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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem
Personal work section notes.
I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.
An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.
The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.
The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.
(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.
'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'[1]
‘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.
^T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
^Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
^ For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
^Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
^George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
^Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
^Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
^John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
^Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
^ Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
^M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
^Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
^ ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
^John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
^Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
^Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
^Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
^Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
^‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
^Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
^cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
^Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
^Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
^'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland.
The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
^Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
^Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
^Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
^'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
^'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
^'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
^Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
^Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
^William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
^William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
^Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
^Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
^James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
^Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
^See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
^John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010
Shoah/Holocaust and 'wildly antisemitic'. A further set of reflections
For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller
'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.'Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.
'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg. [a]
'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable. [2]
The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-
Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.
That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.
This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.
Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?
Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s[b], and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945,M.R. Cohen wrote:
’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’[3]
Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless.[c] This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.
So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges [d] and the larger number is widely remembered[e] – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost.[f] In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7[g] (Snyder) million upwards[h] Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal[10].) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000[11] -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?
There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’[i] In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival.[j][k] The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.
Pt.2. Categories and definitions in historical context
Two survivors from the holocaust concentration camps meet up and exchange some black-humoured repartee concerning the Shoah. They are interrupted by God who happens by and overhears their banter. He interjects:’How on earth do you dare banter and joke about this catastrophe?’ The two survivors snap back:’how could You know what it was like? You weren’t there!” [l]
It took some time for scholarship to settle on an appropriate word to describe the phenomenon.[m] The words used to refer to the phenomenon of WW2 mass slaughter are many,- from the ethnospecific khurbn, shoa,continuous pogrom, Final Solution, Event, judeocide, the unnameable/unspeakable, and pseudo-sacred sacrifice etc., to the more generic genocide, (H/h)olocaust, univers concentrationnaire, (Great) Catastrophe, Götterdämmerung and ethnocide.[20] to name but a few,- and the denotative extensions and connotations of each differ.
Shoah in Israeli usage refers to a 12 year time span, while Holocaust tends to evoke (a) broadly the institutionalization of ethnic murders over the roughly six year period of WW2, from the invasion of Poland, or, (b) more restrictively, to the three years embracing the industrialized murder of Jews specifically that accelerated massively from 22 June 1942 onwards when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. Usage that restricts, implicitly or explicitly, the Holocaust to (b) means that the earlier propaiudeutic operations that set precedents for administratively organized group murders, such as Aktion T4’s euthanization of from 70,273[n] to 275,000[o] deemed unfit to live, or the 61,000 members of the Polish elite prescriptively targeted in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen,[p] of whom two thirds were liquidated largely in the opening months of the war, are scanted from the narrative or marginalized in contemporary Holocaust commemorations, as is the gypsy Samudaripen, 70% of whose Polish population alone was exterminated.
The AktionT4 story, in particular, is a crucial precursor for the holocaust process. One estimate made at the time was that 1,000,000 Germans would have to be exterminated on the grounds of being of unsound body or mind.[22] The original technique consisted of killing the mentally ill with a bullet to the neck. This method of disposing of 'useless mouths' (whose murder was duly calculated to have saved the Reich 885 million marks in expenses) was replaced by building 'shower' rooms in the extermination sites, where groups of 10 to 15 patients were ushered in. Once sealed off, the showers were flushed with carbon monoxide to kill them by asphyxiation. The bodies were then burnt in crematoriums made for that purpose in adjacent buildings. What later occurred at Auschwitz and other death camps was not 'unique' but replicated on a vast scale the methods devised for those diagnosed as insane. In short, as Poliakov notes, the rapidity with which the Nazi authorities implemented the later rational and efficient industrial murder factories drew directly on the model developed to exterminate Germany's mentally ill.[q] One striking difference, was that the euthanasia programme, despite its secrecy, generated widespread popular opposition and protests within Germany which eventually led to its suspension, as opposed to the persecution and deportation of Jews, which, according to one informal wartime poll, left 90% of the population indifferent.[r]
All this is further complicated by the shifts in debate position and focuses over successive decades, with geopolitical pressures playing not an insignificant role. The Yalta division of Europe into an Eastern Soviet bloc sphere and Western Europe under American auspices, played into this, esp. after the Cold War kicked in. The partition translated into a neglect of the Holocaust’s other victims in countries which now became adversaries of the West. Archives were closed off from external scrutiny, with the exception of Poland; no systematic centralization of documentation had been organized, leaving archival material dispersed throughout Eastern Europe,[25] and Soviet scholarship was given very restricted agendas.[s] Further events like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948,[t] the showcasing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961)[u] and the Six Days War (1967) also inflected reformulations of Holocaust discourse, as did the Yom Kippur War.[29][v] To which one might add the impact of a renewed nationalism in the former Soviet states as they struggled to reconstruct their identities by addressing their respective histories, particularly with regard to WW2.[w] This last aspect is the gravamen behind Grabowsky and Klein's critique of wikipedia's Polish Holocaust articles. Whatever the biases, we have empirical evidence that affirms that in Western awareness the immense toll of 5.1 million Slavic, i.e. Polish and Russian victims of the holocaust, has been studiously wiped off the public record. They figure marginally, though constituting almost half of the victims, way under other minorities like the disabled, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, in the awaremess of schoolers in their formative years. [31][x]
As early as 1941 Churchill, sizing up reports of atrocities trickling in from Europe of Nazi policies, stated that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name.' [32] It was Raphael Lemkin, three years later, who in his germinal study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944)[33] devised the neologismgenocide to describe the ethnic and cultural restructuring being conducted by the Nazi authorities throughout occupied Europe, citing the mass murders 'mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians.'[34] Citing Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that 'the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if the bearer is beaten to death by a rubber truncheon', he defines this as referring concretely in his contemporary world to 'the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders.' Lemkin had been from his youth struck by the impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the Armenian genocide. At age 18, he was shocked by the destruction systematically visited upon the Armenians and noted, 'A nation was killed and the guilty persons set free.'[y][z] The term genocide was required because there was something distinctive about Nazi policy as opposed to ethnic massacres of the past and new conceptions require new terms. [35], for
'German militarism is the most virulent because it is based upon a highly developed national and racial emotionalism which by means of modern technology can be released upon the world in a much more efficient and destructive way than any of the pedestrian methods of earlier wars.'[36]
Several terms vied for the choice of a terminus technicus for the Holocaust as it affected Jews. The primary Jewish victims of the Nazi onslaught eastwards referred to the Holocaust in their Yiddish mother tongue as a khurbn
(חורבן), ‘disaster’. A loanword from Hebrew, as opposed to the biblical connotations of Shoa this term resonates in both the original Hebrew and Yiddish with an allusion to two earlier disasters that inform Jewish historical memory, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70.CE, and also to the exile from Eretz Israel.[aa] It maintains its currency among American Orthodox Jews, particularly those who speak Yiddish.[37] Given the resonance of historical antecedents, khurbn implicitly disowns the idea that the European holocaust as it affected Jews was unprecedented.[ab] In the new state of Israel, contrariwise, the term was rejected: it retained a resonance of the language of Europe’s persecuted Jews, from whom the new society of Israelis wished to both distance itself and shake off memories of their tragic fate.[ac] According to Birgitte Enemark, at the time only examples of armed Jewish resistance were considered heroic, and 'all other aspects of the Jewish experience' were lumped together,' under the label "Holocaust"."Holocaust" thus became the `non-heroic' category.'[39]
Shoah ( שׁוֹאָה) "calamity" was the word that emerged in a December 1938 deliberation of the Central Committee of the Mapai party, as the rampaging precedent set by Kristillnacht became routinized. [40] Though mentioned in a work entitled Sho’at Yehudi Polin (Devastation of Polish Jewry), published in Jerusalem in 1940 to describe the calamity that had befallen European Jews,[41] the term was rarely used during the war by the Yishuv in Palestine until 1946.[42] The term has a biblical resonance[ad]- in the Book of Job it is used for a sudden unforeseen disaster and desolation [ae]- and began to enter common usage after the summer of 1947 [44], when, after its establishment in 1946 to commemorate the annihilation of European Jewry, Yad Vashem held a conference dedicated to researching both the Shoah and the Kabbalistic concept of heroism (Gevurah). [42] Khorbn and Shoah were thereafter used interchangeably in public discourse until, by the early 1960s, Shoah emerged as the dominant term in Israeli usage to refer more broadly to what European Jews underwent in the period from the Machtergreifung i.e., Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 down to May 1945. [45][46]
As alluded to above, in 1945 M. R. Cohen could refer to the general annihilation of European peoples under Nazism, Jews and non-Jews, as a 'holocaust'. The transition in the use of this term from the generic to the particular, from all victims to Jewish victims, took some decades. [af]Hannah Arendt, in her seminal masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), speaks of 'extermination' broadly for what befell not only Jews but other peoples in both Nazi and Soviet hands, for which, outrageously, a relatively small phenomenon like 'the Jewish question' and antisemitism could become the catalyst of world war and its death factories.[47] Léon Poliakov recounted in his memoirs that at the time of his foundational study of the holocaust in 1951, the word 'genocide' was deemed not fit for publication,[48] and though he did employ it occasionally in his text,[ag] he generally uses the term 'extermination'. When Gerald Reitlinger undertook in 1953 the first comprehensive English study of the genocide of Jews, he chose to write. not of the Shoah or Holocaust, but of the Final Solution, the title of his book alluding to the specific Nazi decision for an Endlösung der Judenfrage.[ah]
In 1961 Hilberg, writing what was to become the cornerstone of later Holocaust studies, rigorously abstained from using the word in his monumental study.[50] Ever stylistically wedded to detached clinical language, he preferred the term 'destruction' - a generic term shorn of the various emotional resonances instinct in these other labels-in describing the 'annihilation' of European Jews as ‘the world’s first completed destruction process’ . [1] The decisive words here are (a) ‘first’ and (b) ‘completed’, both implicitly denying that, in his historian’s view, we may speak of the phenomenon as ‘unique’. For ‘first’ ominously suggests that the process may repeat itself in the future,(something that is sui generis cannot recur) and ‘completed’ affirms an awareness that the shoah was, at that point in time, the last of a series of comparable events, distinguished only from its predecessors by the thoroughness of its accomplishment.[ai]
That same year was to be a turning point in the assessment of the Holocaust in another sense, since the trial of Adolf Eichman contemporaneously taking place in Jerusalem had widespread repercussions on discourse framing the event. In contradistinction to the Nuremberg trials, where indictments were laid for "crimes against members of various nations," the priority of the proceedings was to focus on the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and, it was believed, justice could only be meted out by a Jewish court, which, paradoxically according to Hannah Arendt, citing the prosecutor Gideon Hausner's words, would make 'no ethnic distinctions.' [aj] This was understandable. given the extraordinary tolerance Adenauer’s Germany , for one, showed to the tens of thousands of minions of massacre in the midst of its citizenry, among them war criminals. Germany had jurisdiction to try Eichmann but studiously circumvented the idea of extradition, and given the extreme leniency of the courts in sentencing men with thousands of murders on their conscience, that country at least could not be counted on to render justice. We all know of the post-war Polish recrudescence of antisemitism, but who recalls incidents like that in August 1949 in Munich when police shot at a crowd of 500 Jews who had taken to the streets to protest the publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a letter that referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers’ (Blutsauger)?[51][ak]
Pt.3.The development of uniqueness
In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history." In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and
ingenuity of theological zealots".' [53]
'According to Saul Friedländer: ‘The absolute character of the anti-Jewish drive of the Nazis makes it impossible to integrate the extermination of the Jews, not only within the killings the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on.’ I disagree.' [54]
As seen above in Pt.2, the East European Jewish victims of the Holocaust appear to have suffered none of the brain-wracking vexations, that arose in the diaspora and Israel in the postwar period, over the mot propre for what was happening to them. They used the emic, historically resonant term khurbn. The word drew an implicit analogy between the scale of the catastrophe that hit them, and two iconic events in antiquity that branded Jewish memory with a profound sense of loss, the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Thus, khurbn disavowed uniqueness, by affirming an essential continuity, the idea that the physical destruction of the diaspora’s core population repeated an earlier pattern: it was a recurrent, if exceeding rare, event. The symbolic force of this analogy lay in the fact that, in the legend of the foundations of the diaspora, the synagogue, wherever erected, slowly came to be experienced as a substitute for the temple in Jerusalem, with rabbis replacing the priesthood, and rituals of prayer and observance supplanting sacrifice. The unique specificity of the one sacred site millennia before has been preempted by a creative solution dictated by necessity: the ‘temple’ was any site Jewish communities built to celebrate their religion. The Final Solution, in aiming to extirpate their communities and raze their synagogal institutions, constituted the third in a series.
In Israel, to the contrary, this Yiddish khurbn was disliked just as the imputed ‘sheepishness’ of the victims and those who, surviving, made aliyah to the new state with its heroic ethos, was a source of discomfort and embarrassment. One slang term in Israeli usage referred to the martyrs of the camps, as opposed to the Warsaw ghetto rebels who fought back, as 'soap'.[al] In its stead, the word shoah, which had become current in the Palestinian yishuv, gained an ascendancy. The emergent preference for the biblical shoah marked a shift from profane history (secular time) to an idiom of religious thrust (sacred). On another plane, it was also emblematic of natural tendency, instinct in the structural dynamics flowing from the definition of Israel as the Jewish state for the Jewish people, to invest it with discursive authority, one with a final say on crucial matters of definition.[am] One might be tempted to think of a kind of unspoken tendency towards a Vaticanization of authority arising to reign over the disiecta membra of diasporic life which had always been characterized by an intense dialogic interplay, creatively dissonant, between far-flung communities which were unified in their sense of a shared Jewish identity but which, one by one, had to, as circumstances dictated, respond to very different historical social and political challenges. The emergence of a Zionist state, which had a completely different, because national and geopolitical, set of priorities, naturally bore a logic that militated towards the subordination of the diaspora, by redefining it as a contingent expedient, chaotically dispersed and historically defeated, to what was the new unifying narrative of Jewishness as defined by the state of Israel.
