Talk:Israeli–Palestinian conflict/Archive 16

Further discussion

Another good idea by TheCuriousGnome. If there are no objections, I'll replace the "History" article with the "Historical outline" section here within the next couple of days. --GHcool (talk) 17:24, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

…and it is important to restate that by doing so the whole current "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article won't be deleted forever - after GHcool would replace the "History" article with the current "Historical outline" section, we’ll all help restoring only the most important information which is currently in the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article and/or debate which information should be restored or rephrased, creating a new, improved and more concentrated historical overview which would contain the best of both the current "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article and the "Historical outline" section for the benefit of our readers. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 18:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I object. I do not see any benefit to entirely removing the abundant data currently present in the History article. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 18:11, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

See the above comment. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 18:21, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Ok, but in that case, any major deletions should be discussed first. We shouldn't delete everything and then discuss what to put back. I'm open to the material which you wish to add though. thanks. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 18:39, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay. I agree that implementing the merge won’t be quick and easy and that we would need to discuss many of the changes, especially when removing information which is currently presented in the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article. That being the case, I suggest that:

• In the first stage of the merge, GHcool would be in charge of merging the contents of the "Historical outline" section into the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article by himself, only adding missing information to it or replacing certain segments with better phrased/sourced segments taken from the "Historical outline" section, instead of deleting any segments/the whole current version of the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article. Any disputed changes he would make, would be brought up and discussed in the discussion page of the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article.
• In the second stage, after he finishes merging the content, we’ll all help editing the article and/or debate which information should be restored or rephrased, creating a new, improved and more concentrated historical overview which would contain the best of both the current "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article and the "Historical outline" section for the benefit of our readers. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 20:34, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

This sounds like a reasonable course of action. I won't do it immediately because more people may want to comment. Also, this week is a busy week for me due to Passover. --GHcool (talk) 21:06, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Ok. Happy holidays. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 21:14, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate GHCool's message. I too will be less active due to Passover. Thanks. CuriousGnome, thanks for your message as well. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 21:26, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

No problem. Happy holidays to you too. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 23:02, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that TheCuriousGnome's solution tackles it in reverse. Ideally, the History article should be cleaned up/rewritten/whatever first, and then a history section written here as per WP:SUMMARY. This was attempted however as we have seen, failed. You can't just replace the entire history article with a (frankly sub par) 'summary outline'. You either fix the history article on it own, and then transfer a summarized version of that content back into this article, or you implement my suggestion of removing the history section completely from this article, and replacing it with a broad blurb on key issues and themes.

Cryptonio, while I don't agree with a lot of GHCool's opinions I acknowledge that he has personally contributed a significant amount of edits to this article compared to yourself. While I applaud a sudden flurry of editors trying to implement radical changes in these articles, I am wary because something similar was tried about a year ago by myself and a couple of others and it ended up not fully being achieved due to 1) drive-by editors chiming in but not ultimately helping out, 2) massive edit warring because the changes were not fully agreed upon, 3) editors not sticking it out for the long haul.

So what I am saying is that while I disagree with what you are doing, if you really are going to do it, don't be half hearted about it. Put in the work. And be prepared to compromise. Suicup (talk) 00:14, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Sure will boss, had to catch up on my reading though, on the subject. To that, it wasn't until today that I had the time to visit the library. Also, proposals like yours are still pouring in, so unlike Ghcool who Zeus only know what he's trying to archive(and a few devil-like as me), I've been waiting to see where we could somehow find an acceptable solution that everybody could live by. Rest assured, I'll dine and wine on these two articles for a while. No time lost. And, I don't think Ghcool has done much of any significant long lasting worth(but that's just me of course). Cryptonio (talk) 02:41, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

could live by. Rest assured, I'll dine and wine on these two articles for a while. No time lost. And, I don't think Ghcool has done much of any significant long lasting worth(but that's just me of course). Cryptonio (talk) 02:41, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

your comment suggests some lack of attention to how Wikipedia works and how people treat each other here, or how this article has evolved, or how this whole topic area has been handled. With all respect, there is no excuse for denigrating the work of any editor here. Maybe you didn't mean to do that? I would like to suggest that you try to not do that. It goes against WP:CIVIL and WP:Assume good faith, and it just isn't helpful. thanks.

Furthermore, many of the editors here have evolved a working relationship. i don't expect you to just jump into that sight unseen. However, one of the rules which we've hit on is the realization is that many of us will disagree over aspects of these articles. In spite of this we treat each other with respect. so that's another thing to take note of. Also denigrating other editors or their work here only lowers your own credibility., in my opinion.

