Kiryat Yam is a town of 40,000 on the Mediterranean coast just north of the port of Haifa. An entry on Google Earth, a feature that allows users to zero in on locations around the world, alleges that the town was built on the ruins of Ghawarina, an Arab village.Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled during the 1948-49 war that began with Israel's declaration of independence. Dozens of Arab villages were destroyed.
Kiryat Yam was pulled into the dispute — still one of the hottest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — when a Google Earth user, Thameen Darby, inserted a note on the map saying it was built on the location of Ghawarina. Darby has inserted at least 10 such notes over Google's map of Israel.Kiryat Yam filed a slander complaint with Israel's police, said town official Naty Keyzilberman. "This obviously cannot be true, because Kiryat Yam was founded in 1945," he said, explaining the police complaint.
Darby, 30, a Palestinian doctor raised in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said his mother was a refugee from to the village Balad al-Sheikh near Kiryat Yam. His said his contributions to Google Earth are part of the "Nakhba -- Palestinian Catastrophe" information hub aimed to help displaced Palestinians understand their heritage or find the villages of their parents or grandparents.
"As far as I can know, the Arab Ghawarina locality was in the place depicted," Darby told The Associated Press. He noted that he may have not marked the exact location and if proven wrong "by reliable sources, I will be quick to reallocate it."Darby's Internet Web site pinpoints Ghawarina on the site of Kiryat Yam, but another places it south of Haifa at the site of a present-day Arab town, Jisr el-Zarka. Six decades later, it is difficult to accurately locate many of the destroyed villages, leading to the conflciting claims.Above Kiryat Yam, Darby wrote, "this is one of the Palestinian localities evacuated and destroyed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war."
"That's simply complete nonsense," Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi of Haifa University told Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. "Kiryat Yam was built on sand dunes, and there wasn't any Palestinian village in the area. The lands were bough in 1939 by the Gav Yam construction company."Asked to respond to the police complaint, a Google spokesman said Google Earth depends on user-generated content that reflects what people contribute, not what Google believes is accurate. The spokesman would not give his name, in keeping with company policy. The spokesman insisted that the altered map is not illegal, and Google's policy is not to remove such postings.
Shame on Google, and who knew the Palestinians had organized a catastrophe information hub though it does make a certain kind of strange sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment