Yahoo! and Apple Divide Yerushalayim on iPhone

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yerushalayimInternet giant Yahoo! and the Apple computer firm have apparently decided to pre-empt those pesky Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations and divide the holy city of Yerushalayim on their own.

Yahoo! — which runs the weather software application for the slick Apple iPhone — last month removed Israel’s capital city from its list of international locations from which to view weather conditions. Instead, one must now choose between East Jerusalem or West Jerusalem in order to figure out what the weather is going to be in the city. The latitude and longitude coordinates for both locations are exactly the same, as is the temperature and other weather details.

On the Yahoo! weather page, which is linked to The Weather Channel, one is offered two Middle East options when requesting weather information for Jerusalem – Jerusalem, Yerushalayim (IL), Jerusalem, and Palestinian Occupied Territories > West Bank, Jerusalem (PS).

 Clearly Yahoo! and Apple executives have decided to recognize the Palestinian State long before direct negotiations have even been contemplated by the parties themselves, let alone conducted to determine actual borders. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, expressed his disappointment with the fact that “Jerusalem, which has been united for 43 years, has been divided by the computer giant and the popular search engine.”

Read more at Arutz Shevah.

{Arutz Shevah/Yair Alpert-Matzav.com Israel}


10 COMMENTS

  1. what do we do to complain this fact? Let’s bombard them with e-mails. How about we divide Texas into Texas and Mexico etc.

  2. Hold on, this looks to be yahoo. What evidence do you have that apple were colluding with them in respect of the set of cities yahoo provided in it’s data source?

  3. I don’t have an iPhone myself, but this doesn’t sound good. Perhaps those who do could organize some kind of boycott or something that will show the companies that this will not bode well financially for them.

    This, however, should not come as a surprise. The United States State Department does not recognize Yerushalayim as the capital of the State of Israel. If you look at American passports of people born in Yerushalayim, you’ll see that “place of birth” is listed as Jerusalem, not Israel. This is in contrast to those born in Bnei Brak or Tel Aviv, for example – their “place of birth” IS stated as Israel.

  4. I’m on the inside and can tell you that this was a software issue, not a political play. The weather app uses a data feed that was recently updated (version 7.5.1). http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/data/ This contained many updates to fix things, add names, etc. This time there was a software problem on the iPhone client (a hard-coded default setting), and the result of the change and the software issues was the appearance that Apple and Yahoo removed Jerusalem in order to create two new options. From the internal notes it is pretty clear that this was not the intended outcome. So it’s being addressed by both companies. It received very high attention. They deal with this all the time — as there are many conflicted places in the world http://www.ygeoblog.com/2010/02/disputed_places_de_facto_or_de_jure/ It’s a bit ego-centric to think that everyone is out to get the Jews. Sentences like “Clearly Yahoo! and Apple executives have decided…” simply reflect bad journalism and knee-jerk reactions. This was a software and data issue. We have no idea what these executives think about Yerushalayim — or if they do. They spend their time running their businesses. Data guys in the make changes based on change requests. They know there is a conflict that they have been told to resolve. Sometime they mess up (in this case it’s a bit unclear where the root of the problem is, but that’s not my point). Let’s not fight phantom enemies. We have enough real ones to deal with.

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