Yahoo Wipes “Ariel, Israel” Off The Map, Replaces It With “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories” (UPDATED)

Original: Kudos to whatever seething, obsessive anti-Israel organization managed to sneak this in under the radar. Drip drip drip delegitimization of the Jewish State is after all the strategy du jour. But seriously? This is what we’re doing now?

Apparently someone has convinced Yahoo to go into their News Weather data, erase “Ariel, Israel” as a valid location, and replace it “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories.” The 20,000 residents from Ariel, where the relevant weather station is built, apparently don’t deserve their own weather. Yahoo has decreed that it belongs to the residents of Jenin, which is 25 miles north and 850 feet lower. It’s absurd that this kind of petty crap even has to be addressed, but inasmuch as it’s part and parcel of a broad-based replacement geography campaign it’s unfortunately not trivial.

Someone should ask Yahoo if there’s a list somewhere: which Israeli cities are Israelis allowed to keep, which do the Palestinians deign to let them share, which are entirely Palestinian, and which are simply unworthy of existing? Because given how they’ve gone out of their way to divide up Weather Channel data – more on that in a sec – apparently Israel’s capital, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, and the city of Ariel are all in play.

As near as I can tell it was Reut Cohen who first reported that something was up. I’ve put the screencaps I reference at the end of this post for readability purposes:

Last night he called me to tell me that Ariel, Israel, which is an Israeli town near Jordan’s west border, had been renamed… Rather than seeing the weather for Ariel [on Yahoo's weather widget], he saw “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories” listed in its stead… It is unclear why the change was made, but it is clear that those who deny the right of Israel to exist consistently refer to all of Israel — not just Ariel, Israel — as occupied territories… It’s this sort of blatant political revisionism of renaming Israeli cities that we are up against… When it comes to historic revisionism, the so-called myth of tolerance and acceptance of Middle Eastern Jewry is a perfect example of history re-written to suit the agenda of Arab Nationalists and/or Islamic Totalitarian organizations.

Here’s where things get weird. Yahoo’s weather widget just takes data from Yahoo’s Weather site, which in turn gets its information from The Weather Channel. If you use The Weather Channel’s weather.com to check what’s going on in “Ariel, Israel” you get data from the weather station that – not coincidentally – is in Ariel. The Weather Channel doesn’t have any data for “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories,” which makes sense since Jenin doesn’t have a weather station. [1]

The results are exactly the opposite on Yahoo Weather. There’s nothing available for “Ariel, Israel.” So if you’re one of the 20,000 Israelis who live there, sorry. But there is a location named “Jenin, Occupied Palestinian Territories,” which is what they’re calling the data that is actually coming from Ariel.[2]

Again: “Ariel, Israel” has been delisted as a real place and replaced by “Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories.” That would be bad enough. But it’s particularly absurd when the “Jenin” data is coming from a station that’s in a city Yahoo refuses to provide the weather for. They’re just intercepting the data and retagging the “name” field, so the Palestinians can feel included or justified or something.

Now Yahoo could have just doubled the weather.com data, leaving an “Ariel” entry and copying everything over to a second “Jenin” entry. That would still have been a deliberate political move. Presumably weather-seeking Jenin residents don’t want to look up the name of the closest Israeli city because it’s too Jewish and icky, but Yahoo doesn’t have to indulge them. Still, it would have been closer to justifiable. The rest of the world seems eager to gratify Palestinian fantasies about things that don’t actually exist – “Palestine,” a Palestinian civic sphere, and so on – so why not Yahoo?

But that’s not what they did. What they did is erase the entry for the Israeli city where the weather station is and replace it with the name of a Palestinian city where the weather station isn’t. That’s why if you click on “Extended Forecast” on Yahoo’s Jenin listing it takes you to the weather.com Ariel page. Yahoo went out of their way to do this, just like they went out of their way to list the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo as a West Bank city in the “Palestinian Occupied Territories.” [3]

So we’ve got an Israeli city that no longer exists and an Israeli city that’s been ceded to the Palestinians. But there’s a third category of deliberate geographical tinkering. Yahoo has made the political decision to pretend that Jerusalem is both an Israeli city and a Palestinian city. The data is drawn from the same place – The Weather Channel’s page for Jerusalem, Israel – but Palestinian fantasies must be attended to. [4]

It’s cute that Yahoo has degrees of craven anti-Israel replacement geography. So seriously – is there a list?

Update – Feb 4: A few people have emailed wondering why they can’t find “Jenin” as an option through Yahoo’s regular weather menu. You can geographically navigate around different stations that Yahoo has declared are “Palestinian Occupied Territories” – Hebron, Nablus, Gilo, etc – but Jenin isn’t an option. So is Yahoo trying to hide something?

Nope. What’s actually happening is that the change they made to the Ariel weather station is so arbitrary and random that they haven’t managed to integrate it into the rest of their database. The switch makes so little sense – they removed the place where the weather station is and replaced it with a place where the weather station isn’t – that there’s no easy way to link it up with the rest of their locations.

Yahoo’s trying to graft their own system onto what they get directly from the Weather Channel. But because the politicized map they made up is unrelated to anything else it’s causing them problems. So if you want to see the weather station you have to jump directly to the Jenin page. So on top of everything else, this stunt actually makes it harder for people to get weather reports. It was more important for Yahoo to wipe an Israeli city off the map than it was to help people get weather from Yahoo Weather.

[1] Weather.com correctly indicates that the weather station in ariel, Israel displays the weather for Ariel, Israel.

Yahoo Weather Erases Ariel, Israel From Map

[2] Yahoo Weather indicates that the Ariel, Israel weather station reports conditions in Jenin, Occupied Palestinian Territories. It does not offer the option to view the location actually being reported, which again is Ariel, Israel.

[3] The Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo is apparently a city in the “West Bank” portion of the “Palestinian Occupied Territories.” That will be news to, among others, the residents of Gilo.