Proprietary – i.e. can be bought for money.

I’m sure that Google has the same problem getting geo-data in other places in the world – I don’t believe that all other countries in the world (including Arab countries) give geo-data for free. The main difference is that if you “google” for “ maps”, you get about two times more hits for “Israel” then for “Jordan”, which is more then 3 times more then you get for “Syria”.

And again, its not like Google doesn’t have that information already! as I’ve mentioned – if you search Google maps for “esoteric” towns such as “Sderot,Israel” they give you the location immediately. They just don’t render the names on the map, and that is done on purpose. Compare for example the small town of “Tatahouine, Tunisia”, which is also searchable but is also rendered even though it is much smaller and remote then Tel-Aviv.