Internet giant Google has changed the tagline on the homepage of its Palestinian edition from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine”.
The change, introduced on 1 May, means google.ps now displays “Palestine” in Arabic and English under Google’s logo.
This was noted in most media outlets, but generally treated as unimportant:
“Google can do anything they want. They’re not a diplomatic entity so they can do Google La-la Land if they want to and that’s fine,” says Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “Still, the question remains, this is a highly sensitive international politics issue, so what made Google decide they wanted to take a position on this?”
Google wouldn’t talk about this, but the company put out a statement saying it was following the lead of the United Nations and other international organizations. It also provided several examples of other name changes.
Israel’s deputy foreign minister sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, saying Google’s move could hurt peace negotiations.
“I can tell you that it has no diplomatic meaning, and it hasn’t,” says Palmor. “But if people on the Palestinian side believe that they can get anything they want through unilateral steps by international bodies, well in that case they will be more reluctant to talk to Israel.”
As my readers know, I place “peace negotiations” with PLO terrorists somewhere on a line between pointless and dangerous. Rather than an alternative to giving them everything they want unilaterally, they are simply a way of obtaining the same result while maintaining the pretense of bilateral legitimacy.
So that isn’t what I would have told Page. Rather, I would have explained that sovereignty over the territories is disputed and that Israel has a prima facie claim on them in international law going back to the Palestine Mandate. I would have added that today’s “United Nations” is a sham and a scam, dominated by a group of the 56 (‘Palestine’ is no. 57) members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and their “nonaligned” lackeys who have a permanent majority for the elimination of the state of Israel, and probably the Jewish people as well.
I would point out that regardless of the votes of the UN representatives of these various dictatorships, kingdoms and theocracies, ‘Palestine’ can’t be a state because it doesn’t control the territory it claims, nor does it have defined borders (the application presented to the UN refers to the lines of the unimplemented 1947 partition resolution), nor is there a single government. Not only that, it has no economy other than the aid it extorts from the West, and its rulers are a bunch of racists and gangsters (not that this matters in international law, but still…)
Google should understand that by agreeing with said gangsters that ‘Palestine’ is a state, they are in effect agreeing that the Jewish people do not have a legitimate state, and that it is perfectly fine to murder Jews wherever and whenever you can in order to create ‘Palestine’, because these are the basic principles expressed in the charters of the PLO and Hamas, the two ‘Palestinian’ governments.
It’s really pretty simple. You’d think the geniuses at Google could figure it out.
This change is surprising and distressing.
I had thought of Google and especially Sergey Brin as especially friendly to Israel.
I wonder who got to them whether it was Big Money or some personal contact.
It is a cowardly and shameful change.