Political interests play an important role in suppressing analogies, in order to assert the uniqueness of the holocaust. In the late 1990s, according to Norman Finkelstein, Jewish lobbyists in Congress succeeded in blocking the passage of a bill to commemorate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The USHMM, he adds, following declarations from both Elie Wiesel and Yad Vashem, and at the request of the Israeli government, virtually erased references to the Armenian genocide from its museum's exposition.[55]
Over the last quarter of a century highlighting the Holocaust as a unique event affecting only Jews has passed out of scholarly fashion.[an] though the idea that the holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews alone still holds the upper hand.[ao]
'(Genocide’s) usage in reference to the Shoah and similar events of comparable destructive intent, both prior and subsequent, has gradually increased, including by historians, especially since the 1990s. The word “genocide” in reference to the extermination of the Jews is, in some respects, more neutral than both “Holocaust,” which evokes an etymological notion of the sacrificial, and “Shoah”, which seems to exclude the affected non-Jewish groups. At the same time, the term “genocide” allows for a comparison of similar causes and effects, and emphasizes, by analogy with the legal definition of crime, the intent, which in this case is the endeavour to partially or completely destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’(Sullam 2020, p. 4)
‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and, it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case. As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples in order to colonize the East and extend the German Empire up to the Ural mts. Thereupon after the completion of the successful war he would he would have turned to the West and to subtract from the French people the 20 million Frenchmen he had promised in his conversation with Rauschning.’ Lemkin cited in (Moses 2008, p. 20)[ap]
If one trawls the global past for evidence of genocide, history becomes a charnel house. Though the holocaust is ‘the most documented of genocides’, [59] genocide itself has always been a commonplace of history. It received powerful theological endorsement in the Tanakh/Old Testament, where the injunction was laid down to annihilate the Seven Nations (Deuteronomy 7:2, 20:16-18) namely the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.[60] The logic and principle of exterminating any resistant population by murdering the males and enslaving the rest were first set forth in Western tradition in Thucydides’ vignette, The Melian Dialogue regarding the options given the islanders of Melos during the Peloponnesian War.
Lemkin was well aware of precedents stretching back to the deep past, [aq] but for our purposes, one should briefly reacquaint our fugitive modern memory with its selective, fragmentary interest in the past, with how the 19th century's periphery must have experienced the glorious march of progress whose beneficiaries, the West-is-besters, complacently celebrate. Incidents of mass killings in the name of civilization were commonplace, many implemented under impress of the Virgilian maxim drilled into the elites who emerged to gather up and govern their flourishing, expansive windfall empires, i.e., the purpose was to retread the path cut out paradigmatically by the Roman empire, whose Virgilian civilizing mission consisted of 'imposing the custom of peace, sparing the subjugated and warring down the proud.' [ar]. An illustration of how this worked out in practice was France's invasion of Algeria, beginning in 1834. At that time the country had an estimated population of roughly 2 million. Four decades later, by 1875 when the conquest was completed, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians had been killed. The necessity of genocidal killings lingered on in everyday conversation. One author in 1882 commented that 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him'. [61][as]
An important principle in approaching history is the relationship between (imperial) core
and periphery.[au] Genocide as a twentieth century phenomenon arguably began with Lothar von Trotha’s campaign to decimate the Herero people in 1904-1905,-in one estimate 65,000 of 80,000 (80%) died- accomplished in broad daylight since it was duly covered in the German press. Remembrance of the holocaust is celebrated in postwar Germany but, until recently, this earlier episode of the country's colonial genocide was all but erased from memory.[av] The idea of herding at gunpoint uprooted townsfolk into arid zones where they might die en masse of famine was taken up by the Turks, with their forced exterminatory marches, and the technique, a typical case of blowback, was adopted and widely deployed by Nazis, and to a lesser extent by the Japanese in WW2.
But this is all too facile, and culturally self-regarding to single out three examples which happen to instance the genocidal practices of those countries which were later to emerge as adversaries of the Western powers in two successive world wars.If we take the years around 1900 as an angle from which to reflect on what was to follow in the 20th century, perhaps the best starting point is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where the complacent Western core becomes, by a brilliant piece of topical tableturning of imperial prejudices, a planetary periphery. Wells reimagined this annihilation with the modern world refigured as aborigines, invaded and under mechanical extirpation from Martians just as Tasmania’s aboriginal population of 5-7,000 people was all but annihilated within a short century, starting with the Black War.[aw]
In 1896-1898 Spain’s concentration camp policy in Cuba wiped out 10% of the island’s population. The British adopted the same system in South Africa in 1899, closeting Boer civilians, women and children into barb-wire enclosures where over 2 years over 25,000 died of disease and malnutrition as their army wardens maintained guard. On the other side of the world, the the United States’ suppression of the Philippine war of independence had the collateral impact of leading to the death through disease and famine of 10 to 20 times the number of guerilla fighters killed. In all three, concentration camps, scorched earth and starvation policies took the largest toll out on civilians. Over a 20 year period Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous policies in the Congo (1885-1908) were so vastin their application that the minimal figure for those killed is 1,500,000, with a maximum estimate ranging as high as 13,000,000. By 1900, only 10% of aborigines (50,000) had survived the impact of British colonialization, with an estimated 20,000 of the original estimated 500,000 members of 300 tribes, each with their distinct languages, killed by direct genocidal settler practices.[63] This was the international background for Germany's policies against the Herero.
After WW1, the metropolitan assault on peripheries resumed. In the Second Italo-Senussi War (1923-1932) Italy likewise killed one quarter of the population in the region of Cyrenaica, by the mass murder of civilians and surrendered soldiers, resorting to the mustard gas bombing of villages,(much as Spain was resorting to chemical weapons against the Berbers in the Rif War in Morocco at that time,[ax] as well as death marches into the desert). Having mastered the techniques there, they proceeded to Ethiopia where their spraying of areas with mustard and other gases, together with tactics of gunning down masses of surrendered soldiers and enforcing death marches. The conservative figure is that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the death of perhaps 225,000 people. Mann comments:'This was the equivalent not of the Final Solution but (on a smaller scale) the Nazi mass murder of Poles.'[64][ay] In the Terror Famine implemented in Ukraine in 1932-1933, Stalin intentionally starved to death over 3 million Ukrainians. At the time, the future core of the Luftwaffe’s new generation of pilots was, under a secretive Soviet-Germany pact to circumvent the Versailles agreement, being trained at Lipetsk fighter-pilot school with close to a thousand German military personnel, not far from the genocidal liquidations underway to their west.[az][ba]
David Stannard, author of a foundational study on the massacre of American indigenous peoples, American Holocaust, has argued that the view that the holocaust as a 'unique, unprecedented, and categorically incommensurable' stand-alone event restricted to Jews, is a recent construction. Questioning the late 20th century arrogation of the term to refer exclusively to what befell the Jewish victims of Nazism, he then argues that
'it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labour by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.'[68]
While conceptually incoherent, the uniqueness model is defended, he then documents, with intimidating polemical vigour. Yehuda Bauer in taking President Carter to task publicly for mentioning the holocaust's 11, not 6, million victims, (perhaps influenced by Simon Wiesenthal's recent surmise) suggested in his excoriation such an attempt to 'de-Judaize' the holocaust was, albeit unconsciously, 'antisemitic'. Deborah Lipstadt, author of one of the most popular accounts of the holocaust, has also asserted that any comparison between the Jewish holocaust and other forms of genocide put such 'holocaust relativists' on an antisemitic spectrum, one end of which included Holocaust denial.[bb]
Pt.4b.Hitler's awareness of a precedent for the Holocaust
Hitler himself, on the eve of WW2, one week before the invasion of Poland, in his Obersalzberg Speech of 22 August 1939, has the Armenian genocide in mind when he set forth before his generals the genocidal thrust of the imminent assault upon Poland:-
Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?[70][71][72][bc].
Those who refuse on principle to entertain the possibity that the genocide of Jews might be further illuminated by analogies or comparisons must of course deny that Hitler's stated intentions here to liquidate the Polish nation are relevant to assessing the ensuing broader holocaust. They must dismiss the explicit justification, that Germany could get away with genocide and enjoy impunity because Turkey had, as immaterial to our understanding of the holocaust affecting Jews.
The Armenian genocide (1915-1918), with perhaps 1,000,000 of 1,800,000 murdered (55%) is defined by Niall Ferguson as 'qualitatively different' from earlier Turkish massacres. The word holocaust itself appears to have been indeed first used, by the New York Times, to describe a new round (‘another Turkish holocaust’) of Turkish pogroms against the Armenian Christian population.[76]. '(I)t is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide,' he continues, endorsing the view of the American Consul in Smyrna at that time, that it ‘surpasse(d) in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world.' [77][bd]
In one sense Hitler was correct. Even today only Armenians recall their holocaust, and Hitler's onslaught on the Poles is lost to general public awareness. Western commemoration is overwhelmingly focused on the Shoah as a unique event, 'qualitatively different', affecting Europe's Jewish population. What would have been unimaginable in the European core in 1905, but proved perfectly practicable if, as with Von Trotta's extermination of the liminal Herero, the 'uncivilised' periphery of Africa was the field of implementation, had its blowback effect a mere three and a half decades later, as the technique was directed at Germany's immediate neighbour.
Pt.5. The politics of restrictive usage
There is nothing surprising in the connection between antisemitism and economic distress. A similar relationship has been observed in many other cases, and there is no reason to believe that antisemitism is exempt from social causation, or that the sufferings of the Jews are something absolutely unique. Unfortunately, the annals of cruelty are inexhaustible and other minorities have experienced at some time or other all the iniquities inflicted upon the Jews. The extermination of the Christians in Japan was just as thorough as Hitler’s genocide. If fewer were killed it was because they were fewer. When massacring the Armenians, the Turks perpetrated all of the deeds of which the SS men are guilty. If the history of antisemitism is particularly long it is because the Jews have clung to their separateness with unique tenacity. Most minorities could not be persecuted for so long because they dissolved themselves in the surrounding population.'(Andreski 1969, pp. 305–306)
How does the Hollocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term 'genocide' was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.'(Moses 2004, p. 533)
Analysing the explosion of Holocaust narratives in the United States in the 1970s, after decades of silence also within Jewish communities, Peter Novick argued that the phenomenon was in part motivated by a desire by many influential Jews to make Americans more sympathetic to Israel and Jews generally. [be] Novick went on to call the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum American Jewry's 'epistle to the Gentiles.' [bf] Originally funded by private donations,[bg] official government involvement was announced by the White House in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of Israel's foundation. This was a political measure to placate American Jews displeased by what they regarded as the President's "excessive evenhandedness" in trying to negotiate a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.[81] The running expenses were thereafter largely taken over by the federal government.[82] Political calculations also contributed to government funding of such awareness programmes concerning the Holocaust, a way to woo the Jewish electorate.[bh]
It was President Carter's understanding that the Memorial Centre, following on the report he had commissioned which he appointed Elie Wiesel to preside over,[83] would commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust.[bi] In a public address on the occasion of its establishment, Carter happened to mention the 'eleven million innocent victims exterminated'. He was immediately soundly rebuked by Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian, for attempting to 'deJudaise the Holocaust' by including all of the non-Jewish victims.[84] Indignant groups, led by Elie Wiesel reacted by launching a campaign, which eventually achieved its goals, to ensure that the Museum would refer only en passant to 'other' (non-Jewish) victims'.[84] Throughout the following decade tensions arose, for example, between Poles and the Museum's authorities over the way the Holocaust was being portrayed. In a recent memoir recalling that period, John T. Pawlikowski, a Carter appointee, states that difficulties arose in efforts to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions. At that time, Poles were mentioned at the beginning and the end (as rescuers) but little was said of their engulfment in the central killing programmes at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which formed the main Judaiocentric focus of the Museum's depiction of the events.
Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general scholarly consensus of experts at the time was that a distinction did exist which militated against any notion the two annihilations could be equated. No decision was reached when, on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:
while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story- Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.(Pawkowski 2022, p. 425) harv error: no target: CITEREFPawkowski2022 (help)
Pawlikowski adds also that, at an NPAJAC[bj] conference in 2004, the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-
For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained.’(Pawkowski 2022, p. 426) harv error: no target: CITEREFPawkowski2022 (help)
When on 17 June 2019 the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the Trump’s detention centres, “concentration camps” and added “Never Again,” her choice of words was challenged by the Republican Liz Cheney, who accused Ocasio-Cortez of deploying a ludicrous, demeaning analogy with the Holocaust and thereby setting up a false analogy, Both concentration camps and Never again[bk] preexisted Nazism, though both are commonly associated with it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stepped in to the dispute by stating that it, “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” [86] an assertion of the dogmatic position that the Holocaust, understood as referring to Jews, was unique. The declaration provoked an open letter of protest addressed to the director of the Museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, and published in The New York Review. The letter was undersigned by 560 academics, many of whom are Holocaust scholars, have supported the Museum, some in the capacity of fellows, and researchers given access to its archives. [87] They remonstrated that
'By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.'
This narrowing of Holocaust to evoke a specific ethnicized denotation, related to Jewish victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing and racial extermination alone, and its successful promotion in this restrictive sense, had an unforeseen collateral effect. One now remarks on how envy and admiration for the publicitarian efficacy in political discourse of the term generated its imitative adoption as a catch-all term among aggrieved constituencies in the rising vogue of Identity politics.[88][bl] Yet, as the headquote from A. Dirk Moses above suggests, it was precisely the wresting of the term holocaust away from its generic usage and its exclusivist application only to the Jewish WW2 tragedy that constituted the first step in the ethnicization of holocaust discourse, and its modern deployment in identitarian discourse and its correlated politics of grievance.
