Google erases Palestine
Rak Besmahot and David Nir write:
There’s a new wonderful service by Google: “Google-Earth.” Takes few minutes to load the free software. One can within several tens of seconds apply close-ups to view any point on the globe, even with 3 dimensional modeling, roads, restaurants, webcams for real time. Some places have resolution so articulate that individual persons can be seen. As an example one can see tennis players in action at the UC Berkeley sports center or view the nearby stadium full of spectators in the midst of a football game.
But wonder of wonders:
Unlike other zones on the globe, it seems that the ultra-right-wing AIPAC had the last word on what Google will let us see in Palestine and Israel.
While all the illegal settlements, even the tiniest ones’ are listed by their names, it seems that most of the Palestinian villages or towns had miracolously disappeared. Full size cities like Nablus are marked by tiny letters, while Elon More, according to the letter size, is probably a 10,000,000 size metropolis, thus Nablus may be suspected as a slum neighborhood at it’s outskirts.
Some examples:
- Nablus Yeshiva = Hawara
- Matkhan Tapuah = Tsomet Tapuach
- Rehelim = Sawieh
- nothing written = Akrabe
- Karmei Tsur with HUGE letters, Beit Ummar hardly noticeable.
Also the resolution quality at the Palestinian zones is extremely poor, compared to all other places on the globe. Undoubtly this is intentional. Therefore we are denied of the lovliest of sights such as the overcrowded checkpoint zones, the splendid appartheid wall (the 9th wonder), the demolished homes.
As a compensation we can see the tip of Eiffel tower and observe nearby strollers, or glide near the Everest’s crest.
Of course the press a mentioned week ago (“The Marker”?) that Google accepted to blur Israel’s sensitive security zones (such as military airfields or Beit Zacharia’s launch sites), but could it be that someone tricked Google to apply this magic also to “innocent” views whereby the Palestinian communities are represented as a blurry spot on the global scene, just as they are treated by the majority of the enlightened countries?
I have no emotional obligations to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds.
