Wikipedia Decrees: Israel is an Apartheid State

'Israel and apartheid' article before and after pro-Hamas editors attacked (click to enlarge)

When you blog about Wikipedia's anti-Israel obsession, there is so much going on that it's possible to miss important stuff. I did. I've just learned, totally through happenstance, that in recent weeks the "Wikipedia Flood" of pro-Hamas editors has achieved a major victory that received little if any attention outside Wikipedia.

Through sheer force of numbers, and by cannily working the system, they have manueuvered Wikipedia into saying, in its own voice, that Israel is an apartheid state, right up there with South Africa in the bad old days.

This propaganda victory achieves a major objective of pro-Hamas editors, which is to put Wikipedia as an institution on the Hamas bandwagon. It's not enough to twist articles and make them biased. They want Wikipedia to become part of their propaganda war against Israel. 

They do this in two ways, both of which took place with the "Israeli apartheid" article:

1.  Changing the titles of articles so that Wikipedia says flat-out that Israel is a no-good, genocide-committing apartheid state.

2. Rewriting the articles themselves to make those same statements, removing all balance, neutrality and words like "alleged," and not giving or downplaying the Israeli side of the story. 

They carried out their mission in the "apartheid" article not long after they rammed through a change in the title of an article so that Wikipedia itself says that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza war. 

While all the oxygen was being consumed by the "Gaza genocide" controversy, they quietly did the same thing for an article that had been titled "Israel and apartheid." Now it's titled "Israeli apartheid," 

As a result of this title change, and previously by a months-long rewriting of the article itself, Wikipedia is saying in its own voice that Israel is committing apartheid. It's not treated as an accusation that Israel and its defenders fervently deny. It's a fact, poison to be spread around the world on the most-read English language reference site.

The mechanics of the change took place in two steps, first preceding the October 7 Hamas slaughters and then afterwards, when the Wikipedia Flood commenced attacking articles in earnest.

At the top of this blog post you can how they turned the article into Hamas propaganda. 

On the left is how the article appeared in June 4, 2023, as captured by the Wayback Machine. (The article history shows the same version of the article but not what its title was at the time.) On the right is how it appears as of Sept. 19.

Aside from the change in the title, the beginning of the article was completely differently than it is today. In June 2023 the title of the article was neutral ("Israel and apartheid") and the lead of the article read as follows:

Israel is accused by international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups of committing the crime of apartheid under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, both in the occupied Palestinian territories and, by some, in Israel proper. Israel and its supporters deny the charges.

That wasn't good enough. The pro-Hamas editors aren't into neutrality or fairness. They want outright propaganda, and they were emboldened by Oct. 7. 

In the months that followed, and at an accelerated pace after Oct. 7, they were able to turn the article into outright, unashamed anti-Israel propaganda. Now the title is "Israeli apartheid" and the article currently says as follows in the first paragraph:

Israeli apartheid is a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel proper. This system is characterized by near-total physical separation between the Palestinian and the Israeli settler population of the West Bank, as well as the judicial separation that governs both communities, which discriminates against the Palestinians in a wide range of ways. Israel also discriminates against Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and against its own Palestinian citizens.

Note that "Israeli apartheid" is stated as fact, without even a weak attempt at balance or neutrality.

The pro-Hamas editors, who coordinate their efforts offsite, drove the point home in a new second paragraph:

After the 1948 Palestine war, Israel denied Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled from what became its territory the right of return and right to their lost properties. Since the 1967 Six Day War, Israel has been occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is now the longest military occupation in modern history, and in contravention of international law has been constructing large settlements there that separate Palestinian communities from one another and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The settlements are mostly encircled by the Israeli West Bank barrier. While the Jewish settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, the Palestinian population is subject to military law. Settlers also enjoy access to separate roads and exploit the region's natural resources at its Palestinian inhabitants' expense.

I could spend the rest of this blog item and a dozen others dissecting, point by point, how this new paragraph is a total rewriting of history. Suffice to say that it does not even pretend to comply with Wikipedia policies requiring neutrality.

To gild the lily, during the summer of 2023 someone added a photo showing a street in Hebron upon which someone stenciled (in English for foreign consumption or perhaps just this photo) the words "Apartheid Street." The photo, taken during a propaganda tour of the West Bank, was uploaded to Flickr by a British anti-Zionist politician named John E. Austin.  

The title change happened swiftly on the "talk page" of the article. The entirety of the discussion can be found here.

It began last July 20, when the veteran anti-Israel editor "Makeandtoss" commenced the "requested move" discussion with the comment that "this move should have been implemented years ago."

Pretty much everyone agreed. Unlike the two-month discussion on the effort by these same coterie of editors to say in Wikipedia's voice that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, there was little substantive discussion at all. Not a single editor objected. The deed was done on August 5 by an administrator named "Robertsky" just two weeks after it was proposed.

While the lack of interest in this title change is startling, as is the lack of pushback into the article's gradual transformation into blatant Hamas propaganda, that's not really surprising. 

The pro-Hamas editors are well-organized offsite and, above all, far more numerous than the editors who might oppose them. They can branch out all around Wikipedia and bring their friends with them.

They are often editors of long-standing. "Makeandtoss" has been around for ten years. Such editors  know how to work the system.

As the "apartheid" article's transformation into Hamas literature demonstrates, they've done an effective job of turning Wikipedia from a reliable if flawed source of information on the Middle East into a propaganda-filled dust bin.