Situation deadlocked, how to solve it? - WikiEN-l

21 Jan 2005

Hello, everybody! I like to draw your attention to the page "Estimates
of the Palestinian Refugee flight of 1948"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refugee_flight_of…).
The page lists estimates of how many Palestinian refugees where
created in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. There are quite a few different
estimates out there, all diverging from each other. Therefore, and
because Jayjg insisted on inserting the number 472,000 in the article
History of Israel
(Ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Israel&diff=65660…)6554019),
I felt that a separate page was necessary.

Recently, that page has suffered a violent revert war, in which me,
Jayjg and Viriditas was the combatants. The issue is over the
following text:

 472,000 According to the "Progress Report of the United Nations
Mediator on Palestine", as cited by Mitchell Bard on the Jewish
Virtual Library. [1]

[1] links to this page:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf14.html#2

Jayjg insists on retaining that source, while I want it removed. Yes,
it is true that Mitchell Bard claims he is getting the estimate
472,000 Palestinian refugees from the UN document "Progress Report of
the United Nations Mediator on Palestine," but a large part of that
document is availible online, from UN:s own site:

http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/ab14d4aafc4e1bb985256204004f55fa?OpenDoc…
That document does not mention any estimate of the total number of
refugees. However, this page:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/decade/decad170.htm

Contains some more bits of "Progress Report of the United Nations
Mediator on Palestine" which mention the number "360,000 Arab refugees
and 7,000 Jewish refugees requiring aid in that country and adjacent
States." Because of this information and the fact that the number
472,000 Palestinian refugees cannot be traced to any other source, I
doubt that the UN Mediator ever wrote it. I've also had an e-mail
conversation with Mitchell Bard and he has so far refused to quote the
full line(s) from where his number 472,000 comes from. To me, that and
the fact that he is an editor of a strongly pro-Israel site
(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org), does make his claim less believable.

That is the reason I didn't want the page Estimates of the Palestinian
Refugee flight of 1948, to tell the reader that the UN Mediator (Count
Folke Bernadotte) wrote 472,000. Because currently there is no
evidence for that, other than that Mitchell Bard has written it.
Therefore, I wanted the text to read as follows:

 472,000 According to Mitchell Bard on the Jewish Virtual Library. [1]

But if someone can provide a more definite source than Mitchell Bard,
the situation changes.

The other reason that the number 472,000 should not be attributed to
the UN Mediator's report is that it was written before September 16,
1948, many months before the conflict ended. Israel's operations in
the Galilee hadn't even begun! It is estimated that in that operation
1-200,000 Arabs were driven from their homes.

How can you make an estimate of something that hasn't occured yet?!
...

This I have told Jayjg many times
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Palestine-info/Ignoring_the_datum),
and after many days of exhausting discussion, he has changed his
paragraph a little:

 472,000 by September 16, 1948 according to the "Progress Report of
the United Nations Mediator on Palestine", as cited by Mitchell Bard
on the Jewish Virtual Library. [1]

But that is still far from factual. What Mitchell Bard really claimed
can be seen when visiting his article:

"This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become
refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even
lower figure -- 472,000"

This claim is made in a paragraph in which he is discussing how many
"Palestinians became refugees in 1947-1949." There is no mention of
the fact that the report was published September 16. If you read the
paragraph it becomes clear that what he is trying to do is to lure the
reader to believe that the UN Mediator estimated that 472,000
Palestinians became refugees due to the war. Therefore, the new
version that Jayjg tried with is also bad - noone but people
knowledgeable about Israeli-Palestinian history knows that a large
number (hundreds of thousands) of Palestinian refugees was created
after September 1948. They will be fooled.

And also, Mitchell Bard did definitely not claim that the UN Mediator
counted 472,000 Palestinian refugees by September 16, 1948.

To solve this dispute, I tried with a footnote:

1: Mitchell Bard alleges that the UN official record "Progress Report
of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine" estimates that the number
of refugees was 472,000. The progress report was published on
September 16, 1948, ten months before the hostilities and the refugee
flight ended. Large parts of the report is availible here
(http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/ab14d4aafc4e1bb985256204004f55fa?OpenDoc…).
It is estaminated that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left in
the months after September, 1948. The number 472,000 should therefore
not be seen as an estimate of the total number of refugees, rather as
an estimate on how many Palestinian refugees there were in September
1948.

This compromise was not acceptable to Jayjg who has continued to
revert. So now I'm at loss of what to do. I've posted a Request for
Comments but it hasn't helped very much. One editor said that my
attention was an attempt to skew the article to a particular POV.
Another said the number might be comparing apples to oranges.

This mail is long, probably too long for people to read. The issue
isn't very important and there are many much worse instances of POV in
Wikipedia than this one. But that is why it is so astonishing to me
that it has taken so much time to try and correct one minor POV
detail. I've tried to discuss for over three months now with Jayjg,
but it just doesn't seem to work. His editing behaviour is very
hostile - if something is even slightly POV according to his
perception he will always revert instead of trying to fix it or
working out a compromise. I've written for Wikipedia for over four
years but I've never encountered an editor quite like him.

I don't know what to do. Do you?

-- 
mvh Björn