If anyone else wants to chime in on this, they are welcome to do so. i hope the concept of trying to maintain some civility at Wikipedia can get at least a few more people to endorse this concept. thanks. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 12:43, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Frankly, I think the content of the history article needs to be written by people who know what they are talking about. No offense to you Cryptonio (I do not know your level of knowledge on this subject), however there are many editors such as Nishidani who have a wealth of expertise IMO. If it is written by amateur 'historians' who've googled most of the info, it will end up into the bloated, POV mess that it is now. I would consider myself to have a better than average knowledge of this history, having studied it at university, however I am by no means an expert, and as such would hesitate to make a substantial contribution (in addition to my numerous edits already). My concern is that this delicate and complex web of stories has not been expressed effectively in Wikipedia, and this is a goal that should be attained. Suicup (talk) 03:27, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I will try to read over the whole section properly and make some specific points which I believe could be addressed, in addition to the ones already mentioned. It may be that I am too pessimistic about the current state of the article. Suicup (talk) 03:32, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Suicup, I see you haven't read my latest suggestion above.. Please read it, I think you would be satisfied with it.

Besides that, I agree that Ideally we would be able to clean up/rewrite the entire History article first and then write a short summary of it here as per WP:SUMMARY. Nevertheless, you need to remember that this complex controversial subject which both of the articles attempt to cover is being subjected on a regularly basis to massive amounts of edits by biased editors, which make it much harder to maintain two different articles which cover the same subject. Therefore, in my opinion, I think that we have no other option but to keep only one article which would contain a well phrased NPOV historical overview of the conflict, and we’ll keep only the short "Periods of the conflict" section in this article (instead of the a summarized historical overview) which would contain a referral to the new and improved merged "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 04:38, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I am dissatisfied with your latest solution, because it is still the same solution - merging the articles. 'Periods of the conflict' is essentially the same as a 'summarized historical overview'. What you are saying is that the summary on this page (even after reform) is better than the entire content on the History page, which is patently rubbish IMO. However, whatever, go ahead, i don't really have any time to contribute seriously. For what its worth though, I have invited Nishidani to come and make some comments. However he knows full well that it is not as simple as you make out TheCuriousGnome. Suicup (talk) 01:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I won't flood this talk page much further.

"Frankly, I think the content of the history article needs to be written by people who know what they are talking about. No offense to you Cryptonio (I do not know your level of knowledge on this subject), however there are many editors such as Nishidani who have a wealth of expertise IMO."

Nishidani has been on this and many other articles, trying in a very smart way, "re-write" or improve all of these articles. Now, even with Nishidani's assistance, this and other articles still look pretty, to say the least, outdated. Now, no doubt about the confrontations that are BROUGHT to Nishidani and others like him on these talk pages. Of these capable editors, I am the smallest. Ashley was another capable editor(with questionable approach to say) with knowledgeable 'experience' and knowledge who also attempted to improve or "re-write" certain parts of this article and look what that led him to(no obligation to follow what is going on with him, so i'll say he got disconnected for now). What Ghcool does is my concern, how i see his work in my opinion, go ahead and improve the article, which will at the same time, silence me and my work.

Cheese whiz, are we adults here. Sue me if you think i'm on the wrong here, but don't call out my name without reading what i've said. I apologize for continuing participating on this talk page without edits. But i am a man, a young man, and have many things to waste time on. none of this can't be brought against me. I apologize to those who comment in good faith and don't even need me here. Cryptonio (talk) 20:40, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

At Suicup's suggestion, though entangled in other things, I've glanced over the discussion. Given the mess many similar articles have, and the long history of politics of article drafting here, I am opposed generally to merging, in the short-term, since you don't merge two articles indifferently composed with any degree of assurance that the baby is not thrown out with the barfwater in either article.

In principle, what is required is to avoid massive ambitious changes and simply devote attention, article by article, to cleaning up the extremely poor sourcing by establishing a certain agreement on method. The fundamental principle on method, in line with the aims of this encyclopedia, which are to produce articles according to the best available reliable sources, is to systematically go through an article, from the beginning, and replace bad sources, mostly from tertiary, or primary sources, with citations from the best available scholarly works. The I/P area is one of the areas mostly richly endowed with readily available academic sources, whose existence dispenses with the need to use government documents, agenda-driven POV-sites' thumbnail descriptions, or press articles. This was the essence of my exchanges with GHcool recently on poor sentences that had 26 sources, when just 2 updated references to cutting edge scholarship would have sufficed to clear the air, and the page, of trash. The method is economical, and eliminates a lot of the nonsense caused historically by edit-conflicts and compromises between earlier editors using, respectively, inferior sources. So, the short-term solution should simply be to rework on each article the notes, until everything is grounded in the best secondary sources. Reading those, in addition, often means finding information that is trenchantly material to these otherwise haphazardly composed articles, that can be included, and often familiarity with that material will make obsolete the kind of stuff harvested from poor, synthetic journalism or government sources. I did this, at User:Ceedjee's suggestion, at Muhammad Amin Al-Husayni for the first part of the article, the article being plagued by politicized editing, and by the use of numerous articles of poor polemical quality reflecting outdated sources. Much of that reconstruction could, once the article is thoroughly edited (still half done) gradually be shifted to relevant sections (The Western Wall, the 1929 Palestine riots etc.) but it is still premature to do so. That is why I suggest that it is sensible, as a working method, to concentrate on one article, bring it up to snuff by thoroughly revising it according to the best sources, and only then, when it is close to GA status, using it as a leaping board to collegially re-edit the other contiguous articles. One has to start somewhere, and it is best to avoid premature merging of articles that are themselves in poor shape. Nishidani (talk) 08:29, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm drafting a merge that I hope both sides will respect. I'm pretty close to finishing it, except it is still too long and I'd like to trim some more when I get a few moments. I tried not to make it a blow by blow account of violence or focus too much of great man explanations, but rather explain certain key moments in the conflict. For example, I cut out the entire Mufti section and the article reads a lot better and clearer. I also try my best to focus on the parts of the history when Israelis and Palestinians interact and limit extraneous, indirectly related discussions of things such as Israeli-Egyptian relations. --GHcool (talk) 17:24, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually nothing ever happened outside of power calculations between the British, French, Israel, and the surrounding Arab countries. The whole history of Israeli-Palestinian relations is the history of these 'extraneous' relations. The 1982 Lebanese invasion is a classic case.Jordanian-Jewish negoitiuations onn the eve of war 1948,1967 etc.etc. It can't be done. It's like describing how two children behave while eliding all mention of other sublings and parents. Nishidani (talk) 17:33, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

