Google changes Palestinian location from 'Territories' to 'Palestine'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22395494

by will_brown • 13 years ago

136 68 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

ars2• 13 years ago

It's interesting how internet companies are taking authority over many things away from official entities that nominally should have that authority.

For example owning the domain name is more important than registering a trademark for that name.

meepmorp• 13 years ago

> It's interesting how internet companies are taking authority over many things away from official entities that nominally should have that authority.

What authority is google taking up here? A text change on a localized website? Nothing about the I/P conflict is changed here. Unless Google's gotten a seat on the UN Security Council since I last read the news.

sp3322• 13 years ago

Maps really are just lines on paper. "A text change on a localized website" is all the power you need to recognize someone's authority.

ars2• 13 years ago

The point is that these days having Google recognize your claims to being a country is more important than having the UN recognize it (which it doesn't, yet Google does).

wsc981• 13 years ago

I don't think companies should take a stance on political issues, which is what Google is doing here.

Would actually prefer companies have totally no influence on politics at all, but as we all know, that would be an utopia.

sp3322• 13 years ago

How could Google avoid taking a stance? Either they call it one thing or the other. Or they could call every contested bit of land Narnia but then no one would be happy with them.

CatMtKing• 13 years ago

I agree. The domain name is already in political territory. Maybe if domain names were by language instead of location...

gngeal• 13 years ago

"How could Google avoid taking a stance? Either they call it one thing or the other."

Perhaps avoiding taking a stance could take the form of following the current practice of major players (UN and others)...?

johneth• 13 years ago

You do realise that however they refer to the region ('Palestine' or 'Palestinian Territories'), they're making a political statement.

Their reasoning (following the example of multiple international organisations - including the UN, ICANN, and ISO) is sound.

mpyne• 13 years ago

And it's not just Google that's affected either.

Imagine making a desktop environment and e.g. showing a world map to select your time zone.

Or having a list of countries & regions to assist the user with localization. Seemingly any list of countries you show will "make a political statement" to someone out there. KDE, for example, had many bugs filed about the naming used for what the ISO calls the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes/country_...

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

> "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann, ISO and other international organisations."

Sounds like this was the less political choice, really.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Not if, like OP, you define "political" as, "different than my preference."

angli• 13 years ago

I don't think this comment makes much sense. If the original name was not political, then the change should be apolitical too. If the choice of text on the .ps page was a "political issue," then google's use of "Palestinian Territories" was already political in a pro-Israeli way – changing it is no worse than keeping up the old text.

Yes, I know you're jumping on the "corporations have too much power" bandwagon, but here I don't think it makes any sense.

JustinSeriously• 13 years ago

Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."

When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.

dragonwriter6• 13 years ago

> I don't think companies should take a stance on political issues, which is what Google is doing here.

Every possible choice of wording for anything having to do with the area of land bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt involves taking a stance on a contentious political issue.

I don't think corporations (or anyone else) should avoid making such choices because they inherently require taking such a stance, nor do I think that they should avoid changing such choices because of that.

minopret• 13 years ago

My maps show Lebanon with Syria to the north and east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west. I imagine yours do also.

stevoski• 13 years ago

Even those bordering countries/areas are unclear. cf Golan Heights (which resulted in Facebook being banned by the Syrian government); and the dispute between Lebanon and Israel on maritime borders.

Talk about messy...

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

I hereby declare Quebec free.

MacsHeadroom2• 13 years ago

> "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann, ISO and other international organisations."

Maybe corporations will start to recognize Quebec as free when the UN, ICANN, ISO, and a handful of other apolitical organizations do too, as is the case with the officially recognized state of Palestine.

dragonwriter6• 13 years ago

> Maybe corporations will start to recognize Quebec as free when the UN, ICANN, ISO, and a handful of other apolitical organizations do too

UN, ICANN, and ISO aren't apolitical organizations.

napoleond• 13 years ago

Vive le Québec libre! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vive_le_Qu%C3%A9bec_libre)

tomjen3• 13 years ago

You do that. Nobody wants Quebec.

rdl• 13 years ago

It could end up like Lesotho, or worse, like Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, or Venda. (the trick to setting up independent states to get rid of territory seems to be setting up several at once, which all cross-recognize each other, so you can claim they're each recognized by "several states". Maybe ditch the Maritimes at the same time?

