Google Palestine was the victim of a defacing by unhappy hackers, who were apparently pissed that the search engine giant had switched its regional search page “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” last May, in recognition of Palestine’s upgraded U.N. status as a non-member observer.

Curiously though, Google’s move was viewed as favorable towards the Palestinians, so it’s quite baffling as to why Google.ps was attacked by hackers and daubed with anti-Israeli messages.

“uncle google we say hi from palestine to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine,” the message read.

The hackers left a message asking what would happen if Israel was removed from Google Maps and changed to Palestine, before answering its own question by claiming it would start a revolution.  Those aren’t the exact words as the Google translation of the message is quite laughable, but it does give us the gist of the hacker’s message. Apart from that, the hackers suggested listening to R&B singer Rihanna and asked visitors to Google.pl to “be cool :P.”

So what’s the point of this attack?  So far, the hacker’s intentions are not entirely clear –  it could well be that something’s gotten lost in translation, but then again the hackers are objecting to Google Maps’ labeling of the Israel and Palestinian borders so it could well be that that’s the main motivation.  Presumably, the hackers want Google to ‘correct’ its Maps, or otherwise, chaos will ensue.

Apparently, Google Maps is the source of the hacker’s frustration

Google has acknowledged the attack, although it claimed that the Google.ps domain wasn’t directly attacked:

“Some users visiting google.ps have been getting redirected to a different website; Google services for the google.ps domain were not hacked. We’re in contact with the organization responsible for managing this domain name so we can help resolve the problem,” Google said in a statement.