Dont know the context in which Israel gets mentioned in the original or Ghorantl in the new anime. Could you maybe fill me in on that?

Besides that, my hopeful interpretation is that the creators dont believe Israel would (still) exist in tga universe

So what? The world does not revolve around Israel. We can make up fictional country names with real world analogs all the time. There's an entire TVTropes entry for it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FictionalEarth

I wouldn’t call it censorship when you don't want to get sued or bombed on for making a prediction so well in advance about countries seeing us more expendable than androids. We are seeing GitS play exactly how capitalists intended, and you had three generations to prevent this dystopia from occuring.
Yet here we are, four apartheid genocides into the 21c, and not a damn change.
I agree with @cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com in the /₀🧵: so what? Are you just noticing artists have had to not mention WIPO signing nations direct names and creatively name them something else in their art? Get creative, luddite.

CX

The only ones that kept the original: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ghostintheshell.section9/posts/10168265956373438/

I now see what this about. Your LA Spanish localizer decided to change it back to Israel, and wants to get Luigi’ed. Good for them.

Kinda hate the name changes a lot just because they make it even harder to follow. I'm bad with names anyway and I can't for the life of me remember these fantasy names that don't even sound like countries.

Still really like it, but this really isn't helping with my one big complaint about this otherwise fantastic adaption.

Wow, surprising that Masamune Shiro was able to predict that much into the future.

Okay so they renamed a country. Why should I care?