Pt.6. Calling in outside institutions,and the need for scholarly caution in these areas
There was, and still is, a very fine line between Israeli government politicization of antisemitism for furthering its national interests—through hasbara [Israeli propaganda] and other political interventions—and scholarly work being undertaken at universities and in research institutes. The blurring of any differences between propaganda and objective research is one of the key factors contributing to the bitter and divisive battles over antisemitism research in the academy.(Burley & Lerman 2022)
le commun des hommes est ainsi fait que si la vue d'un subit désastre émeut et provoque une pitié agissante, la contemplation d'une souffrance prolongée finit par irriter et par lasser.(Poliakov 1993, p. 336)
We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with understanding.(Snyder 2015, p. xiv)
It is true that Israel’s current far-right government has turned dog whistles into fog horns.' (Brown & Nerenberg 2021) harv error: no target: CITEREFBrownNerenberg2021 (help)
This has been proposed by Chess, who nominated in this regard the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its 'institutional' expertise. That Wikipedia is self-regulating,-often ramshackle, provisory and imperfect in its day-to-day workings, but still remains a rare experiment in a project of an autonomous, anonymous self-governing production of an encyclopedia. Its nature means that all articles will be subject to a process of continuous internal development and analysis, and that the major, overriding rules consist in a goal of strict neutrality as a final outcome, as determined by a judicious weighing of all relevant positions emerging from the best available scholarly sources. This eminently internal democratic experiment fits the ideal Popperian criteria for the slow, incremental growth, by constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge.
As I indicated above, an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests, and functions quite differently, however excellent the results generally. In the case of the USHMM, its consultancy would be problematical for a number of of reasons. It has been known to exert pressure to censure criticism of arguments concerning the political manipulation of holocaust discourse. When Norman Finkelstein published his devastating exposé, The Holocaust Industry, and the then doyen of holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, endorsed the accuracy of its scholarship, the USHMM and Elie Wiesel reportedly pleaded 'relentlessly' with Hilberg to retract his support for the book, unsuccessfully.[89][bm] If, further, as one of its Council members has recently recalled (2022), the Polish story of the Holocaust won't get a fuller hearing at the Museum until Polish advocates recognize that their Jewish confreres suffered qualitatively more than Polish victims, then their participation in a wiki dispute precisely over the Holocaust in Poland, and the proper representation of the two sets of victims would, a priori, support one side, namely the position advanced tendentiously in Grabowski and Klein's essay.
I have no set views on the underlying historiographical issues of that paper, as opposed to deep reservations about its quality and methodology. Research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia, and tends to have a half-life not dissimilar to an isotope like Francium 223. It is true that nationalist editing has seriously affected the three core areas under Arbcom restrictions.[bn] But it is extremely naive, epistemologically, or indeed manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists, who, alone, exhibit a POV. The assumption is that there is 'pure' scholarship promoted by one side to any textual dispute and contaminated thinking exhibited by their nationalistic antagonists. All research in the humanities is embedded in, curricular, human, and social intrerests, the difference being that the reliability of the results is in direct correlation with the epistemological sophistication of the research. Too abstract? Let me illustrate.
That in January 2018 a conservative Polish government passed a “anti-defamation” law which is coercive, enabling libel suits against people including scholars like Jan Grabowski when their interpretations of the past do not run in lockstep with an official narrative, is well known.[91] Less well known is that wresting narrative control over holocaust discourse, not only by insisting it be restricted to Jewish victims, has been a major concern over decades for several institutions, and various Israeli governments. The distinguished historian of Poland, Norman Davies was recently reported on Polish Radio as recalling that in 1974 Yehuda Bauer, the acknowledged contemporary doyen of the discipline, in a holocaust seminar for historians conducted in the Israeli embassy in London, stated that the historical actors should be broken down into perpetrators (Germans), victims (Jews) and bystanders (Poles). When Davies, whose Polish father-in-law had survived both the Dachau and l Mauthausen camps, protested, he was apparently shouted down as a Polonophile. [92] Davies was later denied tenure at Stanford University, according to him, because it was imputed that he was ‘insensitive’ to Jews. [93]
In reading the threads, I keep in mind what Timothy Snyder wrote in his Bloodlands (2010)
Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.[94]Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
Notes
^’The SS man at the pit said something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound .The family I have described was among them. I well remembver a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said:’Twenty three years old’. . The pit was already three quarters full. I estimated that it held a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an SS man who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into it. He had an automatic pistol on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people- they were completely naked-went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of those who were lying there to the place to which the SS man had directed them. They lay down in front of the dead and wounded. Some caressed the living and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots.’ (Reitlinger 1971, p. 219)[1]
^'From 1900 to 1959 Western media used ‘holocaust’ to describe a wide variety of events, including the genocide of the Armenians, the 1918 Minnesota forest fire, even the explosion of a cinema projector in May 1947.'(MacDonald 2008, p. 9)
^Speaking of the laying of plaque memorials for two communities struck by Nazi genocidal policies in the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, Stauber and >Vago write:Apparently, some voices behind the scenes demanded that the plaque to the Holocaust of Jewish victims be more conspicuous—perhaps bigger than the one devoted to the Roma. But then, quantity could become quality—why should the plaque to the Roma victims be smaller in size than the Jewish one? Should it be smaller in mathematical terms? If six million victims deserve a plaque of a certain size, should the Roma one be proportionally smaller? Or relative to the overall numbers of victims, or to the proportion of victims among that particular group, Jews or Roma? Or perhaps the size of the plaques should reflect the percentage of Jewish losses in Slovakia as compared to losses among the Roma? [4]
^The widely accepted figure of 11 million for the total number of victims is equally rubbery, since was conjured out of thin air by Simon Wiesenthal in the 1970s and had no empirical basis at that time. The background to its invention was outlined by Tom Segev in his biography of Wiesenthal, who says Wiesenthal added 5 million to the larger figure of 6 million Jews in order to affirm "the brotherhood of all the victims" something which, in Lipstadt's account, "Jews generally fail to do." She writes:'Why is Segev so forgiving of Simon Wiesenthal’s many lapses? Perhaps we can arrive at an answer by considering Wiesenthal’s most egregious distortion of the historical record and Segev’s response to it. In the 1970s, Wiesenthal began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews, but the latter number had no basis in historical reality. On the one hand, the total number of non-Jewish civilians killed by the Germans in the course of World War II is far higher than five million. On the other hand, the number of non-Jewish civilians killed for racial or ideological reasons does not come close to five million (though it no doubt would have exceeded it if the war had ended in a German victory). Nevertheless, Wiesenthal’s contrived death toll, with its neat almost-symmetry, has become a widely accepted “fact.” Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order, which was the basis for the establishment of the US Holocaust Museum, referred to the “eleven million victims of the Holocaust.” .. When Israeli historians Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman challenged Wiesenthal on this point, he admitted that he had invented the figure of eleven million victims in order to stimulate interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. He chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.'[5]
^'Six million is an instantly recognizable number, the generally accepted estimate of the Jews killed by Nazi Germany in its murderous crusade. The phrase "the six million" is a rhetorical stand-in for "the Holocaust." But nowadays, for a great many people, the real number of Holocaust victims is eleven million: six million Jews and five million.'(Novick 1999, p. 214) Recently Alex Kay has attempted to put the overall figure on a sounder basis, concluding that the total civilian and non-combatant death toll was around 13 million:'‘if we take only civilians and other non-combatants into account, the Nazis killed approximately 13 million people in deliberate policies of mass murder, almost all of them during the war during the war years, 1939 to 1945, and the vast majority between mid.1941 and spring 1045, that is, in the space of only four years. . .In view alone of this intertwinement of war and extermination, it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing together rather than in isolation from one another. This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns. Some scholars repudiate the very notion that the Holocaust can be analysed within a broader framework.' (Kay 2021).
^Erhard Wetzel, one of the consultants on Generalplan Ost, was also an advisor to Alfred Rosenberg, and drew up a plan to reserve better employment and wider commercial opportunities for Jews as opposed to ethnic Poles in Hans Frank‘s General Government. The purpose of the proposal was to play one group off against the other by inciting hostile feelings between the two.[6]
^This is the figure given in the November 1945 Nuremberg indictment, which drew on the immediate postwar World Jewish Congress estimate. It was this, rounded off, which established the 6 million figure, a figure which, unverifiable, was jumped on by antisemites to deny the scale of the shoah itself. Reitlinger rightly observed that even if the real numbers cannot be determined within a 'half-million degree of accuracy', and might be a million less, it is utterly shameless to think the difference relevant.[7]
^I only put these figures in because Grabowsky and Klein, in their polemical tirade against Wikipedia, make much of the Polish nationalist inflation of holocaust victims, from a probably historical 1.9/2 million to 3 million. They rightly niggle the details. Which however they do not do when it comes to the formulaic 6 million Jews. When we go above the very conservative but scrupulously empirical Yad Vashem figure, we enter the realm of conjecture, which nonetheless can reasonably infer that the 4,800,000+ figure must lie well below the real numbers, lost in the record destructions of war. Round figures in historiography are always troublesome, and the choice of the minimal upper limit of 6 million has a long public history going back at least to a guess made in 1946 (though wartime rumours in Germany spoke of 6-7 million. See Victor Klemperer's diary entry for 24 October 1944[8], which imaginably might reflect a leak (?) of Eichmann’s estimate of 6,000,000) in his report to Himmler, two months earlier, in August 1944 [9])which has become canonical. This caution would be nugatory were it not for the contradiction between the factual pertinacity pursued by the two authors in insisting on the lowest figure for Polish victims (justifiably) while retaining the canonic figure for Jews (a conventional number without empirical, as opposed to conjectural, backing).(Grabowski & Klein 2023, pp. 7–8)
^Snyder himself prefers the restrictive use of Holocaust, ‘the most systematic killing policy implemented during Europe’s period of mass murder,’ to the Jews alone.. (Snyder & Lane 2009)(Snyder 2009)
^'I am a poor assimilated soul. I am a Jew and a Pole, or rather I was a Jew but gradually under the influence of my environment, under the influence of the place where I lived, and under the influence of the language, the culture and the literature, I have also become a Pole. I loved Poland. Its language, its culture, and, most of all the fsact of its liberation and the heroism of its independent struggle, all pluck at my heartstrings and fire my feelings and enthusiasm. But I do not love that Poland which, for no apparent reason, hates me, that Poland which tears at my heart and soul, which drives me into a state of apathy, melancholy, and dark epression. . I want to be a Pole, you have not let me; I want to be a Jew, but I don’t know how. I have become alienated from Jewishness. (I do not like myself as a Jew). I am already lost.'[12]
^That sense of abandonment and unwantedness informed Franz Baermann Steiner's penitential doctoral thesis (1949) which became a seminal groundwork for the analysis of slavery. Mindful of Jews incarcerated in the camps, he intuited that it reflected an aspect of a broader historical reality, the kinlessness of slavery.'(T)he state of being excluded from kinship relations . .The slave inhabits a "no man's land" that remains unstruictured by social life.' [13] This haunting bereftness did not cease with the conclusion of hostilities. The number of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Allied Displaced Persons Camps by mid 1946 was around 250,000.[14] That figure has a curious history. With the passing of the Polish Resettlement act on 27 March 1947 Great Britain legislated to allow up to 250,000 Polish troops, those unable to return to their country, to settle in England. This at a time when President Truman had been insisting (June 1946) that Britain open the Mandate gates in Palestine to take in 100,000 displaced Jews in Europe. This figure became ‘sacred’/’totemic’ , becoming the number Zionists insisted on for an immigration quota to Palestine. [15]Ernest Bevin countered by suggesting that the American proposal was a dodge to sidestep relocating them in the United States. [16][17] The United Nations Partition Plan effectively resolved reciprocal embarrassments about absorbing unwanted Jewish Holocaust survivors by dispatching them to Palestine as the British Mandate stood to expire. Thus Western powers finally resolved their ‘Jewish question’ at the minor collateral expense, neither of the Great Powers had to bear, of 13,000 Palestinian deaths in the war that followed and 700,000 ‘native’ Palestinians expelled with all their assets expropriated as property of the new state. The effect was to create, as Arendt noted a Palestinian question and a Palestinian diaspora. Arendt wrote:'After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved- namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory- but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and the rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people.' (Arendt 2017, p. 379)
^[18] This profound joke could be traced back to the anecdote related at Bava Metzia 59b concerning Eliezer ben Hurcanus in dispute with several rabbinical colleagues. Compare the Talmudic anecdote recounted by Delphine Horvilleur earlier in her book.[19]
^'Primarily I believe it was regarderd holistically; there was as yet no word for what had happened. If I went to the YIVO, they said this was a hurbn (the Yiddish/Hebrew word for destruction). If I looked elsewhere for some word, it was sometimes called the "Disaster" in English. The vocabulary with which to describe what had happened had not yet been developed'. (Hilberg 2008, p. 26) harv error: no target: CITEREFHilberg2008 (help)
^This is the known figure, based on Nazi documents, for the number of mentally ill killed between January 1940 and August 1941.[21]
^This is the figure produced by the Nuremberg Tribunal which Poliakov considered exaggerated.
