Levivich

Not to start a discussion, just a matter of mutual interest FYI

AI's threat to Wikipedia Late Night Live 8 October 2024. Nishidani (talk) 13:00, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

What you said

Hi Levivich. I don't understand why you would write this. You said there - " Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us." That's an outlier view."

I never said something like that and I don't know why you seem to hold this opinion about me. I'm asking you to please retract your comments. I don't know where your ideas come from but I am really really suggesting that you allow us to just coexist. I think it might do some good to you too. I don't know how this conflict met or meets you so I prefer to give your this chance. PeleYoetz (talk) 19:30, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

In my view, statements like There were always Jews who returned to the Land of Israel and yearned to do so. Starting from the Book of Lamentations through ancient, mideaval and modern sources, this has always been a central theme in Jewish religion, history, and liturgy. It was not yet a political movement, but this fact provides vital context and is absolutely DUE. [1] are among the kinds of statements I had in mind when I wrote variations of "God gave the land to us."; in this example quote, you argue it's true and Wikipedia should say it's true because, in part, the Bible (Book of Lamentations) said so.

Although, when I wrote that sentence, I specifically had in mind this article complaining about Wikipedia's coverage of Zionism, which at the end quotes somebody as saying the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of God’s promise to gather His people back to Zion.

Bringing the Bible to a Wikipedia talk page as if it were a history book is a tell-tale sign of POV pushing of a very specific and uncommon POV: biblical literalism. This view, though almost unheard of in any intellectual discussion in the real world and certainly in academia, finds surprising popularity on the talk page of Wikipedia's articles about Israel, e.g. here and here, where other editors also claim that because it's in the Bible, it's true. Levivich (talk) 19:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry but your response is simply no less insulting and disappointing than your original comments. I'm going to repeat myself - I haven't said at any point "God gave the land to us", and I've never mentioned God.

Psalm 137 is an ancient Jewish text, it described the remembrance and the yearning for Jerusalem from the point of view of Babylonian captivity. It is clearly ancient, probably from the Babylonian or Persian periods. That the centrality of the Land of Israel, and the yearning for a return continued throughout the generations is a historical fact, this theme is indeed recurring in Jewish history since antiquity. In the 2nd century BCE, Simon Thassi, when told by the Seleucids he was occupying Jaffa, replied: "We have never taken land away from other nations or confiscated anything that belonged to other people. On the contrary, we have simply taken back property that we inherited from our ancestors, land that had been unjustly taken away from us by our enemies at one time or another." In the 12th century, Judah HaLevi wrote: "My heart is in the east, and the rest of me at the edge of the west. ... / ... While Zion remains in the Cross's reign¹, and I in Arab chains?" When the Jews of the diaspora revolted against Rome, one of the purposes, was a return to Judea and defend it. Levivich, really just try and read more about the history of Jewish identity. I really think you need to do some self reflection.

I'm now asking you once more, apologize and retract your inappropriate comments. PeleYoetz (talk) 06:37, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

May I intervene here?

"Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us."

Since you are taking an extreme literalist view of part of this, let me construe the sentence and style of that type of remark.

The quote refers obviously to a theme, not to what you said, but to Levivich's subsuming the various remarks you made as reflective of a general theme. This is called stylistically 'variations on a theme' broadly, a musical term which has been adopted in general prose. Technically, these variations are what are called topoi, literary embroideries of some standard image, idea, or argument in a literary canon masterfully surveyed by Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, esp.pp79ff.) When you read anything in literature depicting a pleasant landscape or garden, nilly willy, it will be categorized as an example of the tradition of a Locus amoenus.

So when Levivich states that in his reading your statements are 'variations' on a generic premise that 'God gave the land to us', he is not putting the latter phrase into your mouth. He is saying that he reads your remarks as 'topical variations' on that powerful biblical theme that Palestine was given to Jews as a promised land, and which underlies all alternative echoes of that notion.

In layman's language, you are asking him to recant the reasonable impression he drew from your mode of arguing, in the way your terms evoke to the common reader an omnipresent theme in the Bible and in Judaism. There is no room for ambiguity here: 'variations' means that the quotation in inverted commas does not literally refer to any statement you made. It means, not only in Levivich's view, that your remarks are redolent, as thematic variations, of the topos of the promised land. This is quite innocuous, a fair assessment. It may not reflect what you take your remarks to mean, but it is the inevitable outcome of the language you use.

The attribution to the whole of the Jewish people of a desire to return to the land of their forefathers cannot be grounded on quoting passages from Simon Thassi or Judah Halevi on the topos of Libi baMizrach (my heart is in the east), any more than would be the case for quoting the far more realistic thinking of an 'average' Jew in the diaspora captured by Bloom's thoughts after he ducks into the butcher shop for a pork kidney for his breakfast from his fellow Jew, the Hungarian Dlugacz,- this violation of a kosher prohibition grounded in Deuteronomy 14:8.,- means that he feels he must, when the opportunity presents itself, up stakes and perform aliyah, along the lines of a pamphlet by Agendath Netaim he picks up to browse, a company offering land for prospective buyers with citrus groves by Lake Tiberias. 'Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.'(James Joyce, Ulysses The Bodley Head 1960 p.72)I often sing to myself the songs of my childhood like Molly Malone and It's a Long Way to Tipperary but anyone who took those as evidence of my desire to return there would be mistaken. They reflect a long and intense cultural attachment. Arguments to the contrary simply reflect a Zionist topos which retroactively attributes to all Jews historically the idea proffered by their very recent ideological justification for that movement, one that was dismissed as heretical by the majority of rabbinical scholars when it was first articulated.

