UN rights office reports on business activity in occupied Palestinian territory | Hacker News Reader

UN rights office reports on business activity in occupied Palestinian territory

ohchr.org

55 pointssalqadri27 comments

The actual report can be found at [0] (direct docx download). All the companies listed in this title were providing "The provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport;" and the two other companies from the US mentioned in the report were General Mills which is extracting unspecified natural resources from the land in question and Motorola Solutions which is providing basically security services of some sort (cameras, ID equipment, etc).

Honestly I kind of despair for this ever reaching an amicable solution.

[0] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Sessio...

What does The provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport mean in that context. Airbnb allowing settlers to rent out rooms, or Airbnb allowing settlers to book trips via Airbnb?

It's a very broad category but 'services supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements' would definitely cover providing a way to make money off the homes/apartments in settlements like AirBnB and Booking does. It's providing a means of financial support to the people in the settlements.

I'm a bit confused about TripAdvisor but I bet there's just some portion of their business I'm not familiar with. It seems like reviews etc of businesses and lodgings inside settlements wouldn't be enough to reach that category.

Also booking.com

It's so weird that the title has only 3 companies from that entire list. And none of them are companies under Booking Holdings. Almost feels conspiratorial in some way.

I don't quite understand this.

Is the problem that you can book a hotel (or bnb) within the occupied territories?

Or is it you can book a hotel at something which is an "illegal" (as set by the UN but not by Israel I assume) settlement?

Does the UN want the booking services to check the ownership of the hotel to see if it is Jewish or Palestinian? Or just not have any hotel bookings there at all?

"Human Rights Watch said the list "should put all companies on notice: to do business with illegal settlements is to aid in the commission of war crimes.""

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51477231

Well, it's all stolen property in the common law sense; the owners were driven off at gunpoint in recent decades. In these settlements there won't be any Palestinians.

Do you have any citations for that? The answers to this Quota question: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-land-used-for-Israeli-settlemen... say all the land was bought from landlords (who of course may not have been the people living there) or was registered as public land under the Ottomans.

Which is still an unfortunate situation for the tenants, much like being evicted in San Francisco after your landlord sells your apartment to someone else, but still different from outright theft.

Referencing a Quora statement from "Avinoam Ben Dor, lives in Israel,a Tour Guide"... You are pushing a false right wing zionist narrative, those settlements are illegal under international law. The documented history[0] is evidence of that.

[0] https://youtu.be/BT5L4YU_Fl4

I was specifically asking about the common law theft part.

A Mexican who enters the US without a visa and buys a house there is living there illegally according to immigration law, but that doesn't mean their house is stolen property.

They're orthogonal legal questions.

I have no interest in joining your semantics game. Quoting an unqualified biased person, who lives in the mentioned region and has a track record in defending a right wing zionist position, which opposes the established international consensus and historical evidence, to rewrite history, is deceptive.

1. pfc50 commented on this from a common law point view. klipt asked for citations to support that. If you didn't want to talk about the common law question, why did you respond?

2. The Quora thread klipt linked to included several answers from several people, and did not cite any particular one of them. Picking a single one of those several answers, making an ad hominem based on the person who supplied that one answer, and ignoring the other 18 answers in that thread is pretty ridiculous.

1. The answer to that is already given right above you, won't repeat myself.

2. Deceptive framing on your part. The thread is obviously brigaded by people with a conflict of interest, don't insult my intelligence. The overwhelming majority of answers there are by people, who live in Israel and have no qualifications to answer the question in an unbiased manner. Have you even read some of the answers there? Obviously not, otherwise you wouldn't try to defend the indefensible.

" is an "illegal" (as set by the UN but not by Israel I assume)"

They are considered illegal by US, Canada, UK, EU, and most other nations. China generally supports the notion that this is occupied territory and generally votes in this direction the UN.

So this is not one of those 'North Korea, Syria and Somalia have taken control of some UN working group' type of scenario, nor is there really any lack of international solidarity, at least academically on the issue.

Obviously it's complicated, but there's pretty much a consensus on the de-facto illegality of the settlements.

What exactly did those three companies do?

I looked around the links on that page but I'm not getting a good feel for what happened.

This may help provide more context: BBC News - UN lists 112 businesses linked to Israeli settlements https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-51477231

So doing any businesses that do business in those areas would be "linked"?

Like any hotel booking site that can book a hotel room that is located in the settlement?

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