Since the October 7 attacks, the world has watched Israel inflict spectacular horrors on Gaza; meanwhile, its dispossession of West Bank Palestinians has quietly escalated. In 2024 alone, Israel officially annexed 24.7 square kilometers of land in the West Bank, more than it had seized over the preceding 20 years. The authorities also recognized 68 illegal settlements and approved nearly ten thousand new housing units within existing settlements. For real estate developers, these human rights abuses are opportunities for state-subsidized speculation — and both Israeli and American firms are getting in on the action.

Israel distributes much of its stolen land through the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization. Developers and individual settlers can claim this land at deep discounts, or even for free. If the land is located in a national priority area (NPA), its new owners will benefit from considerable subsidies as they build and sell West Bank property: the state covers 50% to 70% of construction costs up to a certain limit, and first-time homebuyers get subsidized mortgages at preferential rates. These homes, however, can fetch market prices, which are rising as a housing crisis in cities like Tel Aviv sends Israelis searching for property beyond the Green Line.

All this adds up to a bonanza for real estate interests: “Every developer who built in Ariel earned very good money there,” said one businessman of his investments in an NPA settlement where home prices more than doubled between 2007 and 2013. Yet many West Bank developers are motivated by ideology as well as profit. Binyanei Bar Amana, for example, is a wing of the right-wing Amana settlement movement, which was sanctioned by the United States and Canada in 2024. The company uses its lavish returns from established settlements like Peduel to offer homes in new illegal settlements at bargain prices, incentivizing Israelis to move deeper into Palestinian territory.