In 2600 years of life outside of the Biblical land, many Jews the world over may well have taken to heart the stirring passages of poetic nostalgia in the classics of their literary tradition. Percentually, despite no obstacles, very few ever acted on it, any more than Greeks in the oikoumene beyond, when recalling the nostos of Odysseus, dropped their copy of Homer and left the Ukraine, Egypt or Africa broadly, to return to the ancient roots of some of their forefathers in Chios or Samothrace. When Eastern European Jews were offered the prospect of going to the United States or Palestine in the 1880s onwards, the overwhelming majority went West (to the 'new Zion'), not South.

There is nothing to apologize here, except for the commonplace misprisions you make about a putative universal perennial longing among Jews, which is a literary and rabbinical construction of 'Jewishness'. And using an ultimatum for such a trivial misreading of your interloctor's words looks highly 'instrumental'.Nishidani (talk) 08:22, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

... @Levivich, you should clearly redact your comments, you have put words in the mouth of PeleYoetz, who clearly did not say anything about God, just talked about history. Inventing words and attributing them to others to promote sanctions against them is... not right. The time to apologize is now. ABHammad (talk) 12:15, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Please read the thread, which evidently you haven't because nowhere did Levivich put words into the other chap's mouth.Nishidani (talk) 12:46, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

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@PeleYoetz: the yearning for a return continued throughout the generations is a historical fact No, it's not. Levivich, really just try and read more about the history of Jewish identity. I really think you need to do some self reflection. OK. This website is about educating people with reliable sources, so let's read some RS about the history of Jewish identity, and self-reflect, together:

