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New interesting essay by Moshé Machover

Messianic Zionism: The Ass and the Red Heifer, written by Moshé Machover. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:43, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Much of this, reading so far, is familiar, - I once gathered a lot of notes on the Red heifer rubbish, intending to do a major expansion of that article - but like most of my wiki research it remains in files. Life's far too interesting in its variegations to allow it to be channeled into a single area of curiosity. But, on a quick first reading it is, like everything Machover writes, extremely informative and refreshing. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

No one has ever explained to me what why is a resident of Umm Rashrash is a member of the Palestinian people with national rights to Jerusalem while a resident of Aqaba or Taba is a peaceful neighbor of Israel, I expect anti-Zionists to oppose all nationalist movement rather than supporting the poor nationalists over the bourgeoises nationalists.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 16:57, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

I can't see the problem. A Palestinian Israeli in Umm Rashrash doesn't ipso facto have 'national rights' to 'Jerusalem, if only because both 'national rights' in this case, and what is meant by 'Jerusalem' go unexplained. And the same would apply to an Israeli in Eilat (had a great time there, though cut my thigh on coral). As to anti-Zionists, there are innumerable varieties. I would basically concur with Walter Laqueur's position, (if uniquely on this, since he was not a good historian, as opposed to an excellent Zionist): Zionism ended its mission in 1948, and persistence in its attitudes is dysfunctional to a state with democratic ambitions. Yes it was immigrant colonial land-theft and carpetbaggery on a massive scale but the state that emerged from 1948 assumed international legitimacy and its rights as a state cannot be questioned. States are, as scholars since Ernest Renan, affirm,founded on violence and persist culturally by myths that privilege forgetting, and stand on the complacent high ground of a mutual ethno-national self-admiration clannishness. Of course scholars have unearthed the real story, but newspapers never reflect that. It's strictly for seminars in historical faculties from Tel Aviv to Timbucktoo.

Israel is no exception, though of course, like the other state it imitated, the USA, it vaunts its exceptionalism (basically by adopting the American narrative of the conquest of the West (all those films about the murderous Indians raping and killing settlers =all those stories about Palestinians killing settlers) and repackaging in a 'Jewish' idiom the American rhetoric about (a) City upon a Hill, though turning this on its head by inverting the Isaian Light unto the nations to mean 'a beacon for the diaspora'; (b) using the same geopolitical profile of the Monroe Doctrine, to mean that Israel's existence requires every other contiguous or distant nation in the area to keep a low profile, and persist in an unthreatening state of dedevelopment to secure Israel's safety. The expectation that anti-Zionists must out of logical consistency oppose all nationalisms shows a weak grasp of nationalism. The major theoretical books on nationalism in 1980s,( apart from the extremely awkward, indeed embarrassing exception of Anthony Smith's book) by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and Peter Alter, for example, never mention Israel, except in a hurried glance, excluding it, one assumes because it doesn't sit easily with the notion of an indigenous ethnic movement to achieve sovereignty over its traditional land, being a late exemplar of a colonizing migration which used a set of myths to legitimize the denial of national rights to 95% of the historic population (1900s) in order ostensibly to solve an infra-European issue, Christian antisemitism. Bourgeois vs proletarian has absolutely nothing to do with it. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Having written the above, I am now speed reading, before closely rereading, the essay by Moshe Machover kindly referred me to by. In it there are several passages that corroborate the last thing I wrote above. I.e.

From the viewpoint of national theory, Zionism needed a fiction that was incompatible with the accepted concepts of national theory.… [It] needed a much broader conception than the simplistic one. In this other conception…referendum of the world’s Jews superseded referendum of the population of Palestine.

As Ernest Gellner once advised his Japanese government interlocutors along the following lines (if my memory of the occasion serves me correctly: 'You're a ful, rich, successful nation. Recent conflict with others seems somewhat pointless. There are other options. Why not just ease up a little on further global economic expansionism (and frantic ideological self-justifications) and begin simply to reap the fruits of a century of successful economic development?' Translated into the Israeli context that would mean: drop the mess of messianic expropriations and regional hegemonic fury. Of course, that won't happen, except for thousands of individual Israelis who privately prefer an intelligent life of decent expectations to being endlessly coopted into justifying the cruelty, or burying the shame of an evil exercise in nationalistic hybris. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

All of these arguments still don't matter to the fact the Palestinian narrative is just as flawed and full of moral failure. The creation of Israel is an event that was inevitable. The Jewish people were spread all over the world in established communities, but always lived under threats to their lives. The only idea that existed among the Jews that could unite them all together to one place in the world, abandoning their host nations where they've already established their cultures, languages, traditions and history, is the idea of the Land of Israel. It is taught to every Jew for over two millennia. There were two options for the Jewish people to survive the last two hundred years, either to mix with the European societies, abandoning their identity or to create their own nation-state, equal among the nations where they could defend themselves together. The first option, of Jews integrating among the nations might have been more peacefull. Since integration means abandoning your identity, the Jews would have quickly lose their status as a damned people, untrusted and hated. The second option was unprecedented in human history, an entire collection of foreign communities far from apart, manage to physically relocate into a completely foreign territory of the world and using a religious history book as a guide. This wasn't supposed to be accepted by the world. A collection of citizens from all over the world communicate with letters and turn themselves into sovereigns of someone's vital territory. But in history as we know it, the pressure mounted on Europe's Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries was so high that the Jews had no time to decide whether they want to keep their faith or not and whether they want to move to Ottoman Palestine and take it for themselves or not. The Jewish settlers moved there, to be able to protect their lives, a basic human need.

The time arrived for the Jews to establish a nation state in Jerusalem, when Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans, the Europeans were fighting over who has the biggest muscles and the idea getting rid of the Jews was pretty popular. I don't need Zionist history books to tell me that I simply need to talk to my grandparents who suffered both the tragedies of the Holocaust and the tragedies of Israel, getting shot in the head by a sniper in Bar Lev's line, or having family members return home in pieces from when this line was crossed by the Egyptians, and I understand why the creation of Israel was so tragic. All of the people who established Israel lived in post-traumas, and this allowed them to do radical things to defend themselves. My grandfather arrived to Palestine after he finished his military service in the British army, to whom he joined at the age of 17 (lying about his age) upon hearing his whole extended family in Thessaloniki and Kos was killed by the Nazis. My entire family was people who fled because of war and became some soldiers in Israel's wars.

The creation of Israel wasn't perfect and many people suffered because of that, but it isn't Israel's fault. This is what they had to do to survive, and the outcome was determined by the circumstances. The British Empire played with the world as if it was a collection of wild animals. It was a time in which the new morals of the modern age were still combatting each other hegemony. In a way, these morals eventually are acceptable by all and this allows for radicals to rise up. This is the only expected outcome of a fragile peace, like the one achieved after World War I.

With the British playing dolls with entire populations, the Nazis swiftly develop into a brainwashed ultra-fascist dictatorship with the Chutzpah to decide the faith of Europe without minding killing millions, the Jews under the immidiate threat of extermniation virtually anywhere in Europe the only place they go and can trust is Israel, because no nation treats the Jews better than the Jews themselves. The Arabs of Palestine were caught in the middle of this, while their brothers in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt were caught in the middle of other fights between different world factions. The reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict matters so much is because of the Arab and Islamic nations, who overlap each other and use Palestine as means to unite themselves in a failed attempt to return their Impirial glory. This is not rare in the world with Turkey occupying both northern Cyprus and Syrian territory, Iran having proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon which are involved in sabotage operations against Sunni and pro-American factions. You have Russia, occupying Crimea and militarily supporting the independence of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, forcibly controlling Chechnya and gripping Belarus. You have China with their occupied territories in India, which are all in the border with Tibet, another nation occupied, and claims to Taiwan and huge regions of the Chinese Sea. This reality is foreign to the Europeans. They live in a post-modern world where they have redeemed themselves of their horrible colonial, fascist and communist past and now they are here to lecture anyone else.

We the Israelis and they the Palestinians are all righteous victims.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:22, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, I can't easily reply to a response which, however well intended, is not thought out. I feel like a Russian PhD student who, after 4 years work, makes a summary of his research on, say, the failures of Marxist theory to give an adequate typology of social structures attested in history, only to get back a note from his supervisor that ignores its thrust and gist and, instead, briefly trots out the party line. What you write has no trace of personal thinking. This sounds condescending, and somewhat self-regarding. I'm old, you're young. Half of my education must arise from 'Jewish' thinkers who made a profound contribution to modernity, most of yours appears to come from growing up in Israel - they're two different worlds, and not really communicable. Best wishes, Stav, stay safe, lad and consider at some stage in your long future, a deep draft of diaspora experience. Nishidani (talk) 07:19, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

• By 'Jewish' I means, as always, people in what is called a diaspora, regarded, implicitly or explicitly by the various majority social and cultural traditions (and prejudices) they were steeped in, as a minority, addressing general questions about the modern world. For a large number of them, the 'Jewish question' wasn't the question at all, as much as a foreign pathology. Nishidani (talk) 07:30, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

All I am saying that after reading more and more western opinions on our local conflict, as opposed to things I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears, I think more and more that this reality cannot be understood through western eyes. This whole conflict is a complete built upon narratives and misconceptions. I am being told by many people, it doesn't matter if it is you with your army of intellectual sources, or my father, or a 60-year-old Falafel shopowner in Jaffa. I live in the reality of the current generation and I have no idea what happened before 2001 when I trace back my deepest memories. So all of the values and histories before that only help me understand 2020. When I'll be 45 years old, and one of my children will start reading the news or go to the army, he will know better than me what's going on, even if he will not open a single history book. I was raised on a lie, that the Israeli narrative is true and the Palestinian narrative is fake. Me, and many other Israelis have decided to adopted their own narratives and there is a large group of people who realise that history matters less when it doesn't make the Cottage cheese cheaper. None of the histories in the West contribute to peace by writing books to destroy the Israeli narrative. Jews are capable of empathizing with the Palestinians, but the Arabs rarely do the same, and that's the source of the problem. It is just too convincing to be a Zionist. Add rockets, threats of BDS and international condamnations on a nation that remembers Holocausts and Pogroms and what you have is an over protective nation that doesn't give a damn about your international laws. We were and will remain the world's scapegoats. This isn't about values nor human rights, this is an intellectual tournament about how the world should look like, with no regard to how it really looks right now. When the rest of the world will get the same attention that Israel gets, things might be better.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 17:07, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, let's have a conversation. Not now. I'm watching Peacock at the moment, purely on the strength of Susan Sarandon's advertised appearance in it. You might reconsider in the meantime what on earth you mean by 'western'. Anything I say on these matters has been said by Jews in the diaspora, or professors at TAU and other universities, i.e. all I can give you is part of the 'Jewish' narrative that has no political weight, and is not sexy. 'Western'/'Israel' as opposed terms is, for me, as in other national narratives using the us/outsiders binome, meaningless. Nishidani (talk) 19:42, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Well no. Pointless continuing this because you've just defined yourself as a middle eastern redneck with a contempt for learning, a very peculiar position within a culture one of whose shining ornaments for millennia has been love of scholarship.

In my tradition, we were raised to laugh when the answer to the question, 'Why are the Irish like mushrooms?' was 'Because we're raised in the dark and fed on bullshit.' After a trip back there, my father said:'Never trust the local Irish on matters of history. They're too fond of blarney to ever get the past straight.' I've found that that is an excellent rule-of-thumb for every people I've lived among, and, as a writer you like, Yuval Harari puts it (essentially respinnning Ernest Renan's thesis that, 'L'oubli, et je dira même l'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d'une nation' (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation 1992 p.41), with Benedict Anderson's concept nations as 'imagined communities'), societies are functional to the degree they are bound by, incarcerated within their foundational just-so stories or myths that have no objective reality and

'There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down or our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison' (Sapiens p.133)*

Harari also wrote:-

Having so recently been one of the underdogs in the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties about our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty leap.' (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015 p.13)

Make the obvious substitutions: 'underdog' with Jewish people, the 'savanna' Europe, 'over-hasty leap' (Herzl's ignorant assumption that one could jump out of a diaspora and into a nation 95% of which was constituted by another people without engendering as its conditio vivendi endless violence rather than a modus convivendi, and 'historical calamities' with a state condemned by its choices to endless warfare within its asserted borders, and enmity against all outsiders who don't admire one's achievement and lack the appropriate clan and blood credentials, or if they have them, betray the good herd by criticizing its shepherds).