As I wrote in my message above, the focus of my draft are the Israelis and the Palestinians. The 1982 Lebanon War is pretty well featured, but it focuses on the Israelis and the Palestinians more than it does on the Lebanese and Jordanians. I'm trying to differentiate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. Nishidani, I thank you for your interest in my draft, but I'd like to ask that you save the criticisms until after you read a finished draft. At that point, I'd be glad to hear any and all constructive criticism from any Wikipedia editor. Thanks in advance. --GHcool (talk) 18:12, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

GHcool, in order for the merge to be implemented with minimal issues, I ask of you to only focus at this time on merging the content currently presented in the "Historical outline" section into the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article without making any other extended changes to the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article and/or presenting any big draft which should be discussed prior to merge. After the merge would be implemented you’ll be able to discuss any changes you wish to make and/or present us with any draft you have made.

Nishidani, I do not understand why you oppose the merge – I think we both agree that it is very hard to maintain two different articles which cover the same complex controversial subject and are subjected to many biased edits, and I think we both agree that currently we only need to concentrate on one historical overview of the conflict. Other than concentrating all of our efforts in one article, the aim of this merge is to improve the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article by adding to it missing information which is currently presented in the "Historical outline" section as well as replacing bad phrased/sourced segments in the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article with better phrased/sourced segments. If you would disagree with any changes made, after the merge you would always be able to retrieve any information presented in the article prior to the merge (after discussing it of course) and you would also be able to challenge any new information/facts added to the article in the discussion page. Merging the "Historical outline" section into the "History of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" article is the first necessary measure which we would have to take in order to concentrate on one article. After implementing the merge and and/or after we’ll discuss the changes and decide whether certain segments need to be reverted their former state prior to the merge, we would be able to continue to thoroughly revise the article and improve it tremendously in cooperation. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 20:39, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

GHcool's merge

I just made what I feel is a good and fair pass at a merge of the article and a serious trimming of the fat. I think it reads a lot better than the current article. I'd like to hear constructive comments and try to address them. My hope is that this merge eventually replaces History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that we can shorten the "Historical outline" section of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" to about 10-20 paragraphs (right now its about 60 paragraphs long). --GHcool (talk) 17:02, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

It's a well-written account from a purely Zionist perspective of the period in which the central fact, that two nationalisms aspired to a state, the one foreign, Zionism, the other indigenous Arab-Palestinian, is wholly elided, so that every key phase describes Palestinian and Arab movements as obstructive, militant or terroristic. Any average reader would give it full marks as neutral. I think it gets an -A minus for a comprehensive effort to narrate a conflict of two peoples as essentially the heroic success of Zionism in overcoming indigenous obstacles, depicted as intolerant and violent, to the repatriation of the diaspora to a Palestine where the majority didn't want them, but had this imposed on them by foreign powers, and foreign events. There would be a thousand things to remark on, the lack of the McMahon-Sherif correspondance before Sykes-Picot, the idea that persecution of Jews was 'worldwide' in the 1930s; the suggestion Israel offered recompense after 1948 (it owned 6% of the property and infrastructure, and seized, at the end of the war, and expropriated a huge amount of property with Palestinian title, vastly outweighing the pittance you mention, since it included most of the housing infrastructure and territorial assets of Israel in 1949. See Yifat Holzman-Gazit's brilliant Land expropriation in Israel: law, culture and society, Ashgate, 2007, for how this was done); that the Jews were expelled as a consequence of 1948, which is nonsense and propaganda, but placed strategically there to 'balance', the fact of the nakba. (almost as if, after the expulsion of 720,000 Palestinians in 1948 into several Arab countries, which caused huge disruptiveness, economic problems, etc., the long period of emigration, Zionist assisted flight from 1949-1980s, bombs in Iraq, the Lavon Affair in Egypt, the 1956 invasion of Egypt, the 1967 preemptive war, the 1982 war of choice in Lebanon, etc.were consummated by Arabs saying 'good riddance' to their Jewish populations shortly after 1948. Eliding broader historical context, as 'fat' means none of this is visible).

