Waze Lets Israelis Avoid Palestinian Areas, but Not the Other Way Around

Jennifer Attallah was using the navigation app Waze to drive from the Palestinian city of Ramallah to West Jerusalem on a recent evening when she noticed the landscape becoming sparser. On the top of several hills were small settlement outposts. She passed a procession of 15 to 20 people, clad all in white, walking by the side of the road.

Surely this was not the right way. Attallah, 36, turned on Maps.me, a map app that works offline, and saw that she was not approaching Jerusalem, but Jericho, a small city near the Jordanian border, about 15 miles east of Jerusalem.

“I was definitely freaked out,” said Attallah, a Palestinian-American who works for a U.S. government contractor in Ramallah. She eventually made it to Jerusalem, two hours after leaving her house. The trip should have taken 45 minutes, max.

Attallah later realized that Waze was set (as is the default) to “avoid dangerous driving areas and the A, B territories.” In other words, the app was directing her to Jerusalem on a circuitous route designed to avoid Arab areas.

Waze's function allowing people to avoid "dangerous areas" and Palestinian towns and cities. This setting defaults to "on." Image: Hunter Stuart

Attallah and other Palestinians who use Waze, the Israeli-developed app that was sold to Google in 2013 for $1 billion, say it’s a double standard that the company offers a special function for Jewish Israelis to avoid Palestinian areas in the West Bank, but doesn’t offer a similar setting for Palestinians who wish to avoid Jewish ones.

It can be dangerous for Palestinians to enter settlement territory. Certain settlements have a history of extremism and are known for attacking Arabs and their property. Last year, settler attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem led to 89 Palestinian casualties, a rate of nearly two per week, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Three of those casualties were fatalities.

The danger is heightened in times of increased tension, like the recent wave of violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, which has left 269 people dead since Oct. 1, 2015. Residents of settlements are permitted by law to carry semi-automatic weapons for self-defense, and are allowed to use them with near impunity. The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din found last year that only 1.9 percent of Palestinian complaints to police about settler violence result in convictions.

There’s good reason for Waze to provide the option for Jewish Israelis to avoid Palestinian cities. It’s illegal for Israeli citizens to enter the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank like Ramallah, Bethlehem and Nablus. The legality issue is why Waze’s function defaults to “on” when users download the app, Waze spokesperson Julie Mossler told Motherboard.

An Israeli government sign outside the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh. Image: Hunter Stuart

Legality aside, life in the West Bank can be dangerous for Jewish Israelis. Last year, Palestinians in the West Bank killed 18 Israeli citizens, OCHA says. Navigational mishaps in the occupied territories have long been a source of anxiety for Israel.One of the most gruesome episodes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occurred sixteen years ago when two Israeli army reservists accidentally drove into Ramallah and were lynched by an angry crowd. Their corpses were then mutilated and paraded through the city.

That was long before Waze existed. Yet even with Waze’s special functional in place, Israelis and Jewish drivers using Waze in the West Bank have gotten themselves in trouble. In March, two Israeli soldiers using Waze mistakenly drove into a refugee camp near Jerusalem and were promptly attacked by camp residents. The Israeli army’s rescue mission provoked a gun battle that left one Palestinian dead and 10 others wounded.

But some Palestinians are concerned that Waze’s use of the phrase “dangerous areas” is subjective and stigmatizes their communities. On a recent drive through the West Bank it was clear that Waze was using the term “dangerous” to refer primarily to Arab cities in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

The warning that appears when one tries to turn the setting off. Image: Hunter Stuart

By contrast, the app did not make a peep when I drove into the settlement of Maale Michmas or up to the security gate outside Mitzpe Danny, a pirate outpost built in the 1990s in violation of both Israeli and international law.

“Clearly their idea of what ‘dangerous’ means is very skewed,” said Canaan Khoury, who owns a winery in the West Bank village of Taybeh and who has had his vines cut by settlers numerous times over the years.

Salah Amleh, a tech entrepreneur from Ramallah, said Waze’s function defaulting to “on” will be bad for Palestinian businesses. “Tourists won’t be able to come visit us because it automatically shuts down the routes and roads to Ramallah, for example,” said Amleh, who is 36. “So it’s as if the whole Palestinian map is invisible to it, and it will definitely affect the economy.”

After turning down the road to the pirate outpost of Mitzpe Danny, Waze directs me into the settlement in order to turn around. This is dangerous for Palestinians. Image: Hunter Stuart

To be fair, creating an algorithm that can direct drivers safely and efficiently through the West Bank is a complicated endeavor. The region, which is home to around 350,000 Jewish settlers and an estimated 2.6 million Palestinians, is a tangled mindfuck of differing jurisdictions, military bases, checkpoints, barriers, bypass roads and more.

“Waze is a living, breathing global map, requiring… complex technical maintenance,” spokesperson Mossler said, but did respond when asked if Waze would consider implementing a function that would let drivers avoid settlements.