I find Zionists and their stories particularly boring because I read the Bible as a boy, and nothing in Israel's history, for one, is news. If one has a life to live, rather than being a piece of biological tissue yarning time passes through uncomprehendingly, the minimal criterion must be to strive to wake up from what James Joyce called 'the nightmare of history'. That is what the Bible taught me: history is a neurosis of an eternal drudgery of repetitive recursion of archetypes of experience. Everything that will happen in this context has its precedents there,** meaning those who regulate their lives by its residue, wittingly or not, accept that existence must consist of being a marionette in a puppet theatre's plots, scripted by unknown people millenia ago. It's utterly predictable (like much history generally). The only thing distressing about it is the innovative crassness and stupidity its defensiveness, at times vindictive, a times ressentimentale(Nietzsche), blots the modern Jewish tradition with, by associating strategically Israel with the culmination of, or essential redemption of, Judaism. They are two different things: Jewishness and 'Israeliness': the former is comfortable anywhere in the world, with a condign reveling in the plurality of identities: the latter an emotive redneck contempt for anything smacking of a metropolitan spirit. Nothing unique there - Israel marks the lost of Jewish diasporic 'uniqueness' in exchange for becoming a sad theatrical rehearsal of the usual fate of nationalisms that have plagued the world for the last two hundred years.

I woke this morning expecting a conversation, which means a step-by-step assumption of responsibility for the logical and factual basis of whatever one asserts, rather than an exchange of opinions. But I can see it is pointless. You just keep pouring out trite herd-like memes shorn of anything resonant of an interest in reasoning. I admit to a sense of disappointment, not for myself. You're young and bright, and to see someone anticipate their future on the basis of a premise - we will do what we like, so fuck'em while dismissing the achievements of 'Jewish' scholarship as 'western' crap doesn't augur well. So, rather than begin to tease out the assumptions, I've just written an essay summing mine, which are of course opinionable as well, but, unlike your's, they can be logically and factually defended. They do not squirm with contempt, enmity, resentment or defensiveness, as everything above does. I wish you well, nonetheless. Everyone who is young can, if they so opt, be different from what is expected of them, or what they are taught to expect from themselves. If you do come round to the idea that serious argument can have a heuristic value, and I am around, by all means, drop a note here. Otherwise, good luck.Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

• This metaphor has a racy splendor about it, but of course, a compost of a Foucaultian reading of Kant, breaks down, like much of Harari's bolder claims, looks slick the moment you examine its assumptions.
  • Last night, as I said, I watched the film Peacock, and the experience underwrites my generalization. From the moment very early on when the protagonist lifts up a board to get at a box hidden there, and glances up at a window on the second floor, the whole plot was obvious, and therefore the following hour and a half a tedious dénouement. Because that framed moment was an allusion to Hitchcock's Psycho, meaning the man would be a crossdresser - his own 'wife'- and the two would play out a dialectic of roles, masculine and feminine, from a single distraught past. Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

My immediate instinct to almost everything you write is defending what you discredit, and calling out your sources is the method I use. You have probably read more books than I will ever be able to, since you had the privilage to have no cellphone and videogames as a child so your concentration is much stronger than mine. This is why my comments are much more abstract and impulsive than yours, my opinions are based on the feelings I have for the things I read and see since I can barely remember them. When talking about Israel, there is a paradox. On the one hand, I see things with my eyes and on the other hand, sources say otherwise. Not very smart, not very intellectual, but that's how things go in my head.

We both share the same worldview. When I studied chemistry in 9th grade I realize everything is bullshit and that we are all just dancing molecules, which is even "worse" than Harari's outrageous opinion that we are no different than other living organisms. For me, the only real Jews are those who are found in tombs from the Iron Age in the southern West Bank. I have so much goy blood I must look like a pig already. But I live in a society and you have grand claims about this society, about its history and about its ideas. When I call out "western" sources (when I say western I generally mean the western part of WWII's allies in the European theatre) it is not because they are wrong in what they say. It is because I see things worth talking for hours that none of the westerners will ever see. I use the same amount of intellectual care you use for Zionism when I look at the modern Israeli society, which is completely foreign to you. My reality is the reality of 20-year-old Israeli people and I unintellectually chose to dismiss anything else because all I want is to look forward.

It is hard to truely respond to all of your comments, becuase there are so many and each one triggers so many fuses in my mind that my response goes far away from your actual comment. This doesn't prove to me these discussions are worthless, but maybe they are frustrating indeed.

I feel deep love to my surrounding and I want to protect that with myths and I cannot engage in a conversation that deals with my myths when there are millions of others. Israel is a shitty state that lies and occupies. I can only prove many other states are shittier, and that the society created by these lies is actually a pretty decent one. I enjoy the ability to play war in the West Bank and then dance with foreigners in the middle of the desert to repetative electronic music in 145 beats per minute with psychoactive substances in my blood, and then turn rocks and found pieces of pottery and make grand claims to contribute to my myths. It is hard for me one when your comments try to prove all of these are the outcome of a sin.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:35, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

I lived in Israel for several months, and was a 'Zionist' for more than a decade afterwards, so your contrast between the intellectual outsider and the local observer is a bit wrong-footed. While there I never read a book, for the only time in my life. I worked and observed. And I have Israeli correspondents who see exactly the same things you see, did army service, and came out with utterly different impressions, and who retain deep family and personal connections with that country. When I've visited I sit and observe all sorts of things: a black Beta Israel guard with intimidating wrap-round cop glasses scrutinizing crowds of them alien blow-ins -Palestinias with that stupid belief they are native to his country, to spot 'suspicious' activity or those gay bands of young twentyish girls in military uniform bouncing happily, with their Uzis on the ready, and exchanging jokes as they walk through the Arab souk near the Western Wall - that's meant to humiliate the Palestinian shopkeepers I suppose; or listening to Palestinian hoteliers over a beer telling me the technical difficulties endlessly thrown up by the Israeli bureaucracy to make their entrepreneurial activities even more difficult; . . .

I don't know why you think I am implying you are a son of some crime or sin. Most nations have massive crimes on their record book - genocide in Australia, England's genocide against the Irish centuries back; the refusal to acknowledge the fundamental role the enslavement of Afro-Americans played in the building of the American economy, together with the genocidal policies towards Indians; Russia's genocide in the Ukraine; China's 26-50 million dead from 1959-1964 when Mao decided to ignore Soviet advisors and go for the 'great leap'; Belgium's genocide in the Congo; the French genocides to secure Algeria from 1831 down to the 1870s; Germany's holocaust etc.etc.etc. No Australian, American, Englishman, Frenchwoman, Chinese or Russian, let along Germans who are now raised in those countries wear any congenital 'sin' for the crimes of their forefathers. There is nothing worse than watching people agonize about the sins of their forebears, for which they, being born later, bear no responsibility. The only moral responsibility one has is to understand what happened, and see to it, in so far as an individual can, that at least one will not repeat the crime or be complicit in it. My parents told us as children, stories of the violence our forebears wrought on indigenous peoples, as well as telling us of the horrors of the famine of 1845-49, and earlier Irish history's long record of genocidal oppression - perhaps a third of the population died as a result of English military strategies in just twelve years.

These two elements engendered neither guilt nor enmity, any more than living as a Catholic minority in a Protestant area, and being stoned as children by Protestant kids as we walked past their school to ours, and not being allowed to set up any commercial practice unless as publicans, was spun as a story that we, the proverbial offspring of Irish 'apes' as the common 19thy century meme had it, were historically hard done by, feeding into some perduring clannish sense that we were history's victims and had some unbeatable superior claim on the world.* You didn't whinge about the past, or wallow in anguish - good parents teach one how to cope, the art of canny survival and to get above the pettiness of resentment, the most infantile if widespread malady one can be afflicted with, aside from jealousy. We are, lad, responsible for the future, not for our forebear's past(s), though the two are linked. And in whatever historic shithole one is born and raised in, love of landscape, if one has it (many don't) is an unquestionable right. It doesn't matter what the history of that landscape was, (Remodelling the landscape to put fucking conifers everywhere instead of respecting the natural ecology since ancient times, is a stupid example of what is called ecological imperialism.

My primary aesthetic allegiance to the Australian bush landscape is something independent of my sense of the devastation colonialism wrought on the Aborigines. By happenstance, we grew up in a relatively natural bush setting, and even ate grubs, as did Aborigines, caught under the bark. We learnt that the traditional landscape we loved was known with extraordinary intimacy by its former inhabitants, and took on board whatever we could learn from them. The same would apply to any Jewish Israeli in their landscape, regardless of the history. It's a pity that Zionism persists in being so unaesthetically Eurocentric, and has never learnt to graft into its sensibility a biblical attachment to the land as it was. I first had this thought while sitting in a trench and watching a Gazan farmer plough his patch of the strip with a donkey, after a day linking up irrigation pipes on a kibbutz, work which made on see every day, dozens of dead birds in the fields, killed off by toxic accumulations of pesticide.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

• By the way, you made many strange assertions earlier which I ignored. But I'd like to correct one at least.

There were two options for the Jewish people to survive the last two hundred years, either to mix with the European societies, abandoning their identity or to create their own nation-state, equal among the nations where they could defend themselves together. The first option, of Jews integrating among the nations might have been more peaceful. Since integration means abandoning your identity, the Jews would have quickly lose their status as a damned people, untrusted and hated.

I guess you got that 'hystery(a)' out of some local comic book. After Napoleon French and Italian Jews, to name just two, were not 'damned and hated'. Of the former's condition after 1808, there was a proverbial expression:'heureux comme un juif en France’. Jews were not 'required' to abandon their identity: they were recognized as a distinct confession with perfect rights to continue to maintain their culture and observances as long as these did not conflict with the laws all French people were obliged to honour. Again, you characterize as a Jewish dilemma what was the major dilemma facing one of four European Jewish realities (Bernard Wasserstein), that of the Jews of eastern Europe up to Russia's borders. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels, the essential goal of pre-war Yiddish-speaking Jews in the east was to migrate to America, not Palestine, and there is historical evidence popular sentiment preferred America as Zion to Palestine, which suffered a net outflow of Jews after WW1. Your picture is patched up from what happened to Jews essentially in Eastern Europe. The survival of Jews was guaranteed by the global diaspora no fascist power could ever reach: they constituted 3.3% of the population of the United States on the eve of WW2, for example, and had successful unthreatened communities all over the world, including the 1,000,000 in Islamic countries. The percentage of the Jewish population annihilated in the Holocaust is roughly proportionate to that of the Irish population Cromwell devastated. Again, your sense that hatred and distrust for Jews was universal just ignores so much regional realities. Take Zeev Jabotinsky's testimony:

'Not only was anti-Semitism absent in Italy then (1898-1900), but in general there was no specific, clear attitude towards Jews, as there was no definite attitude toward bearded people. Years later I came to know that among the members of my most intimate circle there were also two or three Jews. At the time of my studies in Rome, it did not occur to me to ask who they were, and neither did they ask me.' (Vladimir Jabotinsky,Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life, Wayne State University Press, 2015 p.52).

Note that being Jewish there and in many other places (I know. I grew up in a similar environment where no one advertised their ethnicity) was purely a private matter, not even thought worthy of mentioning or, if in the company of another Jew, a point to establish some ethnic solidarity.