Still you've focused on the Zionist narrative, and as such, it's a middling effort, but the Palestinians only figure as a nuisance to the accomplishment of the dreams of the former. A lot of old history books, and even Benny Morris, underwrite this, but it is not history. It is the selective national textbook version from one party, the winner, recounting what interests that party. The only significant effort for a decent bibliography consists in an absurd holusbolus of odd sources to document the 4-5 armies invasion theory of 1948. The bulk of sources are not academic, but from tendentious sites of no noticeable value)

Well, my exceptions are too substantive, and my time too short, to assist here. But in my world, I can recognize this as a sincere reflection of one people's beliefs about history, while being incapable of recognizing it as what history must be, an impartial account of all perspectives. Good luck with it.Nishidani (talk) 19:46, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Compromise proposal

Due to the complexity of the subject I believe that it would be either almost impossible or that it would take us a lot of time to establish a draft which would be accepted on all sides before implementing the merge. Therefore I suggest that instead implementing a merge, at this point, we’ll completely remove the content of the "Historical outline" section and instead of it add a link to the "History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" article (with a "see also" template) in the "Periods of the conflict" section.

I believe that if we'll focus on improving the "History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" article by ourselves while discussing the changes in the discussion page in a civil manner we’ll be able to reach consensus much faster then trying to improve GHcool’s draft. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 21:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree about deleting the "Historical outline" section, but think that we won't get a much better version than mine if we try and improve the "History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" article little by little. --GHcool (talk) 22:03, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm quite serious in what I said. Your version gives, fairly enough, the skeleton of 'conflict' (qua military conflict, riots, terrorism) as that is read in traditional Zionist historiography. This was, for most of the time, a conflict over land rights, and almost all of this has been ignored, except for Ehud's 'concession', which consisted in taking from 24% to 8% of the 22% of land left over to the Palestinians, parcelled in such a way as to make a state unviable. It is a strictly explicitly 'Zionist' narrative to describe the 20s as consisting only in that extraordinary showcased triplet of Palestinian 'riots', three over 12 days in a decade (1920,1921,1929), coming fast on the murder of 60,000 Jews in Eastern Europe and Petliura's Ukraine, but representing, comparatively, minor ephemeral skirmishes of revolt against a project of dispossession. The word 'conflict' is interpreted in military terms: whereas the whole history is fraught with competing institutional claims of a wholly conflictual nature, and this has disappeared, if it was ever there-

There is a whole literature that the draft seems completely unaware of. It scrupulously follows one side's account. All the 'riot' articles are mistitled, because they give the impression Arabs were rioting for all over those years (the proper NPOV title for the '1920 Palestinian riots' should be 'the Nabi Musa riot'.

There is a cameo section on the great Satan (al Husayni, mostly reflecting 50s historiography). A Palestinian account, for balance, if this useless stuff is included, would balance it with a parallel section on Rabbi Kook, whose works and influence (through his son) created much havoc in the 1970s and 80s, by providing the theoretical grounding of a messianic interpretation of Judaism for an otherwise secular project, an extremist rabbinical approach that eventually justified violence, expulsion and murder as acceptable means for re-appropriating 'the Land of Israel'.

You have 'Palestinian terrorism' and nothing about Gush Emunim and Kahane and other groups: you have the conflict as highlighting Jewish pressures for immigration as an urgent necessity to flee Nazism, while Palestinian post-nakba attempts to return to their homeland are 'border wars' against clandestine terrorist infiltration.

You have a succession of wars with other countries in which Palestinians almost never figured, (1948, 1967,1973, 1982) recognized as part of the conflict, yet ignore much evidence that many of these wars, and esp. those from 1982 were wars of choice to isolate the West Bank from the PLO and set it up for colonization. That was the explicit design of the 1982 Lebanese war, which was provoked by Israel against a UN ceasefire which the PLO observed for several months. You have nothing on the water conflict over post 1967 in which 10 times the volume of water harvested from the West Bank acquifers goes to Israel and Israeli colonial enterprises on ther West Bank, while West Bank Palestinians get hardly enough to allow their sheep to graze, their fish farms to flourish (for the Tel Aviv market). Nothing of the systematic destruction (conflict) of Palestinian cisterns and water harvesting plants throughout the West Bank (the Hebron water system is open and closed at Kiryat Arba where 6000 settlers control the water of 170,000 local Palestinians).

Nothing on the conflict post-Oslo in which 90% of the population in the West Bank lives on 2% of that land, the great urban cities.

