User talk:Levivich

For your attention

Regarding your concerns of tag team editing raised at AE recently, you may want to see [1] and [2]/[3] - IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 09:34, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, yeah, I saw that on my watchlist. I'm going to update the AE report with the Israel edit. The UNRWA stuff is out of scope, but the way things are going, it may end up being part of the next AE report 🙄 Levivich (talk) 15:29, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

a kitten for you!

i avoid participating in contentious discussions, but i happened upon this just now and along with all the other miserable PIA threads i see you at, i just wanted to say thank you for your dedicated & thoughtful contributions :)

... sawyer * he/they * talk 07:00, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) Levivich (talk) 12:48, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Complaints against pro Israelis

Let's put the cards on the table, in all the sensitive preoccupation with articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are almost no objective editors. And that's fine... In my opinion, there is no real objectivity in the world.

I think that complaining about any editor with an opposing opinion is unethical and inconsistent with the spirit of our community.

I don't know if you will back down from your complaints, I won't go into details either and maybe all your complaints are justified. As an Israeli, it is troubling to see the amount of complaints you filed against editors who, on the whole, expressed their opinion (which probably differs from yours) Eladkarmel (talk) 07:34, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with opinions, it's about facts. For example, whether Palestinians are native to Palestine, or whether East Jerusalem is part of Israel, are not matters of opinion. Go through every edit I've posted at AE lately; they're all easily-disproven misstatements of fact. And the edits I'm complaining about aren't "pro-Israeli," they're anti-Palestinian; specifically, they're common far-right propaganda talking points (like "a land without a people for a people without a land" and "there is no such thing as a Palestinian"). There are hundreds if not thousands of objective editors in this topic area, and less than a dozen accounts have been POV pushing these anti-Palestinian lies lately. Staying silent is what would be unethical. I didn't stay silent in years past when some folks tried to change Wikipedia to say that the Holocaust was the Nazi genocide "of Poles, and also Jews," and I won't stay silent about this. Levivich (talk) 13:00, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

I will not write names here, but you and I know that there is also a definite anti-Israeli side here. You did not file a complaint about them.

In my opinion, we should let the "market forces" work here. Writing complaints (I also include the complaints against Nableezy and more...) are wrong and in my opinion hurt Wikipedia.Eladkarmel (talk) 14:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

I absolutely have complained about anti-Israeli and antisemitic editing in the past. Currently, I am not aware of any anti-Israeli group of new and sleeper accounts trying to revise history. If you know of any, I encourage you to report it. Levivich (talk) 14:22, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

I am less active in the English Wikipedia, because of the violence against Israeli editors. I returned to work mainly at the Hebrew Wikipedia (Patrol). What you wrote is naive... there is a definite anti-Israeli group. A group that is very involved in the talk pages, very involved in articles, and you can see statements that clarify their opinion about Israel and Zionism. Eladkarmel (talk) 15:40, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Of course there are editors that have anti-Israeli views, but I'm not aware of any group of new/sleeper accounts with anti-Israeli views who are trying to revise history, currently. It's not like I'm filing an AE against every anti-Israeli editor... these accounts (except for the one forum one) are all connected by virtue of being new/sleeper accounts who are trying to revise history. Levivich (talk) 15:59, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

So just to understand, your whole problem with them is that they are new users? In your opinion, are veterans allowed to cooperate? Ok... how long or how many edits do I need to do before I'm allowed to collaborate with others? Eladkarmel (talk) 06:26, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

But from a compliance perspective there are no pro-Israeli editors. There are just editors who follow the rules, all of the rules, and editors who don't. Why would a Wikipedia editor care whether an account reported for not following the rules is pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? How can non-compliance be enforced unless people report it? Market forces only work in free markets. PIA is not a free market. There is market manipulation. And market regulation via sanctions doesn't work for disposable sockpuppet accounts. Sean.hoyland (talk) 06:53, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the whole problem is new users. Fucking hate 'em. And people who use cheap rhetorical tricks like straw man argumentation. You're allowed to collaborate with others after making 2,279 edits. Hope I answered all your questions! Levivich (talk) 11:59, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

The pro-Israel vs pro-Palestinian meme. This is now accepted even among admins at arbitration, but it masks the essential issue, recently illustrated at the Masada myth. I did not even know this article existed until the AfD issue was alluded to at AE, as evidence for tagteaming by the three editors mentioned above. That article is almost completely documented by citing Israel/Jewish scholars: it is they who challenged a national Zionist myth. What these new editors, like many earlier editors, contest is, not a 'pro-Palestinian POV-pushing crowd', but Israeli/Jewish scholarship in so far as its research destabilizes the popular myths that sustain Israeli identity. These editors are simply uncomfortable with the cutting-edge scholarship produced in their own country or within their own cultural communities, which is, implicitly, viewed as 'anti-Israel'/'pro-Palestinians' to the extent that it challenges the clichés churned out by a political and ideological establishment within Israel.Nishidani (talk) 12:52, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

What label would you apply to these political views? Because you're right, it's not "Israeli" or "pro-Israeli". It's usually "anti-Palestinian" but that seems kind of vague (for example, in my view, and the view of many Palestinians, Hamas is also "anti-Palestinian", but in a different way). I think of it as "ultra-Zionist"; far-right Israeli politics; and I associate it with Haredi, although that's probably unfair to Haredi. It's like "far-right Zionist Haredi", but that's probably not accurate either. Is there a word for this? (Besides Nakba denial?) Levivich (talk) 17:18, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

