[tz] The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of the specification for its time zone

[Paul Eggert]

On 1/4/22 09:12, Eliot Lear via tz wrote:

> The TZ update process here has no formal recognition of governments (any governments).  Still, statements from governments, however they reach this group, tend to carry a lot of weight.

Quite true. In the past we've given a lot of weight to official 
government documents, and we welcome future cooperation in this area as 
this will streamline communication. (All too often for many countries in 
the past, we've had to rely on third parties or the popular press to 
forward their governments' information to us, which has resulted in 
inaccuracies and delays in updating the database.)

 From the timekeeping point of view, the most important thing is to know 
the UTC offsets and the rules for when daylight saving time starts and 
stops in Palestine, and for technical reasons it's best to have this 
nailed down well in advance - preferably at least a year before rules 
change.

Currently for Palestine, tzdb lists standard time of UTC+02, and it says 
daylight saving time starts at 00:00 on the first Saturday on or after 
March 24, and ends at 01:00 on the first Friday on or after October 23. 
Unfortunately, as far as I know these daylight saving time rules are not 
official, in that there's no official Palestinian government document 
listing these rules for future years; however, tzdb must put *something* 
in the database and that's the best guess we've come up with. If the 
government could publish an official document stating what the rules are 
for future years, we'd be happy to adjust tzdb to match that.

Of lesser importance is the English-language abbreviation used for 
standard and daylight saving time in Palestine. (This is less important 
because most timekeeping applications do not rely on these 
abbreviations, as they are inherently ambiguous and somewhat deprecated 
anyway.) Here, tzdb attempts to follow common practice, and it currently 
uses the same longstanding abbreviations for time in Palestine that it 
uses for Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria - namely "EET" and 
"EEDT" (short for "Eastern European Time" and "Eastern European Summer 
Time"). I am unaware of any English-language use of the abbreviations 
"PSST" and "PSDT" to refer to civil timekeeping in this area. However, 
if these abbreviations become popular in common practice we should 
change tzdb to incorporate them.