Nothing on the huge outpouring of hi-tech military firepower essentially on a disarmed population, the policy of 'breaking their arms and legs' set out Rabin,from 1987 onwards which caused 30,000 casualties in 5 years. Nothing on the strangulation of Gaza from 2001, in a policy of ghettoization. These are only a few minor points.

So, as I said, it's a good Zionist job, but it is only one side's account, has nothing to do with fairness, does not in any way draw on numerous, comprehensive, readily accessible academic works that detail the real nature of the conflict, and systematically suppresses what a Palestinian would recount. It is nowhere near a basic level of NPOV, though fairly complete as a Zionist interpretation. The rewritings proposed, if they follow this schema, esp.given that the best editor on these things, Ashley kennedy3, is now expelled for a year for noting how bad several of these articles are, will not improve this lopsided work. I don't think this is intentional, because it is obviously the handiwork of people who have grown with narratives that slant everything one way, unaware that there is a totally different reading available from scholars, many of them Israeli, who have included in their works the narrative dealing with how the vanquished population on the other side saw things. Nishidani (talk) 10:04, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

We have to start somewhere though. TheCuriousGnome (talk) 23:46, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

If you decide to do so, the Palestinian reading can be well represented by drawing extensively on a book like Zeev Maoz's Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006. Without books like this, there is no point in working either article, or draft.Nishidani (talk) 12:08, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll try to respond to the most relevant points:

• The 1920s - I agree that more can be added about the 1920s, which I sort of glossed over.
• The Mufti - The Mufti is not mentioned at all in my draft. Should he be? Rav Kook isn't mentioned either.
• Kahane - I feel like Kahane is more of a domestic Israeli issue. Yes, he was a racist and counter-productive force, but he really only affected Israeli internal politics. If we begin adding biographies of every controversial figure on both sides of the conflict, this article will quickly become very, very long and follow a great man outline. I am not interested in pursuing this.
• Border wars vs. Palestinian right of return - These are two entirely separate issues. The Palestinian fedayeens' goal was not to "return to their homeland," but rather to harass Israelis and steal stuff. A comparison between European Jews fleeing the Holocaust and Palestinian fedayeens attacking Israel cannot reasonably be made.
• 1982 war - I disagree with Nishidani's analysis of the motivations for this war on the Israeli side and I get the feeling that most Israelis would as well. Let's keep it to just the facts.
• Water conflict - Yes, I glossed over this. I wouldn't mind including a paragraph on this.
• Gaza blockade - There are already two sentences on the Gaza blockade in my draft. While this is an important issue in today's politics, I didn't think it was necessary for the broader history article. I added a wikilink to the main article and whoever is interested can read about it there. --GHcool (talk) 18:22, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. The mufti's on the history article (Sorry for mixing. I read the two articles one after another the other day. I don't enjoy reading wiki articles, and didn't rely on anything other than memory, once I've read one through, a bad habit but they make me grind my teeth, and I dislike ending up with dentures simply out of pertinacity in reading poorly drafted essays. Your's is well-drafted, it's just lacking everything readers like myself note from a counter.Zionist perspective).

The 1920s is almost wholly ignored in wiki, except for those three points, which are milestones in the Zionist narrative, small beer in the other. The McMahon-Sherif correspondence had a very large impact on Palestinians and Arabs, after the BalDec came through. It was, to them, as if their own Balfour Declaration had been torn up, after they had rallied with the British against the Ottomans, and another tribe had been given the benefits, a stab in the back.

Kahane, and many associated figures who played a leading role in forcing the pace of settlement, Moshe Levinger, Benzion Heinemann, the Zvi Kook circle, etc.ect. and the settler movement, played a very powerful role in creating the poisoned atmosphere in the West Bank and Gaza. Ian Lustick, one of the foremost international experts in colonialism and territorial disputes, in his 1988 book (1994 ed.) wrote (p.xi):'the Jewish fundamentalist movement, and the settlers in the territories who have been its spearhead, have "emerged as the greatest obstacle to meaningful negotiations toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement.' (p.3 = Despite divisions on the Arab side, and the intransigence of many Palestinians, it is the Jewish fundamentalist movement that has emerged as the greatest obstacle to meaningful negotiations toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement.). His analysis is shared by many Israeli ranking scholars.

I don't think you have read adequately on the parallel between the driving ethos of the Jewish right to settle in Israel, and the Palestinian claim to a right to return. In limotrophic areas there was always a traditional to-and-fro across what later became borders. The expulsion of Palestinians and their desire to return cannot, as Morris argues generally, be summed up as fedayeen terrorism or bedouin banditry. The Palestinian desire to return to their homeland is as strong as any Jewish yearning in the past to make aliyah. Yet the former is deprecated as 'fedayeen' terrorism, the latter as an idealist goal. For example, there was from the late thirties quite a large amount of illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine. That is understandable, as is the hostility to British clampdowns. Writers who turn from this to characterize post 1949 attempts of Palestinians to migrate back to their homes deal frequently with this as some subversive attack on the Israeli state's territorial and demographic integrity.