Stanislawski, Engel, Penslar, Pappe, and Slater, on yearning for a return

Michael Stanislawski, writing Oxford's Very Short Introductions about Zionism, pp. 2-3: Many, if not most, Zionists today regard Zionism as a natural continuation of two millennia of Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel and aspiration to return there in the End of Days. According to this view, Jews prayed daily through the millennia for the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and this hope was realized dramatically, and, for some, miraculously, in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. What this common point of view misunderstands is that the Zionist movement, founded in the late nineteenth century under highly specific and contingent circumstances, was in fact a rejection of that age-old desire for the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, and not its linear fulfillment. This was, quite simply, because that traditional “yearning for Zion” was tied inexorably to the belief in the advent of a messiah chosen and anointed by God—and by God alone—who would then initiate the “ingathering of the exiles” (i.e., the return to Zion of all the Jews in the world) and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. In most of its versions, Jewish messianism also—and crucially—entailed an end to earthly existence as we know it. ... But in between Jesus and Sabbetai Zevi there were many other “false messiahs,” and so the rabbinic leadership of the Jews worldwide declared that although the messianic belief and its call for the Jews to return to the Holy Land was a cardinal doctrine of Judaism, they decried any apocalyptic version of that belief: Jews were forbidden to “advance the end” or even to calculate it. The messiah would be chosen by God on God’s good time, and any activism among human beings to intervene in this process was heresy, to be condemned and punished. The founders of Zionism rebelled fundamentally and viscerally against the political quietism which was the corollary of this messianic belief. They demanded that Jews take matters into their own hands to liberate themselves, not to wait for God (in whom many—quite crucially—no longer believed) to return the Jews to “Zion” to create a Jewish homeland there. David Engel's book about 2013 Zionism, pp. 9-12: It turns out that when it spoke about continuous hands-on efforts by Jews to resettle and reclaim Palestine, the Declaration of Independence glossed over parts of the historical record – as political documents often do. It is true that throughout Jewish history some individual Jews left relatively more comfortable lives outside Palestine in order to satisfy a deep longing to settle in what they saw as their true homeland. However, the number of such Jews appears to have been quite small. In fact, for more than a thousand years after Muslim armies first took control of the country in 632 CE, Palestine’s Jewish population declined sharply, from around 200,000 in the mid-seventh century to no more than 3,000 in 1700. Moreover, certain Jewish religious ideas actually appear to have discouraged Jews from trying to reclaim sovereignty there. Since restoration was possible only after God lifted the punishment of exile, Jews traditionally watched for signs that God was about to relent. They anticipated that, when the time came, God would choose a champion who would gather the Jewish people from all the lands of their dispersion, organize them to take control of the Promised Land, and lead them there in triumph. They called that anticipated champion mashi’ah – literally, ‘the anointed one’, or, as it is usually rendered in English, ‘Messiah’. Once the Messiah appeared, Jews believed, the return to Palestine would be at hand. But they also believed that the timing of the Messiah’s appearance was up to God alone. In fact, throughout most of their history the majority of Jewish religious leaders insisted that, except for praying and observing God’s commandments, Jews neither could nor should do anything to persuade God to send the Messiah quickly. Some even warned that if Jews tried to resettle Palestine en masse before the Messiah came, God was liable to interpret their efforts as an act of rebellion and extend the punishment, making the exile last longer. ... These facts suggest that, prayers for restoration notwithstanding, Zionism might be better understood as a departure from traditional Jewish ways of looking at the world than as an extension of ancient Jewish religious values. And if Zionism really does embody more a modern than an ancient idea, then it makes sense to look for its origins around the time the word gained currency, not centuries before. Derek Penslar, who used to be Chair of Israel Studies at Oxford, wrote a book about Zionism last year, pp. 18-25: Like other nationalisms, Zionism justifies itself through appeals to history, but it does so anachronistically. It transforms rabbinic Judaism’s concepts of the sacred—the Jews’ common devotion to the God of Israel, veneration of the biblical Land of Israel, and the concept of an eventual Jewish return to that land in the messianic era—into a modern nationalist idiom. ... Jewish connections with the Land of Israel are ancient and deep, but they should not be equated with Zionist goals to settle Jews in the land and configure it as a Jewish homeland. Rabbinic Judaism venerates the Land of Israel, but there has been a wide range of opinions on whether it is religiously commanded to live there. Talmudic sources emphasize that the mass return of Jews to the Land of Israel will occur only in the days of the Messiah and that attempting to initiate this return prematurely is a sacrilege. Underlying this concept is a theological passivity formed by two cataclysmic historical events: the destruction in 70 ce of the Second Temple in Jerusalem during a Jewish revolt against Roman rule and the decimation of Jewish communities in Judea in 132–135 ce in response to another failed rebellion, whose commander had messianic pretensions. The Talmud speaks of oaths, sworn by Jews to God in the wake of this calamity, that they would neither rebel against the nations of the world nor initiate a mass return to the land of Israel. Until the twentieth century, Palestine’s Jewish community was minuscule and splintered ... Well into the twentieth century the Jews of Palestine were a collection of separate communities divided by place of origin, customs, and native language or languages. In the 1700s the Jews of Palestine numbered about five thousand, some 2 percent of the total population. In the early nineteenth century, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to increase, and by 1880 there were about 25,000 Jews of a population of approximately 470,000. ... A sliver of the 2.5 million Jews who left Russia, Romania, and the Hapsburg Empire between the early 1880s and the outbreak of World War I emigrated to Palestine. ... All in all, about 65,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine over this time. Some of the new arrivals in Palestine were fervent nationalists, but many were pious scholars like those who had immigrated in the past. ... They came to the Land of Israel to live among its ruins, not to restore the Hebrew kingdoms of biblical antiquity. ... Zionism did not emerge directly from traditional Jewish attitudes toward the collective (the children of Israel) or territory (the Land of Israel). ... Instead, it had multiple sources, dating to the middle of the nineteenth century. The sources were primarily in Europe but were as likely to be found among the more prosperous and acculturated communities of Germany and Austria-Hungary as among the poorer and less secure communities in Russia and Romania. Ilan Pappe's Ten Myths About Israel (2024, 2nd ed.), pp. 20-40: There are those who would like to question whether the Jews who settled in Palestine as Zionists in the aftermath of 1918 were really the descendants of the Jews who had been exiled by Rome 2,000 years ago. ... More serious analysis came from biblical scholars who were not influenced by Zionism, such as Keith Whitelam, Thomas Thompson, and the Israeli scholar, Israel Finkelstein, all of whom reject the Bible as a factual account of any significance. Whitelam and Thompson also doubt the existence of anything like a nation in biblical times and, like others, criticize what they call the “invention of modern Israel” as the work of pro-Zionist Christian theologians. ... ... Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine. ... Historically, the Bible served Zionism well from its inception until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It played an important role in the dominant Israeli narrative—for both domestic and external purposes—claiming that Israel is the same land as was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. “Israel” in this narrative existed until 70 CE, when the Romans demolished it and exiled its people. The religious commemoration of that date, when the second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, was a day of mourning. In Israel it has become a national day of mourning on which all leisure-industry businesses, including restaurants, are required to close from the evening before. The principal scholarly and secular proof for this narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text). After 70 CE, according to the narrative, the land was more or less empty until the Zionist return. ... Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: “the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.” Bible studies are now a crucial and expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that justifies the claim to the land. The biblical stories and the national lessons that can be learned from them are fused together with the study of the Holocaust and of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. ... In the public discussions on the future of Palestine, Ben-Gurion waved a copy of the Bible at the members of the committee, shouting: “This is our Qushan [the Ottoman land registry proof], our right to Palestine does not come from the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter.” Historically, of course, it makes no sense to teach the Bible, what happened to the Jews of Europe, and the 1948 war as one historical chapter. But ideologically the three items are linked together and indoctrinated as the basic justification for the Jewish state in our time. Jerome Slater, Mythologies Without End, pp. 33-35: In theory, the purely religious biblical argument is separable from the essentially historical one (though those who base Zionism’s legitimacy on biblical arguments rarely make this distinction). As already noted, the religious argument is simple and straightforward: God promised Palestine to the Jews, forever. That kind of argument, however, will be convincing only to religious literalists and fundamentalists; indeed, it is hardly clear that most of the Jewish people themselves—the great majority of them non-Orthodox or largely secular—are persuaded by the religious argument. More important, Christians and Muslims also have strong historical connections, claims, and ties to Palestine based on religion and sentiment. ... In short, there is no persuasive general principle that privileges the Zionist claim of ancient religious rights, let alone eternal ones, over the similar claims of Christians and Muslims. ... The second Zionist argument based on the Bible is a historical rather than a religious one—or, more accurately, as I have summarized earlier, it is based on ancient history as described in the Hebrew Bible. To begin with, no part of the Zionist/Israeli narrative that is based on the Hebrew Old Testament stands up to serious scrutiny, and in the last few decades the accuracy of nearly every part of that narrative has been decisively rejected by leading historians and archaeologists—especially Israeli ones—who have concluded that the biblical account must be regarded as theology and myth rather than genuine history. There is little or no archaeological evidence that the biblical figures who are central to the Zionist/Israeli narrative—Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon—existed. And even if they were actual rather than mythical figures, the scholarship has demonstrated that there is little historical or archaeological evidence in support of the “Exodus” myth and other biblical stories: that Palestine was the major homeland of the Jews until they were expelled by the Romans, that Moses and other Patriarchs led the Jews out of Egypt and conquered Canaan (Palestine), and that King David and King Solomon, ruling from Jerusalem, established an extensive Jewish kingdom over most of the land. In short, as the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein stated in 2000, it had been “common knowledge among serious scholars for years” that Zionism was based on biblical myths or folktales that were adopted to bolster the political claim that the Jewish people were rightfully and eternally sovereign over the land of Palestine. ... It is important to examine the biblically based myths in greater detail. To begin, archaeologists and historians have established that there has never been one Jewish “homeland,” whether in Palestine or anywhere else. Long before the Roman conquest of Palestine and the subsequent Jewish revolt, there were large Jewish communities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and throughout the Mediterranean basin. Moreover, contrary to the myth, there is no evidence that the Jews established political sovereignty or control over ancient Palestine, which was inhabited by a number of peoples, no one of which was dominant. In 66–70 ce a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Palestine was suppressed. Zionist mythology holds that “the Romans may have laid the entire nation waste between ad 70 and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews, and carrying off half that number in bondage.” This myth is no longer taken seriously by informed historians. In his review of the scholarship, Charles H. Manekin (writing under his pen name Jeremiah Haber), a Hebrew University philosopher and historian, writes that “there is no contemporary evidence—i.e., first and second centuries ce—that anything like an exile took place.” Rather, some of the rebels were killed, others died of hunger, and some prisoners became Roman slaves. And over the centuries, most of the Jews who remained in Palestine became Christians, and later Muslims, leaving only a small group that preserved its Jewish identity. Although the Zionists are correct that there was a continuing Jewish presence, between the first and mid-nineteenth centuries it consisted only of some 5,000 or 6,000 nonpolitical religious fundamentalists in Jerusalem and two or three other towns or villages. Jewish immigration increased somewhat after that, but by the end of the nineteenth century there were still only about 50,000 Jews in Palestine. ... However small the Jewish community in Palestine was from the first through most of the nineteenth century, the mythology holds that the Jewish people as a whole were unwillingly confined to exiled communities—the “Diaspora”—in other lands, but maintained their attachment to the land of Palestine and yearned to eventually “return” to it. ... It is undoubtedly true that some kind of a Jewish identification, especially among religious Jews, has resonated throughout diaspora history—“Next year in Jerusalem,” and the like—but even during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an overwhelming majority of the East European Jews threatened by anti-Semitism sought to move to the West, particularly the United States, rather than go to Palestine. And today it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people do not think of themselves in any meaningful way as a diaspora yearning to “return” to Palestine—else they would have done so, as they now have had the right and (in most cases) the ability to move to Israel for some seventy years.

