22 ms·

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

136 points by will_brown 14y ago

ars 14y 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 14y 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.
  - sp332 14y 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.
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      True, though recognition of someone's authority is not "taking" authority at all, which is what OP was complaining about. One can make the argument that Google shouldn't be endorsing either side, but taking authority away from either they are not.
      - dragonwriter 14y ago
        > One can make the argument that Google shouldn't be endorsing either side, but taking authority away from either they are not. Referring to Palestine as an entity is (an act certain to be seen, especially by the other side, as) endorsing one sides position. Not referring to Palestine as an entity in and of itself but instead referring to "Palestinian Territories" is also (an act certain to be seen, especially by the other side, as) endorsing one sides position. Even having or not having a .ps localized site would meet that description. There really is nothing with regard to the whole Israel/Palestine issue that is not going to be seen as endorsing one side or the other.
  - ars 14y 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).
    - raimondious 14y ago
      When the UN recognizes Palestine, it will be much more significant than Google's copy change.
      - dragonwriter 14y ago
        > When the UN recognizes Palestine, it will be much more significant than Google's copy change. The UN granted Palestine the status of "Non-member observer State" last year. This status change is one of the many by international organizations with regard to Palestine that led to Google making the "copy change" at issue here.
      - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
        Notice Google said "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann, ISO and other international organisations." Not only does the UN recognize Palestine as a state. But ICANN, ISO, and other international standards organizations do too.
    - dragonwriter 14y 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). Actually, Google is (and this is covered in their announcement) following the UN and other international organizations in the wording change (which is not, on Google's part, recognition of Palestine as a State so much as recognition that it is an entity with the name "Palestine" rather than "Palestinian Territories".) Also, the UN, as of last year, actually does recognize Palestine as a State, having accorded it the status of a "Non-member observer State". http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11317.doc.htm http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11317.doc.htm
      - 14y ago
wsc981 14y 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.
- sp332 14y 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 14y ago
    I agree. The domain name is already in political territory. Maybe if domain names were by language instead of location...
    - tellarin 14y ago
      That would be nowhere easier. Many languages have different names across populations. And people strongly identify to a specific nomenclature. Also, many people speak multiple languages, languages that cross disputed borders, and languages spoken only by populations that want independence from the current states where they're located (e.g. Basque).
    - sses 14y ago
      That wouldn't solve or even sidestep any political issues. You've still got problems like: * ip geocoding to decide which language to serve the UI in * what do you call the languages? Chinese vs Traditional vs Simplified, or Farsi vs Parsi vs Persian, as mentioned elsewhere And while political boundaries are messy, language boundaries are even more so. How do you decide dialect boundaries? And once you do, how do you decide which dialects get separate domains?
  - gngeal 14y 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)...?
youngerdryas 14y ago
I hereby declare Quebec free.
- MacsHeadroom 14y 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.
  - dragonwriter 14y 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.
    - tellarin 14y ago
      No organization is apolitical.
      - maaku 14y ago
        Some are much closer to being apolitical: Doctors without Borders and the Red Cross, for example.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  You do that. Nobody wants Quebec.
  - rdl 14y 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?
tokenadult 14y 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_brown 14y 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 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.
abdophoto 14y ago
Bravo Google.
BrianEatWorld 14y 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 14y 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 https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=fa
joshguthrie 14y 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.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  We've already had our first Google Maps "war". http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-google-maps-war/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-go...
- justincormack 14y 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.
  - joshguthrie 14y 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.
harichinnan 14y 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...
- tellarin 14y 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_Canada_and_the_United_States 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 14y 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 http://afsi.org/pamphlets/PalestiniansKahn.pdf
- tellarin 14y 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 14y ago
  I find the source, the subject matter, and the motive of the letter to be rather questionable.
mbayer 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
And the relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/787/ http://xkcd.com/787/

136 points by will_brown 14y ago

ars 14y 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 14y 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.
- sp332 14y 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.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    True, though recognition of someone's authority is not "taking" authority at all, which is what OP was complaining about. One can make the argument that Google shouldn't be endorsing either side, but taking authority away from either they are not.
    - dragonwriter 14y ago
      > One can make the argument that Google shouldn't be endorsing either side, but taking authority away from either they are not. Referring to Palestine as an entity is (an act certain to be seen, especially by the other side, as) endorsing one sides position. Not referring to Palestine as an entity in and of itself but instead referring to "Palestinian Territories" is also (an act certain to be seen, especially by the other side, as) endorsing one sides position. Even having or not having a .ps localized site would meet that description. There really is nothing with regard to the whole Israel/Palestine issue that is not going to be seen as endorsing one side or the other.
- ars 14y 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).
  - raimondious 14y ago
    When the UN recognizes Palestine, it will be much more significant than Google's copy change.
    - dragonwriter 14y ago
      > When the UN recognizes Palestine, it will be much more significant than Google's copy change. The UN granted Palestine the status of "Non-member observer State" last year. This status change is one of the many by international organizations with regard to Palestine that led to Google making the "copy change" at issue here.
    - MacsHeadroom 14y ago
      Notice Google said "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann, ISO and other international organisations." Not only does the UN recognize Palestine as a state. But ICANN, ISO, and other international standards organizations do too.
  - dragonwriter 14y 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). Actually, Google is (and this is covered in their announcement) following the UN and other international organizations in the wording change (which is not, on Google's part, recognition of Palestine as a State so much as recognition that it is an entity with the name "Palestine" rather than "Palestinian Territories".) Also, the UN, as of last year, actually does recognize Palestine as a State, having accorded it the status of a "Non-member observer State". http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11317.doc.htm http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11317.doc.htm
    - 14y ago

wsc981 14y 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.

sp332 14y 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 14y ago
  I agree. The domain name is already in political territory. Maybe if domain names were by language instead of location...
  - tellarin 14y ago
    That would be nowhere easier. Many languages have different names across populations. And people strongly identify to a specific nomenclature. Also, many people speak multiple languages, languages that cross disputed borders, and languages spoken only by populations that want independence from the current states where they're located (e.g. Basque).
  - sses 14y ago
    That wouldn't solve or even sidestep any political issues. You've still got problems like: * ip geocoding to decide which language to serve the UI in * what do you call the languages? Chinese vs Traditional vs Simplified, or Farsi vs Parsi vs Persian, as mentioned elsewhere And while political boundaries are messy, language boundaries are even more so. How do you decide dialect boundaries? And once you do, how do you decide which dialects get separate domains?
- gngeal 14y 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)...?

youngerdryas 14y ago

I hereby declare Quebec free.

MacsHeadroom 14y 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.
- dragonwriter 14y 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.
  - tellarin 14y ago
    No organization is apolitical.
    - maaku 14y ago
      Some are much closer to being apolitical: Doctors without Borders and the Red Cross, for example.
tomjen3 14y ago
You do that. Nobody wants Quebec.
- rdl 14y 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?

tokenadult 14y 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_brown 14y 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 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.

abdophoto 14y ago

Bravo Google.

BrianEatWorld 14y 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 14y 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 https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=fa

joshguthrie 14y 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.

ceejayoz 14y ago
We've already had our first Google Maps "war". http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-google-maps-war/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/the-first-go...
justincormack 14y 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.
- joshguthrie 14y 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.

harichinnan 14y 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...

tellarin 14y 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_Canada_and_the_United_States 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 14y 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 http://afsi.org/pamphlets/PalestiniansKahn.pdf

tellarin 14y 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 14y ago
I find the source, the subject matter, and the motive of the letter to be rather questionable.

mbayer 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

And the relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/787/ http://xkcd.com/787/