If you read the biographies of Arthur Koestler and Eric Hobsbawm you will note that both were raised in a city (Vienna) notorious for its virulent anti-Semitism, yet neither of their families had any personal experience of it. Koestler's attitudes about his identity changed radically and despotically when he was blindsided by reading an hysterical Zionist account of the putative outburst of murders, castrations, blindings and rape of Jews in Palestine during the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. The reality was nothing like that. He adopted a myth that led him to espouse Jewish terrorism.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Your Zionist experience is still different than my experience. I grew up in the beginning of the smartphone generation, and while soldiers 20 years ago saw Palestinian rioters wearing traditional Palestinian clothing, I saw them wearing masks of internet memes and see my face on a popular Arabic post in Facebook, where the rioters would celebrate their "victory" over the occupation forces. I had girls in my battalions get a follow request from a Palestinian from the nearby refugee camp who would go on to ask them for nude pictures. The past is being forgotten and is only preserved in written language, limited in its ability to describe human scenarios and open to interpretation. Your description of my reality feels too poetic. The 14 million people who live in this geopolitical unit are a bunch of scum compared to those who live in Europe. The European roots of this country are being pushed away. Raised on European values, I used to feel bad for that. But the more I spend time all over the country I realize a society should be judged by its current state. I judge Israel's society all the time, out of a desire to make things better. But the judgment that comes from the world doesn't share the same intentions as mine. It feels like the judgement of Israel and Zionism comes to prove one's virtue and not from a real care for the Israelis, the same care that is easily provided to the weak and poor Palestinians. (Can't say half of my comments don't sound like virtue-signaling, but I try to keep that limited to my own experiences).

In my dreams we are all Canaanites, Jews and Arabs together. I look at a map of Palestine from 1870 and it feels much more authentic than the current map of Israel. Our country was not shaped natrually through human processes in a spesific natural environments, such that will make Megiddo a perfect place for the center of a kingdom. But on the other hand, it proves how much humanity has changed and the model of Israel's development should hint on how societies will develop in the near future. So even though there is not enough respect from the Jewish people to the history of their land, I don't think that the Hasmoneans did. After all, it seems that much of the stories of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites was written to cement a much later reality. Israel, as opposed to the bible and Judaism, is not authentic, but so is the bible as opposed to Israel of ancient times.

As for the hysteria for Jews, it doesn't come from a comic book. My grandmother was raised by Polish and Bessarabian parents in Paris. These are the stories I recall. One of her early teachers would refuse to pronounce her foreign Polish name, as it was too difficult for a French to do. Maybe the French were racist toward slavic people, it is the early 20th century after all. But when studying math she would get humiliated for knowing the answer. She was told with a dismissive voice "of course you'd know the answer". They also had a neighbor who would avoid looking at them most of the time and in the rest of the time would make sarcastic comments on the background. Again, maybe she is racist towards them pollacks I can't know for sure, but it all changed when their next-door neighbor told them that this woman that lives above them and likes to put her wet laundry above my family's dry laundry just to antagonize, has told Nazi officers about my family's background. This is the reality for my French grandmother. Her family members in Poland were less fortunate, and so were my grandfather's family in Thessaloniki. But it didn't end in the Holocuast, becuase both of my grandfathers were born in Egypt and while one moved to Palestine in 1947, the other stayed with his successful toy company. But in 1956, both he, and the relatives of my other grandfather, were expelled from the country. So hysteria or not, no one wants to enjoy any of the experiences above. Most of my extended family don't live in Israel, and they do just fine, but they all have identity issues. My french cousins don't feel French nor Jewish. They feel "French-Jewish". For them, it is enough to visit Israel every year (and for their father, it is enough to evade tax laws in France by buying apartments in Israel) to be Jewish, but they both seem like they are going to marry non-Jewish men and while I only want them to have happy lives, still I wonder what identity will their grandsons have.

Zionism has claimed a monopoly on the Jewish people. It is indeed a problem, but here it is seen as a righteous battle that is either fueled by one's belief in YHWH or just for the right to feel part of something. I see it mostly with Russian Jews, many of whom are far from the traditional description of a "Jew", but still they feel connected to these people becuase this is what Israel does to you. It brainwashes you to believe you are in a good place, and with all of its drawbacks, it is still one of the world's best places to live in. There is a common saying in Israel, "Ein Li Eretz Aheret" (I have no other land), and it is true in the minds of many. So deconstruction of these ideas, with respect for the history as we know it (we were murdered, massacred, raped, looted and genocided), are treated with hysterical opposition. This hysterical opposition is enough to blur ones humane morals which are educated in Israel and lead him to enjoy blowing kneecaps on the Gaza border. I won't lie, the first time I hit a human being who hurled a molotov cocktail at me with a rubber bullet or how you like to call it "rubber-coated steal bullet", I smiled, becuase the reality I lived in has corrupted my values and as an authority of my own feelings, I've decided to accept it. Is is the right thing to do? I don't know. But I know that with or without me, kneecaps meet rubber bullets every day. I voted against the annexation of the West Bank in the last elections, that's the most I can do as a citizen. I take action against things aimed towards me, as a secular person living in Israel, but I don't take action to stop Palestinian suffering, that's not my business. All I can do is take action to prevent Israelis from taking action.

I want for once that the non-Zionist world will change its tone towards the Zionists, and will allow a better discussion, the same way I want the Israeli government to change the tone towards the Palestinians and the same way I change my tone towards all of those "leftist pro-Palestinian antisemites in Wikipedia" which I've been warned not to even speak to by many of the Israeli users. Recently I was even blamed for being a fifth column for that and another email I received for "collaborating with the enemy" has led me to remove my picture from my Userpage.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 02:58, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

But the judgment that comes from the world doesn't share the same intentions as mine.

As I implied. I think you need a diaspora experience. Reading newspapers every day, I see in Israeli media every incident, mostly minor, of anti-Semitism, or anything that can be construed as such even if it is no such thing (Bill de Blasio's recent tweet about 2,500 Haredis gathering at a funeral in violation of restrictions on everyone foregathering publically), blown up and discussed intensely in terms of a collective threat to Jews. I read away, imagining the impact of this incessant alarmism - every storm in a teacup exaggerated to look as though on every occasion we are dealing with something like Hurricane Harvey. The ancillary effect is to make all 'goys' in the public domain so reticently fidgety about negative fallback about anything they might say regarding Israel or incidents in which Jews happen to figure that they are reduced to an extreme form of self-policing to ensure they are politically reelectable in terms of PCorrectness for the affected constituency. People who don't toe the line have huge forces marshaled against them to make them disappear politically (Corbyn, regardless of his actual merits as a politician) simply because on a single issue, I/P, they failed to conserve a prudent reticence or pay lip-service to the standard memes. The most disgraceful trend in this fascist intimidation is the extreme harassment meted out to any Jewish person who might 'step out of line' on these topics. I've heard or read of innumerable cases of such threats since I was first told by an academic friend of one instance in the late 1980s.

In the real world, (excluding the US)this induced paranoid atmosphere is not fed with anything like that alarmism. You have blips, occasional uproars, but there are far too many different problems, ethnic groups, political interests, to cover to allow an obsessive focus on any one community's complaints. In Italy, in the 1980s one used to see regular intelligent coverage, in which a Palestinian and a Jew/Israeli discussed the conflict. In the last 2 decades, Palestinians have disappeared, coverage of their story only emerges in reports of a terrorist event 'in Israel', the International Holocaust Remembrance Day has a lead up for several days, and over a month, every night you get films or documentaries on the holocaust. Israel has been promoted to one of the key countries international reportage covers, from Jerusalem. A huge effort has been made on both public and private channels to showcase Israel in its best colours. Advertising for tourism in Israel is intense. As soon as the covid virus came out, Italian experts from all over the world became regular faces, as well as that of a scientist from an Israeli kibbutz-based pharmaceutical group, who said Israeli had a cutting edge remedy. So the country's image is extremely positive here, with very little negative news. The reality of the occupation and all that implies is a dead issue, though any incident of middle eastern/Arab dysfunctionality gets major coverage. This is true of Europe in general.

I've been a life-long student of paranoia (indeed my best friend was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic,* something that never got in the way of over two decades of an intensely conflictual (discursively) friendship!), and my impression is that the mechanisms are all in place with regard to Zionism, anti-Semitism (it exists, but nothing like what any reader knows of the atmosphere prior to WW2), Israel etc. In real life, throughout the diaspora, Jewish people participate in the fruits of the most successful epoch in history for themselves and their communities, whatever the mediatic rumour-mill mongers go on harping about. Unlike the circumstances in Israel, they do not have constant prods about threats which are inevitable for a small country most of whose massive defense resources are invested in defending the country from the consequences of an occupation it has refused, politically, to forego dreaming of converting into full annexation and, ineludibly, an apartheid reality. This can worry the edges of diasporic Jews who naturally think Israel's achievement touches an important part of their sense of themselves, but nowhere to the obsessive extent it does with Israeli Jews forced willy-nilly to live in a world which, by its ideological obsession with equating Jewishness with just a patch of biblical territory, cannot live up to its foundational dream without accepting that part of it will be a perennial nightmare because half of the population considers the fulfillment of that dream an incubus.

As regards your family anecdotes, remember (as you treasure them) that anyone belonging to any ethnic minority in most of the world will tell one endless stories of the amount of prejudice they had to wear from the majority. I heard a motherlode of similar remarks directed at 'abos/boongs, pollacks, 'fairies/freckle punchers', spics, spags, nignogs, wogs, dagos, gooks, sheep shaggers, huns, frogs, slantyeyes, nips, as well as the Oyrish etc.etc., and not only yids (in Australian slang however that was far rarer than the far less hostile rhyming slang 'four-by-two' (a carpenter's measure)'. It too easily forgotten or overlooked in some quarters that anti-Semitism is just the 'accelerated grimace' (Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pt.2 of a universal pathology -prejudice - that affects us all.

There's far more in the world that ethnicity, politics, and the like. When young, a passion for life's diapason of potential interests and opportunities should take pride of place. We all have several dimensions and one casual nationality should not be allowed, whatever the provocations, to hog the limelight and transform us into monomaniacal worrywarts. Take a leaf out of Daniel Barenboim's book. He's been an Israeli since 1952, has a home in Jerusalem, but also fully lives the many perspectival lives his background and career have allowed him to take on board: though intensely Israeli, the world is his oyster, to the point that he is proud also of having a Palestinian identity.

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

Compare Zeev Sternhell

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

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

And no doctrine has a monopoly on the Jewish people, Zionism, least of all. They fortunately defy definition, despite the best efforts of Nazis, fascists, arseholes of all descriptions, and, on the other side of the spectrum, Zionists themselves, to impose one.

Best regardsNishidani (talk) 10:17, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

• Just for the record I think it was one of the fathers of Italian psychoanalysis, Cesare Musatti (of Venetian Jewish background by the way), who wrapped up my best mate's 'cure' by declaring to him that while his 'symptoms' fitted the theory of paranoid schizophrenia', the theory simply must be wrong in his case because my friend managed to live a perfectly functional life, was extremely gifted in whatever he tackled, could turn the tables on those who were delegated to analyse him, and be a highly creative artist. He was just 'normal' in a completely different way than most others. And at that, his spiritual 'father' augured his 'son' a confident return to his daily world, free of any anxieties about his being totally different from everyone else. Meaning? Never let your identity be gridlocked or straightjacketed by the stereotypes of a given social mould, psychological profile, cultural taxonomy or tribal classification, no matter how cogent they might appear to be.Nishidani (talk) 17:11, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

I read Barenboim's article, There isn't much to disagree, neither there is too much to fundamentally oppose what you are saying. As I've said we all share the same basic understanding of humanity even though I am much less educated and experienced than you. Barenboim states his is a long-term optimist. I am a long-term pessimist. Barenboim will probably not read the news in 2035, but I will, and I will also read them in 2075. The main source of my pessimism is the time I spend with people my age and hearing their opinions becuase they will outlive you, or Barenboin, or my father or the Falafel shop owner. Young Israelis have more access to information than ever, but the way media platforms work cause them to be exposed to what sells the most, and sadly, anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist views sell the most today.

