Just a few years ago, the prospect of a self-described Socialist winning the democratic ticket would have seemed preposterous. It was this view, now largely anachronistic, that prevented Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and his bid for the White House from being taken seriously. Yet, we were, almost all of us, utterly wrong. His increasingly momentous campaign has certainly shaken the all-time Democratic favoured, Hillary Clinton, especially after her landslide defeat in New Hampshire and the unexpected draw in Iowa. Even before these two debacles, the pressure was mounting, forcing Clinton to reconsider her views and move to the left, especially on the issue of minimum wage and on Wall Street regulation. Despite this, it is all over. Or at least it will soon be. The Nevada caucus showed Clinton’s strength and the cause of her future victory: the Mid-West and Southern states and their coloured minorities. In these two categories, Sanders seems unable to climb mount improbable and revert the situation as he has done in the East Coast, which appears to be by now a ‘Bernite’ stronghold. His lack of campaign funds and Super PAC sponsors, in this case, does not favour him either, especially in appealing to low-information voters in the deep South.

Until now, these factors did not suffice to bring the duel between the two to a premature end, making the race a thrilling but time-wasting head-to-head, but next Tuesday, they will. Coming up on the 1^st of March, ‘Super Tuesday’ will see a line-up of 11 states (plus residents abroad and American Samoa) and, you guessed it, they are disproportionately Southern. Ranging from Texas to the Clinton family’s historical stronghold and home state of Arkansas, the caucuses will be a bloodbath. As if this wasn’t enough, Southern States tend to present a disproportionate number of delegates per state, as Texas has almost ten times Vermont’s. By now, it should be clear where this is going. Sanders’ probable victories in Massachusetts and Vermont will mean nothing when juxtaposed to Clinton’s expected victories virtually everywhere else.

But Super Tuesday’s lacerations will not be limited to the sheer delegate numbers, as the media perception and coverage of the Sanders campaign will revert to its original state of dismissive disregard. Bundled with the lack of Super Delegates, and the widening delegate spread, currently sitting on a solid 502 to 70 in Clinton’s favour, the Sanders phenomena will be promptly dismissed, and the party will rally around Clinton and her name recognition. It is true that the Super Delegates’ support is not yet binding, and their endorsement can be changed at any time, as happened in 2008 when many defected to Obama’s camp. But the polling numbers do not justify such a rearrangement, especially considering Sanders’ alienation from the party leadership, from where the Super Delegates are picked. Again, at the cost of appearing redundant it must be said once more: it’s over, and it is time to clean up and go home.

While Clinton’s defeat is highly unlikely at this point, the Sanders campaign will not evaporate as did Jeb Bush’s. The reason is simple. Sanders does not count on the support of large donors which will de-fund his campaign in case of serious and unexpected political beatings, allowing him to carry on nevertheless,  and making him likely to stick around and give Clinton and her Super PAC donors heart palpitations. But this foreseeable panic will have to do more with Sanders’ extreme stances, by U.S. standards at least, and Hillary Clinton’s unmatched desire to make Bill her First lady. This said, the Sanders phenomena and presidential bid should not be quickly dismissed as a temporary phantasmagoria from which the Democrats were bound to wake up. Along with Trump, he was the political revelation of the race. It did stir up an astonishing enthusiasm in the American left; a body which nobody really thought existed. It did influence other candidates on both sides. It did pose a threat to the, otherwise unchallenged, Clinton; but, as of Tuesday, the use of the past tense will become imperative. 

As a second year French sole student who will have to take both translation and grammar papers in fourth year, you can imagine my feelings of surprise, outrage and frustration when I learnt of the recent changes to the French language, affecting roughly 2400 words, being implemented from the start of the 2016/17 academic year.

First things first, what is actually going to change?

• The deletion in some words of the hyphens.
• Circumflexes to be removed above the letter i and u in certain words.
• The bizarre removal of letters creating jarring new words. For example, the French for Onion: ‘Oignon‘ now becomes ‘Ognon‘, which looks like the name of a villain from Lord of the Rings.

The Académie Française, watchdogs of the French language, initially approved this set of reforms a staggering 26 years ago in 1990, but it is only now that they are being acted upon. It must be noted they are only ‘optional’- a laughable proposition on its own. How can a set of official spellings be optional? I mean it’s optional for me to spell anything wrong, but that doesn’t make it right does it?