Slater gets really interesting, though, when he asks the question: well, what if the myths were true? Would it make a difference? From pp. 35-37:

Slater, asking 'what if the myths were true'

For the sake of analysis, for the moment let us leave aside the historical and archaeological evidence and assume that the Zionist narrative and the argument on which it is based is accurate: that Palestine was the homeland of the Jewish people who ruled it for many centuries until they were driven out by the Romans, that nonetheless some Jewish communities remained in Palestine for the next 2,000 years, and that the remainder of the scattered Jewish people never stopped yearning and striving for the reestablishment of their homeland and a Jewish state in Palestine—so for all those reasons, the historical land of Palestine eternally belongs to the Jewish people. That argument, however, is more a matter of special pleading for the Jews than one based on a persuasive and universally applicable principle. For what would the principle be? That lands conquered by force would eternally belong to the “original” inhabitants (whatever that might mean), no matter how many centuries other peoples had been a majority in that land, so long as the previous inhabitants were still a distinguishable people, some small minority of which continued to yearn to “return” to their “homeland”? The problem for that Zionist argument, of course, is that there is no such universal principle. That is, even if the mythology were true, that would not establish a persuasive modern Jewish claim to the land of Palestine. The argument that an ancient claim to a land has precedence over very long periods of a different reality—in Palestine, eight centuries of Christianity followed by thirteen centuries of an overwhelming Islamic majority—is accepted nowhere else in the world, whether in law, moral reasoning, or plain common sense. Put differently, there is scarcely any place on earth that at one time or another has not been conquered, subjugated, and populated by other peoples. Yet there is no other place in which it is taken to be a serious argument that even if more than twenty centuries have passed since the expulsion of a people from their homelands, they still retain their right to permanent political sovereignty there, if necessary overriding the political and other rights of the peoples who have inhabited the land since then, including most of its present-day inhabitants. ... If this way of looking at the issue is persuasive, then what is left of the Zionist argument that is based on ancient history? For over thirty centuries Palestine (or Canaan) has been repeatedly conquered: by the Assyrians, by the Babylonians, by Alexander the Great, by the Roman Empire, by the Crusaders, by the Arabs, and by the Ottoman Empire. After each of these conquests, the previous inhabitants of the land were subjugated by the new rulers who then held sway, sometimes for centuries. In light of these facts, some versions of the Zionist argument hold that violent conquests do not invalidate the moral and political rights of the previous inhabitants. Among other problems with that argument, though, is the fact the Jewish Bible itself claims that the Jews themselves were conquerors, defeating the previous indigenous peoples of the land of Palestine, the Canaanites. Given all these issues, who should be regarded as the “rightful” claimants to Palestine? Absent a religious basis (“the Promised Land”) accepted by everyone, including those of different nationalities and religions, stopping the clock as it marches backward in time to twenty centuries ago, neither earlier nor later, must be completely arbitrary and self-serving. Put differently, by what objective criteria are the claims of one set of victims—the Jews supposedly driven out of Palestine by the Romans 2,000 years ago—privileged over all other such claims? If the most ancient of the “original” victimization is the criterion, then it must follow that the descendants of the Canaanites—in some accounts, the Syrians, whose descendants live in Lebanon today!—must have priority over the descendants of the Jews. On the other hand, if more recent victimization is the criterion, then the victims of various conquests of Palestine since the end of the Roman Empire must have priority over the Jews. Indeed, the great irony of the Zionist narrative is that unlike the alleged Roman expulsion, the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians is both demonstrable and far more recent—seventy years ago, not 2,000. ... In sum, the Zionist arguments based on religious claims, biblical mythology, or ancient territorial rights cannot stand up to serious analysis. If Zionism ever had a persuasive claim for a Jewish state, it would have to rest on the modern period, meaning from the late nineteenth century through today.

