe Balls" was easier to source (and is mentioned in the Wikipedia article).

I'd never really thought about this before, but did, e.g. Allen Ginsburg write "Howl" in anger, or is it just about anger? I imagine the latter. Does it count if the first draft was written in anger? You've got me thinking of poets who might have written in anger, and Dylan comes to mind, but perhaps songs written in anger are different than poems written in anger. Still, I'd guess even angry songs are written calmly even if performed angrily. I would certainly count "Masters of War" as an "angry poem." It's angry when read (Google has the lyrics), and angry when performed--you can hear the anger when Dylan sings it (1963 example). Eddie Vedder hadn't been born yet in '63, but you can hear the anger when Vedder sang it almost 30 years later in '92. Still angry a couple of months ago when Patti Smith sang it while commenting that it was more relevant today than ever. But I think you're right, Dylan was probably calm when he composed it. He's still around, maybe I should write him an email and ask. Anybody got Dylan's email address? Levivich (talk) 07:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks indeed for these stimulating reflections, Lev.I must confess that when Ginsburg recited his work at the Melbourne Town Hall back in March '72 or thereabouts, l walked out half way through, though the tickets were hard to come by. I'd been annoyed at the ruckus caused by protests at the presence of Andrei Voznesensky, simply because he happened to be a citizen of the Soviet Union. Fortunately Voznesensky managed to fit in a recitation for students of Russian at the University, and I thrilled to his performance, the music and technical formalism of his work.

I and my mate walked out I guess as cultural snobs at that time (but we were serious drinkers back then and the long evening drawl was threatening our boozing schedule). We were both specializing in classical Greek and intoxicated by the extremities of technical bravura in Pindar's unbelievably complex verbal orchestration of image after image of recondite allusion, and Ginsburg's yawl seemed prosaic. My measure of quality was, if I can imagine myself doing that (in any creative medium) then I'm not impressed. It didn't help that the throng was highly political, longhaired dope-sucking hippies there because G was an icon of resistance,nothing to do with poetry -very few campus poets of that decade, to gather from a Time poll, could recite a poem, even their named favourite, from memory and Joseph Brodsky turned away droves from his classes unless they had several hundred lines off by heart. I was a radical, but never found myself comfortable in a crowd of the like-minded, and, damn it, poetry was an intensely private thing, requiring years of 'disciplined' listening to words, and the memorized tradition of its masters. As Auden once wrote, a great poet will write several hundred pages, much of it excellent, but only a baker's dozen will pass muster as the stuff of genius,enduring in time because the words make those who chance to hear or read them bristle with a physical thrill that makes the lines and images sear themselves into the thews of one's feeling and thinking. Must watch an evening flick with my sister, but I'll think about and eventually get back to, your remarks on anger: If only because it challenges Wordsworth tired but interesting (ultimately autobiographical) that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Could bychance that infernal A1 machine you hang out with write a wikitype stub or article,trawling the net for stuff kn Crescenzo Del Monte? I guess most of it would be in Italian however Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Read 'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. No one could read that near frantically suicidal pressure of abandoned hope and fraught existential plight without grasping the lived sincerity of the angst it describes. But that order of technical bravura though written out of that paralysing experience, probably wasn't drafted under its immediate impress. The 'composure' demanded by that order of control over the wording stands aside from the stuttered silent wroughtness such an emotion would have induced. Homer dedicates considerable space to the sledging vituperation Achilles spat out towards his lord Agamemnon, but not for tbat would Homer have necessarily had to draw on some memory of his own rage. When Shakespeare has Macbeth utter the words, as he girds himself for battle

I have supp'd full of horrors

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts

Cannot once start me.

Can we infer that (biographical fallacy) Will is writing directly out of his personal experience, rather than just suiting words to the dramatic context and the fictive type his imagination has conjured up, also to fit a theatrical bill and its deadline? No, poetry is chameleonic, and enters like a quick-change artist into the spirit of the words that the experience latched upon for a theme suggests as most consonant with the mood of the poem.