wnight• 13 years ago

Declare everyone free, within Quebec and without, and I'll be there with you. Until then it's just another government deciding what to do with "its" people.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

This issue came up a few times before in discussion on Hacker News. A little known fact is that "facts on the ground," even entries in reference books or labeling on maps, can be taken in international law to indicate acquiescence to territorial claims by other countries (or to indicate assertion of hostile claims by the country in which the reference books or maps are published). This is why some countries with extensive programs of censorship censor maps, dictionaries, encyclopedias, websites, and whatever else is in reach of the government censorship program to make sure that private publications fall in line with the government's official position on territorial claims. (I have in my home office English-language and Chinese-language reference books published in Taiwan during the period of the military dictatorship there, which censor references to the existence of the independent country of Mongolia and assert province names for the mainland region of China that have been obsolete since 1949. Taiwan has since considerably loosened up on this kind of censorship after democratizing, but territorial claims vis a vis China are still a very sensitive issue.)

In countries without official programs of widespread censorship, government-published maps of other countries will still say things like "Boundary representations are not authoritative" and private publishers of maps in free countries will have notes near disputed boundary lines like "actual line of control; boundary in dispute" and so on. This is a pretty big deal in international law, so it is a somewhat big deal that Google, a business corporation organized under United States law, has changed its indication of the status of Palestine, even if only for the Google domain registered for the .ps top-level domain. The United States government may feel the need to make a formal statement to the effect that this action is the action of a private business corporation and does not represent an official view of the United States government.

will_brown3• 13 years ago

Under International Law it is the Montevideo Convention, under which the four criteria for statehood are defined:

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montevideo_Convention)

However, I like your phrase "facts on the ground" and think that is more on the practical side of what I might label "standing in the International Community" which is the most realistic aspect of designation of statehood.

jpatokal• 13 years ago

Reality is not as straightforward as the Convention, which is pretty loose anyway (who defines that territory, government and capacity?). There are in fact two very different schools of thought on what creates statehood:

http://www.lawteacher.net/constitutional-law/essays/declarat...

bitcartel2• 13 years ago

Here's something few people seem to be aware of - Taiwan agrees it is part of China (aka 'One China' [1]).

While we often hear about the government in Beijing claiming the island as the sovereign territory of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), we don't hear much about the claims made by the government in Taipei that the mainland is the sovereign territory of the Republic of China (ROC).

Although both sides dispute who is the sole legitimate government of a single China, they both agree that territorially it includes the island of Taiwan. Meanwhile, a recent poll suggests that for people on the ground, opinion is divided.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy

[2] http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/04/30/2...

xiaoma2• 13 years ago

>Taiwan agrees it is part of China (aka 'One China' [1]).

That is laughably wrong. I say that as someone who's spent half his adult life in Taiwan. Only a very, very slim minority of Taiwanese feel that Taiwan is "part of China". Even the KMT (國民黨）has long given up that stance.

The tension is between those who want to officially (i.e. UN) recognized independence and those accept the status quo of de facto independence in the interests of avoiding a hopeless war with China. Taiwan has never been part of the the PRC. While a significant minority of Taiwanese people hope for a future democratic China, those in favor of unifying with the PRC measure at under 5%.

abdophoto• 13 years ago

Bravo Google.

BrianEatWorld• 13 years ago

Part of me (the part that watches Better Off Ted) thinks this is just another change along the lines of the recent Gmail minimalism.

The new logo which drops the word "territories" looks much cleaner and switching to Palestine from Palestinian really tightens things up.

msoad• 13 years ago

I don't think it's as simple as that. For example there was a debate about Google Farsi[1]. It used to be Google Parsi which is closer to Persian culture but then it changed to Google Farsi which is new name of Parsi (Persian language) after adopting Arabic alphabet by Persians.

Farsi vs. Parsi has tons of difference. People got mad and happy for this decision. I don't believe this kind of decision is made by design team.

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=fa

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

It's interesting to read this post as a "western world citizen" whose country's boundaries rarely (if never) change (well, I don't think a big part of HN ever heard of its country boundaries ever changed in his lifetime).

It felt eye-opening when I stumbled on this issue some years ago. We were building a Google Maps app for a branch of the UN and my boss told me we needed to hide the map's boundaries and use the ones supplied by the UN. I was rather intrigued and he explained how the boundaries used by Google sometimes clashed with the UN's recognition of boundaries for some countries. So I went and loaded the KML using the UN-official boundaries.

