How Western Tourism Giants Illegally Enrich Israeli Settlements on Stolen Palestinian Land

By Kit Klarenberg – Jun 12, 2024

Before booking your summer vacation, be aware that major western tourism operators willfully fund and legitimize illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, actively contributing to human rights violations and war crimes.

On 23 May, Netherlands-based European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) reportedly filed a criminal complaint against Booking.com in Holland. The company, known for providing short- and long-term vacation booking services, is accused of money laundering linked to Israeli war crimes and profiteering from the occupation state’s illegal settlement expansion projects. Booking.com is alleged to advertise accommodations and “experiences” in illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

The complaint highlights booking.com’s alleged complicity in Israeli genocide, as detailed in a report by Don’t Buy Into Occupation (DBIO), a coalition of 25 European and Palestinian NGOs, including the ELSC.

The report exposes the involvement of European financial institutions in funding businesses that support and legitimize Israel’s illegal settlements and apartheid against Palestinians.

The report meticulously documents the various ways western companies “play a critical role in the functioning, sustainability, and expansion of illegal settlements.”

Among the companies mentioned is Caterpillar, a heavy machinery manufacturer whose armored bulldozers are used to demolish Palestinian homes and construct Jewish settlements. The company is notoriously linked to the death of young US peace activist Rachel Corrie in 2003. Another mentioned is Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, which produces bullets, drones, combat vehicles, electronic warfare systems, and missiles for use during the ongoing genocide.

Implicated alongside these are a number of unexpected consumer-facing companies, including major tourism and leisure providers.

Impact on the Palestinian population
The findings expose how a major component of the modern western travel industry is intimately implicated in sustaining and furthering the Israeli occupation project, actively contributing to, profiting from, and complicit in crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Palestinian people. As ELSC’s Daan de Grefte informs The Cradle:

Settlements are illegal under international law, cause systematic human rights violations, constitute a war crime and are harmful to any prospect of justice and peace in Israel/Palestine. These settlements also form an integral part of a system of racial domination that amounts to apartheid. Several major online tourism companies offer services in the Occupied Territories, which contravene these companies’ own human rights commitments, while also legitimizing Israel’s clearly unlawful policy of colonizing the West Bank. By operating in the settlements, they exacerbate human rights harms to the local Palestinian population.

Take Airbnb, for instance, the controversial “digital tourism company” that has sought to disrupt and replace the traditional hotel industry. It offers short and long-term rentals of private homes worldwide. Today, its website lists “a large number of Israeli settlements.” These properties are based in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights.

“In most cases,” DBIO observes, “the descriptions of the properties name the settlement location, but the properties are listed as being located in ‘Israel’ and do not inform potential visitors that the accommodation is located” in the Occupied Territories. In November 2018, Airbnb announced it would remove around 200 listings in settlements, “at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

The decision was reversed just six months later due to multiple lawsuits in the US and Israel. In 2020, when the company was going public, it neglected to mention its commercial interest in stolen land in filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a report two years earlier, Human Rights Watch noted how many Airbnb listings “are constructed on land that is acknowledged by the Israeli authorities to be privately owned by Palestinians who are not permitted to access it.” The report adds: “[Airbnb] helps make West Bank settlements more profitable and therefore sustainable, thus facilitating Israel’s unlawful transfer of its citizens to the settlements.”

Destination: Occupation
Airbnb is included in a UN database of companies “involved in the provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.” So, too, is Booking Holdings, another US tourism giant, which claims to be the world’s leading provider of online travel and related services. DBIO’s report notes that the company’s Booking.com holiday rental subsidiary advertises hotels, guesthouses, and short-stay apartments in settlements throughout the Occupied Territories.

While some listings note the properties are located in “Palestinian Territory, Israeli settlements,” others are simply labeled “Jerusalem,” etc. According to a May 2022 Booking.com “Human Rights Statement,” customers are to be provided with transparent information on listings in Occupied Territories, but this hasn’t happened.

Instead, listings primarily feature disclaimers, inviting customers to review their government’s travel advisories before booking, as the area “may be considered conflict-affected.”

