Pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters converged near a Brooklyn synagogue on Monday as demonstrations against Israeli land sales in the occupied West Bank continued.

The annual real-estate exhibition, called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” is on a multi-city tour that has set up shop in North American synagogues to sell occupied land in illegal Israeli settlements. The exhibition touts “sought-after locations” for English-speakers, including Gush Etzion, a group of nearly two dozen Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The protest in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Midwood attracted waves of Israel’s supporters, including a horde of teenage boys on scooters and bikes eager to drive the protest out of the neighborhood.

Sara Erenthal, a pro-Palestinian protester and an ex-Orthodox Jew, said she wasn’t surprised that Orthodox Jewish teenagers had converged on the protest.

“They need action,” she said. “They don’t have as many activities as secular people do.”

From their perspective, she said, “they’re trying to be macho and protect their neighborhood.”

The hostility between the two groups prompted some ideological debate and many physical fights to break out. Counterprotesters were seen by this reporter spitting at the protesters, and, in one case, a teenage counterprotester jabbed a pro-Palestinian protester with a pole.

Police made four arrests but a police spokesperson would not tell The Indypendent on what charges. 

The consensus of international law experts have overwhelmingly found that the settlements are illegal, and have routinely warned that the land sales could constitute war crimes. Protesters have accused the annual exhibition of breaking federal anti-discrimination and fair housing laws in the United States, alleging that the land sales are designed to be available to Jewish buyers only.

“We can’t buy houses in America, but we’re allowing home sales to go over for some overseas-type shit?” one pro-Palestinian protester, who went by the alias A+, said. “Doesn’t feel proper.”

Protesters were met with counterprotesters on May 5 outside of Park East Synagogue in the Upper East Side, a frequent stop for the real-estate tour, where police separated the two groups. The New York Times reported that a man taunting the pro-Palestinian protesters bore a logo from the Jewish Defense League, a Jewish extremist organization.

Spokespeople for Mayor Zohran Mamdani have said he condemned the real-estate exhibition, adding that he supported demonstrators’ right to protest. But other state officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, have objected to the demonstrations against the land sales on the grounds that they target synagogues. They have offered no such condemnation for the exhibition’s placement in synagogues.

That event instead tested a city council ordinance passed in April banning protests within a protest-free “buffer zone” around houses of worship, though it has no explicit radius. Governor Hochul is similarly seeking a 25-foot buffer zone statewide.

It was not clear if a buffer zone was established between the protesters and the synagogue. At various points, protesters passed by the synagogue as they marched around the neighborhood. Counterprotesters followed them.

The exhibition’s last stop in North America will take place in Queens on Tuesday May 12 before continuing in London in June.

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