Babylonian captivity lasted for maybe 50 years. Israel's exile of Palestinians has lasted longer. I'm not the first to say that Israel is the modern Babylon--conquering Jerusalem and exiling its inhabitants--while Palestinians have become the modern Jews--exiled, stateless, and discriminated against by almost everyone. And those who draw on the Book of Lamentations or the Psalms to justify Zionist claims to Palestine are, indeed, arguing variations of "God gave the land to us," variations of "because the Bible says so." It's a weak argument, unpopular outside Israel, and that makes it easy to spot.

Yesterday, a non-XC account said to me:

The key similarity is “foreign”, ie do Jews/Zionists constitute a “foreign” presence in Israel / did they in 1948. Again, to use an imperfect example, displaced Ukrainians returning to the Crimea in the event of Russian withdrawal would not be considered “foreigners”, and therefore definitionally incapable of being colonisers or colonialists of Crimea (given the distinction you make).

Let's contemplate this Crimean analogy for a moment. Let's suppose instead of 2024 it's 4024, two thousand years into the future. First, think about that period of time: can you imagine what life will be like in 2,000 years? You'd probably agree with me that by 4024, humans will almost certainly have been living on Mars for over 1,000 years, probably also the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and quite likely have figured out how to travel to other star systems and probably colonized those, too. Imagine, then, that in 4024, people who identify themselves as the descendants of Ukrainians -- and who maintained Ukranian customs and religion -- but who lived in a place far away from Crimea, like, say, China, or maybe Mars, claimed that they were the rightful owners of Crimea, because it was taken from their ancestors two millennia prior. How fucking crazy does that sound to you?

And suppose the world government (or interstellar government, in 4024) decided to give half of Crimea to these Martian Ukrainians, but the Martian Ukrainians took three-quarters of it by force and expelled almost everyone who was living there, prevented them by force from returning, put those who stayed behind under military government, and, twenty years later, occupied the remaining quarter and subjugated the local population there as well. And they justified it all by saying, "the history books clearly establish that in 2014 we were expelled from Crimea, our ancient homeland!" Yeah, right. We would think they were absolutely out of their minds. And anyone who showed up arguing that the land belongs to them because of an exile 2,000 years ago would be instantly recognizable as a Martian Ukrainian, simply because of the manifest irrationality of their arguments.

Zionism is fundamentally irrational: as soon as you lay it out and look at it, you realize it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That's what the reliable sources about Zionism explain, and that's what Wikipedia's summary of those sources will say, regardless of how many accounts the modern-day "Martian Ukrainians" make. Levivich (talk) 17:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

It's nice that you share your opinions on Zionism, but the scholars you chose (mostly) don't deny the lasting importance of the Land of Israel for Jewish identity, including the belief in returning to Zion someday. The scholars you mention seem to not be experts in ancient or medieval Jewish history, they are scholars of the modern time with quite specific views (and it seems like you haven't read Jewish identity). I would question choosing Ilan Pappe as a neutral source in the first place, and when Slater says 'there is no evidence that the Jews had political control over ancient Palestine,' it really shows the value of this source when talking about ancient Jewish history (he's 100% wrong).

Anyway, the reason I contacted you here is a much simpler matter. You started an SPI on me, which one SPI checker rejected, and then another closed it as unrelated. Before that, you made more accusations about tag-teaming at AE, which were also unproven. Now, after all of these were closed, you are putting words into my mouth that I have never said.

These are uniquely crazy suggestions, they are the best behavioral indicator of sock/meatpuppetry. Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us." At no time did I say 'God gave the land to us.' Never. Under any variation of it. Saying that the Hebrew Bible features the theme of longing for Zion, even if you don't agree it does, is not the same as making the claim that 'God gave us the land'. Another thing I never said, but you put in my mouth anyway, is that the Golan Heights belongs to Israel. This just never happened.

