The financial architecture sustaining Israel's settlement expansion across the occupied West Bank stretches from state-backed Israeli banks to global tourism platforms and European construction firms—a network that has operated largely out of public view for decades despite repeated United Nations calls to halt the building.
Israel occupied the West Bank following the June 1967 Middle East War. Settlement construction intensified in the immediate aftermath of that conflict and has continued under successive Israeli governments as an explicit policy of expanding Jewish civilian presence in territory the UN considers occupied. International law, as interpreted by the UN, classifies the settlements as illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The clearest catalogue of corporate involvement comes from the UN Human Rights Council's database, updated Sept. 26 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The list names 158 companies operating in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—138 of them Israeli and 20 foreign firms registered in 10 countries: Canada, China, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The United States accounts for six entries—the most of any foreign country. The six firms are Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Motorola Solutions, Re/Max Holdings and TripAdvisor. Their activities span short-term rental listings, hotel reservations, communications infrastructure and real estate sales in settlements the UN considers illegal.
Spain contributes four companies, all tied to construction, infrastructure and rail: ACS, CAF, Ineco and SEMI. France appears through two engineering firms, Egis and Egis Rail. The United Kingdom's entries are Greenkote P.L.C. and JCB, the latter a manufacturer of heavy machinery used widely in earthmoving and construction. The remaining foreign firms are Altice International of Luxembourg, Booking.com B.V. of the Netherlands, Heidelberg Materials AG of Germany, Steconfer S.A. of Portugal, Fosun International Ltd of China and Metrontario Investments Ltd of Canada.
The UN database covers companies operating primarily in construction, real estate, tourism, travel and mining—sectors directly tied to building and commercializing settlement infrastructure.
On the banking side, a Human Rights Watch report published May 28, 2018, found that Israel's seven largest banks help fund settlement construction, secure ownership stakes in new projects and manage those projects through completion. Human Rights Watch identified the seven as Hapoalim, Leumi, Discount, Mizrahi Tefahot, First International Bank of Israel, Union Bank and Bank of Jerusalem. The report described these activities as facilitating the movement of Israeli settlers into occupied territory.
Most settler associations and movements do not publish budgets or disclose foreign funding sources, according to Israeli and international human rights reporting. Israeli left-leaning outlets, particularly Haaretz, and international human rights organizations have been the primary sources surfacing financial flows that official Israeli media rarely covers.
Public government budgets represent a second, more visible funding channel. Successive Israeli governments have allocated direct public spending to build new settlement units—expenditures that appear in official budget documents but whose scale rarely enters mainstream Israeli political debate.
Israel has pressed ahead with settlement construction for decades in the face of UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions demanding a halt. The UN has consistently described continued settlement expansion as a direct obstacle to a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The question of U.S. policy toward the settlements has shifted over time. The United States designated settlements as illegal under international law for decades, a position the first Trump administration reversed in November 2019 when it declared that establishing Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, in the U.S. view, inconsistent with international law.
The UN database and the Human Rights Watch findings together map two distinct but reinforcing channels: private corporate activity that commercializes or builds within settlements, and institutional bank financing that funds the construction of new units from the ground up. Settlement financing has remained the primary driver of physical expansion, providing the capital that turns government policy into concrete buildings on contested land.
