Booking.com and Airbnb offer accommodation offers located in territories occupied by Israel for several years. The movement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) recently posted a video on Twitter of accommodations offered by Airbnb located in the West Bank. For its part, Booking.com presented, between 2021 and 2023, 70 advertisements for accommodation located in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, identified by the Dutch NGO Somo. Last Mayseveral organizations had filed complaints against Booking.com for alleged money laundering linked to its operations in the occupied West Bank.
While the genocide in Palestine has lasted a year and the expansion of colonization continues, the platforms Airbnb and Booking.com do not hide the economic and commercial advantages they derive from their partnership with the State of Israel , and has been doing so for several years. Indeed, Airbnb’s complicity with the State of Israel is not new. In November 2018, following pressure from Palestinian human rights groups and the publication of a rapport de Human Rights Watchthe platform announced in a press release its intention to remove its ads located in the occupied West Bank.
These statements were very poorly received by the American and Israeli governments, which then exerted pressure on the group, issuing threats of legal action or accusations of anti-Semitism, according to the Middle East Eye. Airbnb then backtracked a few weeks later, declaring in a new press release: “ Airbnb has never boycotted Israel, Israeli businesses or the more than 20,000 Israeli hosts active on the Airbnb platform » before putting its announcements on the territories occupied by Israel back online.
While on the night of October 3 to 4 lastIsraeli bombings in the West Bank killed 18 people, a reminder of how the colonial war extends beyond Gaza, Airbnb and Booking therefore have no problem working in a territory under occupation. A West Bank eaten away by illegal settlements, whose population suffers brutal attacks from settlers and repression from the army, which maintains a climate of terror to prevent any dissent.
The complicity of the multinationals Airbnb and Booking amounts to complicity with the ongoing genocide. She is not an isolated case. In a context of deadly acceleration of genocide and colonial crimes, capitalist companies are not ready to put their financial interests at stake and continue to support the State of Israel. Like other sectors, tourism in this geographical area benefits economically from the confiscation of Palestinian lands and Israel’s colonial policies.