^This was in marked contrast to the situation for Jews in the East. 'the Germans knew extremely little-in fact almost nothing-about the Jews. It is amazing to realize that when they conquered a town they did not have the faintest idea about the occupants, the leaders or who would be the proper person to head the Judenrat. They could not select anyone, because they did not know who should be selected from their point of view.'(Hilberg 2008, p. 31) harv error: no target: CITEREFHilberg2008 (help)
^'les malades mentaux d'Allemagne ont fait office de banc d'essai pour les Juifs d'Europe.'[23]
^5% approved the measure enthusiastically;69% were completely indifferent;21% were troubled by doubts, while 5% were categorically hostile to the practice.[24]: Writing in 1951, Poliakov concluded that there was hardly any difference between this German insouciance and the general Polish view to Jewish suffering:'l'amère constatation ne peut être évitée:l'attitude populaire polonaise, en face de l'agonie des Juifs, ne se distinguait guère de l'attitude allemande.'(Poliakov 1993, p. 333)
^ For example, the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, in November 1949, started pursuing the topic of the Judenräte’s help in ‘organizing the liquidation of the ghettoes’[26] and in some cases Jewish victims in exchange for securing the lives of rabbis and their families.[27] That factor, when Raul Hilberg explored it in his Phd in the early 50s, unnerved his supervisors, Salo Wittmayer Baron and Franz Neumann, who thought it too premature to raise the tragically painful details, and mentioning them would compromise his career. Hilberg nonetheless pressed on, and ventured the highly controversial idea that:'The Germans controlled the Jewish leadership, and that leadership, in turn, controlled the Jewish community. This system was foolproof. Truly, the Jewish communal organizations had become a self-destructive machine.' (Hilberg, 1973 & pp?122-125,125) harv error: no target: CITEREFHilberg1973pp?122-125,125 (help)
^'The majority of the more than 200.000 immigrants arriving in Israel during the first two years were Holocaust survivors hoping to be met with understanding in their new homeland. The struggle, however, to create a new society in the midst of ongoing wars was of primary importance and gave no room for anything but the heroic myth in the face of the enemy. This resulted in a disproportionate emphasis on the partisan and ghetto fighters' active resistance during the second World War and a contempt for the passivity of the Jewish masses; for those who had gone "like sheep to slaughter".' [28]
^Arendt's idea of the banality of evil in her report on the trial has been associated ever since with her name. But the concept was already implicit in Poliakov's 1951 book where, in speaking of the figure of Heinrich Himmler, he writes:'ce qui frappe le plus chez le maÎtre-bourreau du 111e Reich, surtout losqu'on le compare aux autres acteurs de tout premier plan, c'est la disproportion singulière entre la tracée démoniaque qu'il a laissée dans l'Histoire, et sa totale insignifiance humaine.'(Poliakov 1993, p. 284)
^Following Calimani, who however appears to ignore here(the oversight is partially corrected on pp.52-53) the seminal work of Léon Poliakov (1951), Reitlinger (1953) and Hilberg (1961) in making the following generalization:’Ci vollero decenni, infatti, perché intellettuali, storici, comunità ebraiche e centri di documentazione dessero vita a una vera e propria storiografia dello sterminio: il processo di Adolf Eichmann, quelli di alcuni responsabili del campo di Auschwitz, la guerra dei Sei giorni in (sic) Israel, sono alcune delle vicende che contribuirono a mutare la percezione della storia recente e a dare nuova vigore alla ricerca.'(Calimani 2018, p. 7)
^In this connection, one might observe that the acuity of critical Jewish responses to Polish narratives of the holocaust has often been blunted in the reception of 'autobiographical' novels and hoax memoirs that ostensibly portray experiences of Jewish persecution in Poland, and excuses are given when the deceptions are unmasked.Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird (1965) which describes the anguished travails of an orphaned Jewish boy at the time, was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim for its powerful evocation of the period. The novel turned out to be a faked autobiography: Kosiński had lived throughout the war closely protected by a Polish Christian family, whereas in the novel Poles prove to be relentlessly sadistic towards Jews. Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) likewise conjured up a putative holocaust survivor's memoirs until the deception was exposed. Yet authentic victims like Israel Gutman, director of Yad Vashem, could still appraise the work and its mountbank author, after its fraudulently fictional nature had been exposed, as 'not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. The pain is authentic.' Hoaxes that have played on Jewish holocaust grief have often been treated leniently, seemingly exempt from the unremitting hostility to tendentiousnessn or nationalist bias in Polish holocaust historiography.[30]
^In the summary of the 2016 Foster et al., ('Non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and murder,' we read:'While Jews, Roma and Sinti, gay men and the disabled were all mentioned by large numbers of students as victims of the Nazis, some other groups were rarely mentioned. We can only speculate on why these groups appear to have all but ‘disappeared from view’, but it seems likely that they are considered somehow less ‘relevant’ to contemporary social issues. Many schools are rightly concerned with homophobia, for example, or the attitudes of society today towards disabled people; perhaps other groups persecuted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators have less ‘purchase’ on many teachers’ and students’ concerns with modern British society. Whatever the reason, the outcome is that the murder of up to 15,000 gay men appears to receive a lot of attention in the school classroom, whereas the murder of 3.3 million Soviet POWs seems to be forgotten, and the Nazi genocide of Poles (in which at least 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered) is barely mentioned. The persecution of political opponents also appears largely overlooked, even though the first concentration camps targeted these victims, and an understanding of this initial period of terror is important in understanding the later development of Nazi violence and genocide. It may be that an over-emphasis on the ‘lessons of the Holocaust’, leads to a particular focus on groups that feel ‘relevant’ to today’s issues, but that this leads – unwittingly – to both a distortion of the past and the forgetting of millions of victims.'
^'To Lemkin, it was deeply dismaying that government could essay to destroy an entire group due to the absence of any law, while an individual, accused of lesser-scale atrocities, would be criminally charged. When he went to law school in Lwów – interestingly, the same school where the other prominent lawyer of the Nuremberg trial, Hersch Lauterpacht, deviser of the term ‘crimes against humanity’ as a legal term of art, was taught by the same teacher – he confronted his professor with this iniquitousness. His tutor pointed to sovereignty: any intervention in internal affairs would be as unlawful as preventing someone from slaughtering his own chicken. 'But', Lemkin replied, 'the Armenians were not chickens'.' (Vasil 2019, pp. 1053–1054)
^Analogies abound between this earlier 'event' and what happened in WW2, as anyone coming from a reading of Franz Werfel's novelistic reconstruction of the Armenian genocide,The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), uneerily premonitory of what would happen to Jews in Europe, can see as they approach Holocaust memoirs. The assassination of one of the main organizers of the genocide, namely Mehmet Talaat, by Soghomon Tehlirian in 1921 likewise anticipates the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan in Paris in 1938 to avenge his Polish-Jewish family’s expulsion from Germany. Telhirian was absolved and the incident lost to all but Armenian memory, the latter led to the Nazi retaliation of Kristallnacht.
^'Hurban was the traditional Hebrew term to describe the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the exile (galut) from Eretz Israel. Jews extended the concept to include their sufferings as a result of pogroms in medieval and modern times, as well as their loss of national independence in ancient.'(Ofer 1996, p. 568)
^In an essay on the catastrophe and Jewishness in 1964[38]Manes Sperber, analysing the phenomenon of the Hourban, later made the point that:'Le genocide n’est pas un crime sans précédent; pour s’en convaincre il suffit de lire les histories de l’Antiquité, et en premier lieu la Bible.'(Sperber 1994, p. 78)(Calimani 2018, p. 19)
^'nel neonato Stato d’Israel, esso venne abbandonato, anche per le associazioni che suscitava con la lingua dei perseguitati da cui gli abitanti del nuovo Stato volevano distinguersi e dalle cui tragiche memorie volevano liberarsi.'(Calimani 2018, p. 18)
^'In the Bible, Shoah denotes a terrible and unforeseen individual or collective disaster. In the books of Zephaniah and Isaiah, it is connected with the wrath of God and the punishment he inflicted through defeat by a great enemy. In the books of Proverbs and Psalms, Shoah is used in connection with a disaster that befalls an individual as punishment for his evil deeds. The biblical subtext hints that when a Shoah occurred it was sudden and unforeseen, and that the event in question came as a shock to the individual or group. In the book of Job, Shoah appears in the context of a terrible famine that connotes a cosmic disaster, but here too, the issue of sin and punishment is central.'(Ofer 1996, p. 568)
^e.g.'génocide systématique et intégral'. Perhaps Poliakov was referring to its absence in the title.[49]
^Reitlinger’s book was 'the first significant work to tell the story of what was then nameless, and is now known as the Holocaust.' (Aronson 1987, p. ix)
^Completion here does not mean, 100% of Europe’s Jews were murdered -25% somehow survived. It refers to the process of perfecting ethnic extermination on an industrial scale via the mise en scène of an efficient administrative mechanism for achieving the declared aim, and the overcoming of all moral scruples that might have impeded its execution.
^They were to watch a spectacle as sensational as the Nuremberg Trials; only this time, Mr. Hausner noted, "the tragedy of Jewry as a whole was the central concern." In fact, said Hausner, “if we charge him [Eichmann] also with crimes against non-Jews . . . this is” not because he committed them but, surprisingly, “because we make no ethnic distinctions.” That was certainly a remarkable sentence for a prosecutor to utter in his opening speech; it proved to be the key sentence in the case for the prosecution. For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. And, according to Mr. Hausner, that amounted to the same thing, because “there was only one man who had been concerned almost entirely with the Jews, whose business had been their destruction. That was Adolf Eichmann.” . . . The Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants had been “for indicted crimes against members of (many and) various nations,” had left the Jewish tragedy out of account, Hausner said, for the simple reason that Eichmann had not been there. Did Hausner really believe the Nuremberg Trials would have paid greater attention to the fate of the Jews if Eichmann had been in the dock? Hardly. Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies.(Arendt 1963a, p. 6)
^ The situation has of course improved imnmensely. Now it is Palestinian Germans who are regularly beaten up by Berlin police if they are sighted wearing keffiyahs or marching to commemorate Nakba day.[52]
^'Over and again Zionist writers of the 1940s wrote in near fascist terms of the “beautiful death” of the Warsaw rebels and thed “ugly deaths” of the martyrs of the camps. .'(Boyarin, pp. 292–293, n.61, 293) harv error: no target: CITEREFBoyarin (help)
^'the Zionist enterprise claimed to be the spearhood of the Jewish revival, which also included the claim to be the center for Jewish historical memory.'(Michman 2008, p. 13) harv error: no target: CITEREFMichman2008 (help)
^ Among scholars, discussion over the perceived ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust has long ‘lost most of its steam’ (Bloxham 2013: 319). Advances in knowledge of Nazi ideology and praxis have furthered understanding of what happened to its various victim groups, how, and why, while a greater appreciation of the interface of these policies has helped transcend dichotomies of uniqueness and comparability. In sum, scholarship of the last quarter of a century has positioned the Holocaust within a much wider spatial and temporal context, allowing the ‘specific features’ of the murder of the Jews to be drawn more sharply within the context of the ‘broader phenomenon’ of genocide (Bloxham 2013: 1),[56]
^More vexed than this is the matter of precisely what the phrase refers to when it is applied – a question especially charged since the use of the definite article ‘raises questions concerning the distinguishing features’ (Lang 1999: 77) and in particular whether it should apply only to the genocide of the Jews or more widely to include other Nazi victims. Within the academy ‘the traditional view that it [“the Holocaust”] was the genocide of the Jews alone’ (Niewyk and Nicosia 2000: 51) tends to hold sway, though there is some ‘debate’ between ‘those who reserve the term “Holocaust” specifically and exclusively for the Jewish victims of Nazism and those who opt for much wider inclusion of victim populations’ (Rosenfeld 2011: 58). These contrasting positions of exclusivity and inclusivity are much more highly charged outside academia however, where they are intensely politicised – not least because they often segue into contrasting claims over the uniqueness, universality and comparability of different victim group experiences under Nazism. ..Here, the experiences of other groups of people persecuted and in many cases murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators are recognised as critically important to an understanding of the Holocaust, but they are not themselves denoted by the use of this specific term'[57]
^The reliability of Rauschning’s recall of Hitler’s views here, published in 1939, have been questioned, but are generally considered now to be indicative, if not taken, as recorded, verbatim.[58]
^Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento: hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (Virgil, Aeneid Bk. VI, 851-853)
^In pressing for the overthrow of Ghadaffi’s regime, Western interventionists cited as a justification for invasion the same abuses of human rights, (charges denied by Amnesty International), which had been documented as characteristic of Italy’s earlier invasion and genocidal onslaught , such as the mass gassing of ‘rebellious’ tribes.[62]