My analysis of 1982 is not 'mine'. I could provide a dozen sources of high quality that analyze this, citing Begin and Sharon and Eytan's own expressed interpretations for that war of choice, which wasn't even preemptive. It was strictly designed to isolate the West Bankers and destroy their aspirations for a national home, just as the treaty with Sadat was. I'm not in the habit of saying what I think. If writing discursively on this, I always bear in mind what sources tell me. You can look at my toponym essay on my page and see 3 or four quotes on this there. I have about a dozen.

I'm happy to see you note the water conflict, which goes a long way to clarifying much of the tensions with both Syria and Jordan, as well as explaining difficulties on the West Bank. It is one of the central strategic factors in all Israeli thinking, and has been since the 50s.

Gaza is crucial. In the 1990s it had 30,000 commuters working in Israeli daily. 2001 made that all but dry up. It is now the central area of conflict.

Generally however, I don't think the article can be done unless books like the recent work by Maoz are used. It's very long, but throws a huge amount of light on IDF decision-making, and was written by an insider who supported everything and saw these conflicts unfold, and, eventually recanted and wrote that extraordinary book. (Un)fortunately, I do not have the time to attend to this article, or many others. Secondly, I think the first sensible step is simply to embrace a principle, one I keep harping on. Everything down to 2004 at least should be book-sourced, ignoring all internet government or PNA, partisan web-site sources, mainstream newspapers or old books. The best work is in the huge scholarship from the 1980s onwards: what the net gives us is recycled and often outdated narratives, or POV spinning. There are many other points I could make, but since I am not active on this page, and will not edit it, it seems pointless to niggle.Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

I just added a sentence on the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence. I took a look at the footnotes and noticed that of the 40 cited works referenced from the period before 2004, 17 of them are books, 5 of them are from government reports, websites, and documents (UN, US, Israel, Palestinian National Covenent), 3 are from scholarly journals, 1 is from Encyclopedia Britannica, and 1 is from Human Rights Watch. The rest are from websites ranging from the highly respected (BBC, etc) to the borderline RS (Damascus Online). Therefore, 67.5% of the sources cited are extremely reliable. The remaining 32.5% are still reliable, but I'm all for citing the info to even better sources. --GHcool (talk) 21:38, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually your draft conserves that absurd concatenation of superfluous sources, a mixed bag of books, 10 just for an uncontroversial point (note 11), which means 10 sources are basically used or introduced for just one undisputed moment in a century long history. Subtract most of those sources (only 2 are used elsewhere) and you get less than 10 books for the whole page. This is just bad methodology. Since all the period is intensely covered in books citing the BBC and other web sites is futile.Notes 11-19 are useless, since the two points could be covered by Gelb and Morris, without citing so many one-off sources. Most of the books in the 17 listed are cited but once, half are outdated, (Arafat's testimony useless in any case). There are dozens of methodological errors like that. I think we discussed this a few weeks ago. It's called source-economy, a variant on Occam's razor, 'the sources are not to be multiplied beyong necessity', and they never are if one bases one's work on comprehensive histories.Nishidani (talk) 08:37, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

In my defense, I did not write this article alone. If I did, it would look a lot different. It is a merger of what was already on Wikipedia with some transitional stuff by me. As I wrote before, I'm always in favor of citing better sources. --GHcool (talk) 18:35, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I just cut out a lot of the extraneous sources and consolidated some of them into The Cotinuum Political Encyclopedia. --GHcool (talk) 19:44, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

You have a huge amount of work to do on the wars. As I said, read Maoz, who has extraordinary good credentials as an Israeli academic and insider expert on security. His thesis is summed up by his own words.

‘The major theme is that most of the wars in which Israel was involved were the result of deliberate Israeli aggressive design, flawed decision making, or flawed conflict management strategies or were avoidable. Israel’s war experience is a story of folly, recklessness, and self-made traps. None of the wars – with a possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence- was what Israel refers to as Milhemet Ein Brerah (“war of necessity”). They were all wars of choice or wars of folly’ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.35

There is a large literature on this, it is interpretive, but the way your draft reads, one would never gather that this is a widely shared reading of the sequence of wars and conflict. Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Like Joe Friday, I'm interested in "just the facts." --GHcool (talk) 01:25, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually, there is a timeline structure, and then a selective use of facts to underline a Zionist narrative. All facts, readily available to an editor, not bearing on this narrative are omitted. Why is Abu Nidal registered? He was under a death sentence from the PLO in 1982, and the attempt on the life of the Israeli ambassador to London seems to have been ordered by Saddam Hussein. That the event was a pretext to blame the PLO and then destroy them in Lebanon is known to everybody. If you cite Abu Nidal, then you are obliged to reference not only the trite pretext, but also the dozens of later historical accounts, like Maoz's which supply full analysis and quotations from the decision-makers on why they decided on that war of choice. The real 'facts' behind the decision are known to all scholars. They are not in your account, here as throughout. But I see it is pointless to insist. Go ahead, but on a present reading, there is no possibility of your draft being a merging. Nishidani (talk) 09:26, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Nishidani, I have not read the same books that you have. I do not own those books. I will go forward with the merge and encourage you to add any verifiable, relevant information you wish into the merge. Any omission in the merge I drafted are not by design to help the Zionist agenda or any other such fiddle-faddle. --GHcool (talk) 16:53, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I say Zionist in all honesty. From someone wholly outside the perspective in which this merge is written, it looks like an essay in Zionist interpretation.

