‘War Crimes Are Not a Tourist Attraction’, Airbnb and Booking.com Enable Israeli Settlers to Profit from Stolen Palestinian Land, Report Says
Occupied West Bank (Quds News Network)- A total of 760 rooms are being advertised across hotels, apartments, and other holiday rentals in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on two of the world’s most popular tourism websites.
An exclusive analysis carried out by the Guardian found the listings that appear on either Airbnb or Booking.com could host more than 2,000 people as of August 2024.
Tekoa Town
“Tekoa is a quiet, respectful, and diverse, residential community,” reads an Airbnb listing of a villa which is in a settlement located on land seized from Palestinians and considered illegal under international humanitarian law.
The listing doesn’t mention the recent Israeli attacks just outside the Tekoa town, which have forced Palestinians off their land.
The nearby Israeli-administered Nahal Tekoa nature reserve and Herodion National Park was the settlement in the West Bank with the highest number of listed holiday rentals on Airbnb outside East Jerusalem, according to The Guardian.
In total the Guardian identified almost 350 properties – 321 of them houses, apartments, or rooms listed on Airbnb, and 26 hotels on Booking.com – across the West Bank including East Jerusalem, as of 30 August 2024.
Looking at listings instead of properties, there were 402 in total across the West Bank including East Jerusalem – 350 on Airbnb and 52 on Booking.com.
The Airbnb listings found by the Guardian analysis include 18 situated in outposts – settlements considered illegal under international law and also not officially authorized by the Israeli occupation government and against Israeli law.
‘War Crimes Are Not Tourist Attraction’
Booking.com and Airbnb are among 16 non-Israeli companies identified by the UN as having ties to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
By operating in settlements, multinational companies including Booking.com and Airbnb are violating international law, human rights activists warn.
“Any company doing business in Israel’s illegal settlements is enabling a war crime and helping to prop up Israel’s system of apartheid,” Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s crisis response manager, said in response to the Guardian’s findings.
“With Israeli military forces and settlers having killed and injured huge numbers of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank including East Jerusalem in the last 15 months, tourist companies are making themselves complicit in a blood-soaked system of Israeli war crimes and systematic repression.”
“War crimes are not a tourist attraction – Airbnb, Booking.com, and the wider business community should immediately sever all links with Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing annexation of Palestinian territory.”
Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch, said that, in allowing properties in Israeli settlements to be listed on their sites, “Airbnb and Booking.com are contributing to land grabs, crippling movement restrictions and even the forced displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, abuses that Israeli authorities commit to maintaining oppression and domination over Palestinians as part of the crime against humanity of apartheid”.
“Businesses should not enable, facilitate, or profit from serious violations of international law. The time has come for both companies to stop doing business in the occupied territories on stolen land.”
Legal Challenges
Dutch prosecutors are continuing to investigate a criminal complaint against Booking.com over its listing of rental properties in Israeli settlements, with no decision made as to whether to take further action.
The Dutch non-profit organisation the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (Somo) filed the complaint with the Dutch public prosecutor in November 2023.
In the complaint, Booking.com is accused of “profiting from war crimes by facilitating the rental of vacation homes on land stolen from the Indigenous Palestinian population”.
Last month, the group submitted fresh evidence to Dutch prosecutors, saying that since filing the initial complaint, Booking.com had “significantly expanded” its listings in the occupied West Bank.
Lydia de Leeuw of Somo, who leads the complaint, told the Guardian: “We can see from the continued [Booking.com] listings … in the occupied Palestinian territory that they have no intention whatsoever of stopping doing what they are doing.”
Two in five Airbnb properties on Israeli settlements listed their location as Israel – not the occupied Palestinian territories – in their title, addresses, or location details, and only two listings explicitly mentioned they were on Palestinian land, The Guardian analysis found.
Three-quarters of them mentioned the name of the settlement in the title, name, or location.
As of 30 August, just five of the 26 hotels listed in Israeli settlements on Booking.com explicitly mentioned in their address or description that they were located on Palestinian territory.
In 2018, Airbnb announced it would remove about 200 listings in the occupied West Bank, but the company reversed its decision months later after Israeli lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of hosts and others against removing the listings. The company has said it donates profits from the area to aid organizations.
