Apple Maps not featuring all of Lebanon is a ‘colonial’ act

Apple Maps has drawn condemnation over its satellite software displaying vast blank areas across Lebanon and missing most Lebanese settlements.

Although apparently not a new feature, the discovery comes as Lebanon faces repeated Israeli bombings, ground invasions and an expanded genocidal assault on its civilian populations.

Apple: ‘rotten to its core’

A viral X post by American Christian “Truth Seeker”, Ethan Levins, claiming that “Apple has removed Lebanese village names in Southern Lebanon” sparked outrage.

Levins wrote:

As Israel invades, they are already setting the state to justify occupation. I’ve never seen something like this.

Levins’ remarks quickly spread and were reshared, gaining more than 15 million views between just two accounts. While two substantive aspects of this story appear untrue that doesn’t mean there’s no story.

Firstly, it’s not only the south of Lebanon that’s empty on Apple Maps: none of the country’s place names appear, regardless of zoom level.

Secondly, the names of towns, villages and streets haven’t been removed recently, according to Apple. They were actually never there to begin with.

Apple never featured most of Lebanon’s villages and towns on its Maps platform, making their suspected duplicity arguably more of a structural complicity.

Zionist crimes unfold in Lebanon

The Zionist imagination of West Asian territory, dating back to long before Israel existed, was of “a land without a people [Palestine], for a people without a land [diaspora Jews]”.

Now it appears that Zionist-aligned corporations like Apple are replicating this template as another Nakba-scale event sees more than a million Lebanese people displaced, and thousands murdered by Israel since 2023.

In one of the worst atrocities committed in decades, Israeli bombings of Beirut killed more than 350 civilians in under 10 violent minutes of bloodshed. As far as Apple is concerned, they weren’t there.

Lebanese officials dubbed the massacre “Black Wednesday” and multiple human rights organisations have condemned it among many Israeli war crimes.

Now, Israeli politicians are openly stating their plans to indefinitely occupy southern Lebanon, right up to the Litani River, in yet another flagrant violation of numerous international laws.

Zionist settlers are already sharing plans, based on purported “God-given” right, to settle southern Lebanon just as they’ve violently settled Occupied Palestine, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.

Rather than removing southern Lebanese villages from Maps specifically to aid Israel’s murderous 2026 assault on the country, the US mega-corporation arguably laid the groundwork long ago.

Instead, Apple did so by deciding never to host Lebanon’s civilian life on its platform in the first place.

Apple’s bullshit ‘on background’

Journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who covers US tech oligarchy extensively at the Nerve, provided a stern rebuttal to Apple’s denial of the viral online story.

Cadwalladr reached out to Apple for comment on the story. Apple offered not a quote per se, but rather an ‘on background,’ non-quotable response to the circulating story.

‘On background,’ according to Apple, means that “information is provided on a non-attributable basis and should not be directly quoted or attributed to Apple”.

Cadwalladr described this ‘on background’ method as “tech PR bullshit”.

‘On background,’ apparently, allows companies to launder corporate narratives through unscrupulous hacks, without journalists stating where their analysis or ideas originate.

Cadwalladr is scrupulous, however, and took the opportunity to expose Apple’s “bullshit” PR meandering with a direct screenshot of their otherwise unaccountable statement.

Cadwalladr pointed out that Apple’s ‘non’-statement that the newest version of Apple Maps “is not currently available in that region”, is demonstrably untrue.

Just south of the Lebanese border — internationally recognised yet repeatedly breached by Israel for decades— Apple Maps works very well, even for minor Zionist settlements.

Apple Maps also functions clearly and well in neighbouring Syria. As Cadwalladr wrote on X about Lebanon: “there’s lots of ‘detail’, just not the place names”.

Even more gravely, she highlighted Apple’s “major business interests in Israel” and the fact that “Israel is erasing Lebanese villages” on a multiple-daily basis.

Apple and apartheid

Apple’s embeddedness in the Israeli apartheid state is well-documented. For one thing, Apple’s second-largest R&D centre is based in Israel.

Since 2012, Apple has acquired multiple Israeli technology firms, with the most recent reported $2 billion takeover of Israeli spyware firm Q.ai in January this year.

Israeli start-up Q.ai’s flagship tech model reads facial movements and interprets non-verbal communication, allowing it to plausibly read minds and unspoken thoughts.

There’s no other way to dress it: Apple bought a Zionist-manufactured AI technology that’s as close to non-invasive, non-supernatural telepathy as currently possible.

According to Bloomberg, the facial cue tracking technology — based on visual capture — is supposed to help with audio products like AirPods and audio features like Siri.

Strangely enough, Bloomberg’s business promo piece does not explain how exactly the visual detection software is supposed to help with any audio output.

It gets worse, however. In June 2024 the Intercept reported that Apple whistleblowers decried the company for matching employees’ donations to illegal Zionist settlement projects in Occupied Palestine and to the IOF during the Gaza genocide.

So while Apple didn’t remove Lebanon from its Maps for Israel today specifically, the corporation’s longstanding ties to the Zionist project — which has consistently threatened Lebanon and its people —indicate that its ‘blank map’ still holds sinister intentions.

Technologies of erasure

Spatial data sciencist, Johara Meyer, at UCL shared her perspectives on Apple Maps with the Canary, leaning on her advanced critical studies in geography.

She said that mapping services like Apple’s — using detailed satellite imagery and speedy computing systems— have very effectively constructed a veneer of scientific objectivity.

But maps are never neutral representations or ‘mirrors’ of the world. Instead, they are de facto world-making technologies — rather, they are tools of power.

Meyer said:

Blank maps have long been used to foster myths of un-occupied and un-inhabited land to make settler colonial endeavours more imaginable, palatable, and possible.

She added:

Apple removing or even simply not displaying Lebanese places names is not a neutral act—it’s a colonial one. Removing the spatial signifier of the people and memories that live in these places constructs a blank-slate upon which imperial fantasies and geographies can more easily be imagined and imposed.

In geography we call this practice cartographic erasure, or silencing.

Thus we need to understand that Apple scratching Lebanese villages from the map is a threat. As we’ve seen in Gaza, places that are silently erased from the map become communities violently erased from the ground.

Meyer bluntly concluded:

The map of Lebanon isn’t blank; it’s been strategically erased. And the Apple isn’t bitten — it’s rotten to the core.

Featured image via X/ Villgecrazylady

By Cameron Baillie

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