Also why create this unnecessary confusion? If the aim is to improve learning, then we should be simplifying the process, not complicating it. Good spelling is about precision, a word is either spelt completely correctly, or it’s wrong. There’s not meant to be any middle ground, so having an optional ‘i’ in ‘oignon‘ is counter-intuitive and frankly bonkers.

The announcements provoked an enormous backlash amongst the French public, who were outraged by what they considered to be an attack on their language, culture and national heritage. On Twitter, the hash tag of #JeSuisCirconflexe was taken up in protest.

The only potentially valid argument in favour of these changes (brace yourselves for its subsequent dismantling), relates to France’s immigration problem, which has arguably never been so pressing. The lack of integration of new settlers into French society results in the creation of ethnic ghettos in the suburbs of major cities such as Paris and the infamous ‘banlieues‘ de Marseille. Since many of these people are coming to France with little or no knowledge of French, then surely making the language as easy as possible to learn will help them settle into mainstream French society and form a link with the culture, as opposed to what happens far too often; individual ethnic groups living together in small, insular communities and having very little interaction with the rest of French society, with many making no effort to learn the language. This is the perfect breeding ground for racial/ethical tension and more worryingly, extremist radicalisation, which is an ever-growing and very real problem being faced in the West.

However, changing a handful of words in an arbitrary manner won’t suddenly encourage people to engage with the rest of society and learn the national language. The problem lies in the social segregation and the atmosphere of tension, which is what the French government should be focusing on, rather than taking away the circumflex.

In response to criticism, the AF claimed the changes reflected an evolving language. This is a fair enough point, us British too aren’t shy of adding new words to our language. It was only last August that ‘ awesomesauce (adjective): extremely good; excellent’ (truly embarrassing) was added to the OED. Of course this is an intentionally bizarre example and I wouldn’t disagree that new words should be officially added to languages to keep them up to date, but changing words that have proudly stood for hundreds of years and have made up the backbone of countless works of literary greatness and cultural significance is an out-right attack, and doing so in the name of simplification is an insult to the French peoples’ intelligence.

All languages have idiosyncrasies, especially English; funny little rules that you only learn by getting wrong, and they’re something to cherish. I savour that little jolt of smug pleasure you feel when you hear someone getting something wrong that you had previously gotten wrong but learnt from it. Take ‘hanged’ for example – you say ‘the nasty villain was hanged’, not ‘he was hung’, it’s ‘hanged.’

Finally, poor spelling abilities could be blamed on the reduced importance placed on reading in our society, where everything is condensed to a 140-character tweet, with little attention paid to the spelling or grammar.

If I were in charge of the Oxford Modern Languages faculty, I would have released a formal statement, announcing that the faculty isn’t acknowledging these changes and is sticking to good old fashioned, traditional French. If it was good enough for Voltaire, it’s damn well good enough for me.

So, if the word ‘onion’ comes up in my finals translation paper, rest assured, I’ll be spelling it ‘oignon.’ 

Max Leak’s article published online in Cherwell the other day painted the Israeli-Arab conflict as a simple and monolithic issue of justice and equality vs. oppression and evil. To back up his point, Leak embarked on an ‘experiment’. He took an apartheid apology and replaced South Africa with Israel, and succeeded at getting it published in the OxStu. He claimed that this proved the worth of the apartheid analogy to Israel.

Leak’s experiment lacks any argumentative worth. This was a poor attempt to construct what he perceived as stereotypical ‘pro-Israel’ arguments, followed by the claim that these arguments were analogous to defences made against apartheid. It’s worth dealing with this first.

Leak’s article claimed that many of the arguments made by Israel’s defendants are the same as those made by apartheid apologists. He cites the following arguments:

‘We are told that the natives are barbarians who will slaughter their former rulers as soon as they get freedom; we are invited to look at a troubled region, and then at the little island of repressive stasis under discussion, and draw the conclusion that oppression works better than freedom in such a savage, unruly part of the world.’

Sure, there may be a small section of hardliners that may occasionally make these embarrassingly poor arguments. But if he ever cared to properly investigate what constitutes pro-Israel thought he would discover that this quite simply isn’t the case. Those who believe in Israel’s very existence (a bizarre claim to have to justify anyway) do so from a range of important normative positions.

The most common arguments in favour of Israel tend to fall into two categories. Firstly, many see Israel and Zionism as the fulfilment of Jewish collective rights to self-determination. The Jewish people, in an age of nation-states, sought to fulfil their own collective rights through creating a nation-state of their own through mass immigration to an ancient homeland. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, others see Zionism as a vital refugee movement, providing one safe haven for Jews around the world in a period where anti-semitism led to a genocide from which the Jewish people still haven’t recovered. It is an argument that seems anachronistic, but yet in 2016 there is something of a Jewish Exodus from France to Israel.

