JAWS condemns the sale of stolen Palestinian land
Throughout March, “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” has been touring Canada and the United States to expedite the looting of stolen Palestinian land. The series—organized and sponsored by Keller Williams Realty, “International Marketing and Promotion,” Emanuel Group, JewishPress, “Your Home in Israel,” and the Israeli American Council—is as brazenly colonial as its name suggests.
As if a conference that masquerades a brutal occupation in glossy real estate brochures, auctions, and financial advice isn’t farcical enough on its face, many of the listed properties are located in zionist settlements in the West Bank. We stand in solidarity with the activists that have been coming out against these criminal events in their communities.
Keller Williams has been holding these events for several years, each time showcasing West Bank properties and providing prospective settlers and colonial speculators with legal and financial advice. Only Jews have been allowed to attend these events. In its very existence, this real estate series, which flagrantly violates both international law and national anti-discrimination laws, makes a mockery of the liberal values that the colonialist and capitalist Canadian and American states claim to uphold.
Land purchases have been integral to the zionist settler-colonial project since its beginning. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jewish Colonization Association (now the Jewish Charitable Association) and the Jewish National Fund organized these efforts in Palestine. As the movement for Palestinian liberation continues to grow, these long-time zionist, colonial organizations must also be opposed.
JAWS decries any smearing of protests against these settler real estate events as anti-Semitic. Propagandists have been glomming onto the fact that this series has been hosted at synagogues, ignoring that it is the upholding of colonial violence that profanes these spaces. Zionism must be dismantled anywhere and everywhere. As Jews, we cannot shy away from confronting this white supremacist ideology that has taken hold of many of our communities, or from building alternative organizations and institutions dedicated to liberation and justice.
“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” of March 2024 concludes tomorrow, March 13th, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. At least two of the properties that My Home in Israel has been advertising for this event are located in the West Bank.
“Adret Jerusalem” is a development across the 1949 Armistice border in Al-Quds that has been planned for decades and is tepidly opposed even by US and EU liberal zionists. The Ramat Aderet development, meanwhile, represents an expansion of a settlement that has seized lands, disrupts travel, destroys olive groves, and leaks untreated wastewater into Salfit and nearby Palestinian villages.
We cannot stand for any sales of stolen land in the zionist entity and its settlements to be brokered in our communities. We urge our followers in New York to protest with us on March 13th at 3 PM at 2701 Avenue N, as part of an action organized by PAL-Awda, NY/NJ PAL, and the PAL-Awda Mothers’ Committee.