JetBlue’s seat back entertainment map now displays the Palestinian territory, and it does so in “significantly larger text” than Israel “to the point where it is overlaid on the entire state of Israel.”

While the airline has stopped allowing flight attendants to wear personal, unapproved pins like Palestinian flag pins after the airline had a passenger removed by police for questioning one such pin, their moving map appears to have struck a middleground between recognizing Palestine (which the U.S. does not) and recognizing only Palestine (‘from the river to the sea’).

In fact, “according to the map, Israel’s northern border does not include the Golan Heights” or “a division of the West Bank” instead appearing to call much of what is internationally acknowledged to be Israel ‘Palestine’.

While it’s unclear when the change was made, JetBlue acknowledges it, telling me,

The map app on seatback screens allows customers to see where their aircraft is flying at any given time. The digital maps are licensed from a third-party provider to JetBlue and other airlines around the world. We have reached out to the service provider to understand how their maps are sourced.

While blaming a third party provider, they don’t express concern over that provider’s choices in their statement. Nor did they commit to addressing it.

I’ve written in the past about an airline announcing their destination as ‘Palestine’ and removing Israel from their inflight map. Swiss even had a policy of turning off its inflight map 30 minutes prior to arrival in order to avoid displaying Israel to passengers flying to Israel.

JetBlue is headquartered in New York, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. On the other hand this is an increasingly large customer base…

Pro-Hamas fans in New York chanting that Palestinians can resist “by any means necessary” on the day an American hostage was buried. Hersh was shot in the head and they think it’s “necessary”. What a twisted, sick, foul movement. pic.twitter.com/BbC4U57opY

— Heidi Bachram ️ (@HeidiBachram) September 3, 2024

…and on the other side of the Atlantic at JetBlue destinations like Amsterdam as well.

Update: 9/5/24 JetBlue adds an additional statement:

The map app on seatback screens is an interactive map that allows customers to see where their aircraft is flying at any given time.

The map app is provided to us by a third-party company, which they license from a specialty technology company. (https://www.geofusion.com)

A number of other airlines around the world use the same map technology on their seatback screens.

We don’t believe the provider has made updates or changes to the map recently. The concern reported about the font size seems to be related to when a user zooms into the map on an area that is small in size. When zooming into smaller countries and cities, the font labels increase disproportionately to the land. This is how the technology works on all areas of the globe and it does not appear to be an intentional choice or statement about Israel.

The map app is primarily meant to see where your aircraft is flying, and JetBlue does not fly to Isael or the Middle East. To that end, we have not previously reviewed the map app’s functionality in that region. We’ve reached out to our service provider to get more information about the map’s functionality and accuracy.