^The historical sociology of this idea goes back at least to Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377) down to Immanuel Wallerstein’s work. The underlying premise in the modern worldview down to the end of WW2 was admirably set forth by Toynbee in 1934:'the fact that we have ceased to apply any common name to ourselves is historically significant. It means that we are longer conscious of the presence in the world of other societies of equal standing; and that we now regard our society as being identical with 'civilized' Mankind and the peoples outside the pale as being mere 'Natives' of territories which they inhabit on sufferance, but which are morally as well as practically at our disposal, by the higher right of our monopoly of civilization, whenever we choose to take possession.'(Toynbee 1962, p. 13) This dialectical interplay between metropolitan dominance and the outlying colonial/marginal world everywhere inform Michael Mann’s 4 volume masterpiece, The Sources of Social Power(1986-2013). It constantly illustrates the phnomenon of blowback-exceptional measures taken, way off centre stage, to subjugate, dominate and incorporate ‘backward’ societies into the ‘civilized’ world often end up coming home to roost, with a vengeance in the metropolitan hearthland.[at]
^'In Germany, debate about the country’s colonial project has long been overshadowed by the crimes of the National Socialist era. While most German cities commemorate the victims of the Nazi period, there are no significant monuments to the victims of German colonialism.’ Lars Kraume’s exploration of Germany’s colonial genocide in Namibia Der vermessene Mensch came out only this year.(Connolly 2023)
^'Indignant objections to the Martians taking unfair advantage are quickly squashed by reminders Wells drops about what humans did to dodos, and what Europeans did to Tasmanians.’(Kemp 1996, p. 147)
^The official Ethiopian count, according to our Wikipedia article, later spoke of 760,300 deaths, referring to Arthur J. Barker’s The Civilising Mission: The Italo-Ethiopian War 1935–6,Cassell 1968 ISBN978-0-304-93201-6 pp. 292-293
^A sideline to Germany’s cooperative ventures with the Soviet Union via personnel deployed by its Trade Enterprises Development Company(GEFU: Gesellschaft zur Förderung gewerblicher Unternehmungen) was to gather information on their host country. The projects run by Special Division R or Zentrale Moskau trained 100 German pilots from 1925 to 1933; a tank school was established in Kazan in 1929 forming the core of the future Panzer forces; part of the armament manufacturing agreements had a company, Bersol Aktien Gesellschaft, operating secretly to manufacture poison gas on Soviet territory.[65][66][67]
^‘It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.'(Snyder 2009)
^'In other words, you are to be considered in the same general category-as an antisemite, as a creator of "moral equivalencies" . .if you are a neo-Naszi or a comparative historian. For, to Lipstadt, even someone who has no doubnt regarding the ghastly hoprrors of Jewish suffering and death under Hitler - but who has the temerity to dissent from her insistence regarding the unquestionable uniqueness of the Jewish experience is, in her phrase, merely a not yet denier. And 'nopt yet' denial, she writes, is "the equivalent of David Duke without his robes". In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition . .a crypto-Nazi'.[69]
^The source for this remark is the Pulitzer Prize-winning (1939) head of the Associated Press's Berlin branch, Louis Lochner. The authenticity of his version was questioned first at the Nuremberg trial by lawyers defending Hermann Göring and Erich Raeder, and subsequently by the Turkish government and several scholars, on the basis of the fact that two other transcripts of the Salzberg talk later discovered do not contain the reference to the Armenians. The Armenian massacre allusion was however not the gravamen of the defense's challenges to the memorandum, but rather the reference to 'brutal' measures. In the forensic reconstruction of the likely provenance of Lochner's version, Hannibal Travis,[73] who defends its authenticity, infers that the indirect source for these remarks was the head of German military intelligence (the Abwehr) Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. His notes to the meeting were passed on to Hans Oster, Ludwig Beck and Hermann Maaß, the last-named being the probable informant referred to by Lochner. Thus a chain of transmission from Canaris to Lochner is traceable.[74] He also documents not only the many Germans in Hitler's circle who were very familiar with the Armenian genocide, but notes that Hitler himself had alluded to the Armenian genocide several years earlier. In that 1931 interview, Hitler expatiated on considerations to be borne in mind regarding the future of Germany, stating that one should remind oneself of,'the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages,' and 'remember the extermination of the Armenians'. Hitler also dedicated part 1 of Mein Kampf, further, to a comrade of his early militancy Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter killed while standing next to Hitler during the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. von Scheubner-Richter had been German vice-consul in Erzerum in the period when the massacre was planned and implemented and was intimately acquainted with the events. [75]
^ Paul Johnson in his A History of the Modern World, characteristically blames the invention of genocide on Lenin and communism, in 1917, three years into the Armenian genocide which he ignores completely.[78]
^ How did this European event come to loom so large in American consciousness? A good part of the answer is the fact, not less of a fact because anti-Semites turn it into a grievance, that Jews play an important and influential role in Hollywood, the television industry, and the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing worlds. Anyone who would explain the massive attention the Holocaust has received in these media inrecent years without reference to that fact is being naive or disingenuous. This is not, of course, a matter of any "Jewish conspiracy"Jews in the media do not dance to the tune of "the elders of Zion." . .In large part the movement of the Holocaust from the Jewish to the general American arena resulted from private and spontaneous decisions of Jews who happened to occupy strategic positions in the mass media.’ (Novick, 1999 & pp.207-208) harv error: no target: CITEREFNovick1999pp.207-208 (help)
^'When it comes to how American Jews represent themselves to others, there is no question but that the Holocaust isat the center of that representation. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is the principal symbol and "address" of American Jewry, our "epistle to the gentiles" about what it means to be Jewish.'[79]
^By the end of the 1990s the USHMM's annual budget totalled $50 million of which $30 million came from federal funding. [80]
^'What were, de jure, government initiatives were often, de facto, those of Jewish aides, simultaneously promoting projects in which they believed and helping their employers score points with Jewish constituents.'(Novick 1999, p. 208)
^Out of our memory and understanding of the Holocaust, we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way or fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.In addition to the Jewish people who were engulfed by the Holocaust simply because they were Jews, 5 million other human beings were destroyed. About 3 million Poles, many Hungarians, Gypsies, also need to be remembered. To memorialize the victims of the Holocaust, we must harness the outrage of our own memories to stamp out oppression wherever it exists. (Carter 1979)
^This is not only an egregiously crass expropriation of natural idiom, but extremely provincial in its eurocentrism. Tanimoto Kiyoshi, a Methodist minister who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima perhaps contributed to the wording mō nido to+negative verb) (never again) which is customary in Japanese commemorations of the bombings of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He used it as early as 1950 (もう二度とあんなようなことが起らぬように祈る。 I pray that something like that never happens again). [85]
^'As the Holocaust came to figure ever larger in the American scene, to be invoked in various contexts, the problem repeatedly arose of distinguishing between the (legitimate) "use" and (illegitimate) "abuse" of the Holocaust and its imagery. Finally, what did non-Jews make of all this talk of the Holocaust?.'(Novick 1999, p. 209)
^When not passed over in silence, critical reactions to the book were often frivolous in their trivial nitpicking, dismissing for example Hilberg's appraisel as a sign of his lack of knowledge of Judaism. Dominique Vidal challenges his dating of the revival of holocaust interest to 1967. It began, Vidal asserts, with Eichmann's trial in 1961, which however contradicts most assessments by Novick and others; Finkelstein fails to mention that one of the functions of the trial was to reunify Israelis whose identity was shaken by Mizrachi upheavals. Nothing to do with Finkelstein's theme; Finkelstein's analysis is vitiated by failing to say anything about the 'natural' causes for the early postwar tendency to forget the holocaust. But he does, stating that most of his youthful acquaintances in the United States were simply indifferent, and the problem was to explain why a decade or two later, they suddenly adopted remembrance as a core element of their identity.[90]
^'It is one of only three content areas on which the Arbitration Committee – the highest authority of administrators, elected by the community from among Wikipedia’s most experienced editors – has placed a special set of restrictions on the entire topic, the other two being India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine.'(Grabowski & Klein 2023, p. 39)
Assman, Aleida (2010). "From Collective Violence to a Common Future : Four Models for Dealing With a Traumatic Past". In Guarda, Filomena Viana; Martins, Adriana; da Silva, Helena Gonçalves (eds.). Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 8–23. ISBN978-1-443-82005-9.
Hilberg, Raul. "The Development of Holocaust Research: A Personal Overview". In Bankier, David; Michman, Dan (eds.). Holocaust Historiography in Context:Emergence, Challenges, Polemics & Achievements. Yad Vashem/Berghahn Books. pp. 25–36. ISBN978-9-653-08326-4.
Michman, Dan. "Introduction". In Bankier, David; Michman, Dan (eds.). Holocaust Historiography in Context:Emergence, Challenges, Polemics & Achievements. Yad Vashem/Berghahn Books. pp. 9–21. ISBN978-9-653-08326-4.
Ofer, Dalia (July 1996). "Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust in Palestine and Israel, 1942-53". Journal of Contemporary History. 31 (3): 567–595. JSTOR261021.
Spielvogel, Jackson; Redles, David (2011) [1989]. "Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources". In Marrus, Michael Robert (ed.). The Origins of the Holocaust. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 79–98. ISBN978-3-110-97049-4.
Weitz, Yechiam (Summer 2009). "In the Name of Six Million Accusers: Gideon Hausner as Attorney-General and His Place in the Eichmann Trial". 14 (2). Israel Studies: 26–49. JSTOR30245851. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
You may appeal this sanction using the appeal process. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything above is unclear to you. ~~~~
If I had seen this comment from someone who just barely had ECR, I'd have likely indef blocked them (with the first year being a CT sanction if they were eligible). If there is another UNINOLVED admin who would like to discuss something longer, or refer this to AE to discuss a longer sanction, I am open to both of those, but after a bit of thinking this is what I felt appropriate given all the facts at play here. Barkeep49 (talk) 18:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Please see my comment on Barkeep49’s talk page. The point Nishidani makes, with the same cultural joke as an illustration, was made in a peer-reviewed academic journal of high repute. Unfortunately it seems this did not come up easily on google when quickly searched for. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:43, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In short someone emailed you offwiki to weaponize this totally innocuous edit and see to it I am put behind bars and kept there for 3 weeks, if not indeed permabanned. Well, that spell might enable me to finger where in the hell I buried Eric Berne's classic Games People Play to refresh my memory about this kind of social gamesmanship. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I contacted Barkeep about this for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted another set of eyes to look at it. As I've said before, I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Second, I was at work, soon to leave, had to stop for an oil change, and now I'm about to sit down for enchiladas with my wife, and my father is coming over to join us, so I didn't have time for all of this this evening. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:51, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a pleasant evening. Thanks for your scruple in clarifying this remark by Barkeep. In short, no editor on the page complained, any more than in 2018, when I cited the same joke on my talk page, any reader or admin saw anything 'inflammatory' - had they I would have been immediately reported. That's really bizarre to me, but I'll call it quits if you could do me a simple favour, since I think I'm wasting my time on wikipedia in this kind of atmosphere of by now inveterate nagging over nothing (the nothing being my 'integrity'). At Killing of Nahida and Samar Anton, I promised to provide the page numbers for a source a hard copy of which I only received yesterday, and read last night. At Note 24 re after ‘with the Catholic parish’ the citation with the existing page = should read {{sfn|Sale|Neuhaus|2024|p=406}} and, just below the same ? in the citation should be fixed to ‘engaging in blood libel’ {{sfn|Sale|Neuhaus|2024|pp=406-407}}. These are necessary because an editor asked me to supply them. This is not a request for meatpuppetry, but a matter of courtesy, since Barkeep's original action was done, as he admits, based on insufficient evidence, and no courtesy note to me to ask for the clarification he needed to assuage his, and your, concerns. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You probably don't realize this, but since the issue is about my behaviour judged in terms of a misreading of the meaning of a joke, your reply can be read as a crass example of Schadenfreude, with the same licence used by Barkeep and others in interpreting my edit as a disruptive violation of our civility code. Why? Because you can be heard as saying more or less
(a) it was I who reported you to Barkeep, because I was short on time in RL to handle this myself. (b)you are now in porridge, placed off-limits from your wikipedia community, being under a sanction I started while (c) I'm have a pleasant evening in a nice family setting.
I'm not singling you out. Habitually, reading the talk exchanges on wiki pages for what the subtext intimates, I see what I consider rudeness or crassness regularly, but ignore it, because it wastes serious editing time. It is that incivility that escapes through the nets of what admins think of as documentable incivility.