The winds are blowing right. I am being told the rift between left and right in Israel is still not as deep as in the 80s or 90s, when Emil Grunzweig and Rabin were murdered by Zionist terrorists, but when I speak with young people in Israel I see a large difference between older populations. Most of the young Israelis today read their news on Facebook and Instagram. This isn't so problematic, the regular media outlets, Channel 1, 12, 13, Ynet, Walla! and others just post their regular content on Facebook. But the problem is when the new media platforms are used by radicals. I wonder if many people in the West who read about Israel know Yoav Eliassi, known by his stage name "The Shadow". He has 130,000 followers on Instagram and 430,000 on Facebook. Most of his audience are young people. His views are extreme and outrageous, but he is seen as a saint in Israel, because "he speaks his truth". The right-wing is being criticized on media, and therefore many people in the right dismiss the media as leftist. This allows people like Eliassi to rise, because the media in Israel is a free-market and there is a demand for non-leftist media, and Eliassi provides that and uses provocation as a promoter. He is not the only one. Countless others take advantage of the media to spread radical views that wouldn't get a voice on the media because of their extreme manner.

For the younger population, being right-wing is sexy while being left-wing is treason. While the non-Haredi/Arab population of Israel is split roughly 50-50 on democracy versus Jewish nationalism, the younger population have mostly preferred the latter, because it is sexier. This is all a result of the right in Israel trying to stay in power. The Israeli political system has different camps, the Arabs, the far-left (Meretz), the center-left (Labour and the various centrist parties), the right (Likud), the far-right (settler parties) and the Haredim. This fragmented reality forces the Likud to side with radical groups such as the Haredim and the settlers and surrender to their demands. The media criticizes it, so the Likud dismisses the media as leftist. The law system calls out this union's corruption and unlawful actions, so the Likud tries to weaken the law system. Recently the Knesset had a majority against Netanyahu, so the Likud simply closed the Knesset (blaming the coronavirus). Israel is becoming less and less democratic every day.

I have accepted the fact, after 2009, 2013, 2015, 2019a, 2019b, and 2020, that this cannot be dealt with force. The left in Israel opposes violent resistance, such as the killing of Grunzweig or Rabin, but it is very militaristic in its intellectual opposition to the right, using every tool other than a grenade and a pistol against the right. The result is that the right is crushing the left, just like Israel is crushing the Palestinians. And just like Israel defends itself from Western countries, the United Nations and international law, the right defends itself from the media, the legal system and the legislative bodies.

When I was a commander I received 10 of the most undisciplined soldiers. I was enlisted the same day as them so I had no seniority over them. They already had 5 other commanders and knew their job better them me (the area north of Jericho). At first, I wanted to fight them with discipline, but the more I dug into their minds I realize it ain't going to work. I recognized that the army is a broken system and I can't punish people for not submitting to a broken system. Instead, I sympathized with them and did unspeakable things for their sake, things that would put me in jail. The result was amazing, they were faithful and obedient. Not perfect, but better than what they were on day 1. In the meantime I struggled with my commanders. Most of them were self-loving idiots who cared more about their authority than the actual job they came to do. So to them I spoke in a professional manner, I put on a show. I always took responsibility for things I've done and even though I was seen by many as an undisciplined commander, I was also seen as someone with his own mind who understands what is going on. The result? I was tasked with commanding many operations, even though I was a commander of the lowest rank. I was allowed to chose my men and plan my operations. I was invited to my battalion staff meeting and the high-ranked officers wanted to hear what I had to say. I was even offered to take the position of a platoon commander even though I was an NCO. I gave up my values for my soldiers, and I lied to my commanders and disobeyed their orders. The result was I earned their trust.

I belive the same should be applied to solving conflicts in the Middle East. Rather than calling out Zionism or the Palestinians, the international community needs to earn our trust. Threats of BDS and excessive attention to every single thing we do in international spaces aren't earning our trust. The ultimate result is more dead Palestinians and more settlements.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:03, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

My mind works analogically, with the result that nearly all pleas for exceptionalism fall in a deaf ear, or rather, they catch my eye which starts to squint at the fine print to see exactly what privileges of exemption from the civil rules of human conduct are being sought. I watched the Whoopi Goldberg/Sissy Spacek film The Long Walk Home about the Montgomery bus boycott last week. In your perspective, the African-Americans should not have boycotted the bus system which was run by the whiteman's council and obligated them to sit in the back seats: they should have exercised some Palestinian sumud, kept their nose to the grindstone of laborious humiliation, waiting for the northern liberals ('westerners' in your idiom), amongst whom in the fight against US apartheid Jews Jewish Americans played a seminal role, to win or indeed earn the trust of the complacent racist middle class oppressing black people in the South, and gently persuade them over another several decades to be more amenable. The important thing to work on would be, not those black folks' plight, but the anguish and compensative aggression of their masters. I could add a dozen more off the cuff. Israel has made its bug-ridden bed, and must lie on (and about) it. If you go on to the university, ask around for a course on philosophy which parses Hegel's Herr und Knecht dialectic. The whole problem is all there in those brief pages. Nishidani (talk) 11:56, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would advocate making peace with Israel, because it won't be peace on Israel's terms, but on UN terms, which are unfavorable for Israel. They would have a narrow country with half of its population Arab. When Israel will mistreat its Arab population, that would be the time to strike and cause the Zionist entity to collapse. Instead of fueling the paranoic Israel with threats of war, it is better to have them let their guard down. This is the ultimate PLO plan described by rightwingers, that at first they will make peace with Israel and then they will flood it with refugees and win the war. Today the Arab countries with the most influence on Israel are Egypt and Jordan. Israel refrains from doing many things for the sake of those countries. Without peace with Jordan, I believe that the al-Aqsa mosque would've been stormed by Messianic Jews more often. And all of Israel's ceasefires with Gaza were mediated with Egypt. If the Arab world will share interests with Israel, it will be easier for them to pressure Israel to do whatever they desire. Look at what Netanyahu is doing. Seeing that the relations with Europe are not so great, Netanyahu chooses instead of convincing France or the UK that Israel is right, to ally Israel with every single country that wishes to do so. From the Trump administration to third-world dictatorships in Africa, it doesn't matter. What's the point in making peace with Syria, when you can have Saudi Arabia as your friend? Screw em', they don't like us. As long as Israel's allies won't pressure Israel into doing things it doesn't desire, it doesn't need to care about the demands of the rest of the nations. Many Palestinians actually want this, they want to make peace with the Jews as a technical way of getting freedom of movement in their land and have national rights. This way they could get what they want without fighting wars they will lose. They believe with a virtuous smile on their faces that they can redeem the Palestinian nation by having one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 12:53, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Of course, this cynical use of peace should be used only when real peace is not achievable, which is in 2020 I believe is the situation for many things from secular-Haredi rift to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we can't call draw and make peace, we should win with peace. The less battles, dead bodies and violations of human rights, the better.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:33, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

As earlier, there is just too much there that is not thought through to respond to. I'll just take the first line.

If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would advocate making peace with Israel

That is a factual error but one that lets slip your POV, that ‘Israel’ has been Palestine since the year dot. Israel did not exist in 1947 so no Arab leader could make peace with it. The 9 Arab countries directly concerned with the issue for cultural, political and religious leaders had their votes trounced by votes from 13 South American and Caribbean countries with no connection whatsoever to Palestine. What you should have written was:

If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would have accepted giving up to 30% of the population of Palestine - almost all recent immigrants from Europe - 56% of the land, allowing them political control over a territory of which they owned 6% of the property, and I would have told my Arab brothers that, despite being 66% of the population, and owning or working 94% of the land, they should forsake their land, wealth and livelihoods in order to make life comfortable for European refugees. This deal of a lifetime is ‘’unfavourable’ to Israel!

Of course, the Arab leader in question would be arguing this politically impossible proposition knowing full well that the United States and European countries consistently refused to allow large scale Jewish refugee immigration into their countries, before and after the Holocaust. The problem they created or abetted, was something Palestinians would have to pay for, perhaps with the connivance of some jolly Arab leader with a yen for political suicide.

I could respond to the rest (Jordan is not interested in Palestinians. Its politics are grounded on the geostrategic necessities of preserving its monarchy against a large Palestinian population in its own territory. Egypt is not interested in Palestinians: the vicious thug ruling it is interested only in cutting a deal with Israel on the gas reserves in Gaza’s offshore waters, which technically are Palestinian property etc.,etc. Arguing like this is pointless, except over a beer in a pub, when the day after, one gets on with real life once the hangover is gone.

Stop worrying. You've got a career to prepare for, perhaps university studies, and the future is a great unknown. You mentioned that your own generation thinks with FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram and don't give a fuck for serious history. In short, that modern Israeli identity, very much like that everywhere, is based on social media contacts. Knowledge can be a burden, freighted with the sadness of insight. Ultimately, if pursued, it pays back its suitor or sutler. For to master a subject requires solitude, while familiarity leads one to a sense of gratitude for the masters who illuminated one's way, and the product is an unmanufactured, inexpensive happiness out of kilter with the packaged variety one is expected to take on board as a consumer. In sociological terms, there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of people one knows through such virtual media, and well-being and, I might add, using one's intelligence creatively. A good family, a handful of serious friends, and a leisure to pursue with curiosity what the best of mankind has thought, or thinks, painted, composed or invented, far outweighs any prospects of a return on investment from one's time-consuming absorption in the dispersive flutter of post modern media and their technologies of mass distraction. If I may make a suggestion, put these mega political and identitarian worries on the back burner and burrow away, while on duty, into learning to read the physical landscape and its history as read by geographers, botanists, historians (prior to this tragedy) That you do so shows in some excellent topical edits you've made. Then, well, graduate in a subject that energizes your curiosity. One only knows who one is, if one is lucky, decades down the track, not in early youth, so identity as the search for national respect, is a waste of time, too messy. Respect, if it is worth anything, is, ultimately, self-respect (self-integrity), not something won from others. Nishidani (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

I talk hypothetically of course. If I were an Arab leader I were an Arab leader, not a recently released soldier from Tel Aviv. The point is that the Arabs chose war. They lost, no one can deny that. The problem is insisting on keeping the war going. I kindly ask the Palestinians to stop their war because it ain't bringing them anywhere. This request wouldn't be necessary if a pro-Two State solution government was in office. I cant take responsibility for my government actions because I've already voted against it three times in one year. The Palestinians are strangled in occupation and Israel is strangled in Democracy. While the anti-Netanyahu camp wants to end this with legal tools, the right wants to change the rules and give up basic democratic values. Maybe this is a good time for the Palestinians to do what Israel doesn't and state their refusal to continue to live under occupation. I dream about thinking outside the box, demanding Israel to annex all of the West Bank and provide citizenship to all Palestinians. Or otherwise have Israeli Arabs build outposts with Israeli flags in the West Bank. Challenge the Israeli occupation without blood. Confuse the enemy. Make the Israelis tilt their head and think about who they are really, just like Israel did to them when it sat on the side when Hamas and Fatah fought over Gaza in 2007.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 23:43, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

Demanding territory back and reparations is too obvious. Instead of proving to the world Israel is mistreating them, prove to the Israelis they are mistreating them. When Palestinians harrass the Israeli civilian sector, it doesn't work. --Bolter21 (talk to me) 00:10, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Stav, you have consistently walked past every statement that asks you to think something through. Conversation worthy of the name is not a pastime: that was the innovation Socrates introduced. Zionism, like any other ethnic, national or collective system of 'thinking' -slavophilism, fascism, falangism, peronism, commumism, Maoism, is an ideology - the only one that, in the West, still has street credibility. An ideology is a straightjacket and its exponents don't need to think - their thinking has been done for them. So in walking past my analogy to raise another point, all you did was throw a standard gambit fished out from the 'answer goys' queries about Israel' texstbook or supermarket, taking off the shelf the Abba Eban option:'The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. You didn't even have to dust it off: since it is in constant circulation. When I translated what it effectively would mean:-

If I were an Arab leader in 1947, I would have accepted giving up to 30% of the population of Palestine - almost all recent immigrants from Europe - 56% of the land, allowing them political control over a territory of which they owned 6% of the property, and I would have told my Arab brothers that, despite being 66% of the population, and owning or working 94% of the land, they should forsake their land, wealth and livelihoods in order to make life comfortable for European refugees. This deal of a lifetime is 'unfavourable’ to Israel!

