Despite the fact that the weather in Israel is either hot or even hotter, Simon Plosker, our Managing Editor, still likes to check out the forecast for Jerusalem on his iPhone using the pre-installed Yahoo Weather application.
But over the weekend he couldn't work out why the weather for Jerusalem simply wouldn't update. Turns out that the Weather application has unilaterally divided Jerusalem into "West Jerusalem" and "East Jerusalem, West Bank". Check out these two screen grabs:
"West" and "East" Jersualem aren't stand-alone geographic entities. Jerusalem was always a unified city — the only exception being from 1948-1967, when Jordan captured the city's eastern neighborhoods where both Jews and Arabs lived.
I wonder what prompted Yahoo Weather to suddenly follow the footsteps of the UK Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled that Israel can't promote eastern Jerusalem as part of the Jewish state.
It's just another example of the soft, creeping spin denying historic Jewish claims over Jerusalem.
UPDATE May 30: This is part of a larger, ongoing problem at Yahoo Weather. In January, Mere Rhetoric first blogged Yahoo Weather getting twisted up in knots trying to politicize weather reports in Ariel, Jenin and Gilo.
Even the weather's political.