You see, though that was not your intention, that is how any number of literate readers, were this to occur in a social setting or a novel, might read it for context and tone, as socially inept and offensive. Just as my innocuous illustration was interpreted. Since this has happened several times in the past, - admin unawareness of how language works, leading to sanctions - I have lost faith in my future as a contributor to wikipedia because of eight fatuous complaints in a year one has achieved its end. I read it as the instauration of a wokish Miranda warning to the effect that from now on in, 'anything I write can and may be used against me in arbitration,' if it can somehow lend itself to raising suspicions of a possible infringement of our strict laws on courtesy. So I clearly cannot work here, suspension ended, with this sort of Gordian knot of surveillance hanging over my head, with the scissors in the hands of admins who have, in my view, at times snipped before reading closely and checking with their peers. On the other hand, I don't yield up a natural right certainly when thuggish off-wiki sites have increasingly pressured wikipedia (lately here) to raise the temperature and target editors like myself. Unless I get permabanned, I will retain and assert my right to edit here, if infrequently. but to avoid supplying anyone here with excuses to keep up the harassment I experience, I will exercise that right by no longer exchanging a single word on talk pages when, and if, I do feel inclined to add something. That will stop admins from these embarrassing wastages of everyone's time, since my voice will disappear, as many no doubt want, but my right to continue to influence article content will remain intact. Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have an outsized influence on the topic area, so more administrative participation is better. Or less. That would be another option. Levivich (talk) 18:59, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The only unnecessary and extremely inflammatory comment made here was this remark by Barkeep who directly accused me of antisemitism by saying I was responsible for mentioning a joke that weaponized antisemitism (I see a joke weaponizing antisemtism). That reading borders on the illiterate. You endorse this egregious misprision. This is a failure of the most elementary reading skills. Since you both are highly literate, the only explanation that comes to me is that such a judgment reflects a personal impression over the last several months that there is something antisemitic, hard to pin down, but there, in Nishidani, and when I posted an utterly innocuous statement, confirmation bias kicked in, I'm sure unwittingly, but that is not a rational judgment based on evidence (that I am responsible for spreading antisemitic ideas) that would stand up in any court of opinion. I tried to be courteous in my dialogue with Barkeep but the door was shut in the face of evidence that his judgment was deeply flawed, and you second this closure. I'm not quite surprised. It's been in the air since that foreign lobby persuaded arbcom to allow one of its spokesmen to make a case against me, and, with the four subsequent cases, two by socks, something like this was on the books (the 'no smoke without fire' syndrome). Well, I'm fucked if I am going to continue to volunteer contributions for an organization that has now registered me, via admin fiat, as antisemitic, after 18 years in which this kind of repeated sockpuppet-type trashing of my work was dismissed dozens of times in an appropriate tribunal. Nishidani (talk) 19:26, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ding. Why some admins think they should be handing out sanctions without any complaint or giving the person, with over a decade of contributions to this project, the chance at explaining themselves is something I fail to understand. I actually think Barkeep is generally a great admin so I’m a bit baffled at this sequence tbh. Especially when the basis for the sanction was nearly instantaneously proven false. nableezy - 19:37, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It goes without saying that both are fine admins, dedicated and conscientious. That is why this profound misreading is disturbing. I suspect that the burden, which I would never have the guts to take on, of having to read vast reams of often inane prose in complaints or on talk pages, dulls the edges of concentration at times. I know that happens because that is what has always worried me about having to read so much uninformed argufying on IP talk pages, that the resolute attention in the face of tedious repetitiveness risks desensitizing me, so that the payback of actually getting articles written in full scholarly attire looks like a bad investment.Nishidani (talk) 19:44, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Onceinawhile SFR is active in this topic area not because they are WP:INVOLVED in a Wikipedia sense of the word but because they are an administrator attempting to uphold behavioral expectations. So they reached out to me in an administrator to administrator capacity, despite the fact that we often disagree on the right outcome in our discussions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard (I normally am for milder or even no sanction than what SFR supports). And that noticeboard was, until this incident, where I had limited my activity in this topic area. This includes times where SFR has reached out about specific incidents and I've declined to take action. Hopefully that better explains the context in which SFR contacted me. Barkeep49 (talk) 19:45, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the ubiquity of insult and calumny in the everyday vocabulary of social media plays a not insignificant part in the foul-mouthed verbal assaults described by Jewish MPs in the recent Commons debate. This said, most Jews do understand the risk of hypersensitivity. There is the story about Goldbloom, doing well in the rag trade in Stepney, who has to make a dash for Euston to sort out a problem with his supplier in Glasgow. As the night sleeper pulls out, he realises he has left his overnight bag behind. Luckily the man occupying the other berth in the sleeper compartment has a spare pair of pyjamas, which he lends Goldbloom, and tells Goldbloom he can use his razor in the morning. But when Goldbloom asks if he can also borrow his toothbrush, he politely declines. The next evening, when he returns from Glasgow, Goldbloom’s wife asks him how the journey went. ‘Not bad,’ says Goldbloom, ‘but did I meet an anti-Semite!’
I quoted this, prefaced by the words:'The point was put with great lucidity by Sir Stephen Sedley in the brilliant essay I cite just above this.' and discussed it, on my talk page, when dealing with a query about a wikipedia editor whose behaviour was, in my view, antisemitic 6 years ago. Not a peep or boo from anyone. Nothing problematic. How times have changed. I don't mind the fact that Sir Stephen can retell an anecdote which gets both a laugh from his readers while inculcating a deep lesson, but I on wikipedia am sanctioned if I paraphrase it to the same purpose. What is a moral reminder by a great jurist is 'inflammatory language' for a wiki peon. I don't mind the offensiveness of this insult to my moral probity in these matters. I'm used to it. But how the trigger-finger now itches to shoot anyone who dares tread on this ground whose zones of what is discursively permissible are narrowed day by day, now even on wikipedia even with a light joke. My block log is thus crammed with just one more example of being punished because an admin didn’t read up, or ask around, and no doubt the usual reports asking for another sanction on the usual spurious grounds will have further 'evidence' to lead me to Galgenweg. Well, as the previous section says, sumud. Nishidani (talk) 19:32, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. A known Jewish jurist warning Jewish MPs to not be hypersensitive is a rather different context than you using it to score try to convince someone you are correct on a Wikipedia talk page. This is indeed how something which can be thought provoking in one context is unconstructive or unnecessarily inflammatory language in another context. And good news - I intentionally did not add to your block log choosing instead a rather short topic ban. Barkeep49 (talk) 20:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What you are saying is that a Jew can tell a self-critical Jewish joke to another Jew. If a non-Jew repeats that joke (to a Jew or not), they are being inflammatory (and many would say 'antisemitic'). In other words, no non-Jew may intrude on an infra-Jewish conversation without being inflammatory. The world is, admittedly, a lunatic asylum run according to Rafferty's rules, unlike the physical universe, but I try to maintain my sanity by trusting in logical analysis and the moral parity of all humna beings. You are in your rights to disagree, but your statement is not underwritten by any awareness of the principles of coherence. I say that without enmity.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Reading Gershon Legman’s mammoth works on jokes in the late 1970s taught me an important lesson: listening to comedians, or diving into the vast lore of jokes could tell you as much, perhaps even more, than philosophy or logic about the human world, not to speak of the hilarious way it is recounted in top-shelf newspapers. Bassem Youssef blew up Piers Morgan’s haranguing insistence on Hamas’s putative use of human shields by interrupting the latter’s usual tactic of hammering interruptions with a simple comical analogy:’I know all about them! I’m always trying to murder my wife (she is of Palestinian descent) but she keeps using our children as human shields’. End of argument.
Wikipedia is increasingly, administratively, a tired humourless place, shorn of all of the delicacies of style like irony, where passionate ignorance gets a podium and the rules require that one take everything seriously. And if you don’t, and tell a joke, the surveillance of wokist minds will haul you over the coals for being ‘inflammatory’ even if they themselves don’t believe in anything other than the instrumental ('weaponised') opportunism presented by a joke to lay that kind of fatuous insinuation. Who gives a fuck? I think I’ll drop Georges Dumézil for bedtime reading and dip back into Legman’s magisterial anthology of limericks:) And now to bed. I don't think anyone in the Western world can feel entitled to any sentiment like unfairness or grievance - whatever occurs in the bitching banter of midget pissing matches we call the 'mainstream' reportage that we discuss to edit anything, - and that is all the more true of my response here,enjoying rather the farce in comical misreadings like the above. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 23:04, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(Talk page watcher) A bad call, administratively, especially because of doubling down on the block despite getting further information about the Jewish history of the mentioned folklore. Perplexing decisions resulting in an outcome without justifications that hold up under scrutiny. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 01:29, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry about this block. I try and avoid anything like humor myself on Wikipedia as it simply doesn't travel well. I keep whatever I say straightforward and avoid saying anything that requires a modicum of thought, there's no point as it will simply cause trouble and not accomplish anything. Thank you for pointing out that problem with the Wikimedia Foundation trying to be woke and accomplish social goals. I fully agree with trying to get more women to edit - the purpose though is to help create create a free, reliable encyclopedia. NadVolum (talk) 15:50, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When I told an Israeli scholar that joke after my suspension he laughed, never having heard it, and sent this link to another. Jokes are currency and should be repaid. They are one of the primary indexes of the self-perceptive temper of peoples and the quality of their civilization (which as regards the West began its death agony with the Holocaust, and, with the cormorant war on the Gaza fishbowl, banged the last nail into its coffin.). Some Auschwitz survivors remembered that they had to make jokes in order to survive and save themselves from lethal depression.
As early as 1927 the Soviet Union passed a law (Article 58) forbidding on pain of imprisonment the telling of anti-régime jokes and one calculation put the number of Soviet citizens who ended up in gaol for telling them at 200,000. The best Russian comment on this farce was the joke that has a judge walking out of court, bent up laughing. When asked why, he gasped that he’d just dispatched someone to the gulag for ten years for telling the best joke he’d ever heard, which, of course, he couldn’t repeat for fear of incriminating himself. Nazi Germany wasn’t slow to imitate the Soviet measure. One of the first laws passed in Nazi Germany in 1934 was the Heimtückegesetz, which outlawed as treasonable acts any jokes about Nazis. One of the reasons undoubtedly lies in what Henri Bergson detected when, in his classic Le Rire, he wrote:
(On y verrait) le rire accomplir régulièrement une des ses fonctions principales, qui est de rappeler à la pleine conscience d'eux-mêmes les amours-propres distraits et d'obtenir ainsi la plus grande sociabilité possibles des caractères (. .laughter regularly accomplishing one of its principal functions, namely, to summon the distracted expression of self-esteem back to a full awareness of itself and thereby obtain the greatest possible sociability of characters). Henri Bergson, Le rire:Essai sur la signification du comique, (1900) Presses Universitaires de France 1975 p.133.
As wiki wokifies itself, making an advanced degree in the niceties of political correctness, rather than familiarity with scholarship, the essential qualification for writing articles, I hope the picayune historic record of this nook in the selva oscura of the world will include me as the first, I believe, to fall victim to administrative humourlessness for an innocuously instructive on-topic joke. As for the rest, administrative failings in correctly construing simple English sentences are nonetheless nothing new, as my block log’s rapid overturnings of hasty suspensions show.Nishidani (talk) 14:12, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Once was maybe a misspeak in the moment so I disregarded it, but this is twice now that you've characterized the situation as wokist or wokifies. I thought you better than being one to play into right-wing authoritarian 'anti-woke' discourse but now I'm not as sure. This was a bad administrative call, but it wasn't a bad call because it was a 'woke' call. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:40, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Norman Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, Sublation Press 2023. When an authoritative scholar voices views I had already arrived at independently (I wrote extensively on the dangers in identity politics before it became a fashionable topic), I defer to their conclusions, preferring to get sceptics to read that book or article rather than argue with me briefly on a wiki page. Books have depth not allowed here, also per TLDR. which marks the default attention span customary on wiki Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While Finkelstein has published quality work on topics like memory studies, antisemitism, and the genocide in Palestine, I think it's telling that unlike those works, I'll Burn That Bridge was not published with a university press, academic journal, major national publisher, etc. I know some editors think that anything a professor writes or utters anywhere is equally golden, but I think that publishers and venues matter. I consider "Cancel Culture and Other Myths", published in established academic journal The Yale Review and written by Kathryn Lofton—herself hardly a non-entity in academia as former Yale dean and current holder of an endowed professorship—instructive on the topic. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 21:35, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For 2 thousand years hardly any of the books constituting the 'great tradition' of Western thought were published by a university Press. One of the greatest historical works in that discipline, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews was rejected by 3 university presses, included Princeton, because his research of agonizing moments of history woke anxieties, ante litteram. Personal anecdotes by friends still in academe underscore how careful teachers must be in speaking in classes on any topic about which some special constituency has ideas of being an historic victim of discrimination, just in case someone in the class may share them. If they do not learn to tiptoe around the minefield of these diverse sensitivities, they risk being reported to the deans, and having their careers damaged. And I am speaking of personal knowledge of people on the left. It's more or less what is happening on wiki with ARBPIA5Nishidani (talk) 22:48, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For 2 thousand years hardly any of the books constituting the 'great tradition' of Western thought were published by a university Press: Yeah, and we still don't cite Augustine's The City of God on Wikipedia pages about human history.In the meantime, I've been reading thereviews, and frankly I don't have money to spare on buying transphobic, anti-Black trash written by a red fascist annoyed that his students care about trans rights and learn about racial capitalism. You can keep your Finkelstein fanboying. If something goes wrong in ARBPIA, it's going to be because committee members think it's unnecessary to read up on the topic at issue beyond what gets filtered to them by osmosis through media mired in Islamophobic neo-imperialism. It's not going to be because they're 'woke' and voted for Obama in the primaries instead of Sanders. Verso didn't reject I'll Burn That Bridge because it was too radical. They rejected it because it was sloppy and reactionary.That you had the gall to recommend this book as if it has any real wisdom—that's the funniest thing on this page, or it would be if it weren't so pathetic and sad. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 23:04, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
'I feel a real and solid pleasure when anybody points out a fallacy in any of my views, because I care much less about my opinions than about their being true.'Bertrand Russell, as cited admiringly in Finkelstein's book.
This you fail to do, unfortunately for this conversation, which ends here. That epitaph, to you, since I also cite it, is sheer gall, by a reactionary thinker, devoid of wisdom. Some of us live by that credo, which ultimately goes back to Plato and Aristotle, for both of whom personal affections should never compromise our loyalty to the pursuit of truth. There was of course, an implicit danger in that notion (amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas in a totalitarian state or family could provide a warrant for murder, if the 'truth' is confused with an authoritarian parent's right to domineer or with a party line which runs roughshod over people by advocating the betrayal of one's family or friends), a danger corrected by Russell. In his reformulation, in all of us, even the most gifted, there is a tendency for our self-esteem to get the better of realities and concepts that deflate and challenge it. But, of course, this is just my gall, livid and splenetic, and you are not obliged to torment yourself by reading this page where consolation for what one ardently believes is not my concern. Fare thee well.Nishidani (talk) 02:30, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If my calendarizing is right, ur free to speak once more of matters that shall not be spoken of. Apropos of nothing I look forward to your participating in the upcoming ARC, no excuses. It's planned for December, after that you can put your feet up:) Selfstudier (talk) 19:28, 16 November 2024 (UTC)
been there, done that. Nothing I say, or for that matter in my view what the indicted write in their defence will alter substantially the outcome, substantial damage to regular, competent editors with a balancing ban for one or two others. The probable verdict is already present in the selection of names - the majority of those listed as under suspicion are commonly if ludicrously identified with a 'pro-Palestinian' profile. That is what I meant by 'wokist' above. And, indeed, I take the weird otherwise inexplicable sanction I received as a foretaste of what's to come, since it must reflect some irrationally cautious protective atmosphere surrounding anything deemed 'Jewish' (as opposed to Palestinian- there's no jumpiness about that term). In the IP conflict, Israel, reflecting the mainstream media bias, is, qua an ostensibly 'Jewish' state, increasingly considered ‘marginalized’ and therefore requiring the same special protections and sensitivities accorded other marginalized groups on wikipedia. This consideration does not apply to the other half of the equation, the Palestinian people, who are suffering extreme marginalization if not genocide at the hands of that state. Since 2019 this undercurrent has been slowly creeping into Wikipedia and, I expect, has essentially since 7 October, won the ‘argument’, thanks also to the, apparently, massive disruption of an organized sock farm, whose irruptions were mostly reverted by regulars, while the 'others' stood silently by. Good luck.Nishidani (talk) 21:54, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I had the good fortune in September while in Paris, to sight and buy a copy of Foucault’s thitherto unpublished lectures on Nietzsche, which were finally edited and published in August. But perhaps I should rather reread his Discipline and Punish which seems more actual. I was reminded of this this morning when low and behold I was pinged to note the 8th report against me over the last year or so, and this time the in-your-face harassment hinges on an awesome innumeracy.