You ignore that implication because to understand anything in history requires empathy, to put yourself in someone's boots. All ideologies train the peoples they are targeted to indoctrinate with (a)hypersensitivity to grievances affecting the ingroup, and conversely (b) obtuseness about the same grievances one might happen to observe with or indeed inflict on, anyone in the vast outgroup. My mother whenever, witnessing some tragedy hitting others, would utter:'There but for the grace of God go I.' The ideological reaction is:'They got what was coming'; 'they asked for it'; 'It's their fault'. Its most refined form was the Golda Meir gambit, which your prose also echoes with:'’We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.'*

A Zionist is raised, like all citizens in any ideologically swamped culture or society, to parrot memes, or tailor elegant variations on the standard clichés produced to 'manufacture consent'. To talk to one is like meeting someone who, when one poses a question, replies in such a manner one realizes the person is a medium, the conversation a séance, and the medium is channeling dictums of the dead, memorized from some standard script worked out before hand to cover any imaginable inquiry. So it's pointless my countering your gambit pawning the countermove of citing Arab Peace Initiative, repeated in the 2007 Arab League summit as a countermove. Despite the fact that these initiatives illustrate that Abba Eban's dictum reflected what Israel does, you'd talk your way past the analogy.

The essence of Zionist attitudes was set forth by Jabotinsky. We have to smash Palestinians' desire, identical to ours, for a homeland, and successively humiliate them until they crumble before the fait accompli. Once we are masters, we can talk with them, and compromise a bit.

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future . .My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. . .Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home,of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuseto admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. . .We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "no" and withdraw from Zionism....Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims,watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

So, really a country that wittingly embarked on the occupation, on a systematic policy of humiliation of a captive people and the plundering of its residual stock of lifemeans (Lebensnotwendigkeiten in the German phrase), renounces its right to respect, as it airily discards any serious claims that anti-Semitism is a problem. For sensitivity to being the object of systemic ethnic enmity is either a general principle, or it is nothing. One cannot refine one's antennae to flutter at every gust of intolerance of Jews in the diaspora, and yet behave exactly as anti-Semites do,-smearing, harassing, robbing, engaging in Kristallnacht bombing operations at the slightest fizzle of a pseudorocket in the Negev, saying it's different because Palestinians are not 'Jews' and therefore there is no moral problem in treating them like shit. The IDF finds the occupation useful because the whole population of each generation's youth gets practical training in being insensitive (be as sensitive to humiliating Palestinians as one is to seeing a Jew anywhere wronged, is life-threatening). Doing military service there means become complicit in humiliation, and not feeling ashamed, since the victims are to blame, and indeed, we are the victims because the Arabs forced all this onto us.

So, the conversation is pointless.

• In the film Michael Collins, the protagonist, (Liam Neeson) at one point on the ship over to England, says:'I hate them for making hate necessary'. Well the scriptwriter obviously got that from Meir Golda, and there's some point in the bridge between the two narratives since the Irgun, which essentially established the ground rules of how to 'handle' Arabs used the IRA tactics in the Irish War of Independence as a promptbook for wearing down the British in Mandatory Palestine. Don't be offended. My side of life is short. I prefer intensity, therefore, rather than leisurely divagations to 'kill time' or engage in 'playing', which is what time quite rightly is intent on doing with people of my age.:)Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

During the discussion, I had a nostalgic flashback to a 2001 animation video which I've long forgotten. I believe it shaped my world views more than anything I've ever read. Need some time to process that. Since I struggle to keep up with the discussion (dafuq is "suitor or sutler", "kilter", "flutter", "burner" etc.). You keep telling me to stop worrying about nationalist ideas. Truth is I am mostly playing here. I have no national identity, or rather, my national identity is subjected to the person I am addressing. I'll end the discussion here as I devote my attention to Well of Harod, which postpones the planned work on Tel Hashash.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 08:50, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear A,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Nishidani,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

'Reply to E and N.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What brings you here?,'Inchcape asked.

'The Iron Guard.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good morning Nishi. I had filled 13 pages with material copied from Mbembe-related sources, trying to build an opinion on the man. I am sorry, I really am, about moving away from it for so long, I can only say that I ended up deeply resenting the topic, not to say the man. There's always a shortcut, quickly putting together a few statements written by others and that's that, but I'm not naturally inclined to doing that. And then I end up postponing indefinitely. Btw, I don't know why Americans like the word "procrastinate" so much, I personally hate it, to me it sounds pretentious, of lexical snobbery. It took me until now, looking up the etymology, to learn that cras means tomorrow. Postpone is a good, basic English word and far more self-explanatory (maybe I'm biased being a Romanian-speaker, where 'to put' translates to 'a pune', but still). Whatever you call it, when I'm not forced to do things I'm weary off, I end up doing that - putting them off. Mbembe and his article can do perfectly well without me, but you have asked me, and that does oblige me. Interesting subjects: virtual friendship, social norms being "in the head" and their power, the need not to disappoint, mental self-protection, the game of intellectual pretense vs gut feeling, trying to "read" a person you never met from fragments of written declarations given while keeping up a front, a public intellectual persona, etc. Mbembe looks to me like a man with a polemic tendency, harsh temper, but who didn't go into martial arts, military, plain activism, arts or other similarly common outlets for people with strong convictions and driven by feelings, but being intelligent and finding satisfaction in the academic game, went for a life in combative philosophy. Perfectly legitimate nowadays. Not very suitable with German attitudes in the field, because of their experience with letting strong theoretical opinions spill into political decision-making. Opinionated intellectuals, like for instance Marcel Reich-Ranicki, can end up being very popular specifically because they disrespect this norm. It is no wonder that both Reich-Ranicki and Mbembe, each in his own way and field of activity, and each with his Soviet general-style 'chest-ful' of German medals & awards, are not Germans (unlike the post-war German law, I don't believe receiving a citizenship makes one be of a certain nationality). "They can say that", and it's refreshing and a good pressure valve for the German public. When that doesn't suffice, you get Pegida and AfD. Mbembe made it clear: the one place where he felt (almost) free to speak up his mind is the foreword to "Apartheid Israel: The Politics of Analogy" (2015). Btw, that is the correct title of the book, and not "The Politics of Analogy", much more academic-sounding, as he disingenuously quotes it here, reproduced here. In that book Mbembe figures on the cover: "Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs | Foreword by A. Mbembe". This gives his contribution a prominent role from the start. And then he contributes – 22 sentences. That's all. And in those 22 sentences he manages to compress so many hissing vipers (see here):

• "thuggishness, jingoism, racist rhetoric, and sectarianism."
• "the army, the police, the settlers, the pilots of bombing raids, the zealots, and the cohort of international Pharisees and their mandatory righteousness, starting with the United States of America."
• "Thus every two or three years, an all-out, assymetrical assault against a population entrapped in an open-air prison."
• "We all know what is going on: by all means necessary, they must be purged from the land."
• "The refusal of citizenship to those who are not like us."
• "Israel is entitled to live in peace. But Israel will be safeguarded only by peace in a confederal arrangement that recognizes reciprocal residency, if not citizenship.

The occupation of Palestine is the biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals of the century we have just entered, and the biggest act of cowardice of the last half-century.

And since all they [the Israelis as a whole, I guess] are willing to offer is a fight to the finish, since what they are willing to do is to go all the way—carnage, destruction, incremental extermination—the time has come for global isolation."

I could have said some of those sentences myself - not all! - strewn in discussions. But put together like this, it's a dithyramb of hate, with one disingenuous "Israel is entitled to live in peace" thrown in out of a PC reflex. I can argue against a dozen of his statements (and offer reasons why I may support them as well), but taken together they show a clear attitude: hate and repulsion. Everybody is entitled to hate and be repulsed by controversial entities, especially if they feel betrayed and misled before opening their eyes to the "truth"; but Mbembe later makes great efforts to pretend he's above that, and play the academic game of objectivity and of comprehending the deeper mechanisms not visible to the mere mortal's eye.

One can reduce anything to its worst aspects and worst possible angles, and that's what he does. In good old propagandistic, rhetorical tradition, like any author of incendiary political pamphlets would.

"All-out assault against a population"? Really? Does he know how that goes when intended? Ask Assad and Putin, they can show him. Or just go online and look up Aleppo and all the other wiped out "ruin heaps formerly known as cities" in Syria and Iraq. Done by connationals, with a little help from their friends, as was Guernica. Or stay on Wiki and go to "Terror bombing" (Coventry, Dresden, not to mention Hiroshima & Nagasaki): one wipes out a village, town, city, targeting the population along with some military targets, so as to scare the shit out of the enemy and make him surrender. Surrender, or better just die, in pain if possible. Sure, the Gaza wars were horrible and even strategically stupid, but "all-out assault against a population"? Has he lost his mind?

"By all means necessary, they must be purged from the land" - does Mbembe think that's what's happening? That translates in plain English to "total war", a "final solution" carried by the politicians and people of Israel.

"Refusal of citizenship to those who are not like us" - hello? If he supports the one-state solution, he should plainly say that; but he supports the Historical Palestine solution, and doesn't have the guts to say so. Over 25% of Israel's citizens are Palestinians/Arabs. All inhabitants of occupied East Jerusalem have "permanent resident" status, which offers all rights apart from voting in national-level elections. Citizenship can be applied for in East Jerusalem and the Golan. Correct and just, especially for the West Bank inhabitants? No, but that's not what he's saying.

"[A]ll they [Israel] are willing to offer is a fight to the finish, since what they are willing to do is to go all the way—carnage, destruction, incremental extermination" - the same again. Massive repetition in a 22-sentence intro? Poor style, Mr Mbembe, even for a pamphlet. But hate needs to find its overpressure valve, or leads one to blast. Very detrimental to one's health. "All the way—carnage". "Extermination". Says Mbembe. Did the "Death to the Arabs" faction take over Israel while I was having dinner? Not even in the worst nightmares of hysteria patients, or Gaza's anti-Hamas ISIS faction. Just in some propaganda outlets here and there. This requires medication.

"Israel is entitled to live in peace. But Israel will be safeguarded only by peace in a confederal arrangement that recognizes reciprocal residency, if not citizenship." Here the cat is coming out of the bag. One-state with right of return. Don't argue about it with "transfer" and "annexation" fascists, argue with Norman Finkelstein, not famous for being a Zionist, but knowledgeable and sincere enough as to oppose it, as he doesn't wish for another Nakba "mit umgekehrtem Vorzeichen", i.e. going the other way.

"[T]he biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals of the century we have just entered, and the biggest act of cowardice of the last half-century." Heaviest machine-gun salvo. There's the crux. Why does one feel that? I'm not arguing anti-Semitism, not just in dubio pro reo, and not because it's a club always and disingenuously swung by propagandists I despise, but because that really isn't my default thought. Why is this injustice the biggest moral scandal of our times, which is truly not lacking in examples of genocidal and/or absolutist immorality? I can only come up with one answer: if Assad, the ayatollahs, Putin, Xi, ISIS and the other usual suspects do it, there's no surprise and their way of justifying their actual massacres or cultural genocides never really interest anyone, as it's never sincere. But this is different: One, Israel pretends to be a beacon of morality. Two, Jews anywhere have representatives among the most visible public personas who wield moral authority, either rightfully so and explicitly claimed by them, or by public reflex ("(s)he's famous, has made it, they must know how things should be"). But Israel's claim to ultimate righteousness is a point of attack and a reason of worry among thinking Israelis, not a base for putting Israel on the Guinness Book pedestal of "biggest moral scandal of our times"; and the issue with Jews as co-citizens in one's own country taking this or that position is worth a discussion in the respective context, but has very little to do with Israel as such, or else here I do indeed see anti-Semitism creeping through the cracks.

