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| Anti-Zionist spin in red (click to enlarge) |
The article, which currently looks like this, reads as if it was written by a coterie of anti-Zionist activists. Because it was.
The slanting of the article, almost certainly coordinated offsite, took place in a spasm of edits by pro-Hamas editors subsequent to Oct. 7, when the article was reasonably stable and was not heavily edited. At the time of the "Al Aqsa Flood" slaughter in the Gaza Envelope, it provided a balanced and neutral depiction of Zionism, noting criticism by anti-Zionists but not giving undue emphasis to it. Then the Wikipedia Flood invaded the article.
It took a lot of hard work by pro-Hamas editors to turn the article on Zionism into anti-Zionist propaganda, with some of the most toxic changes happening in the past few weeks.
On August 11, the prolific anti-Zionist editor "Levivich" added at the top of the article that "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."
The sourcing of that and other anti-Zionist statements includes a long roster of anti-Zionists. The sourcing of the statement cited above include anti-Israel extremists such as Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, infamous for his support of terrorism, all quoted at length in a footnote.
On Wikipedia, Zionism is defined by people who hate Zionism. It's the Wikipedia way, as pointed out in this blog and in a recent Jewish Journal article.
Anti-Zionist sourcing cited by anti-Zionist editors results in an anti-Zionist article that makes a mockery of Wikipedia's supposed "neutral point of view" policy. Thus the frequent and prominent references to Zionism as a "colonial" movement, and the watering down of text that points out that Zionism is actually a movement of return of an indigenous people to their homeland.
A sentence that read
This process was seen by the Zionist Movement as an "ingathering of exiles" (kibbutz galuyot), an effort to put a stop to the exoduses and persecutions that have marked Jewish history by bringing the Jewish people back to their historic homeland
was edited to read
The process of Jews moving or 'returning' to the land (around today's Palestine and Israel) they purportedly had been exiled from, was seen by the emerging Zionist movement as an "ingathering of exiles" (kibbutz galuyot), an effort to put a stop to the exoduses and persecutions that have marked Jewish history by bringing the Jewish people back to their historic homeland.
Note "purportedly" and how other language was added to downplay the roots of the Jewish people in the Holy Land, which is well-established historical fact.
An effort by an editor to return the article to its pre-Oct. 7 state was twice reverted today, with the results shown in the illustration at the top. The anti-Zionist poison is outlined in red.
The editor who sought to fix the article was promptly targeted by an administrator on grounds of "gaming the system," and was banned from the topic area.*
The Zionism article is an excellent example of how anti-Zionism is baked into Wikipedia through slanted sourcing and a "flood" of well-established anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and often just plain antisemitic editors, who are allowed to run rampant by indifferent "administrators," often themselves anti-Israel, abetted by a do-nothing Arbitration Committee and a Wikimedia Foundation that looks that other way.
*In fairness, this editor did "game the system" by making trivial edits like this to inflate his edit count. To cement their control over the topic areas, pro-Hamas editors pushed through a rule requiring editors to have at least thirty days editing experience and 500 edits in order to edit "Israel/Palestine" articles.. In a previous blog item I warned against edit-inflation games to surmount this unfair rule.
