You’re right, my last line was itself provocative and unhelpful. Unfortunately I’m unable to edit now. But my point is that what also doesn’t belong on HN are (a) a blatantly editorialized clickbait title and (b) a comment section full of knee-jerk reactions seeming to take the title at face value.
But to your point, indeed the IDF are not going to be planning their air strikes via google maps. The violent actors on the Palestinian side are more likely to “benefit” from publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel than vice versa. However as others have noted below, US law (kyl-bingaman amendment) apparently requires blurring of high-res imagery of Israel, so Israel was going to be blurred no matter what.
Which ironically brings us back to the question, why is Gaza blurred as well? Google doesn’t have to do that.
My initial assumption is laziness backed by armchair altruism. It’s easier to just apply a blanket blur policy to the entire Israel-Palestine region to comply with aforementioned KB amendment given the dynamic nature of the borders. Given that blurring is, at least at face value, considered a good thing for security, I could see the people in the room thinking “it’s easier for us and it increases the security of the entire region. We get ahead of any possible claim that google maps is enabling attacks on Palestine while protecting Israel. Problem solved.”.. without thinking through the potential negative externalities.
But as you’ve raised, blurring Palestine doesn’t meaningfully prevent planned attacks on Palestine, except if they’re carried out by rogue Israeli actors without state resources. In my understanding those are not as common. So then it raises the legitimate question, “does the negative externality of ‘preventing the world from easily accessing satellite imagery of Palestine and thus understanding the extent of urban destruction’ outweigh the positive benefit to general Palestinian security”? From an objective perspective, possibly, but from Google’s perspective, not blurring would be a much more politically charged move requiring nuanced explanation, so they’re not going to risk it.
In the end it’s very “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” much like every other aspect of the broader conflict.