I could go into these arguments in more depth. I’m sure Leak was well aware of them. He could have quoted pieces from student publication Zionish, or have looked at the output from liberal Zionist organisations Yachad or JStreet. He could have looked at the ideology of prominent early Zionists such as Ahad Ha’am, Be’er Borochov or Chaim Weizmann, or of Israeli political parties such as Meretz or the Zionist Union. But he undoubtedly chose to ignore these sources because they didn’t suit his pre-chosen narrative.

In short, Leak can only sustain his analogy with a weak parody of what arguments constitute ‘pro-Israel’ discourse. If he ever cared to talk to anyone who even remotely claimed to be ‘pro-Israel’, he would have realised this. Instead, he picked and chose from the dregs of the internet and hard-right organisations.

The absurdity of his argument is also worth pointing out. Because some people justified both A and B using the same argument, Leak claims that A and B must therefore be the same thing.

Well, to apply Leak’s argumentative structure to his own cause, let’s try this. Hamas, a brutal and deeply anti-Semitic terrorist organisation, uses anti-colonial rhetoric and the language of oppression in its screeds against Israel. Leak and other Palestinian solidarity activists also use anti-colonial rhetoric and the language of oppression in its opposition to Israel. Therefore, as justifications for Palestinian solidarity activism are the same as those used to justify anti-semitic terrorists, all Palestinian solidarity activism must be anti-semitic terrorism.

I’m sure Max will agree that this is ridiculous. In short, the only conclusion we can draw from Leak’s experiment is that a rushed OxStu student editor agreed to publish a poorly written and weakly argued opinion piece. Some ‘experiment’.

It’s also worth turning to the narrative that Leak seeks to promote. The author’s slander of all pro-Israel and Zionist discourse with the tag of apartheid apologetics is particularly awful. Fundamentally, it fails to reflect the reality of the situation. The distinction between Green Line Israel and the Occupied Territories is one which did not exist in South Africa. The Occupied Territories are not part of Israel; they are Palestinian land in which the Palestinians should form a sovereign state.

This is the reality of the situation that Max ignores when he describes Israel as apartheid. The plight of the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories is an awful human tragedy, and should shame the state of Israel. The occupation must end. But to conflate this with green-line Israel is an astonishing claim. Palestinian citizens of Israel have the same rights as any other Israeli citizen in crucial areas – not least the vote. There is discrimination, sure, but to claim wholesale that Israel is an apartheid state is nothing short of intellectual fraud.

Leak’s fundamental narrative of the conflict is also worrying. In the last paragraph, he states that, ‘If you want to know about that struggle – if you want to know how you can be on the right side of it – come to our events at Israeli Apartheid Week, running Monday to Saturday of 6^th week.’

In my view, precisely the problem with much of the discussion around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is an issue of ‘us and them’; two opposing sides and activists on either side must choose one side to place their flag. The idea there is a ‘right side’, that we must all stand with in uncritical solidarity, in a conflict as complex and nuanced as the Israeli-Palestinian one is laughable.

To say that one side is flawlessly moral and just, while the other is a den of racists and colonialists, is simply untrue. There are many problems in Israel, its society and its politics, I don’t deny that, and I’m sure you can learn about them at Israeli Apartheid Week. But Palestinian society and politics is hardly blameless. Israel is currently in a wave of random knife attacks, where elderly women are stabbed to death whilst walking down the street. Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a four year term in 2005 that he’s still serving, and Hamas is designated as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the USA.

Nor is each side monolithic. Many Zionists and Palestinian activists share criticisms of both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Many on both sides actively campaign for the two state solution. Leak’s conception of the conflict as a zero-sum game of good and evil is a dangerous one that threatens to alienate the moderates on both sides who are genuinely capable of making peace.

We should not restrict ourselves to blindly standing with one camp or the other. Many on both sides do this, including Max Leak. To claim that Israel can do no wrong, like some pro-Israel activists do, is misguided. But the opposite position is equally so. Max paints the conflict as a black and white issue, right vs wrong, justice vs apartheid. This is an unhelpful distortion of the realities of the conflict. I’m not asking anyone to view the conflict in 50:50 terms. But 100:0, in either direction, is ridiculous.

If we want a constructive discourse about the conflict that includes all voices, then it’s imperative to ditch worldviews which force activists into extreme positions. In Oxford, of all places, this is something we should strive for.