Lost in Occupation: How Google Maps Is Erasing Palestine | Hacker News Reader

Lost in Occupation: How Google Maps Is Erasing Palestine

972mag.com

92 pointsxtof31 comments

So they won't even touch the efforts to combat ISIS, but they'll disenfranchise Palestinian civilians from their service.

Sounds like a great moral compass they have over there.

I'm sorry but who is "they"? Google? Israel? the palestineans?

Google leadership, up and down, is filled with people who are of Jewish and Israeli heritage (or are married to them). What did you expect? Find me a Palestinian in any of their leadership team.

I'm not suggesting they're intentionally doing this with google maps, but lacking a Palestinian voice, it's easy for Jewish and Israeli bias to take over.

Bias confirmed. According to Google Maps "Quick Facts": Poland is a place of Jewish heritage, and not much else...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Poland/

Wow, this is actually really bad.

> In 2014, an estimated 87% of the population belonged to the Catholic Church

> Prior to Second World War there were 3,500,000 Jews in the Polish Second Republic, about 10% of the general population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Poland

I have no idea where they got the claim that Poland is a place of Jewish heritage, what the hell google?

maybe the intent was to say that Poland is a prominent place _for_ Jewish heritage, i.e. a large proportion of the Jewish people lived in Poland for ~1,000 years.

It doesn’t make sense to prioritize that over the clear majority of Christians.

It’s a bit of a reality bias, for most poeple’s living memory. Politics and what people wish were true aside, the outcome for Palestinians is more or less a forgone conclusion. Acknowledging what is rather than a fantasy of what think should be isn’t really a bias, it’s reporting facts. In the same way that fact sheets on America will talk a lot about what America is today, and not a history lesson about how it was colonized by Europeans.

yes, maps are important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Ramallah_lynching#Inciden...

There was a recent incident, were drivers were almost lynched, after making a wrong turn.

Tensions were running high: over 100 Palestinians, nearly two dozen of them minors, had been killed in the preceding two weeks in violent protests with Israelis forces in Ramallah,[11] and four days earlier, the badly beaten body of Issam Hamad (36) had been dumped outside of the city after being run over by a car, an autopsy revealed. His death, according to Marwan Bishara of Al Jazeera, was attributed by locals to settlers in Halamish.[12]

Both Haaretz and Maariv reported that approximately 13 Palestinian policemen were injured while attempting to stop the lynching

Israel kills and injures 100s of Palestinians, Palestinians try to stop angry mob. Somehow Israel is not at fault.

You're right maps are important and they should be accessible to everyone.

9/10 on mental gymnastics.

> Israel kills and injures 100s of Palestinians, Palestinians try to stop angry mob. Somehow Israel is not at fault.

the palestineans actions were so virtuous, yet they found the need to break the reporter's camera, and threaten the italian news agency into not reporting about the lynch.

you may claim that the IDF committed crimes (a discussion for another time) but lynching is at the same level as cannibalism. one thing is mistreating/torturing/executing a POW. another is lynching two people, telling the wife of one of them from his cell phone "we are killing your husband" and then raising your blood drenched hands from the window greeting the cheering crowd below.

Do we simply ignore Israel's illegal occupation, and the oppression of the people of Palestine?

I suppose that does provide better framing to pick out and criticise an individual act by the Palestinians.

At what point do we stop calling it an occupation, like it’s a temporary state of affairs, and call it what it is? None of us live in a land that was free from a history (some very recent) of violent conquest, and to be clear I know I’m taking a purely amoral stance here. I’m not saying that Israel is the “good guy” I’m just noting that they clearly won, and international fantasies aside, that’s done.

So when is it just a conquest and not an occupation? 70 more years? 170? When does Israel stop being a special case the rest of the world uses as a distraction from their own recent history of violent conquest? Do you seriously think Palestinians have a future that isn’t as a diaspora of refugees? If we’re just into pure quality of life, I’d argue that resettlement in Jordan, SA, Egypt and other neighbors would be better than leaving them stuffed into a few small regions of a country they no longer control and never will again. Of course then they can’t be used by oppressive Arab regimes as a scapegoat and distraction.

I want to say that I realize how unpopular this view is likely to be here, and I’d just ask that you set aside what you want to be, and just consider what is. I’m not arguing for the right or wrong of the situation, just the reality and immutability of it. I don’t think it’s very fair that the U.S. is built on the graves of a whole series of cultures and peoples, but I also recognize that calling the U.S. an occupying force would be a farce.

Generally people are referring to the on going expansion of Israel into the West Bank (and less commonly these days the occupation on the Golan Heights) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement

Israel doesn't want it to be a conquest.

The current fiction is that they are going to end up with some sort of two state solution, with the Palestinians getting their own country. If instead, this is really conquest, then we have the one-state solution option. But Palestinians have more babies than the Jewish Israelis do. So in a very short time period the Jews will be outnumbered by Arabs in "their own country."

I suspect the most likely outcome of this whole fiasco, is that Israel continues to build on whatever land they like the best, and if the Palestinians ever get their own country it will be on whatever land is left over. Perhaps all they will have left is Gaza, at the end of the day.

Basically, the Palestinians are fucked.

That's gymnastics.

Other crime being committed is not a defense, even a justification for the broader picture here.

That's what this perpetually comes back to. "Palestine cannot not be occupied, oppressed, etc. If we try it, they'll just attack Israel." It's pathetic.

Are you really trying to justify the lynching?

> Palestinians try to stop angry mob

Composed of... Martians, I presume?

> Somehow Israel is not at fault.

Yes, it is not. Those who perpetrated the murder are at fault. No amount of sophistry and "but what about?" is going to change that simple fact.

I agree, try these: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/mapstellstory.... My link is actually to maps.

The amount of land lost by Palestine since 1947, and the tacit approval by the West is something we should be ashamed of.

There was no independent Palestine before, or after, 1947. So no “land loss”.

If there's no independent Palestine, then Israel is "merely" allowing land to be stolen from its own apartheid-oppressed citizens by the favored social class. That's supposed to be... better, somehow?

This set of maps is a fabrication http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/07/debunking-map-that-...

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