For the third time, I ask you to strike your inappropriate comments that put words into my mouth. Please do it. PeleYoetz (talk) 19:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

You are the one putting words into Levivich's mouth. As my grammatical analysis showed, it is not he who asserted that you said 'God gave the land to us', but you asserting he claimed you said that. I gather this is all just a preliminary to reporting Levivich at AE, but you should consider carefully that your whole premise here is that (a) the Jewish people 'yearned' for the Land of Israel for 2,500 years but that (b) this has nothing to do with the core Biblical assertion that the area in question is the Promised Land, a land promised by God to the Jews, a core idea that underwrites Judaism.

To maintain those two propositions simultaneously is, to a neutral eye, a remarkable example of counter-historical errancy, a failure to connect the dots.Nishidani (talk) 21:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Ah yes, as always, I quote sources, and you say those sources aren't qualified. Like Derek Penslar, former Chair of Israel Studies at Oxford, and current Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard... what the hell does he know about the history of the Jews, amirite? Nobody ever claimed Pappe was neutral, including Pappe; Pappe cites archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein, but hey, what the hell do they know about ancient Israel? Slater was a Fulbright Lecturer at Haifa University, but I'm sure you know better than he does about evidence of Jewish dominion over ancient Palestine.

Claiming RS is not RS is another tell-tale sign of POV pushing, so predictable that I said it in the full quote that brought you here:

You know that recently-created account that rushed to XC then immediately started arguing the moon is made of cheese? Yeah, almost certainly the same person/group as that other new account that rushed to XC and immediately started arguing the moon is made of cheese. There just aren't that many people who really want Wikipedia to say the moon is made of cheese. There aren't that many people who would claim the Masada myth isn't a myth, or Golan Heights belongs to Israel, or Palestinians aren't from Palestine, or mainstream historians are fringe, etc. These are uniquely crazy suggestions, they are the best behavioral indicator of sock/meatpuppetry. Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us." That's an outlier view.

Now you're not quite saying these mainstream historians are fringe, but you are saying they're not experts in the right field, which is only slightly less wrong.

Back to this post of mine that brought you here: as you can see from the context, I did not put any words in your mouth, and I did not claim that you said "God gave the land to us," because of I wrote "variations of," which is how the reader knows that "God gave the land to us" is not a direct quote. And when you try to use the Bible as a source of historical fact, you are making a claim that is a variation of "God gave us the land." You don't have to agree with that, but I'm not going to strike it because you disagree with my characterization.

Not only that, but I didn't even say that you, specifically, said all those things on that list. My accusations against you have been specific and backed by diffs, at AE and at SPI. But you reinforce it by arguing that Psalms is correct but Slater is wrong. When you suggest that Pappe and Finkelstein don't know Jewish history, the right kind of Jewish history, but you link to a Wikipedia article instead. These are, as I said, outlier opinions. Levivich (talk) 21:20, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Just a private note, no need to reply.

Zionism is fundamentally irrational: as soon as you lay it out and look at it, you realize it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

All ideologies are 'irrational' in one sense, in that they seal themselves off, by their assumptions, from empirical correction. No amount of evidence can substantially undermine the faith of true believers, of any description. Of these, Zionism is, nonetheless, highly 'rational' in the sense that it has historically excelled in the meticulous deployment of everything in the toolkit of instrumental rationality (what Weber called Zweckrationalität) to achieve the goals it sets itself. It is fascinating for the extreme efficiency of its planning and purposing, aided by a steely insouciance to any trammels of scruple that might get in the way of those goals. Not 'immoral' but 'a-moral', and in this it is not alone. We don't like to admit, particularly anyone of us who greew up in the bright postwar era within a liberal world, how much of what goes on in the real world of geopolitics observes the same (un)principles. It is, however, and this is how I take your remark, profoundly, pathologically I would prefer to say, 'irrational' in the yawning gap its successful modus operandi has opened between the civilisation of Judaism and Israel. And there lies the danger, to Jews of any description, everywhere. Build to serve the Jewish people, it has arguably succeeded in a disservice of historic magnitude to the very people it claimed it was redeeming. With my apologies and best regards.Nishidani (talk) 17:15, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

What about secular humanism? I'd call that a rational ideology. I am, however, hard-pressed to think of a second example, which I think might prove your point :-) Nationalism, certainly, is always irrational, and that's a good point, it's not just Zionism. I love that quote, "A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of their past and hostility toward their neighbors." As to the gap between Jews and Israel, well, we all know the conflict will not end until Israel engages in some kind of "truth and reconciliation" process a la South Africa and other states that have gone through similar developments. And that won't happen until the diaspora demands it. If Bibi's legacy ends up being that he was the one who got the diaspora to turn its back on Israel, or to force Israel to own up to its history and reform its future, well, then perhaps he will have done world Jewry a service, after all. I just wish we could get from here to there with fewer dead babies. A lot fewer. Levivich (talk) 18:04, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think secular humanism is an ideology, anymore than the dazzling arc of the haskalah could be called ideological by anyone other than its religious critics, or the usual antisemitic trash, figures like Édouard Drumont, Charles Maurras et al. To the contrary, secular humanism emphasizes dissonance as the leavening of its democratic aims, embraces a self-corrective rationality, It is ameliorative, not recursive (nationalism), and 'humanism' is diametrically opposed to Einstein's measles of mankind. In any case, secular humanism looks more and more like a dead letter in a world that is historically analphabetic. Sigh.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

ANI

You and I tend to see eye to eye on a lot of things, but on the ANI thread I think you have missed what I was saying. Someone has closed the thread, but for the record, the unsubstantiated claim I was referring to was the repeated insinuation that I had deliberately targeted that page for deletion because I am in league with off-wiki trolls. If there are off-wiki comments or not is one matter (and in that discussion, it was clearly stated there had been no off-wiki discussion of the merge). But there is no doubt that many WP:ASPERSIONS were made against participants in the merge. Against me personally merely because (a) I voted merge in an AfD in which I did due diligence, and (b) I started a merge discussion per the AFD close comments when the page lit up in my watchlist from a brief edit war months later. That was done to diffuse tensions. But still I have been repeatedly accused of targeting that page to get it off-wiki. I haven't. I have been doing what I do. Commenting on AfD cases and retaining an interest in articles I have researched at AfD.