I could spend months on noting where the method is poor, or the text ignores decades of scholarship. I clicked back to check 1948 just now and what do I get?

The Arab leadership called on the Arab population to evacuate[16] many areas to make it easier for the Arab forces to take them over. Many rumors of awful acts that were committed by Jewish fighters as well as a number of serious actions taken by Jewish forces made a greater number of Arabs decide to leave Palestine.

This is a style of interpretation common to Zionist propaganda down to the early 1980s, and only survives in non-historians like the hackwork of Alan Dershowitz. In fact, note 16 which buttresses it, reads:

16. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 256, quoted in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 80.

Alan Dershowitz is not an historian, virtually everything in that book is useless, he has so twisted everything one cannot use it. It should not be cited. But he is used to cite Benny Morris. If we look at ther quote from Benny Morris we get

In some areas Arab commanders ordered the villagers to evacuate to clear the ground for military purposes . .More than half a dozen villages, just north of Jerusalem and in the Lower Galilee-were abandoned during these months as a result of such orders. Elsewhere, in East Jerusalem and in many villages around the country, the (Arab) commanders ordered women, old people, and children to be sent away out of harm's way .. in 1946-47, . the AHC and the Arab League had periodically endorsed such a move when contemplating the future war in Palestine'

The text drafted from this reference is patched up by selective citation, a violation of WP:SYNTH, WP:OR which actually manages to misrepresent Morris's known views, though he is cited for it (via the lamentable Dershowitz, who still subscribes to the myth of his youth here).

• It changes the subject of 'some Arab commanders' in a few villages to 'the Arab leadership'
• That the AHC and Arab League had periodically endorsed the idea a year or two before in thinking of strategy is immaterial, since there is no evidence it was put into practice, as your synthesis asserts.
• It reintroduces under false credentials (Morris) a myth fabricated by Zionists and effectively buried by Erskine Childers 5 decades ago. All serious historiography no longer entertains the myth in the formk enunciated in your first sentence.
• It ignores the conclusions of Morris's massive study, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004). Morris in this book footnote 95 pp.269f. dismisses what your synthesis of the Zionist propaganda, from a misreading of the passage Dershowitz quotes, implies he maintains. There, he explicitly states there is no evidence that the Arab leadership made a blanket call for evacuation. The only example that vaguely fits this is the evidence for Haifa (see pp.133ff.pp.198ff but p.139 concludes that before April 'the AHC and by and large the NCs opposed the flight' p.130).
• Your draft here also refers to post May 14 events that occurred (flight, rumours leading to flight) underway long before that date, late 1947 through to April. Morris and many others document that throughout, a transfer mentality guided many Israeli operations that 'cleansed' villages. Of this no word.

Attempts to write singlehandedly a draft requires, to meet NPOV, either deep familiarity with historical method, and reliable sources, the best academic works period for period, over this conflict, or, alternatively, collaboration with people who know the literature thoroughly, to ensure the compensations of much one misses, and the other POV. The one person who might have helped has been screwed off the encyclopedia for a year. Life's short. I can't spend what's left of mine cleaning up messes like this. It is better to have two messy pages with much useful information scattered over them, than a merger written by one hand that is organized along one POV, Zionism. You work hard, the draft is well-organized and neatly written. It neglects, elides, glosses over or ignores everything of moment not considered welcome by the vetero-zionist approach to historical writing. I.e. it neglects modern scholarship from 1980s onwards. You have some reading to do, therefore, so good luck.Nishidani (talk) 20:28, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

ps.I note that the 24 incidents Morris analyses as outright massacres of Arabs in 1948 are reduced to 'rumnours' or 'serious actions'. (All actions in war are serious, except when General Spike Milligen was in command).Nishidani (talk) 20:46, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I just reworded the sentence so that it says "some Arab commanders ordered." --GHcool (talk) 21:40, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Correcting the text/source error, but leaving in, along with a tendentious ultra-Zionist secondary source of notably poor quality (Dershowitz) a diluted echo of a hackneyed myth, thus still showcasing flight-as-self-induced, while ignoring the dozen key elements (transfer, forced expulsions of entire cities, ethnic cleansing of areas) (Morris) that any neutral text would remark on. Another reason for not collaborating on the draft. You pick a few things to improve the aesthetics of the skeleton, dab in cement on a rotten joint, but it remains a rickets-ridden corpse.Nishidani (talk) 07:22, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

I just fixed the sentence, completely removing the Dershowitz citation, and replacing it with the two you have provided Nishidani. With regards to your comments of massacres of arabs you refer to directly above, could you provide Morris's reference for that, and i can rewrite the second sentence: "Many rumors of awful acts that were committed by Jewish fighters as well as a number of serious actions taken by Jewish forces made a greater number of Arabs decide to leave Palestine."