Spanish travel company eDreams and US-based Expedia Group, which operates portals like Hotels.com and Trivago, are also involved in advertising properties in illegal Jewish settlements without informing customers of their unlawful status. Customers are not informed about the settlements’ illegal status under international law. The company instead categorizes these listings as being “in line with applicable law” while claiming to manually remove “illicit” properties if they are identified by its staff, or flagged by website visitors.

Tripadvisor and its Viator subsidiary go further by promoting tours and activities in these settlements, including tours of wineries built on illegally appropriated Palestinian land, including one situated at Tel Shiloh, built on stolen Palestinian land and managed by a local settler council.

Germany’s TUI Group, one of the world’s largest tourism companies, offers guided tours of these settlements, labeling them as part of “Israel and Jordan” or “Highlights of Israel.” These tours often involve visiting sites built on stolen land, which has displaced indigenous Palestinian Bedouin communities, such as the Qumran National Park — communities who are increasingly forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands, and suffer crippling restrictions on access to water, electricity and more today.

Another tour is titled “Back to the Beginning—Israel,” which comprises visits to Occupied Bethlehem, the occupied Golan Heights, and sights in occupied East Jerusalem.

DBIO charges that TUI Group’s activities are of particular concern “as they are supporting the existence of illegal settlements and contribute to their normalization.” ELSC’s Daan de Grefte tells The Cradle that online travel agencies, by offering properties on colonized land, afford a cover of normalcy to settlements and encourage unaware tourists to visit the settlements and spend their money there.”

“Palestinians are not allowed to enter the settlements, meaning that the accommodations listed on these websites are only open to foreigners and Israelis,” Daan de Grefte adds. “The companies therefore operate in a highly discriminatory environment and enable the functioning of the illicit settlement economies. By being active in these illicit economies created on stolen Palestinian land, these OTAs run the risk of profiting from the war crimes that established the settlements. It’s high time that the climate of impunity surrounding these activities is challenged, especially now that Israel is taking unprecedented amounts of Palestinian land and repression of the civilian population is rising to new extremes.”

Israel Steals 16% of Gaza’s Territory for ‘Buffer Zone’

Economic consequences for Israel
As The Cradle has documented earlier, damage to the occupation state’s economy inflicted by the Palestinian resistance’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation was immense. It has only been further wrecked since, with dire labor shortages in key industries, huge military expenditure straining already failing finances, and a collapse in foreign investor confidence.

In February, Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating, warning that the country’s economic outlook was “negative”, and likely to worsen further if the war is protracted, which seems almost certain.

In the past six months, Israel’s tourism industry has been especially ravaged. Not long after Moody’s bleak appraisal, Yossi Fattal, director general of the Chamber of Inbound Tourism Organizers, a trade body representing travel agents, hoteliers, and other businesses in the sector, bemoaned how the occupation state “has become one of the most isolated countries in the world, like North Korea.”

Prior to 7 October, 250 airline companies flew to and from Tel Aviv; that number is now just 45. As Fattal reported:

Eighty percent of flights today are operated by aircraft from Israel belonging to the [Israeli] El Al company… [This is] an unfortunate victory for Hamas over Israel. The war is harming Israel’s strategic image. Israel should have created a situation in which it found a way to facilitate and encourage tourists to come here despite the war…The insurance premiums required to travel to Israel are enormous.

It is not merely “insurance premiums” deterring visitors, of course. On top of security concerns, the Gaza genocide has dealt a fatal, likely permanent, blow to Israel’s international public relations.

The brutal, murderous reality of Israeli occupation and settlement viscerally writ large on TV, computer, and smartphone screens the world over daily, Tel Aviv’s actions are producing global revulsion and boycott like never before.

Many high-profile western firms and brands that initially expressed solidarity with Israel have reported sizable dents in their incomes due to consumer backlash. Such admissions amply demonstrate the urgency felt by populations everywhere to hold any and all companies that support Israel’s erasure of the Palestinian people since 1948 to account.

It’s a criminal constellation spanning every conceivable industry and sector, with many offenders hiding their complicity and support in plain sight. But as global grassroots — and increasingly, government and institution-sanctioned — boycott and divestment efforts expand, there may never be a return to “normal” for Israel or its western backers at any level.

(The Cradle)