[tz] Proposal to use Asia/Tel_Aviv for Israel - Jerusalem is not internationally recognized as part of Israel

[yoshito_umaoka at us.ibm.com]

The tz database does not tell Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. However, 
at least, zone.tab specifies TZ Asia/Jerusalem belongs to country 
specified by code IL, that is Israel.

IL      +3146+03514     Asia/Jerusalem

I actually consulted with a development group in Middle-East in my company 
several years ago, when I was working on the short time zone IDs in 
CLDR/Unicode locale extension project based on UN LOCODE. (Of course, UN 
does not assign any LOCODE to Jerusalem)

Our development team in Middle-East said - "Time in Jerusalem" is 
perfectly fine - but "Time in Jerusalem (Israel)" has a political problem 
and not acceptable by some regions. The display name in the software 
(CLDR/ICU) was constructed  from a localized name of a city and a country, 
and the country for each zone was resolved by data imported from zone.tab. 
So I told them about  the specific line in zone.tab. At that time, they 
said it's really problematic and they told me they were going to post 
something in this mailing list. (Although, I did not see any at that time)

I think Toby's point was to use a different city "Tel Aviv" - so zone.tab 
can be changed to:

IL      +xxxx+yyyy      Asia/Tel_Aviv


"Asia/Jerusalem" is just a zone identifier. This might be similar to 
"Asia/Shanghai" vs. "Asia/Beijing" discussion. If the way of display a 
zone is problematic, then it should be resolved by the code formatting the 
zone name. But the tz database maintainer may still consider this because 
the tz database can stay away from the political conflict.

-Yoshito

> 
> Where in the TZ database is Jerusalem declared the capital of Israel?
> 
> Deborah Goldsmith
> 
> On May 4, 2013, at 10:53 AM, David Patte ₯ <dpatte at relativedata.com> 
wrote:
> 
> > So is cow-towing to an aparteid state.
> > 
> > The unilateral declaration of Jerusalem as capital of Israel is in
> violation of international law and custom.
> > 
> > 
> > On 2013-05-04 12:44, Bennett Todd wrote:
> >> 
> >> > What is the reason that the IANA time zone database keeps Jerusalem 
as
> >> > Israel territory
> >> 
> >> Because change is expensive.
> >> 


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