I also just want to say thanks to Nishidani for coming here and offering feedback. It is a shame he (or she?) doesn't have the time to properly contribute, however as always it is extremely welcome to have someone with the insight and familiarity with the historical method to comment. I would hope that these couple of sentences are a clear example of what can be achieved for the whole article. Regards. Suicup (talk) 07:37, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

That said, I completely agree with Nishidani that this merge was a bad idea for reasons already established. While we may have 'fixed' this sentence, the fact is, the whole article and its citations must be reworked in this manner, which involves a lot of work, especially for a single editor. Much better IMO to leave it as it was. Suicup (talk) 07:40, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Morris gave that figure, 24 Jewish massacres of Arabs, to Avi Shavit in the by now famous interview in Haaretz, after the publication of his rev.ed. of the 1988 masterpiece. In that book he gives 3 Arab massacres of Jews for the same period. But this wasn't just about massacres, though they played a huge role in flight. One cannot reduce such a monumental moment to a few stray remarks. Generally the thumbnail sketch approach in one overview article can only be done if one has a full and cogent synthesis on all period pages to work from. Unfortunately, most of these pages are 3 decades behind the specialist literature. That is why I continue to suggest that whoever is keen to work towards a revision of any page simply begin by checking the notes, and replacing all newspaper sources, government-slanted or NPA-sourced material, or encyclopedia compendia, or tertiary sources, with references from the secondary literature. User:Ceedjee does this, as does User:Ashley kennedy3. Without some overriding and binding principle like this, fully compliant with the ideal of WP:RS, all editing is merely tatting and patching up from hearsay, outdated POV material - which is the congenital problem with I/P area articles. Regards Nishidani (talk) 08:13, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps it would help if you could list here 4 -5 key sources which could be utilized for this purpose. That way, potential editors have a starting point for their research. Regards. Suicup (talk) 08:20, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

goal of Palestinian violence (cont'd)

I agree with GHcool. The mere fact that someone said something at some time does not demonstrate its truth. All four of those citations are pro-Israel, which should point a warning finger to partiality. Michael B. Oren served in the Israel Defense Force, Daniel Pipes is a pro-Israel political commentator, and this declares its status as fringe politics. Obvious personal investment in authorship should always warrant additional scrutiny when citing.

If Joe Johnson says that "potatoes taste terrible", the article on potatoes should not state that "potatoes taste terrible"; it should cite that as his stated opinion. Furthermore, if Joe Johnson states that he bought a Ford because prefers American companies, the statement "Joe Johnson bought a Ford because he prefers American companies" is not necessarily true, but "Joe Johnson stated that he bought a Ford because he prefers American companies" is true. Intentions are difficult to ascertain. Note that the featured article on Barak Obama never discusses Obama's intentions. Certainly if the claim is as significant and powerful as the intention of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, care (and nitpicking) is crucial.

Unless Daniel Pipes interviewed every Palestinian militant and determined that Israel's destruction is their unanimous goal, his claim should not be stated as true. If Pipes did interview every Palestinian militant and determined that, then that should be cited as Palestinian militants' unanimous stated goal, not their actual goal.

Also, I must express my support for the neutrality template. It's not a matter of arbitrary balance; it's a matter of weasel words.

Palestinians insist on contiguous territory which will in turn rupture the existing territorial contiguity of Israel.

Insist. Rupture. Most of the article is fine, but the Israeli security concerns section is a biased wreck.  dmyersturnbull  ⇒ talk 21:14, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I assume you meant "I don't agree with GHcool" unless you were specifically referring to their statement about the WP:BRD process. Sean.hoyland - talk 05:17, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with User:dmyersturnbull. Also, the sentence states that the motives are complex and then proceeds to say that really it is about elimination of Israel, which doesn't really make sense. Is it complex or not? For this reason I have reworded to sentence, and also removed superfluous language. I also removed all the references except the Continuum Encyclopaedia because a) one should be enough, b) the others were hardly objective. Regards Suicup (talk) 11:30, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I think that anyone who makes a firm statement about a "common goal of Palestinian violence" can be forgiven for believing it not only true, but proven by their overwhelmingly having elected Hamas to lead them. There's no bias involved in such a position, just observation.FlaviaR (talk) 21:55, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

That is an incredibly silly "observation". nableezy - 22:01, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

If you could prove that it was "silly", you would no doubt have done so. Likewise with proving it false. You might want to take another look at Hamas' charter before you answer.FlaviaR (talk) 07:51, 30 November 2009 (UTC)