That's a three-pint problem, and it's just about time for my sundowner at the pub. I'll get back to you later.Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

I would definitely exclude any association with the Haredi in this. Apart from Neturei Karta, there are Haredi communities like Satmar abroad which are anti-Zionist. I've long had a deep admiration for figures like rabbi Yaakov Shapiro whose ultra-orthodox vision of Judaism utterly repudiates Zionism, and who can calmly and amicably sit down with a despised 'anti-Jew' like Gilad Atzmon -without suffering the usual rash of anxiety, and explain why (and he is far more eloquent and incisive than Atzmon. See this from 21 minutes in . I might often disagree with several of Shapiro's views, but admire his moral integrity, cogency of argument and humanity)

The simplest term is '(pro-)Israeli (ultra-)nationalist' - my country right or wrong. Its main characteristics are to take personally any criticism of the state as an insult to one's values, which requires one to climb into the trenches, and (b) a confusion of identity between being Jewish and identifying Israel a part of the core of that identity. The common strand is the almost total elision of Israel's 'other' (Palestinians): a kind of anxious discomfort emerges if one merely mentions anything regarding that other reality. To edit/discuss the Palestinian side is not read on its merits, but as implicitly taking a shot at Israel and the validity of one's attachment to that country. Editors who fit this profile are very vulnerable because they underwrite so many commonplace opinions that are known to be false. As with the facts that East Jerusalem is not in Israel, that settlements are illegal, that the nakhba occurred, etc.etc.etc., their perhaps unwitting premise seems identical with that of, putatively, Karl Rove in his dismissal of the complacencies of the Reality-based community as exhbited in his view by the interviewer Ron Suskind. He said:

guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Out of personal curiosity, I once traced this back to its historical sources, via the 1909-1911 period to the immediate conservative reactions to the French Revolution (Joseph de Maistre etc.), but it goes back to Plato. It is no longer, as we see in the Trumpian era with its 'fake news', a minority view since its efficacy has been repeatedly demonstrated and has gone into the rightwing mainstream. Concretely this means that, in 'good faith' people with this worldview can challenge 'facts' in the belief that all such 'facts' are provisional and can be replaced now by a different order of facts if one can convince enough people to believe otherwise. Once a consensus spreads, the factual landscape out there can be changed to fit these new 'facts on the ground', which is what Israel's policies in the territories are essentially about. There are even reliable legal sources in the IDF who explicitly state this: sure, we are breaking international laws, but overtime, with the precedents we establish, those selfsame laws will die on their feet, as modifications are made to take in the 'newer realities'.

Strong Zionists by contrast (and there are quite a few editors who fit this profile) are not worried by these (self-)defensive reactions. They are realists, secure in their sense of who they are and who grasp that Israel has won, has so for 70 years, and all the backchat is just that, frivolous moaning, pro- or con- that will never inflect the historical achievement of a Jewish state. They pose no problem for wikipedia. For them, it is no problem accepting what Israeli/diaspora scholarship comes up with or with writing articles up that radically alter traditional perceptions (the myths) of the past.

Ugh, for effs'sake, those beers have me frothing at the cake-hole again. Sorry. Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining this to me! Rove was right: we are studying what they did, so we know how not to repeat those mistakes... Levivich (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Lev, though I should have, tipple permitting, put that more precisely (I was trying to avoid the psychoanalytic temptation, which is a private interpretative vice, when identity questions emerge, whose expression I have to restrain myself, fortunately, from voicing in wikiland). Rove's explanation actually had its roots in the theorizers of fascism, unbeknown to him. The new realities he and the administration created were of course 'democracy' in Iraq and Afghanistan, forking out a trillion dollars in that 'new reality' over two decades. Perhaps I've told this anecdote before, but when Blair was convinced by GWB junior at his ranch to launch the Iraq war, the English foreign office was disconcerted (two not too realistic men playing an earth-quaking dice with history). They begged Blair to hear England's top 6 historical experts on the region before he confirmed his decision. 'Sure. I can spare them half an hour'. So they were convoked and each given five minutes - during which they all advised that the notion was a recipé for regional disaster. At the end, Blair said he wanted to ask them just one question:'Was Saddam Hussein evil'? Sigh. (A deeper reading in the hermeneutics of suspicion mould would counter that even that was foreseen, and that chaos was the aim, for strong geostrategic reasons, and the rhetoric of democracy just hot air to blandish the public) I've lost all of the lengthy notes I made on Rove's idea somewhere in the dark memory blanks of this computer, and should try to retrieve them and work them up. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 23:02, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

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Parties

I think they were limited by the template; they said I will shortly be adding the rest of the admin and non-admin participants to the list above in their own section. (I was also surprised by it at first) BilledMammal (talk) 17:45, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I saw that but I'm still confused by the names even on the partial list. Levivich (talk) 17:47, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I see now it's everyone who commented at the AE filing. Odd way to list parties (reminds me of "everyone whose name appears in this paper..."), but maybe that's how AE referrals are supposed to be done. Levivich (talk) 17:51, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Lgtm

Does that mean something other than let’s get this money? nableezy - 17:48, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Looks Good To Me :-) Levivich (talk) 17:50, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Arbitration notice

You are involved in a recently filed request for clarification or amendment from the Arbitration Committee. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment#Amendment request: Referral from the Artibration Enforcement noticeboard regarding behavior in Palestine-Israel articles and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. Additionally, the Wikipedia:Arbitration guide may be of use.

Thanks,

— Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 17:52, 17 August 2024 (UTC)