Palestinians demonstrate against the demolishment of their homes in Khirbet Susiya village in 2012, TripAdvisor has listed services on the illegal Israeli settlements built in the village (Photo: WikiCommons)
Elham Asaad Buaras
Amnesty International (AI) is urging TripAdvisor employees to lobby their company to end “listing tourist attractions and properties in illegal Israeli settlements across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)”.
In an open letter to TripAdvisor staff last month, AI said the settlements had a devastating impact on the human rights of Palestinians, with tens of thousands of homes demolished and large numbers of Palestinians forcibly displaced to make way for their construction, in flagrant violation of international law, since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1967.
AI’s, head of Business and Human Rights, Mark Dummett, said, “Israel’s policy of settling Israeli citizens on stolen Palestinian land in occupied territory is a war crime.”
“By promoting tourism in these illegal settlements, TripAdvisor is helping boost their economies and contributing to the immense suffering of Palestinians who have been uprooted from their land, had their homes destroyed and their natural resources plundered for settlement use,” AI added.
In its report published in January, AI, also names and shames AirBnB, Expedia and Booking.com for “sustaining an illegal situation and fuelling human rights violations against Palestinians.”
Airbnb has announced in that it would remove some 200 rental listings in West Bank settlements because it contended that the settlements “are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Amnesty said that TripAdvisor was the “focus of this campaign because of the company’s relative importance to the tourism industry in Israeli settlements.”
The report titled ‘Destination Occupation: Digital Tourism and Israel’s Illegal Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, AI found that TripAdvisor, one of the most visited online tourism websites by foreign visitors to Israel, lists more than 70 different attractions, tours, restaurants, cafes, hotels and rental apartments in settlements across the OPT.
Among them is the settlement of Susya build on the Palestinian village of Khirbet Susiya. Palestinian residents were forcibly evicted to make way for the illegal settlement in 1983 many of them reduced to living in temporary shelters since ever since.
‘Since then, the villagers have lost vast swathes of farmland and had to cut back the size of its herds, its main source of income. The Israeli authorities have blocked water cisterns and wells in Khirbet Susya, and villagers spend about a third of their income paying for water. The Palestinians of Khirbet Susiya also live in fear that their homes or other property could be demolished at any time and face systematic violence and harassment at the hands of Israeli settlers,’ says the report.
A spokesman for TripAdvisor told The Muslim News their listing is not an “endorsement of that establishment or a region’s public policies” and that their listing is there for “for guests to share their genuine experiences with other travellers. As such, we do not remove listings of properties or businesses that remain active and open for business.”
“With respect to where a location is listed on a map, including disputed regions, TripAdvisor – in its role as an information platform – intend to be as consistent as possible with the travel industry and Internet search display standards.”
“TripAdvisor will continue to monitor how other travel and Internet search companies list information about properties in regions like Israel and the Palestinian Territories as we aim to deliver a consistent experience to all of our users across the globe.”
