Apple is facing accusations of antisemitism after iPhone users noticed that a Palestinian flag would pop up as a suggestion after they typed “Jerusalem” in messages — but the tech giant insists it is just a bug that its engineers are working to fix.
British television presenter Rachel Riley first pointed out she was receiving the emoji suggestion on Tuesday, noting that she had just upgraded her iPhone to iOS 17.4.1.
“This didn’t occur on my phone immediately before this update,” she posted on X, including a “non-exhaustive list of capital cities that do not offer their nation’s flags, let alone the wrong one.”
“Showing double standards with respect to Israel is a form of antisemitism, which is itself a form of racism against Jewish people,” the television presenter claimed.
She then asked Apple whether it was intentionally suggesting the Palestinian flag when users typed in the capital of Israel, or if it has “no control over rogue programmers.”
Riley then signed her post “a Jewish woman concerned about the global rise in antisemitism.”
A software tester later shared Riley’s post, writing that it is “ridiculous that Tim Cook and Apple already decided that [the] historic capital of Israel belongs to Palestine,” while another X user declared: “Jerusalem is NOT the capital of Palestine.”
Eylon Levy, a former spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also spoke out about the predictive text.
“A glitch like this on Apple that erases the capital city of Israel and wants to hand that over to the Palestinians is unfortunately part of the global wave of hostility that we are seeing towards Israel,” he told The Sun.
Levy went on to urge Apple to take action to remedy the error, and said he would “expect them to look into that and ask how that happened, especially if…no other city gets associated with flags in that way.”
But the issue appeared to only affect those who had their language settings configured as “English UK, English Singapore and English South Africa,” one iPhone user noticed.
A spokesperson for Apple has since said it is “aware of a predictive emoji bug in the iPhone’s keyboard,” which prompted the suggestion, and said the issue “will be fixed,” industry news site iMore reported.
The company did not give a firm timeframe for the fix, but iMore suggested it would be remedied by the time Apple rolls out its next update.