Of course, I see some were quick to jump the "Google is taking too much power" bandwagon, but a story is not just on HN to be told but also to engage our minds to reflect. And to me, the story here seems to be about digital recognition of countries beginning to be almost on par with international recognition, and how the digital world, that we thought (hoped?) would abolish the frontiers between men, is still taking these frontiers in account.

justincormack• 13 years ago

Borders change quite a bit, Yugoslavia broke up, and Czechoslovakia too, both of which I am sure many HN readers are from. East and West Germany merged, even more HN readers from there.

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

Guilty on this one, especially since Germany is a neighboring country and I didn't even think of it. Which illustrates my point: when our borders never changed, we can have a tendency to take them for granted and not imagine that other countries are struggling to have theirs recognized.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

We've already had our first Google Maps "war". http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-go...

harichinnan• 13 years ago

If it was this easy, google should take a survey in asia and redraw the map of every country there. A map of India with Line of Control with Kashmir and Line of Actual control with China as real borders should permanently resolve the issues between three nuclear armed nations.

There is more. The island between Japan and China. The island between Russia and Japan. Also for Sri Lanka create a map of Tamil nation with Jaffna as capital. And Taiwan..

Wish it was so easy...

tellarin6• 13 years ago

Hell, that would even solve the disputes between the USA and Canada [1]. </sarcasm>

1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Canad...

Edit: Just adding some context, the disputes mostly deal with islands and areas of the sea. Canada, other 163 countries, and the European Union join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; but the USA does not.

Tangaroa• 13 years ago

A relevant letter sent to the New York Times in 1975:

---

Dear Sir:

Your newspaper frequently uses the term "Palestinian" to describe a section of the Middle East population which is Arab, to differentiate it from Israeli Jews. As the holder of a Palestinian Identity Card and a Certificate of Discharge from a Palestinian Unit of the British army, I find this practice annoying and certainly untrue...

We Palestinian Jews wore the uniform of the British Army, and on our shoulder epaulettes the single word, "Palestine" in English. We tried to get permission to wear Hebrew insignia, fly the Jewish flag and be recognized as Palestinian Jews, but-no, Palestinian meant Jew and Arab, and who cared if there were fewer than 3000 Arabs as compared to 36,000 Jews in khaki? In British Army nomenclature, the equivalent of a GI is BOR, meaning British Other Rank. We were formally known as POR, Palestinian Other Ranks.

So we fought the war as Palestinians, set up the Jewish Brigade as Palestinians, and I'll be damned if I agree that only Arafat and his assassins are Palestinians.

As a Palestinian, I was arrested by the British on suspicion of smuggling immigrants into the country. As a Palestinian, I had the honor of commanding the 329th Palestinian Company of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME - all Jews). There were no equivalent Arab units. Once a British general said to me, "Migawd| I have so many things to dislike you for, for being a Jew, American born, a Palestinian-and you don't even know how to handle a knife and fork!

So cut it out, please. Call them what you will, but not Palestinians.

Yours truly, Joe Criden

---

Source: http://afsi.org/pamphlets/PalestiniansKahn.pdf

tellarin6• 13 years ago

While this helps showcase the problem in nomenclatures and how people relate to them, I personally don't feel there was that much to this specific claim/complaint.

The population at the 'British Mandate of Palestine' (which resulted in the name of the unit in the British army at the time) was mostly of Arabs. Especially if you also count parts of Transjordan that some claim where also "Palestinian".

Agreeing to definitions is usually hard, and especially so in that region.

circuiter• 13 years ago

I find the source, the subject matter, and the motive of the letter to be rather questionable.

mbayer• 13 years ago

Well done Google. Palestine is and always has been a country, occupation or not. To call it by any other name is simply ignorant and uneducated.

purephase• 13 years ago

Wow, odd coincidence here. I was just taking a stroll through the ISO 3166-1 country lists to update our own database and noticed that they had changed it to "Palestine, State Of".

I'm not sure when it happened, but I dutifully changed ours to match (in the same way Google has) as following the standards orgs is generally good practice.

rzimmerman• 13 years ago

And the relevant XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/787/

Google changes Palestinian location from 'Territories' to 'Palestine'

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