Mbembe's conclusion, "the time has come for global isolation", can be a valid discussion point with parallels drawn to the international boycott of apartheid-era South Africa. But that really and truly isn't the core of what he's saying.

There is also the story with the boycott of the "Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma" 2018 conference , but after the previous points it almost feels superfluous to comment. However, in short. Here come the all-out lies, and being more Catholic than the Pope.

The boycott statement wasn't sent (to the black South African organiser, who was terribly disappointed by the outcome) by Mbembe and "his colleague at Witwatersrand University, Prof. Sarah Nuttall", but by Mbembe and his wife. It does make a difference to know. There are cases of happy couples who deeply disagree on matters of weltanschauung, but they don't abound, and mixed couples in present-day South Africa still are, beyond the normality of being human and falling in love, a statement. So what did they oppose? "We let the organisers know this morning that we would have no option but to withdraw from the conference if a satisfactory agreement was not found between the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Organising Committee. A short while ago, we were informed by the organisers that the Israeli speakers who were on the programme have rescinded their participation at the conference and for this reason, we are open to participating in the conference." So they'd only participate if the Israeli academics were disinvited. Why? Because that was allegedly what the BDS movement was asking for. Later came Mbembe's statement "The truth is that although I am committed to Palestinian equality and freedom, I have no relationship whatsoever with BDS", made to journalist René Aguigah. I see. Very deep dialectics. He would easily qualify for some Talmudic prize. "I support the movement X's positions, but I'm in no way part of the movement." It was tried before, also in court, and didn't succeed very well. But back to the boycott. What does the institution who called up for the academic boycott of Israel, the "Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a collective of Palestinian academics, artists and cultural workers", say? See here:

"Academic Boycott guidelines - a summary
Israeli academic institutions are a key part of Israel's regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. PACBI urges a boycott and work for the cancellation of all forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements, or projects with them. PACBI also urges a boycott of propaganda initiatives that promote Israel or whitewash its violations of international law. The academic boycott is a boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions not individuals. This boycott should continue until Israeli academic institutions recognize the rights of the Palestinian people as set out in the BDS call and end all forms of complicity in Israel’s violations of international law."

Again, one's dialectical skills are put to the test, but the one highlighted sentence is pretty straight-forward. Who did the couple Mbembe & Nuttall boycott, and claiming what? "We have sympathy for those Israeli academics whose own work as well as political positions are critical of the Israeli occupation and who as such, are in dispute with their respective institutions or, in some cases, ostracised." Let's check.

• Prof. Shifra Sagy, psychology department at Ben Gurion University (BGU) (see her university page here). A typical target of right-wing and fascist Israeli groups like Im Tirtzu because of her work with what she herself calls "Palestinian" (n.b., not: Israeli Arab) youth.
• The others: "Sagy described herself and fellow Israeli delegates as "peace activists", as they are all deeply invested in reconciliation work in the region." But some might want to disregard the information, as it comes from an article published by the South African Jewish Report. I don't, I do buy from Jews.
• "Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, from Al-Quds University, was also disinvited. He is the founder of the Wasatia movement of moderate Islam, and took Palestinian students on a groundbreaking trip to Auschwitz." Same source.

Mbembe & wife went more anti than the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), who asks supporters to boycott "complicit Israeli academic institutions", but "not individuals"; and Mbembe lied when claiming "sympathy for those Israeli academics whose own work as well as political positions are critical of the Israeli occupation and who as such, are in dispute with their respective institutions or, in some cases, ostracised." If I'm proven wrong on these two assessments, I'm an idiot who can't tell black from white (no pun, not racism, just a common expression).

In short, in my own words: fuck him. He's exactly the type of people I've learned to hate and despise, no matter what side they pretend to be on, because they're only on their own side, full of themselves, dangerous when in power, following their lowest instincts while pretending to stand above the mere mortals' feelings in their deep understanding of the essence of things. So no, not Frantz Fanon, that's what he would like to be likened to, but much worse. No thanks.

So sorry, but I think it's much better if I don't write anything about him on WP. I am grateful for your confidence and for you recommending me so warmly on that talk-page, but I will disappoint you, and I do feel bad about it, but I still won't go back to it. It really does have a bad impact on me. I hope you can see where it comes from. Whishing you a great day, warm regards - Arminden (talk) 06:44, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

PS: That's the problem with public intellectuals, if they pick up a pen or a microphone, it's all for the record. There can be no compromise to that. Arminden (talk) 07:09, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Just noticed this, since I only looked at Hijiri's post when I noted that someone had edited this page. I have to be in Rome for a few days to get my second Pfizer injection and see if it rejects me. Will get back to you. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:49, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Pfizer has the best track record, no worries. Good luck! No hurry, anyway. Arminden (talk) 02:45, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

The traffic jam in Rome is holding up our departure for a few hours. Thank goodness. In the interim, I noted after 35 years of carefully busting sods, and sieving the soil for fragments of rock, stone and weed, a dazzling exemplar of what in the local dialect is known as a taragnola, a spider wasp, with a bright blue mesosoma, and bloodred winglets trailing over its rear past the petiole. I’m particular about encouraging spiders to find a haven round the nooks and crannies of my garden, and was half-minded to kill it, and save the tarantulas it preys on. On second thought, I decided not to: apparently the sting is one of the most alarmingly painful experiences one can undergo. Leaving it and its kind there, aside from the aesthetic splendour, adds a thrilling touch of danger to the otherwise placid life of a gardener. But I’ve still enough time to dash off a note re part one of your text.

You really shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble, or rather, I shouldn’t have asked, knowing you’re the kind of friend who’s likely to personally climb the the sheer rockface if asked for a crampon by an an amateur stumbling in the foothills.

You may well be right re Mbembe. But reading your description of your impressions of a someone given to pugnacity (to use a fine Latin word: procrastinate is of Latin derivation, but on the same grounds one could have an animadversion to the ‘English’ term you prefer, postpone, which is equally Latinate, and would have struck the traditional English country ear, with its preference for ‘put off, delay, defer’ or even more idiomatically, ‘put on the back burner, as ‘foreign’ smartspeak) and channeling it rather inappropriately into the sphere of the mind, a kind of martial intellectualism, made me think of 90% of the esteemed public intellectuals speaking out for Zionism. Mbembe is small fry, for example, if you compare the figure of Alan Dershowitz. he leaves Mbembe and his kind at the starting mark, breasting the finishing tape in the outrageous bullshit marathon. The fact that Mbembe’s jargon comes out of Paris, deep-redyed in German Kritik, is neither here nor there. I see a massive degree of polite aggression in the urbane thoughtlessness of that tone of domestic reasonableness that underlines so much discourse on Israel and its occupation, all by gentle(wo)men who would, were I to encounter them, breathe liberal sweetness and light in any other context. The question is not whether Mbembe is worth listening to or not. It is rather, why do documented prevaricating arseholes drivelling the usual outageously contrafactual memes have no problem in finding media that listen all ears, and are willing to pay ludicrous sums for such cant, while a single appearance by people like Mbembe stating the contrary (perhaps even that contrafactual or grossly simplified) are sent to coventry, banned, and sub ject to a vilification whose aim is to make them disappear, to suppress dissent?

I say this as I read, mainly in those interludes from brawny afternoons caring for the architecture of my gardens when I duck down for an evening stroll and beer at my local bar, a recent book by Luciano Canfora, perhaps the foremost classicist certainly in Italy of our day. It is a history of the concept of democracy, and forensically pulls the plug on that complaisance which underlines our general impressions of democratic societies. From the outset, democracy has been at odds with the liberty proclaimed by the powerful and the elites that have paid it lipservice, have done so reluctantly, and with strategic reserve. I don’t expect that Mbembe’s works would illuminate much more than the guiding sources of his inspiration – from Foucalt and Deleuze through to Derrida – except in the topical reflections he would bring to bear. But since I think history is basically rapine tizzied up by the robbers’ genteel descendants as progress, and, not to quote the Latinizing Gibbon’s famous dictum about it, but rather the same wisdom lilted in popular song:

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose.

This is admitted by the foremost neoliberal historian we have Niall Ferguson: the West is best, and was built on plunder, piracy and slavery. The tradition Mbembe works in theorizes this for the post-piracy, post-plunder, post-slavery ‘enlightened’ industrial world which, in the common reading, is now redeemed of its sinful past, but which can still be read as having its roots solidly in place in a kind of domesticated systemic criminality that seems orderly. Anyone knows that if they study the actual impact of our packaging and waste disposal technologies on the environment, to cite one item. Israel is just the latest quintessence of this historical process, so no need to single it out, but I think it still important, given the silence reigning over public awareness over how it got there: it’s an instance worth reminding oneself of just to shrug off the exceptionalist rhetoric that, outside Israel (where this is discussed animately), prevails when that country is mentioned. I have always read these modern philosophers with an awareness it is a rather recondite conversation that is not going to be broadcast because difficult to understand. The public gets the message from Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan rather than the likes of Foucault or Giorgio Agamben. But the message is the same.

Everything you quote fromMbembe is not new: it simple recycles with emotive rhetoric what 30 years of reading Amnesty International, B’tselem and Human Rights Watch, eminently respectable and relatively objective NGOs, have been repeatedly documenting. Not a dithyramb of hate, as much of outrage. Personally, this kind of stuff bores me, because I want freshness of thinking, or new historical facts. Not moral recitatives. So he doesn’t get a medal for insight. The Israeli occupation is not exceptional: Israel ‘s elites have consistently decided, with the occupation, to behave as the standard Middle Eastern world’s monarchs and dictators behave, but with a canny varnish on what one does by doing as they do far more efficiently as a successful industrial and democratic polity. In so far as it efficiently and brutally chooses to remain an occupying power, it disowns itself as a child of the West (except in historical terms) and embraces itself as a ‘normal’ non-European , quasi Arab political entity. Zionism is something of a miracle in the way it has reengineered so many Jews back to a ‘semitic’ identity, disowning the haskalah- That is what David Dean Shulman and Arik Ascherman, and a hundred other important figures I could name, are on about What is exceptional , the ‘moral scandal’ is the scale of the blindness to an obvious systemic brutality beyond Israel, in the Western (diseased) heartlands. You know it is almost taboo these days to even mention Palestinian realities on TV here, and that speaks volumes for the particular success of its foreign lobbies in intimidating journalists. Off the record, they admit that it’s far too uncomfortable (a career risk) to talk about it.

Israel/Palestine is a small place, and the big picture we have of Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, etc., is what has periodically been practiced on Gaza. Those one-off events are, this is the difference – repeated in your area, in Lebanon earlier which was a practice run, and now in Gaza. I travelled to Madrid in late 1981 for no other purpose than to view Picasso’s masterpiece at the Casón del Buen Retiro when it was finally displayed there . In one day, some 400 dead from bombings. Israel was less efficient, it took 49 days to kill some 2200 Palestinians. Gaza is Guernica on repeat mode. Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Dear Arminden. There's been a global and regional conspiracy against my spare, scarcely free time, so I'm late in explaining precisely what the point of my juxtaposition of two distinct things entails (spider wasps and Mbembe). I hope you will bear with me with a little more patience, and that I can exfoliate the jungle tomorrow, sometime. Even this is written snatching a moment - I need to relax- during an ad break for a film on the life of Ruth Ginsburg. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:36, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

By all means, relax! I've put Mbembe to rest, he's not bugging me anymore. Not even as much as a stray kitten a dog has taken a bite from. The wound just wouldn't heal. Doesn't mean I don't like dogs, just too bad they haven't heard of the sixth Noahide Law. Arminden (talk) 11:30, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I left two French guests in my waspish garden for a half an hour yesterday and managed to dash off a quite long reply which, when I pressed the key, disappeared on the pretext that my computer lacked a connection. Let me synthesize it as far as I recall the points made.

