Google and Apple did not remove Palestine from maps, worse… they have never put it!

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Google and Apple have been accused of deleting Palestine from their maps but the worse news is that Palestine was never labeled by both tech giants in the first place.

Searching for Palestine on Google Maps, it shows an outline of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, but with no label for Palestine and ‘Israel’ labelled alongside it, although 136 members of the United Nations recognise Palestine as an independent state and maps of pre-1948 Palestine in the British archive clearly show Palestine’s entire area.

Google did not comment on the accusations. Its spokeswoman however had said back in 2016 that “there has never been a ‘Palestine’ label on Google Maps, however we discovered a bug that removed the labels for ‘West Bank’ and ‘Gaza Strip’. We’re working quickly to bring these labels back to the area.”

A petition from March this year urging Google to include Palestine on their maps has gained traction in the last few days, now with almost 600,000 signatures.

While nothing has changed, the online outrage has pointed to questions about how mapping technologies affect people’s understanding of the world. The Washington Post’s Caitlyn Dewey wrote:

In their attempts to dispassionately document the physical world online, tech companies often end up shaping our understanding of it, too. That’s not something that we tend to think about often, but it does become pretty obvious when a map changes/is said to have changed, or when we compare different maps against each other.

‘Israel’ was created in 1948 by the Zionist movement, which gathered and sent Jewish migrants from all over the world to Palestine. ‘Israel’ has been never mentioned or appeared in historic maps or in excavations in archeological sites. Zionists, however, depend on interpretations of the old and new testaments to justify their claims of Palestine.

‘Israel’ captured and occupied the West Bank, Gaza strip and Golan Heights during the 1967 war. ‘Israel’ asserts that it no longer occupies Gaza after dismantling settlements in 2005. However, as it retains significant control over the coastal territory’s airspace and borders, Gaza is still classified as occupied land by the UN.

Monitoring groups say there are more than 500 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, that have been increasingly expanding and swallowing Palestinian lands despite being deemed illegal under international law.

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