Moreover the uninvolved closer has been singled out and repeatedly been called inexperienced, despite being a very good, thoughtful, careful and intelligent editor from everything I have seen. Again, aspersions and invective against someone. I left them a barnstar because I felt bad that they had been attacked for a close request I raised. I carefully avoided naming pages or editors in that talk page comment. It was meant merely as encouragement; but still I am accused of gravedancing on my page, and the closer is again accused of being inexperienced. Unsubstantiated, the lot of it. Not a single apology from those doing it. Colour me unimpressed. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 21:38, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@Sirfurboy: I thought when you asked "What am I being accused of?" and someone answered "Not you," that cleared up that the accusations regarding WPO weren't directed at you? Or maybe there was something else I missed? Anyway, and maybe I should have been clearer about this on my part, in no way were any of my comments directed at you or even at the issues you raised. I also think that LB went too hard at the closer, but I also understand why he overreacted, which isn't the closer's fault, but I'd feel ganged-up-on, too. After all, let's be real: he was gone for like two months or something after the AFD, and AFAICT, nobody did anything about those articles. He comes back and removes some tags and within days, a merger proposal is started. And the WPO's on his ass all the time, and a bunch of WPO people were involved at every step of the process, like maybe a majority of the participants, I'm not sure exactly how many. I do feel back for the closer and I'm glad you left them a barnstar, that was a nice thing to do. I hope LB takes a break and cools off and regains his sense of perspective, but frankly I'd bet that he'll take a break, come back later, and apologize to the closer. Levivich (talk) 05:13, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

That attack (by a different editor) was not directed at me, as they said. There were plenty of comments that were flung my way after that though. But hey, I've been called worse and often. I'll live with that. But what did annoy me was the repeated attack on the closer's competence, even after they had been called out on that at AN. And it got doubled down on here, on this page too. Still, you will probably have seen by now that I was able to make my point, as LB managed to get taken to AN/I again. Hopefully things will settle down, but perhaps LB will not take the warning from me. You may be better placed here in seeking to ensure calmer heads prevail going forward, with a quiet word in the right place. Cheers. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 19:49, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

(Parking this in the same section although there's not much overlap.) Levivich, I am often impressed with the level of clue and the integrity you demonstrate at noticeboards. Then you make an intervention like this, and I'm left scratching my head. Before the thread was closed, ATG pointed out your serious misreading of the context of the "smear attempts" remark, and you apologized. But I agree with Sirfurboy, Licks-Rocks has been treated deplorably, first, foremost, and most recently (this thoroughly nasty comment at their talk page) by Lightburst and at least one other editor—for a well reasoned NAC that has been endorsed at AN. (And I am generally leery of NACs, and was in the opposition in that merger discussion.) And the section was closed before I—or many people really—had a chance to "stand up on-wiki" and own up to being a WPO participant as you come close to demanding, with a dash of gasoline on the fire in suggesting Lightburst contact ArbCom with a list of who they think is who at WPO. Well, over my late breakfast, here I am. I am who I say I am at Wikipediocracy. I argued against merging the Bent's Camp Resort article. I referred in my post to Carrite, who makes no secret of the identity under which he posts at WPO, working his ass off finding references to try to save that article at AfD. I don't appreciate the smear that those of us who participate at WPO as well as on-wiki are complicit in malfeasance, or the implication that we should be reading AN/I every hour and should jump to with confessions of guilt and if necessary self-outing when someone raises the specter of BADSITES. I don't know whether you yourself have an account, or how often you read there, and I don't care, except that in addition to the serious misattribution of the comment at AN/I itself, your research for that AN/I post was lacking. You missed that ATG had first posted in 'crap articles', not in a dedicated thread on Lightburst; you cast aspersions about the membership at WPO. I think you let yourself be carried away by your own rhetorical flow. That's bad. It's bad whether or not it arose from the urge to defend someone, friend or not. (Whether or not you intended to "take sides.") It's another instance where you've lost respect from me, and more importantly, where your involvement at the noticeboards has done more harm than good. Now I will finish my coffee. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:10, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: I appreciated Levivich's honesty. Sorry you were caught in the wake, but I think you know what Levivich is saying and it ain't really about you. It is a testament to Levivich's good character that they articulated the issue. Lev and I have been at odds and came to appreciate each other recently. Yngvadottir, i appreciate that you did not assist the trolls when you voted to keep the article. I think deep down you know this article was scrubbed because of off-wiki banter and action. I think that you cannot cavort with bullies and trolls and than say you are not one of them. I just said the same to JSS on my talk page. WPO is not accomplishing not much more than trolling and other hurtful behavior. And, I certainly do not think my message to Licks-Rocks was a PA. I have long been of the opinion that complicated discussions are not for inexperienced editors to close. Licks Rocks only started one article and was involved in 20 deletion discussions. This was not a discussion they should have closed but now I am stuck with their supervote. Sirfboy, I have no idea of their motivation but this is the project. We build, expand, cooperate. We do not snipe and destroy. Lightburst (talk) 23:45, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: One of our admins who happens to be blind has recently become the subject of criticism at WPO over some blocks he made. And one of his fiercest critics called this admin a "blind hog," writing "Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then." And when another person tactfully pointed out that this was very crass and gave the critic the benefit of the doubt that it was inadvertent, the critic responded by saying that it was not inadvertent. The critic called the admin "like a crack addict," and at one point suggested the admin had a WP:CIR problem because of a typo. A typo, by someone using a screen reader. I don't know why you talk to that critic, I don't know why you hang out over there. Levivich (talk) 05:33, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Partly to know what's going on. Carrite and I both found out about Bent's Camp Resort over there and tried at different stages to save it. And partly to participate in the discussions as a pro-Wikipedia voice. I imagine you saw my posts in the the forum thread you just alluded to, and in the AN/I discussion. You don't do your argument any favors by being so absolutist; I'm sure I could find associations of yours that wig me out, and I came here to post not just because of your high-handed challenge to every member of that site to answer to your personally at AN/I, but because of what Sirfurboy mentioned: you've associated yourself with an attempted pile-on against Licks-Rocks. I see now that you've admitted Licks Rocks has been treated badly. But you haven't improved the situation by taking sides so strongly. You've associated yourself with undeserved abuse of Licks-Rocks, and are encouraging Lightburst to see themself as entirely and unfairly victimised, which is not going to help them deal with the inevitable disagreements on this project, such as a merger proposal being closed in a way they don't like. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:38, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