I’m always amazed at the lengths some types of editor will go to to rake up, or extort readings from, diffs in one’s record to exact punitive measures from contributors whose commitment to wikipedia they evidently dislike.Apparently there are some who work under a different calendrical system than the one I, and perhaps yourself, were raised to master by rotework in bubs. I.e.,
Thirty days has September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February at twenty-eight,
But leap year, coming once in four,
February then has one day more.
Some years later, I realized that it had two anomalies: (a) has should be ‘have’ since the subject is plural, and (b) the rhyme scheme is defective because ‘thirty one’ and ‘twenty-eight’ do not rhyme with each other, as the format would lead one to expect. Something like
Indeed the last diff is particularly comical. I paraphrased a joke used by Sir Stephen Sedley, a distinguished EEC jurist sharing with a non-Jewish readership (The London Review of Books) a joke Jews tell among themselves to warn against the excesses of accusing indiscriminately critics of Israel as, ipso facto, antisemites. No one raised an eyebrow when I quoted this on my talkpage in 2019. By 2024, SFR thought it 'inflammatory' and was backed up by Barkeep, who said, unintelligibly, that my use of it 'weaponised antisemitism' when my use of it underscored how Jews themselves have jokes which caution the community not to weaponise antisemitism!!! And what is the result? an absurdly confused misreading of the evidence and flawed judgment and sanction is now part of the 'proof' I have a battleground mentality. That's called a disinformation feedback loop, and it is so thoroughly ingrained in the system that woe behold anyone dragged into its indefatigably superficial toils. I'll trust the judgment of admins to exercise their functions as serene IP supervisors when they can, as Slim Virgin did, write or rewrite from top to bottom a conflicted or difficult IP topic article or two, displaying mastery of the literature and respect for NPOV balancing between the two parties, an achievement all recognized, even while recognizing imperfections remained. Few of those who kibitz but refuse to help out and prefer to sit in judgment on the sidelines have the faintest idea of how conceptually, methodologically and ethically demanding a serious commitment to that area is, and to see so many good editors hauled over the coals for putative abuses or occasional slips is sad, given the impunity of the endless socks that infest the area with utter cynicism and contempt for encyclopedic aims Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Declined. I’m retired and stirring from the grave would aggravate rheumatic risks. I see no evidence there, unless for what looks like settling an old score/sore dating back to 19th of August 2023 where you appear to have been upset when I used the adjective ‘extraordinary’ to characterize an edit you made to Zionism, race and genetics (which I rewrote from top to bottom), an edit suggesting that 19th century science ‘provided evidence’ for the existence of races. It did no such thing, and it struck me as extraordinary for someone with a scientific background to suggest, by careless language (noting careless language has proved to be the bane of my former wikilife . It really upsets people), that science (or the pseudo-science of that day) had anything resembling evidence for its contention that ‘races’ (the ideological virus of modern history) existed. If any admin wants to make an informed judgment on the weird insinuations purported to emerge in those diffs, they’d better read the five archived discussions of that page beforehand, where they will find almost nothing from me but patience, urbanity and scholarship used to address other editors few if any of whom appear to have familiarized themselves with many if indeed any of the 103 or so academic sources I and others brought to bear to substantiate the article. Nishidani (talk) 23:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Since I believe the recent sanction was injurious to my bona fides here, however, and since in that request of yours to drag me into a deliberation which I think is conceptually flawed from the outset, further insinuations were made I am disruptive, I will drop a few notes in response to your 'evidence' because I like to think that, at least here, the record of my activities here should be complete. This interests no one but myself of course, so I don't desire any feedback. It may take some time since I am engaged privately in a lengthy argument over Dante's cosmology and the Timaeus, which consumes most of my leisure reading.Nishidani (talk) 13:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Being dragged repeatedly to AE can be evidence for every imaginable conjecture or nothing. Diffs like that look impressive, (that nothing basically happened only feeds into glancing eyes the suspicion that Nishidani must be one of the so-called Untouchables) in terms of the 'no-smoke-without-fire' effect in rumour-momgering, so I will open each up to dissect who said what of whom, in what context, and what the results were. Nishidani (talk) 13:39, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
'newly added parties have adequate time to engage in the case.'
I have no adequate time to engage with what is going on over there, which, in any case, is so humongously messy in its conceptual sprawl that to unpack the conflicting premises would take weeks, something which, given the austere word limits, is formally impossible anyway. Perhaps they have the liberty to try and drag me by the virtual short and curlies out of a contented retirement, but my gut feeling is that initiatives of this kind smack of being a kind of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel which bears some analogy to things that go wrong on wikipedia. Now, kindly leave the page to my annotations, which have no interest to anyone at this point but myself.Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
'In the past two years, Nishidani has been the named subject of 5 AE cases': [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], although the last one was initiated by sockpuppets.
To underline the recurrency of my obnoxious behaviour as recognized at AE two precedents were cited: the second (Sandstein 2019) I deal with elsewhere down the page. The first goes back to a single, bizarre report for 2017
The report arose from my adding to the List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2017 a datum about 4 Israelis throwing a stun grenade into an apartment where two Palestinian women, a mother and her daughter, lived ( apparently to drive them out of a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood). The mayor of Petah Tikva called it an example of racist violence. It was immediately reverted on the grounds that the incident was ‘a neighbor dispute over music and criminals’. I thought (mistakenly it turned out) that I was entitled to 1 revert, especially given the bizarre contrafactual edit-summary made by the reverter. This restoration was expunged by a second editor saying the incident was not dissimilar to Palestinian stone-throwing (?!!).
Administrators all agreed that the RS confirmed this violent incident was clearly related to the I/P conflict (i.e. my addition was justified). The technicality that in my one revert I’d failed to get consensus meant I’d apparently infringed an Arbpia ruling. Getting consensus for inclusion of even obvious facts was technically impossible at that time, since from 2016 there had been a concerted ‘pro-Israeli’ majority relentlessly reverted a great number of well-sourced contributions I had made to IP pages on the most spurious or picayune of reasonings. But the technicality stands and, in those terms, I was justly blocked for 24 hours. The long-term result was (a) that nothing can be reverted if one editor challenges an addition, save by talk page consensus (a rule consistently breached since then with impunity) and (b) that this perfectly valid datum is missing from that page to this date. The case can hardly be cited mechanically as evidence for my putatively consistent bad behaviour. I had simply misunderstood the nicety of a rule.If anything it constitutes strong evidence of how rules are abused tactically both to erase legitimate data from IP articles, and to manoeuver content editors into errors that can feed AE reports and get them removed. Nishidani (talk) 14:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
caricatur(ing) my good-faith comment as some kind of laughable conspiracy theory a la the Protocols of Zion makes me uninterested in taking such a reply seriously.
(1) On the 11 August Drsmoo filed a report against me for 'bludgeoning and hostility . . . (and) making personal attacks, assuming bad faith, and casting aspersions on the talk page of Zionism, race, and genetics'.
Drsmoo cited for my ostensible bludgeoning mentality a 2019 case where Sandstein took no action against Icewhiz, reported by Nableezy, while blocking me for a week for a ‘battleground’ use of Wikipedia: I'd characterized Icewhiz as someone with extremist views. Sandstein judged that I’d given no evidence (the evidence I gave was that Icewhiz characterized ) several famous left-centrist Zionist scholars in Israel (Avishai Margalit, David Dean Shulman, Baruch Kimmerling, Zeev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana) as people militating on ‘the fringes of the Israeli radical left’, whereas, in his view, Bezalel Smotrich and Rehavam Ze'evi, figures on the radical right, were simply on the generic right side of the political spectrum and putative opponents of the occupation (radically false).
Anyone who actually knew the records of all the named figures would grasp that my inference from that evidence was more than reasonable, not an 'aspersion'. But, true, it was an inference, and Icewhiz was only permabanned six months later, surviving as a prolific sockmaster, even after his Eostrix admin candidate puppet was detected. Technically Sandstein’s sanction was understandable – reasonable inferences are not evidence, even if well-founded. But it was certainly not a battleground aspersion to note that IW’s skewering of those prominent Israeli intellectuals as fringe radical leftists in contrast to the putative moderation of far-right settlers was an ‘extreme’ distortion of the know facts about their respective profiles. Citing a prior case result as a diff, as usual, can be question-begging, since the later record arguably vindicated my inference. Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As to the substance, Drsmoo's relevant diffs consisted of my dismissing as 'rubbish' an assertion he made that the Zionism, race and genetics article was stating
(a)in wiki voice that modern genetic studies on Jews are both “Zionist” and “race science”
It was rubbish because it was tailored out of whole cloth because there is simple no textual evidence for any such insinuation, and to assert it suggests one didn't even read the article. The article stated in wikivoice paraphrase what scores of academic studies argued, that an early Zionist concern for 'race' left traces in post war genetics research, primarily in Israel, and a certain methodological divergence between this and broad genetic studies, a trace closely studied and criticized by Israeli scholarship itself. Etc.
Tryptofish added to Drsmoo’s list of what he deemed disruptive or aspersive remarks. I was indeed exasperated by that talk page mess. I had noted on July 24 that some editors to the page were getting it bogged down by expressing their opinions or impressions of the article as then written, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the analysis of sources. fiveby reasonably raised an issue of one source interpretation, and I responded addressing the sources mentioned. Having clarified them, I then concluded: ‘What’s the problem?’ Suddenly Tryptofish stepped back in. He said my source analysis was very helpful but his issue was my language.
I think what you quoted there is very helpful in addressing the concern that I had. (What's the problem? I'd say that there is a problem in your speaking to me in that tone.)’
That in my view was typical of the distracting drift on that page. One analysed sources collaboratively, and out of the blue an interjection would pop up expressive of some personal grievance. This sort of hypersensitive personalization, interrupting textual analysis one admits is illuminating by saying one is offended by some ‘tone’, to the point that an innocuous ‘what’s the problem’ is pointed out as injurious, this kind of derailing of work by petty or sniffish remarks, is incomprehensible to me. I was forced to waste time explaining that misapprehension on his part. How did Tryptofish read this? He construed my explanation as really saying that Nishidani believes that in these exchanges 'It's everyone else's fault, not (mine).' That is the extraordinary way (an AGF abuse of course) he glossed my attempt to assuage his strange sense of personal affront. With that kind susceptibility to see a plea for commonsense as an example of demeaning hostility, editing becomes impossible: the sources are lost from sight.
The result was a logged warning for both the plaintiff, Drsmoo, and myself, by Tamzin for battleground conduct on 28 August. Fair enough.
You are receiving this message because you are on the update list for Palestine-Israel articles 5. The drafters note that the scope of the case was somewhat unclear, and clarify that the scope is The interaction of named parties in the WP:PIA topic area and examination of the WP:AE process that led to tworeferrals to WP:ARCA. Because this was unclear, two changes are being made:
First, the Committee will accept submissions for new parties for the next three days, until 23:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC). Anyone who wishes to suggest a party to the case may do so by creating a new section on the evidence talk page, providing a reason with WP:DIFFS as to why the user should be added, and notifying the user. After the three-day period ends, no further submission of parties will be considered except in exceptional circumstances. Because the Committee only hears disputes that have failed to be resolved by the usual means, proposed parties should have been recently taken to AE/AN/ANI, and either not sanctioned, or incompletely sanctioned. If a proposed party has not been taken to AE/AN/ANI, evidence is needed as to why such an attempt would have been ineffective.
I appreciate the courtesy but decline to participate. Still, on reflection, I owe this page a fuller explanation to explain why, and will set out several reasons why, even as a retired wikipedian, re-engaging would be pointless and a waste of everyone's time. A second point is that I do not wish whatever material I may have to cite here furnish matter to be re-cycled against editors there.
First Reflection
I have been very diffident about arbcom since, in my permaban of 2009, analysed here, the case for my putative ongoing ‘incivility, personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith’ included this, which got my account immediately blocked by Jehochman. Several editors within hours complained and his sanction was almost immediately reverted by Bishonen because he had misread the point of my edit. Note that in Jehochman’s defense I immediately added that while wrong, Jehochman’s mistake was understandable.
One month later, Arbcom, completely ignoring or totally unaware of the fact that Jehochman and Bishonen had annulled the suspension, recognizing it had nothing to do with a personal attack, cited it as core proof of my incivility. It permabanned 5 ‘pro-Palestinian editors’ and 2 ‘pro-Israeli editors’ (not 3: every editor probably knew, as I did, NoCal and User:Canadian Monkey were one and the same person (the stylistic thumbprints and tagteaming were a dead giveaway but at that time I certainly doubted that was sufficient to report the sock), still highly active under other names on wikipedia. My mere 8 reverts over 45 days of the politically explosive ‘Judea and Samaria’ for the default term in international literature ‘West Bank’ consisted of desultory but reasoned restorations of proper text (in terms of thick RS evidence) not some mindlessly mechanical and partisan ‘edit-warring’. Indeed I wrote an extended scholarly article on the whole issue of that naming, which still remains at the top of this talk page. Of course, arbitrators probably, and understandably, did not read it. TLDR, and perhaps to many, looking like a personal divagation, mere 'opinion', irrelevant to evidence, rather than a comprehensive academically orientated background paper to Arbcom's deliberations.