In a notoriously complex place, no one is expecting Waze to be perfect. Being fair is another story.

from Waze Lets Israelis Avoid Palestinian Areas, but Not the Other Way Around

Accelerating Startups Under Blockade in the 'Gaza Challenge'

Outside, horses and donkeys pull creaking wooden carts of vegetables down the street. Inside, dozens of people are hunched over laptops, working out the code for mobile apps that they hope to take public within the year.

This is the “Gaza Challenge,” a five-day tryout event for Palestinian entrepreneurs in the Gaza Strip, a Philadelphia-sized enclave in the Middle East that’s been under an Israeli- and Egyptian-imposed blockade for the past nine years.

The organization behind the Gaza Challenge is Gaza Sky Geeks, a startup accelerator that mentors new tech startups in the Gaza Strip.

Nuwar Abu Awwad, 21, is here to present her idea for a web platform that will provide new entrepreneurs in the Middle East with Arabic-language resources that they can use to solve problems they may encounter with starting a business.

Gaza Challenge participants break for lunch. Image: Hunter Stuart.

Abu Awwad, who is from a neighborhood in Gaza City called Al Twam, where the roads are made of sand, told Motherboard she had the idea for the platform a year-and-a-half ago while working for a different Gazan startup.

“I noticed there was a lack of Arabic resources for people who want to start their own company,” she said. “Like, ‘how can I make a business plan? Or a financial study?’ or ‘How can I best manage my team?’”

She said the information online is in English, which presents difficulties for Arabic speakers, of which there are 300 million in the Middle East.

Users will have to pay a small monthly fee ($9.00 or $10.00 per month) to use the service, said the university student, who is clad in a neon-patterned dress and a green hijab.

The service will be called Tashbeak, which means “making connections” in Arabic.

Of course, this is still theoretical: Abu Awwad and her three partners are just one of 46 teams here at the Gaza Challenge, and only 10 to 12 of those teams will proceed to the next phase, a five-month “incubation” period where products are actually deployed online to see if people use them and like them and why.

Horse drawn carts in downtown Gaza City. Image: Hunter Stuart.

Gaza Sky Geeks is a project of the Oregon-based charity Mercy Corps, and is based out of a loft and co-working space in central Gaza City, a chaotic, lively city that is still being rebuilt from the 2014 war with Israel.

The accelerator, which is the only one in Gaza, was founded in 2011 with a $900,000 grant from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm.

Its bigger mission in Gaza is to grow the Strip’s nascent tech sector, which it sees as an area with great potential. The siege of Gaza means that starting a traditional business is fraught with myriad obstacles, first and foremost the movement of goods and people, on which tight restrictions are placed by both Israel and Egypt. Both countries consider Hamas, the ruling regime in Gaza, to be a terrorist organization, they restrict what comes and goes from the 25-mile Palestinian Territory.

The blockade has had disastrous effects on Gaza’s economy: the Strip’s gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen by 50 percent since the blockade was put in place in 2007. Unemployment in Gaza is now higher than anywhere in the world.

But the beauty of the internet is that it can soar above the fortified walls and naval blockades that hem Gaza in. And since technical talent in Gaza is plentiful, and fiber internet here is strong (even in the absence of 3G), creative or tech-savvy people can invent web services and apps the same way they can anywhere else in the world and then target them at lucrative markets elsewhere in the region.

“All the companies we work with are working on products that can maybe be tested in Gaza, but the real market opportunity is in places like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, where people have money, and where smartphone penetration is one of the highest in the world,” Gaza Sky Geeks director Ryan Sturgill told Motherboard.

Gaza City, where many roads are not paved. Image: Hunter Stuart.

The 10-12 teams that are chosen to undergo Gaza Sky Geeks’ five-month incubation phase are then subjected to a further winnowing. “If teams don’t hit their milestones, we’ll filter them out,” said Sturgill, who is 31 years old.

By February, Gaza Sky Geeks directors will have selected three to four teams to undergo an “acceleration” phase, which also lasts five months. At this point, the teams’ apps are already online, people are already using them, and the focus is on growth.

This is the period when the investments start rolling in. Last year, four of the teams that went through Gaza Sky Geeks’ acceleration period got investments of between $20,000-$65,000 right off the bat. Investment comes from venture capital funds in the Palestinian West Bank as well as other parts of the Middle East and also from Europe and the United Kingdom, Sturgill said.

Though some of the investors who are giving their cash to Gazan tech companies are doing it for philanthropic reasons, all of them are profit-oriented, Sturgill said.

And that’s a good thing.

“It’s very important to teach people [in Gaza] that this is actually disciplined money coming in, that’s also going to help you. It’s not just grant money that’s being thrown out the window. This is money that’s going to be returned one day, and then some. And that discipline leads to real growth. That’s really important for the growth of the [tech] ecosystem here.”

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from Accelerating Startups Under Blockade in the 'Gaza Challenge'