You'll never find me chit-chatting with someone who intentionally calls a blind person a "blind hog," or anything even close to it. Levivich (talk) 16:39, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Request

Hi, Levivich. I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for best sources regarding the expulsions from Lydda and Ramla. Thanks, IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 05:43, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

@IOHANNVSVERVS: FYI the operation, Operation Dani, is sometimes spelled Danni or Danny, and the places are Lydda, Lydd, Ludd, or Lod, and Ramle, Ramleh, or Ramla, and probably other spellings as well; the mosque massacre is spelled Dahmash, Dahamsh, Dahamish, and others... so lots of search term variations.

Not to state the obvious but there are of course sources in Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle and Nakba and elsewhere on Wikipedia. The in-depth ones I know about are:

• Busailah 1981, "The Fall of Lydda, 1948: Impressions and Reminiscences" [2] (might be too old, pre-archives)
• Morris
  • "Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948", 1986, [3]
  • Morris 2004, starting p. 423
  • Morris 2007, Making Israel, "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past," starting on p. 11; it's a reprint of a 1988 essay published in Tikkun (magazine)
  • Morris 2008, starting p. 286
• Masalha
  • Masalha 1988 [4] - discusses Lydda throughout (along with other expulsions)
  • Masalha 2003, starting p. 29 [5]; on WP:TWL: [6]
  • Masalha 2012, in various places in the book: pp. 76-79, 86, 170-171, and 179
  • Masalha 2018, various places, lots of history (not just the expulsion): 38, 46, 96, 165–7, 170, 178, 180–1, 186, 206, 303, 368, 383
• Munayyer 1998, "The Fall of Lydda" [7] (sometimes referenced as Walid Khalidi 1998, but Khalidi just wrote the intro)
• Kadish & Sela 2005, "Myths and Historiography of the 1948 Palestine War Revisited: The Case of Lydda" [8]
• Pappe 2006 (Ethnic Cleansing), starting p. 166
• Golan 2010, "Lydda and Ramle: from Palestinian-Arab to Israeli towns, 1948–67" [9] (PDF)
• Khoury 2012 - doesn't really get into the details so much, but does specifically talk about Morris 1987/2004 (Birth of...) and Pappe 2006, "We don’t need to prove what is now considered a historical fact ... No one will argue about names like Operation Dani or Operations Hiram and Dekel. Many stories of massacres, rape, and expulsion are known ..." [10]
• Hasian 2020, starting p. 82, he mentions it while talking about Israeli historiography, and specifically discusses Morris's 1988 essay in Tikkun (see also footnote 23 for that chapter)
• Manna 2022 (free), throughout the book; from the index: pp. 29, 42, 46, 48–49, 51–52, 91–92, 110, 126, 201–3, 212, 296nn72,73, 297n80, 307n56, 323n51

HTH! Levivich (talk) 21:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 23:00, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

arbcom

did not know one could departy oneself. 😜 -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 18:54, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

I departy all the time! I figured if editors can just add editors to the party list (without any evidence, without even a post on the RFAR page saying that they did that), then why can't editors just remove editors from the party list? Thinking about it, I wouldn't really mind having the power to add people to arbcom party lists... but of course that would be a recipe for chaos, so instead I sent my party list to arbcom by email along with links to on- and off-wiki discussions (before the RFAR party even started!). Levivich (talk) 19:17, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Brilliant -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:17, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Socratic Barnstar
		I've seen your name often recently, and it feels like it's always attached to a clear, well-reasoned comment. I'm always glad to see you participating in a discussion, thanks for doing so! —Compassionate727 (T·C) 23:54, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, C727! Levivich (talk) 02:46, 29 October 2024 (UTC)