While in Rome, I asked myself why, intuitively, having written the rushed remark about Mbembe, before I posted it, I scribbled off a prefatory anecdote about the spider wasp. Psychoanalytic reading techniques, not the theory, are important to me, and I immediately realized, strolling around a park the day after the vaccine shot, that the two were connected

I think it reasonable for me to assert, in reading myself, that the (a) spider wasp anecdote thrown there off the cuff, followed by the (b) remarks on Mbembe indicate that unconsciously I linked the two. What does this mean in context?

I don't think it a presumption on my part that our epistolary exchanges reflect a real sense of friendship, an 'elective affinity' or Wahlverwandtschaften (breaching the kind of Wandverwandtschaften, to make a bad pun, that vexes so much conversation between Israel and the outside world).

The quotes that understandably raised your ire with Mbembe are, as you know from many sections of this thread, not far, indeed, often identical to views I entertain. In Mbembe's voice these remarks exasperate you, whereas you can engage sympathetically with their content when I write more or less the same things. So it is, one might infer, not the content, but the tenor of the rhetoric, and the sense that tone of Mbembe's gives you, that lends itself to the impression other motives are present in what Mbembe writes: perhaps, a sense that he has a problem with Israelis tout court, if not indeed Jews more broadly. My presentation of the same views is couched in a thick context, and part of an epistolary exchange where many implications, intended or otherwise, are duly examined and, over the months, I assume (I think on good grounds) that my approach, however similar, does not unnerve you particularly either as a Jew or an Israeli.

If there is some truth to this, then it alerts us to a broader issue: trust. A perceived liar or hypocrite or whoever can say something that is true, but our knowledge of their character or where they are coming from, undercuts the thrust of that truth, lending it too the semblance of a trite meme that is being used for tactical discursive purposes, rather than to grapple seriously with the topic. Likewise, as is not unusual by any means, two Jews can debate with ferocious contrariety issues regarding the I/P situation, without either thinking necessarily that the other is in bad faith. (Well, of course, in public expressions of such argumentativeness within the 'fold', tabloid minds toss up the 'self-hating Jew' meme, but that really just flags a lack of rationality, a cliché culled for its emotive rhetorical effect).

In short, this extremely painful issue almost ineludibly gets entangled up with a much larger background, the history of anti-Semitism, and the understandable difference with outsiders that such an awareness breeds.

If so, then my spider weasp anecdote perceived that hermeneutic possibility.

I’m particular about encouraging spiders to find a haven round the nooks and crannies of my garden, and was half-minded to kill it, and save the tarantulas it preys on. On second thought, I decided not to: apparently the sting is one of the most alarmingly painful experiences one can undergo. Leaving it and its kind there, aside from the aesthetic splendour, adds a thrilling touch of danger to the otherwise placid life of a gardener. But I’ve still enough time to dash off a note re part one of your text.

Embedded unwittingly (at the time) there was a suggestion that (a) An edenic world is disrupted by a parlously intrusive presence: for an Israeli (settler) that would be the Palestinians, and for Palestinians the Jews. (b) Independently of the two respective observers, the 'other' of the piece, the spider wasp, should be gotten rid of. (c) In my view, as the teller of the story, despite the danger, there are good reasons to tolerate the intrusion, cohabit, with due caution. (d) At another level, it could be read as entailing also the possibility that, unconsciously, I could be seen as the spider wasp and you are the tarantula (or vice versa)!

Often language, it is one of its supreme joys, tells us more about the complexities of our inner worlds that we would admit to ourselves, as presumptively 'conscious' authors of just one of the meanings implicit in what we say. In any case, I think the unspoken issue all this exfoliates is 'trust'. I still think however that, while this is always present, the problem basically is one of suspending psychology and simply examining the propositional nature of whatever is said, to educe both its logical status and thereon, measure it against the factual record.

There's other stuff I did not have time to reply to, dear friend, but hope to address when time allows, or my appointment with an optician may explain that the curious 'toile d'araignée' and peripheral blitzes that has hit my right eye these last two days, won't devastate my reading life but still allow me to read texts, like those I find on a computer screen. Best regards as always Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Dear A. This is no invitation to reopen these wounds let alone comment on recent events. I came across an essay this morning that I thought might interest you. If Peter Beinart is coming round to see things as several of us do here, then some progress in the quagmire is possible. Peter Beinart, A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return The Guardian 18 May 2021. My best wishes for you and your family to remain safe.Nishidani (talk) 09:16, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Dear friend, you obviously sensed that things had become a bit too intense and I simply must stay away of The Conflict, at least on some levels, in order to regain some foothold. You were of course partially right regarding trust, except that there is one more important reason for my conversation with you: the hope that you might have understood some things which have been eluding me for far too long. Or at least to sharpen my thoughts about them when confronted with your nuanced and well-considered views. So probably a bit egoistic, but where is the boundary between common interests and egoistic curiosity?

All else aside, I truly hope your ophthalmologist has given you good news. Many years ago, one of the people dearest to me has suddenly given up the fight once he was told that reading won't be possible anymore for him, and that's a 1984-type horror that stuck with me. Computers can replace some of our senses & skills by now, but better not need it.

Thank you for the article. I need to get some exercise and fresh air, so I'll be happy to read it tomorrow.

I am so, so tired of pushing against people who can't, or won't, tell a sophism from a cow (a mathematician who was wasting his time with us as a school teacher used to say "Klar wie die Kuh. Was ist schon klarer als eine Kuh?"). Who lose sight of the fact that thoughts impact reality, and flawed thoughts create a painful and dangerous reality. Who're pushing logical fallacies until every neuron in the logic and common sense centres starts hurting, but expect to have a "civil conversation". I can't.

The stray kitten missing a piece of its neck coat is getting better after a month of looking like a scalped child soldier. But that's about all on the plus side of things. It feels like the vets have been sleeping on the job and all the crazy dogs on the horizon have gotten the full-blown rabies.

I wish we could continue this by email. It feels like abusing this platform when it's not strictly about some concrete Wiki topic. I can almost hear Greta shrieking: How dare you, think about the Megawatts! Although so many come to WP to impose their point of view on others, and end up learning a lot. But even more don't. And fight their wars on every (un-)imaginable page, as if taking revenge on the reality they can't change. Take care Nishi, good night and don't let the wasps bite. Arminden (talk) 19:46, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

I feel uncomfortable often with people who agree with me. When I wrote my book, I thought, before the criticism came in, I should try and rip apart its contradictions in anticipation. So I pulled it apart for thirty pages. Criticisms there were, but none grasped the flaws I perceived. I was invited therefore to present them in public in a lecture, which I duly did. (Mind you, I did in the meantime write a countercritique of the assumptions behind my self-critique, from a psychoanalytic angle, but I kept that to myself!) No. Agreement tends to stasis, and one needs a sense of insecurity if one is to get anywhere in life. Good friends serve that function. The trust is there, so they can jolt one out of one's complacency. I once told my wife that if she noticed any signs of my tending to acquiesce overly in the atmosphere of harmony her being bestowed upon much of my life, to warn me I was in danger of losing myself in the enfeebling complaisance of ageing.

I think discussing our different views openly, though the audience is minute, has (had?) a useful function for the I/P area, where diffidence, contempt, suspicion and iron-cast convictions reign. The point, as I see it, is to show that quite radical disagreements in approach should never spill over into enmity, or personal or national antagonism. One of argumentation's core purposes is to secure a reciprocal respect, indeed friendship, despite the frequent inconclusiveness of the respective positions. I know I have melded well with my acquired community because in daily contact there are enough people with whom I can be told, or say, 'Get fucked' as a sign of intimate regard.

By all means, feel free to email me if you prefer that venue however. No problem.

Eyewise- Well, the eyes remain a mystery. The specialist visit only led to my doctor shaking his head when I read the whole chart at 5 metres from top to bottom without hesitation, a bit like Donald Sutherland in Space Cowboys, only I hadn't memorized it beforehand. Said it was extremely rare, and even odder given my known reading habits (I often read while walking). After a close examination of the retina, he said he could detect no problem, so suggested it must be low water consumption causing eye fatigue. I told him, in the Aussie mode, that we don't drink water downunder because fish fuck in it. That joke got me a discount on the fee. But I have taken to drinking tapwater before knocking off a beer or indulging in my usual several cups of tea a day. Hasn't quite gone away, the spiderweb, so who knows. We'll see, or rather, I hope if I don't see one of these days, the doctor will see to it.

Thanks for the kitty news. I help look after a woman neighbour with dementia, who has lost the power of words. She began recently to sleep all day, and the signal was, something was wrong. Indeed, now hospitalized she was found to suffer also from advanced septicaemia and must have been in pain for days. The terrible thing about animals is, like her, they lack the means to communicate pain and languish stricken unless we teach ourselves to observe them closely. The greatest doctor I knew, of Jewish background though a Catholic, had this ability uncannily. He would often dismiss a t a glance patients who came to his surgery whining. And his judgment was unerring. Twice he stopped people who felt fit and hale, on the street, and told them to see him that day at the surgery and saved their lives. If only that exceptional gift were teachable, we would all live in peace. Keep well then, dear friend. We can resume this in any form, any time, or talk of whatever else, as you like. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:44, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Hi Nishi. My last partner asked me about a year ago "Please help me move away from you." Our relationship was going nowhere and time was passing. So I did, and it wasn't easy. I don't know how to wean myself of this Wikipedia addiction. Worse than all, it ends up aggravating me instead of calming me down, as it used to. It's always been a mix, but now the balance is clearly tilted. "The conflict" is the most dishonest lifer stage I've known, with people unwilling to call a spade a spade, unwilling to think beyond the first or second layer, mistaking sympathy and gut feeling for a solution or a true understanding of a complicated historical process. Activism is the attempt of moving something in the real world. I know of a few revolutions who have managed that and won, and brought a mixed bag at best and a disaster at worst. But the activists are never to be blamed ("they really did believe in it!"), unless maybe if they belonged to the losing side.

Almost nobody here on fucking I/P seems to have tried to make themselves familiar with all the aspects from all sides, or managed to get over the frustration and resentment they felt the first time they realised that X or Y had managed to cheat them into believing their propaganda. You need to go on and taste this disappointment with all contributing sides before you realise that it's not a football match where you haven't picked yet the team to cheer for. You need to see through all the fallacies served as pure truth by all sides, and not make up your mind based on whose lie hurts less, or sounds less implausible or closer to your own favourite self-deceipt. That when it's about many people's lives it takes something else than "hitting the right note": it's not a debate club, and nobody wins the prize. That's for sure, and nothing else is.

Is a nation state a good thing?
Is there such a thing as the right to have a state?
If yes, what creates such a right? I.e., who gets it? Why Kosovo and not the Kurds, Basques, or Welsh?
And if not, do socio-ethnical identities have a role, merit, and possibly a right to exist?
If everybody would be better without them, what can one do about the (still) vast majority who prefer to talk their mother tongue and eat mom's food at home?
History has had its way of selecting who stays and who goes. How much can and must we intervene in changing that?
When does "the new way" of dealing with it start? Why then and not the previous day, or the day after?
Is inheriting a moral thing?
Who is the right heir?
Is perception indeed reality?
What would qualify as the moral outcome of "two suitors for one bride" when the bride is mute and both suitors sincere?

I hated "Schindler's List" because of its shallowness. Why was that one girl important, because she had a red coat on? Why was the public supposed to identify and tremble with suspense about these 1000 people taken to the death camp instead of another 1000, and be happy that the swap was made at the very last minute?

Why does public opinion accept the same barbarism committed by one, but not the other, depending on sympathies?
Why does it sway by up to 180 degrees depending on a photo of a dead child? When there have been so many more dead children, and endless numbers of them if the one actor had its way, except that it didn't?
There was an expression one would nowadays be ashamed to use due to PC: midinette. On the level of a midinette. Midinette literature, midinette movies, drama for midinettes. But now midinette lives & taste matter, and even more than others', so politics and the bigger things in life and the world are cut to size for the chewing capacity of midinettes.

