User:Horizon206

About Me
I'm here, somewhere
General Information
Name	Ofek
Gender	Male
Birthday	September 26, 2006 (18 years old)
Born in	Ramat Gan, Israel
Living in	New York City, United States
Interests / Hobbies
Spaceflight, Seismology, Public Transit, Video Games, Anime
WikiProjects This user is a member of WikiProject Spaceflight. This user is a participant in WikiProject Earthquakes. This user participates in WikiProject Video games.

Wikipedia:Babel

heמשתמש זה דובר עברית כשפת אם.

he-3

משתמש זה יכול לתרום ברמה מתקדמת של עברית.‏

en-4This user can contribute with a near-native level of English.

ja-1この利用者は初級の日本語ができます。

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Hello random stranger, welcome to my user page!

Just a fair warning, I mostly use this page currently as a to-do list for myself:

My General To-Do List

☐ Find a source sufficient enough to include the bird that struck a space shuttle on liftoff in the list of unusual animal deaths article.
☐ Attempt to improve old seismology articles, such as the one for moment tensors, which hasn't been significantly changed in over a decade and a half.

Stubs for Me to Expand Sometime

• Leonardo City Tower Hotel*
• Academy of the Hebrew Language*
• Ktiv menuqad

* Can be expanded significantly by translating from the corresponding Hebrew Wikipedia article

Hebrew Audio Files that I Think Could be Better

• File:He-Medinat Israel2.ogg
• File:Shekel_Hadash.ogg
• File:Ramat gan.ogg
• File:He-Ivrit-2.ogg

Wikipedia's Anti-Israel Bias: A Showcase in Hopes of Change

For quite a while now, but especially since the start of the recent war in Gaza, I feel that there has been quite a significant anti-Israel bias throughout the English Wikipedia—even through the lens of my relatively left-leaning ideologies. That being said, I do not currently intend on directly attempting to change the articles myself, both because it would be a waste of time and to ensure absolute neutrality despite me having absolutely no affiliation to the Israeli Government nor any pro-Israel organization.

However, I still very much adore Wikipedia and desire it to be as good as it can, so I will be dedicating the bottom of my user page to logging any anti-Israel bias I can find, with hopes that this can be used by other Wikipedians as a point of reference on where to improve. As such, I will also be ordering these issues by which ones I find more pressing, with the most troublesome ones being on the top.

Sources with an anti-Israel bias not being defined as unreliable

Despite organizations such as the ADL being labeled as "generally unreliable" regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, many organizations continue to be seen as reliable (or not unreliable) despite obvious signs of bias, such as:

• Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatari pro-Hamas government and banned in the Palestinian Authority for “inciting sedition”, is not explicitly stated to be unreliable and thus continues to be used extensively as a source in many articles relating to the conflict.
• The United Nations, who have been repeatedly found to be bias against Israel by organizations such as UN Watch, especially with the malpractice present at UNRWA.
• Amnesty International, which is still seen as "generally reliable" in all topics despite their clear anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine biases as well as signs of systemic racism.
• Human Rights Watch, which similarly also has an anti-Israel bias.
• The BBC, who—according to a 2024 Daily Telegraph report—breached their own journalistic guidelines 1,500 times over the course of the Gaza war, are still considered by Wikipedia as "generally reliable" for all topics. While the BBC remains generally reliable for most topics, their reliability regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict needs to be reevaluated.

Extremely biased phrasing throughout the article for Zionism

Since the start of the Gaza war, the Wikipedia page for Zionism has been repeatedly edited to include incredibly biased phrasing that seeks to vilify the term, which is simply a general term to describe those who sought/supported a Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Many of Zionism's alleged ideologies and principles in the article are not taken from actual Zionists, and present ideologies which many/most Zionists do not hold as ideologies of the whole movement, either by citing people who are not Zionists themselves or by taking the view of one/some Zionists as that of all Zionists. Thus, the article includes phrases such as "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible." even in the lead section of the article.

I could go on and on about this article, but I'm sure someone else has already done so, so I will refrain from doing so for the sake of time and my sanity.

Other cases of anti-Israel bias

I intend to make each of these into a full section, I just haven't had the time yet:

• The matter-of-fact manner in which the Gaza genocide article claims that the mass killing in Gaza is a genocide despite:
  • The lack of distinction between civilian and combatant deaths in the death toll,
  • The fact that civilian casualty rates in urban warfare have always been very high, and
  • The civilian casualty ratio largely conforming to those aforementioned figures regardless of the source being used.
• Reluctance to call Hamas a terrorist organization and relegation of accusations of Hamas even being such. While their goals can be a topic of some debate, their means of achieving them has always been through unmistakable acts of terrorism against civilians.
• The lead section of the Israeli apartheid page claims in a very matter-of-fact manner that Israel also discriminates against Palestinians / Arab Israelis within Israel proper, then mostly contradicts that statement when it actually expands on that claim later on in the article.
• The victims of the Ramallah lynching are described as "Israeli military reservists", something that is not optional for Israeli citizens. The two victims were—at the time—ordinary civilians with no distinctions that could have marked them as military personnel, thus I believe that the term "military reservists" attempts to downplay their status as victims of an unprompted lynching.
• The First Intifada is described as a series of "non-violent protests, acts of civil disobedience and riots", which is a big understatement seeing as how it was also characterized by multiple terrorist attacks on civilians.
• The article for Jordanian rule over the West Bank is currently named "Jordanian annexation of the West Bank", while the article for Israeli rule over the West Bank is currently named "Israeli occupation of the West Bank", which I believe to be biased. This used to be the case for the articles for the rule over Gaza as well, but that has since been fixed.