[OSM-talk] Naming dispute over Jerusalem - OSM failure‏

[dimka israeli]

Hi to all,

The reality in Jerusalem is not simple, but some  basic relevant facts are these:

A. All branches of Israeli government reside in Jerusalem.
B. No official branch of the Palestinian National Authority has a representation in Jerusalem.
C. Most Arab residents of east Jerusalem hold the status of "permanent 
resident", they are free to work and live in Israel, and they also receive 
social security rights. Some of them are full Israeli citizens (but 
anyone of them is eligible, if he/she wants to).

D. The whole of Jerusalem, including the eastern part, is subject to 
Israeli civilian (not military) rule. In particular, there is no 
restrictions on freedom of movement.



Now I would like to make several comments (hopefully without a lot of noise) on issues which surfaced up in the discussion:

1. Both Arabic and Hebrew are official languages in Israel, but they do not have equal status - Hebrew is preferred in some government institutions, and of course majority (~80%) of Israeli citizens speaks Hebrew (this is in contrast to Belgium where, according to Wikipedia, the ratio of Dutch-to-French speakers is 60%-40%). As far as road signs are concerned, Jerusalem is not special in this regard and in all Israeli cities the road signs read in both languages. 

English is not an official language.

Our standard of default tagging for Israeli places in Hebrew reflects the fact that Israel was created as, and it is in reality, a Jewish state. This fact is not disputed by any sane person. It is also upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court on several occasions (as the legality of exercising Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem).

2. The people we met clearly did not regard themselves as being Israeli, and referred to East Jerusalem as "their capital". Therefore I assume that tagging "Al-Quds" as "capital=yes" and "is_in=Israel" (or equivalently part of the relation "Israel") will not be acceptable for the other side (but I would be very glad to hear their opinion on this). On the other hand, "capital=yes" and "is_in=Palestine" or is_in nothing would be purposefully misleading. A dual Hebrew-Arabic name on a single node, tagged as capital=yes, appearing on the "semi-official" main OSM site, say on zoomlevel 7, would probably suggest to a causual viewer that it is a joined capital of two states and not mixed-population Israeli city (like Haifa or Yaffo).

AFAIK, "Al-Quds" in Arabic geographically refers only to the Old City plus the eastern neighborhoods of (united) Jerusalem, therefore IMHO the "place=suburb" node in Arabic reflected exactly this (taking the Old City out).

3. Esperanza36 and others who changed the name: tag of Jerusalem to something other than Herbew, prior to December 2010, had not done so in a consistent manner and so I have no idea what was their justification for a particular tagging (Hebrew-Arabic, Herbew-English-Arabic, Hebrew-English). I did not refer to them as amateurs and they certainly are not, but rather to the people we met in Jerusalem.

4. Running a specially configured rendering server would solve the problem of the other side as expressed by them. I also suggested it  to them directly. BTW, what about http://toolserver.org/~osm/locale/he.html and http://toolserver.org/~osm/locale/ar.html? Does anybody know how frequently it is updated?

I would also very much like to have local OSM server for Israel, and I believe that as our community grows, this will come as well.  We already had some discussions, but things are moving slowly. Thank you  John and Ian for the links.

As a side note, there are several mapnik bugs related to Right-to-Left 
display which caused a mess in all labels, both Hebrew and Arabic. These bugs were open for years and solved only recently upstream (see e.g. 
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/1515). Does anybody know when will mapnik2 be incorporated into main OSM rendering?

Regards,
Dmitry B.


 		 	   		  
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