Israeli town sues Google over claim it was built on Arab village

"Hell Most
of what is
called Israel
Was created on
Palestinian Land
was made
from
ruins of
Arab villages
Israel destroyed"

The northern
town of Kiryat Yam is suing Internet giant Google
for slander, a local official said Monday, because
a feature of its worldwide map service shows the
town was built on the ruins of an Arab village.

The dispute brings together two controversies,
one old and one new. Officials from the town
deny they displaced Arabs during the War of
Independence, and Google is defending the
practice of allowing any surfer to change
information in its files.

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.
Pushing back invading Arab armies, the forces
from the new Jewish state also overran Arab
villages, destroying dozens.

Kiryat Yam was pulled into the dispute 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. He 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 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.

Above Kiryat Yam, Darby wrote, this is one
of the Palestinian localities
evacuated and destroyed after the 1948
Arab-Israeli war.

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.