Within months, the overwhelming evidence for this led to an obvious consensus that ‘West Bank’ was the default neutral term for Wikipedia. Had arbitrators any knowledge of the state of the considerable literature on that consensus, they probably would not have taken those rare reverts as indicative of edit-warring. But they are formally under no obligation to read up on the topic and consider that such things are just 'content disputes'). The result was that the I/P area was 'gutted' of most of its regular 'pro-Palestinian' (ugh) editors, with only very minor damage to the editors whose POV invariably favoured a 'pro-Israeli' (ugh) POV. Not malice, just sheer disattention.
My diffidence is, furthermore, based on principles of method.
(a)an admin cannot be expected to be familiar with the topic literature (immense in the I/P area);
(b) no diff elicited in ‘evidence’ can be properly evaluated unless the original thread (often long) in which it is embedded, is read closely. If that is not done exhaustively, the likelihood of small but persistent misreadings of what is apparently going wrong increases exponentially;
(c) the most common forms of abuse are not verbal incivility but an obstinate refusal by editwarring parties to read the sources while dilating at length on their views about the article, and comments made by others about their equally source-insouciant impressions (WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT).
(e) if an editor fully fluent in the high quality RS literature, (which editors have imposed as an I/P area article sine qua non, thank god), complies with the obligation at WP:Consensus to negotiate in these endemic stonewalling threads by replying to the manifold of vagrant assertions at length, that gets them nowhere except risking a sanction as someone who spiflicates
(f) If you show and state that a persistently objecting editor doesn’t appear to have read the sources, that will be cited as an WP:NPA attack, something which encourages the practice to continue with impunity. The result is that the way we are obliged to achieve consensus, under these conditions, resolves nothing, but lends itself to AE reports of the serious editors’ incivility per occasional outbursts of frustration. An Arbcom5 review, covering several hundred diffs at a minimum, cannot afford the time to read all of the pages where the implicating diffs are embedded. So everything is reduced to ostensible ‘conduct issues’ in the words contributors used. And that MissManners approach totally disregards what we are supposed to be here for, i.e., not to pass the time opining on an interesting social medium, but to muster the finest available sources in such a way that the global public can trust the high quality of its encyclopedic articles.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Second Reflection
Mention has been made that Sandstein banned me from appearing at AE. That has been in effect since June 2019. I may only appear there if I am reported, i.e. to defend myself, but otherwise no. The implication there is that I abused that arbitration process. Since that right is universal in Wikipedia, it looks like a very black mark, indicative of some horrendous behavioural trait. It was odd, however. To my memory (I will stand corrected), from the very outset of my wikiwork here I had undertaken to never resort to arbitration by reporting another editor as a means of settling differences. No matter how incomprehensibly stressful a talk page might be, differences must be thrashed out by careful argument on the talk page. I thought I must allow myself no margin for weaponizing AE etc to get at my interlocutors (though I fully understand that this system is indispensable otherwise). This, even though many of them were to relentlessly pursue me there. I was faithful to that decision from 2006 to the time Sandstein banned me in 2019 save for one exception. I reportedGalassi in 2016, only because Sandstein himself suggested I do so after warning Galassi that he was breaking his topic ban at Khazars by challenging me and my edits at that page, which I had managed to retrieve from a messy slough of conflicting POV clashes to bring it to its present, close to FA state.
In short, though often quoted at face value against me, there was no need for Sandstein to deny me the right to make reports to AE because on principle I had denied myself recourse to that instrument before that decision and afterwards. I think what happened is that Sandstein’s way of phrasing his decision created an ambiguity. He did not want me to participate, as a commentator on reports against other editors made by third parties in the IP area, which, from his strictly decontextualizing legalistic perspective (i.e., no interpretations please, only diff data, to be measured strictly against the rule book), quite understandable. But it cancelled in theory, inadvertently, a natural right all other wikipedians have to exercise. The anomaly persists. Any editor or sock can, as they have done repeatedly for 16 years, make reports against me, but I, uniquely, cannot exercise that right in their regard. That, and my own refusal from the outset to use that forum, has given potential harassers a very strong advantage, particularly over the last five years. I'm not troubled by that unique ruling against me. Together with a probable doubling of a permaban, I might even feel somewhat tickled that my work here has been skewered as so 'toxic' (a 'net negative' as one admin insists) that otherwise unexampled measures must be taken against me to bring serenity back to this place, a kind of backhanded honour:) Nishidani (talk) 15:01, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Third Reflection
When the ARCA discussion opened, I noted, while objecting to be sucked into it, that 10 contributors drew dire pictures of utter chaos in the IP area, all of which struck me (impression) as uniformly ill-informed and almost all blaming this putative abusive morass on a small core of highly experienced ‘regular editors’.I’ve been reading that invariable impression by people who rarely if ever engage in editing there, for 15 years. It is one of wikipedia’s clichés. But, reading between the lines, the intimation was that the IP area had been hijacked by ‘pro-Palestinian’ POV pushers. FOARPwrote of these putative POVwarriors as being editors ‘seeking to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS.’
Like all acronymic links, this has its uses, but often begs the question. It suggests that the ‘pro-Palestinian’ editors are abusing Wikipedia, by trying to twist the known facts in order to secure justice for Palestinians, in civil POV-pushing. If one concedes there might have been a 'great wrong' (i.e. since 1948 at least 3 million Palestinians have lost their land, homes and livelihoods, with 55,000 homes bulldozed in the West Bank alone, as a byblow of the establishment and development of Israel as a homeland for the diaspora), that ‘wrong’ cannot be righted. I have consistently asserted this, advising potential editors not to work in the I/P area if they have succumbed to the naïve notion that such contributions can change the outcome.
Yet, history is not, contrary to Hermann Göring ’s view, written by the judges among the victors. It is written retrospectively by the descendants of both victors and vanquished. There is a remarkable overlap between Israeli/diaspora and ‘pro-Palestinian’ approaches in the scholarship on this history, reflecting the greater detachment of retrospective learning. A large number of pages where key issues of summary judgement and phrasing are contested reflect the contentions between the abbreviated generalizations of contemporary mainstream media overviews and that shared body of historical research, which lives in a far more complex universe.
The associated implication, again, that the putative 'pro-Palestinian' 'regulars' (a bad word whose military connotations seem to have slipped past the attention of too many here, vie to wrest control of the narrative, never collaborate, and in editing do so with such violence that they deter new editors, and discomfort 'pro-Israeli' colleagues, is undermined by the fact that whenever a promising new editor, espousing a strong pro-Zionist view, shows care over RS, erudition and a commitment to rational talk page dialogue but still gets into hot water, they have been consistently defended by their ostensible ‘pro-Palestinian’ ‘adversaries’. Suffice it to glance through the AE records of cases involving Arminden (here),Monochrome Monitorhere, Bolterhere, or what happened at AE in the frequent cases against Davidbena but his importance to the project, given his erudition, has been defended by his so-called POV adversaries to mitigate the severity of sanctions. Nableezy indeed took over the role of mentorship The problem amongthe slandered regular 'core' has never been what POV an editor may entertain, but the potentials for improving the quality of the encyclopedia. I myself even had an informal agreement with Irondome, who mentored ‘pro-Israeli’ editors aspiring to work in the IP area, to help him out to that end. All this is lost from view in simplistic snippety diff histories, as is the fact that reciprocal gestures of this kind seem unexampled among editors identified with the other POV, with the outstanding exception of Irondome, who stepped in to defend me at just one more frivolous AE report in 2016 –the year I was so repeatedly reverted over numerous pages by several mostly tagteaming editors that I was close to throwing in the towel. Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fourth Reflection
Tryptofish insisted I be listed at ARBPIA5 as a problematic editor, and this proposal was accepted. There is a long story behind this which goes back to strong differences of opinion that emerged between us when I rewrote the article Zionism, race and genetics that had been put up, when a stub, for immediate deletion.
People upset at the article dealt almost exclusively with a phrase or two in the lead, or the title. Almost all objecting editors showed themselves wholly indifferent to the extensive scholarship underpinning that article. Andrevan and Tryptofish in particular vigorously argued that genetics and race should be removed from the title (which I didn’t invent), and were successful, following standard procedures, and now we have ‘Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism.’ It was renamed but the title remains a glaring misnomer: that article has nothing to do with the very broad concept of ‘racial conceptions of Jewish identity’ : it is narrowly focused on the scholarly documentation of how early Zionist ideas about race later inflected quite a bit of Israeli research on Jewish origins, a subject intensively analysed over the last two decades by Israeli scholars. The fact that half of the article is about traces of the earlier thinking about a 'Jewish race' in Israeli genetic studies has been buried from sight by its elision from the original title. Between the lines, I think one editor at least, sincerely believed that the scientific discipline nof genetics was being unfairly 'tainted' by the original title, however strong the academic evidence for this might have been.
In that discussion for the proposed name change discussion the breakdown of the main editors’ comments is
Andrevan 59 comments
Tryptofish 45
Nishidani 27
The same two editors, each took me to AE subsequently, and now participate in the evidence section at ARBPIA5, where I was not listed. Tryptofish in particular insisted I be included. His argument is that I appear to suggest that their views coincided throughout an extenuating thread of sheer argufying in which there is little evidence of their displaying any familiarity with the topic’s literature. Much of this irrationality (my view) appears to be linked to a common perception that I am pushing an ‘anti-Israel’ POV ‘agenda’.
That diff shows no such thing. It reveals on my talk page an acute and troubled sense, shared with an Israeli and based on scholarship, that Israel’s systemic political choices, in the name of Jews, half of whom live by choice in a diaspora, will exacerbate common perceptions that Israel and Jewry are synonyms, and what is done by the former will be blamed on the latter, and feed anti-Semitism. All these careful discriminations are lost when editors persist in thinking that criticism of actions taken by an occupying power of territory outside Israel against a people militarily occupied for 57 years, are read as delegitimizing Israel proper. This blurring of precise conceptual distinctions is inscribed in the politics of language vigorously promoted in attempts to get the (notoriously unworkable) Working definition of antisemitism translated into many legal systems, so that work in various media, Wikipedia included, to document human rights abuses, can be spun as intrinsically anti-Semitic, if Israel is mentioned. In the IP area, Israel is not the focus, but Israel's occupying policies in the Palestinian territories. There are two subjects - an occupying power acting outside of its recognized borders and an occupied people both of whose rationales must be represented with equal weight per NPOV. It is an uncomfortable topic, but must be covered whatever the intense, intimidating pressures may be, also here, to 'normalise' this as a struggle by a democracy against terrorism, or as a result of resistance to the unilateral right of one people to self-determination, whatever the expense may be to the rights to self-determination of people in the other half of the equation may be.
He had evidently forgotten that he originally voted for deletion of the article on the grounds it violatedWP:Synth (aside from the absurd claim that it ‘promoted antisemitic pseudoscholarship’ which, when asked for diffs, he couldn’t corroborate.
Evidence makes a huge issue of POV inconsistency. There is merit in examining this, but, over a manifold of pages across years, it is not hard for even the most self-aware editor to slip up. POV-pushing is said to be where double standards are evident. That doesn’t worry me overly. You can point it out on talk pages without harassing the editor by an immediate AE report. A real problem emerges only when the POV-pushing editor repeatedly returns to his notion despite being reminded it is incoherent. All one gets are further recycling, at length, of arguments already disposed of, often at tedious length when the simple solution is to admit one's fallability. I'll give but one example related to the aftermath of the Zionism, race and genetics page dispute.
At Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism he introduces here the Israel historian Anita Shapira’s view that genetic studies confirm a Jewish view that they all have common Middle Eastern roots. Shapira is not a geneticist. A scholar without specific qualifications in genetics can therefore comment on that topic is she is Israeli, but not if she is Palestinian.
A year earlier he made much of Abu-Haj being Palestinian (invalidating her scholarship) and imputed that she was a political activist, and possibly therefore associated with antisemitism.here,here, here and here, to cite just a handful. Cf my comment.
I raise this here, after the Evidence page has closed, because I do not want to be involved there and have no interest in providing diff evidence that might embarrass or complicate the wikilives of other colleagues. Apart from socks, no differences among regular contributors on talk pages should lead to AE actions except in exceptional circumstances. Nishidani (talk) 15:10, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It strikes me as self-evident that participating in a case when three admins had determined, by totally misreading one diff, that I was either a spreader of antisemitic hate (leeky cauldron) or a weaponizing purveyor of antisemitism (SFR and Barkeep)- all being, with good cause, highly respected-would be pointless. There is no logic in imagining a punishable distinction between
Sir Stephen Sedley telling a non-sectarian global audience a joke underscoring Jewish awareness that antisemitism can be weaponized, and
Nishidani reminding one English editor on wikipedia of that same joke, bearing directly on the same topic - the Weaponization of antisemitism.
Since the propositional values in the two statements are identical, either Sedley was also being 'inflammatory' by weaponizing antisemitism, or I was, like the distinguished English jurist, trying to bring to the discussion the same illuminating reminder that Jews themselves take care to not weaponize antisemitic accusations. Being inadvertently but objectively smeared on the eve of ARBPIA5 with that insinuation by a sanction blotting a record that shows just two minor infringements since 2017 spells the end of my wikiwork. We peons are held to the highest standards in the IP area, a standard, unfortunately here, which those who govern us don't have to live up to on those rare occasions where an indisputable error of judgment occurs .Nishidani (talk) 18:15, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
