On Feb. 18, in a Jewish section of the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, an event by The Getter Group promoted the sale of Palestinian land to prospective Israeli settlers. The slogan on the company’s website reads, “Israel is your home: Buy like you were born here.”

Outside the event on 14th Avenue, the struggle over the future of the West Bank took an ugly turn as Palestinian protesters came under attack from Zionist counter-protesters while the NYPD watched.

In one video from the protest, a man with an ­Israeli flag tied around him punches a woman wearing a keffiyeh. The police tell him to back up, briefly hold onto his jacket, then let him go. Throughout, Zionists yelled “terrorists out of here!” with one man shouting, “I’ll set your Quran on fire!” 

Also caught on video was a Zionist with a metal stick lunging at pro-Palestine protesters, a gallon of water being poured out of the sixth story of the building where the land sale took place, and protesters being chased by counter-protesters on their way to and from the protest. A mob of dozens threw objects at, banged on, and tried to pull the driver out of a vehicle full of pro-Palestine protesters, according to PAL-Awda NY/NJ, the group that organized the demonstration, after the protest. 

Malik Hassan of the Muslim American Society youth center in Brooklyn described another incident: “While we were making our way back to our car, we saw our Jewish allies from Neturei Karta getting harassed by the Zionists in that neighborhood. At that moment, MAS youth came, intervened, and created a circle around our anti-Zionist Jewish allies to protect them.” Zionists then began to attack the MAS members, according to Hassan, who said the police did little to stop them. He told The Indypendent that two MAS youth had to go to the emergency room afterward. One needed staples to close a long cut on his head, and the other had cuts and bruises on his face. Throughout the incident, the Zionists were making “Islamaphobic and anti-Palestinian racist remarks. This was a hate crime,” says Hassan.

This was not the first time Zionist counter-protesters have become violent at land-sale events. The ­Essex County Prosecutor’s Office filed charges against two men who in November caused severe injuries when they attacked a pro-Palestine protester during a West Orange, N.J., rally against a sale of Palestinian land co-organized by PAL-Awda NY/NJ and American Muslims for Palestine-NJ.

At the “stolen land” action PAL-Awda NY/NJ held prior to the Feb. 18 one, Zionists “jumped a couple of people and stole someone’s bike. They’ve been violent in the past, but this is the most violence by far we’ve seen,” says Mohamed, a PAL-Awda NY/NJ organizer who asked to be identified by first name only. 

The Feb. 18 counter-protest was organized by Betar, a far-right Zionist group that has recently received attention for its death threats against prominent advocates for Palestine and for its work to get pro-Palestine visa holders deported, as detailed in a recent report by The Intercept’s Jonah Valdez. 

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Palestinian land-sale protester Rich Siegel told Al Jazeera in January that he once went undercover to a real estate event in Woodmere, Long Island, in the basement of a synagogue. 

“We pretended to be interested in a home in a condominium in a West Bank settlement,” said Siegel on the Al Jazeera podcast The Take. “People who are defending these events are saying that the real estate isn’t actually for sale — it’s just information that’s being given. In my experience, they’re being sold at the point where we could have signed on the dotted line.”

There have been protests against these real estate events since at least 2007, when there was a demonstration in Teaneck, N.J., organized by Siegel. 

The Palestinian Assembly for Liberation-Awda (PAL-Awda NY/NJ) is a Bay Ridge-based group that promotes Palestinians’ right to return to Palestine. It launched a campaign against the events, which it says are illegal, in the fall of 2023 and has since held 15–20 protests. 

The land expos are held by a variety of real estate companies almost exclusively based in Israel that target U.S., Canadian and European Jews, marketing “anglo” neighborhoods in occupied Palestine. In addition to The Getter Group, other real estate companies include CapitIL, My Israel Home, and Home in Israel. Their events have mostly been protested in New York and New Jersey, but there have also been protests in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Toronto. 

It is unclear how long the expos have been taking place, but illegal settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been ongoing since Israel seized the territories from Jordan in its 1967 war against the countries surrounding it. As of 2023, there were just under 700,000 Israeli settlers, according to the Israeli group Peace Now. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented a two-year plan to bring 500,000 more settlers to the West Bank in 2023. In January, he took new measures to ensure the acceleration of illegal settlements. 

The construction of settlements entails the violent dispossession of Palestinians’ homes, farmland and communities by settlers and the Israeli military. It is illegal under multiple international laws. 

“I just bought a house in Jenin,” one Zionist boasted at the February Borough Park protest. Jews from anywhere in the world who have never spent a day in Palestine [to them, “Israel”] can buy homes in settlements or even move into a previously ­Palestinian-owned home from which a family was forcefully evicted. Palestinians, though, are barred from returning to their homes once they are expelled from them. And if they flee Palestine, they and their progeny are not allowed to return. 

The Feb. 18 protests in Borough Park were denounced as antisemitic by Zionist groups and their political allies. In response, Betar announced a Feb. 26 protest at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge’s mosque on Fifth Avenue in the heart of Little Palestine. 

“If they would stop having illegal stolen land sales events hidden in their synagogues and Jewish community centers, we wouldn’t be going there protesting. That’s the only reason we go there,” said Tova, a ­Jewish organizer with PAL-Awda NY/NJ who also asked to be identified by first name only. “Coming to the Palestinian community to try to attack a mosque in response to this is totally Islamophobic.”

The Betar protesters did not show up, likely because a PAL-Awda NY/NJ counter-protest — planned two hours before the Betar action and endorsed by over 30 groups — drew hundreds, including many anti-Zionist Jews. 

The Palestinian Assembly for Liberation also has a legal team, the PAL Commission on War Crimes, Justice, ­Reparations and Return. When a land-sale event is planned, the team serves cease-and-desist letters to groups and individuals including the sponsors of the events, the locations hosting the event and the attorney general. The commission says the events break 22 New York, federal and international laws. 

Between the work of the PAL Commission on War Crimes and the protests organized by PAL-Awda NY/NJ, the goal is to thwart the sales from happening. By serving the cease-and-desist orders to event sponsors and hosting locations; notifying them of its plans to protest the events; and publicizing the location of the sales, which can be hard to find, PAL has seen a handful of successes in having the events relocated, moved online, or canceled. The vast majority go on as planned, but protesters show up whenever they can. 

This all occurs as more Palestinian land is being illegally taken right now. As The Indy goes to press, the Israeli military’s “Operation Iron Wall” has displaced over 40,000 Palestinians from the West Bank, largely emptying the Faraa, Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps. This is the largest mass displacement since the 1967 war. Displaced ­Palestinians are being told they will not be able to return to their homes.

Back in New York, Mohamed says protesting the land sales is the most critical action to take in support of Palestinian rights right now: “We’re literally trying to prevent settlers from North America, from New York City from going to Palestine and stealing our land and our homes. You see the reaction from these Zionist protesters because they know what a powerful campaign it is. These sales are there to ethnically displace people and help carry out a slow genocide in the West Bank.”

Most recently, PAL-Awda NY/NJ held a protest on March 10 in Teaneck, N.J., at an “aliyah fair” that encouraged settlers to move to Israel.

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