I don't have the benefit (?) of a clear-cut identity, but I'm holding enough strong opinions and principles as to understand many of those whose own opinions and principles do keep them inside the mainstream of a group. I have no love left for nationalists, fundamentalists, pursuers of any exclusivist ideology. That said,
Why is Zionism in your eyes a mistake from the start?
Why are the Palestinian national rights to be held higher?
What do you think about cultural Judaism? About this concept treating the Bible as a founding myth, no more and no less than all the Cuchulains and Persepolises and Mariannes?
Do you really think a one-state solution would not mean an all-out massacre? Or should the well-intended world wait and see if it happens, and be sorry for the losing side and "process it" and "find closure" after it happens?
How is Israel different from all the other places where modern, recently created modern states have been created through population transfers, with rivers of blood flowing?
How easy do you find undoing historical omelettes?
Were Afrikaners or Boers colonialists out to steal from the natives? Or the "young men going West"? Or were the Irish running away from starvation and landing in Australia bandits raiding native lands?
One step further. Were the Zulus natives or colonisers? Were the Arabs in the 600s "occupying" Palestine? Were the Crusaders "occupying" the Holy Places, or "liberating" them? What was Saladin doing? The Turks? The British? The Zionists? Arafat?
What credit of being able to act more or less humanely have the different actors in the conflict gained, both when they win, and when they lose?
How did they act, in the main, so far?
Who among the main two camps are the strongest factions now, and (as far as predictions have ever taken us anywhere) likely to be leading their own camp in the medium and long run?
What is the most likely scenario if camp A wins, or B?
What the realistic worst-case scenario in either case?

What good outcome might one realistically hope for, i.e. no genocidal wars and no entire populations living lives not worth living? (Sarcastic laughter explodes among the spectators in both aisles of the theatre, bringing the ceiling down on heir heads.)
Who can be the agents helping reach that outcome? Deus ex machina is hanging in the ropes, strangled and blue in the face.
Is education still an option? Who can push for the right one? What a shame that the time of prophets & miracles is sealed.

That's it. My scream from the roof, lost among the clouds. More personally, I could ask you how much time you've spent face to face with Israelis and Palestinians, in their own environment. That's what is making things become real, everything else is theory. There are toys that can't be fixed. Why don't many people, why don't you lose night's sleep over the millions of North Koreans starving mentally and physically for generations? Or the Mongolians and Tibetans being erased from existence? Or over Crimea for fuck's sake, or Kurdistan, or the Chukchis? Why is it OK for Armenians to do without a state, or with a rump territory at the mercy of whoever feels like taking a bite? Why are you still talking to me, instead of dealing with that black hole Turkey is becoming - T/K and T/D and T/S and T/C conflict galore over there! Kurds, democracy, secularism, Christian minorities - all being drawn, broken on the wheel and quartered by the sultan. I deeply hate the Anti-Defamation League's knee-jerk answer to that, but why this obsession? Not that I didn't have over a dozen excellent and plausible answers to that, most of them radically different from the ADL's, although not all (a mirror image is flipped by 180 degrees, but it still wouldn't exist by itself). But it never stops amazing me.

Why do I feel friendship and affinity to you? Yes, trust is an element. Trust that you can and do go one step further into analysing complex matters, don't start hating or despising as quick as others. It makes me hope that you might have some answers I haven't found to some specific, but important matters. To questions I've asked from others I respected and who've been witnesses to events and actors in them, but I did't get good answers from them. Or I did, but those were good answers for them, just didn't work for me. Truth is not universal.

I'll go and see after that kitten, who's much better already, and who's conquered for himself the best sheltered place around. It's never the first to come out for a bite and looks skinny, keeps its distance even if it means eating less, but it won't ever be the first one to be caught by a dog again. (A cigar can be just that, a cigar, so no conclusions to be drawn from the kitten saga.) Have a great time, in spite of my wall of words, and try to gain your distance. Thomas Friedman has learned that lesson once, and good for him. I'm almost there too. My warmest regards, Arminden (talk) 17:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Now, my friend, you would do well to detach yourself from all the above, and look after yourself. I learnt to deal with headaches (very rare) as a youth by treating (phenomenologically) the dull throb of pain as localized within, to be left to itself as I concentrated with the rest of my brain on whatever I was doing. I 'detached' it, without repression, and got on with the things I tasked myself with, or with the normal pleasures of life. (My first problem in life was handling the rage in others: I insulated myself and hid the hurt. Growing up, I then did the next step: analyse the effect this defensive retreat had on me, and slowly untangle the negative aspects of my self-protective withdrawal from violence; the third stage was a diplomacy of affection - hoping what laughably is called in psychological jargon a' significant other'-(all others are significant, hence my contempt for the term) to come to terms with themselves. But all this is not something to be spoken of online).

Usually, the nagging headache would stop within a few minutes. It's late here, so I won't comment on the above, except to remark that, sure, it is not surprising for me to see so many other peoples crushed under the national jackboots of winning nations or ethnoi. That is what history is. Rereading this week (just to check actually some details on Pelops in Pindar's Ist Olympian) Walter Burkert's Homo Necans, prompts me to reply that, yes, one focuses on the I/P instance - that is the most studied case. Is this some deviant abuse of scholarship that subtly jumps at Israel's crimes in order to ground what, after all, might simply be antisemitism- neatly camouflaging the old European unease with Jewish difference in the impeccable neutrality of analysis/scholarship. Well, I can't speak for others. Analysing my interest, I think much of my disconcerted curiosity stems from the clash between my early and long admiration for the way so many Jews handled hatred throughout the millennia - mastering the world, the cultures the languages of their domineering overlords, by patience, close reading of the psychologies of those around them, to the point that they too could feel themselves into the 'other', even be as patriotically national as 'them', - and what, with Israel's creation, happens with the Israelization of Jewishness, to me, a contradiction in terms. I don't see any connect between the two, each taken as an Idealtypus. The more I draw stimulus from the extraordinarily rich world of the haskalah generations, and even certain religious figures, some Haredim included, the greater my tendency to shake my head wistfully as I watch an all too predictable, repetitive rerun of the nationalism that has overtaken a country that imagines itself as having redeemed the putative neurosis of the Jew in galut, by creating galoots (but also here)in the new 'homeland', Those key figures who call the shots have imitated, with startling success so far, the outset of the careers of the likes of the Maccabees, Hyrcanus and bar Kochba. As those historic figures (avatars of modern Zionism's second and third generations' gungho crowd) battled for the Biblical territorial ideal, serious Jewish thinkers, bureaucrats, merchants and vibrant communities within the Hellenic world flourished elsewhere, in diaspora. The whole public discourse on the problems there or abroad is, for me, a cesspool of crassness, a word I would never associate with what I like about, what I admire deeply in, the Jewish thinkers, writers, artists, or even everyday people I've known and learnt from, endowed as so many were by the experience of prejudice in their own regard, with a higher sensitivity to injustice evil and inhumanity than, I think, the peoples they dwelt amongst and whose cultures they were assimilated into.

There's no way out of the I/P impasse. The most most individuals can do is ignore the shouting and ideologization of grievance, by just being just and decent in the sphere of their own lives. As I said of my parents' silent example on several occasions: when encountering prejudice, they just stopped speaking, and, without making a scene, dropped the relationship with the persons who had aired their racists animosities. In a way, if I can against my instincts abuse the idiom of ethnic ontologies, they taught me a lesson in being 'Jewish', for I had occasion to note Jewish friends handling anti-Semitic jokes or diatribes in a very similar fashion later. Speaking of lateness, I really must to bed. Look after yourself with a little more affection. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:24, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

In the meantime, the heartening news today is that a smiling chocolate frog (the brand name of an Aussie lolly) can thrive in the most disease infested and threatening environment imaginable.Nishidani (talk) 08:10, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

• 'Is a nation state a good thing?'

States are excellent things. There is no intrinsic reason to idealize the particular form of a nation state, particularly since those, historically throughout modernity, tend to suffer from the politicization of ethnic diversity, producing the pathology of nationalism. As Einstein remarked, nationalism is infantile, mankind's measles. It didn't take his genius to grasp that - he said it before 1948, in 1934 (Nationalismus ist eine Kinderkrankheit, sozusagen die Masern der Menschheit,p.24 ) in the thick of Europe's turn towards succumbing to fascism. What nation states do is reverse the natural logic of modernity under globalization, by restoring as a pinion of the state's identity the very kinship units that normally wilt as they are replaced by a broad de-ethnicized civic consciousness (whatever our differences we are all in the same boat), i.e. Tönnies's noted distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

• 'Is there such a thing as the right to have a state?'

Yes. It is recognized as a fundamental human right in International law in the principle of Self-determination. The core tenet underwriting it is inscribed in the older concept of rule by consent.

• 'If yes, what creates such a right? I.e., who gets it? Why Kosovo and not the Kurds, Basques, or Welsh?.'

The right isn't 'created'. It is stipulated as a general principle in law, and endlessly evoked by Israel itself as the legal charter or warrant for that country's establishment.

Those who get it do so normally by wearing down opposition by an empire/colonial power/regional dominus to their self-determination through recourse to violence, accompanied by politicking among the major powers to get their right recognized as legitimate, and buttressed by demographic realities (where they are not traditional, relatively assimilated minorities such as the Basques in Spain/France or the Welsh in England. By the way, you know what happened to the Basque soccer team hurrying to get out of the Savoy hotel all together? They got stuck in the Drehtür. They learnt a lesson: don't put all of your Basques in the one exit). Where you get, as in Israel/Palestine the Jewish and Palestinian populations on a demographic par, or where regionally their numbers constitute overwhelmingly a strong identity, as with the 25 million Kurds in the Middle East, the problem won't go away. It will be aggravated overtime, and become a chronic geopolitical sore that the dominant powers can't heal, yet refuse to live with, let alone resolve.

• 'Why is Zionism in your eyes a mistake from the start?'

I think I answered that several times earlier in this thread. But, in synthesis, it never achieved the goals it set itself. To the contrary. Herzl's dewy-eyed Altneuland turned out to be an existential and cultural dystopia in the larger context (not everyday life, which however Jews in the diaspora live more comfortably); Jews with a tradition of multiple identities were homogenized to have one overriding one, political and nationalistic (the only advantage being the retuning for modernity of a beautiful language). It solved nothing and created a huge proliferation of burdensome complications. It constricted all Jews in Israel to find part of their core social identity in the acculturating violence of an army, whose dominant function is to put down, evict or make life impossible for the people occupied, something that had never existed in Jewish history before.etc. I must shop.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

• Why are the Palestinian national rights to be held higher?

The question is loaded with a false assumption, that criticism of Israel's occupation means prioritizing the rights of the occupied Palestinians over those of settlers in their territory. Rather, the question is, why does the state of Israel consider, in its constant history, that the former indigenous Christian-Muslim majority have no legitimate aspirations to obtain nationhood in the residual handkerchiefs of territory that remain to them, as Jewish immigrants have?

I came in for information, stayed on to create a go-to cheat sheet, and found myself a friend instead. The rest can wait. Follow your own advice and don't get pinned down with this over the weekend. Thank you my friend. Arminden (talk) 10:47, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Don't worry about it (I know the problems are deeper). It's only a half an hour of typing to respond to your bulleted queries, and, among friends, one doesn't fuss about, or think in terms of, 'wasting time'. Good conversation thickens the empty continuum of otherwise listless hours with the brio and élan of thinking beyond the usual Lebensnotwendigkeiten, but of course, if you prefer I ignore the points, no problem. The day promised an onset of warmish to hot weather, hence gardening mainly. Now light cloud clusters are scumbling the azure, so it will be a books-and- armchair 'arvo'. Best Nishidani (talk) 11:06, 29 May 2021 (UTC)