Synagogues that sell stolen Palestinian land should, of course, be protested

As the State of Israel and the United States collectively engage in innumerable forms of spectacular state violence, the question of who has the right to protest and where continues to be used as a distraction. The latest debate once again involves the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli land-theft organization, My Home in Israel. The event, which occurs annually, is sponsored and hosted by Jewish community organizations, including synagogues, all over the United States. This month, events held at the Park East Synagogue in New York City’s Upper East Side neighborhood on May 5 and at Young Israel of Midwood in Brooklyn on May 11 highlighted listings in and around the Palestinian village of Beit Iskâria, currently illegally occupied by the Israeli State and known as the settlement bloc Gush Etzion. In response to this event, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (Pal-Awda) organized protests outside the synagogue, where hundreds of people showed up to condemn the illegal land sale. 

Similar protests have previously drawn attention when Zionist politicians like former President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom condemned protestors as antisemitic. Similarly, on May 6, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced, “I’m deeply disturbed by the hateful rhetoric heard last night outside Park East Synagogue. Calls for the destruction of Israel and the glorification of Hezbollah are horrific, intimidating, and only fuel the flames of antisemitism.” In line with Menin’s statement, Jen Goodman, spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul, said: “While protesters have a First Amendment right to be heard, hate-fueled antisemitic rhetoric has no place in New York and Governor Hochul will continue to call it out and confront it head on.” Falling in line, General Letitia James added, “Antisemitism has no place in New York…We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights and condemn hate, harassment, and violence in equal measure.” While New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani initially condemned the event itself, stating, “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians,” after much public pressure, his Press Secretary, Josh Raskin, clarified, “Some of the rhetoric and conduct outside Park East Synagogue — including displays of support for terrorist organizations and antisemitic acts — was unacceptable.” 

The answer is clearly, “No.” In fact, they have fully revealed how claims of “antisemitism” are merely a distraction from Israel’s genocide in Palestine, including the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their land. The truth is, every institution complicit in this violence should be targeted, regardless of whether that space is a school, synagogue, or weapons manufacturer. Exceptionalizing synagogues as exclusively religious spaces erases their political, financial, and ideological investments in Zionism and, therefore, genocide. The debate over the morality and legality of synagogue protests is a distraction amidst the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and imperial wars waged by the State of Israel. 

As of April 2026, there are 3,826 synagogues registered in the United States. Only four have been willing to publicly claim an anti-Zionist political stance – Tzedek Chicago, V’ahavatah in Boston, Makom in North Carolina, and Beyt Tikkun in the Bay Area. This means that 3,822 synagogues in the United States embrace a Zionist politic, support the State of Israel, and are either actively or passively complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And the sale of stolen Palestinian land is only one form of Zionist practice occurring within Jewish institutions. 

While these land sales events reveal explicit ties between some conservative (and usually Orthodox) Jewish synagogues and the active settler politics and practices of genocide and ethnic cleansing, it would be a mistake to overlook the Zionism of 99% of Jewish institutions by singling out these overtly far-right institutions and labeling them as “fringe.” For example, I grew up in Washington DC and my family was members of Temple Sinai, a reform synagogue that traffics in the language of “liberalism” and “progressive politics.” Like many liberal Zionist institutions, Temple Sinai talks out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, it makes statements about Palestinian human rights and multicultural co-existence. On the other hand, it embraces a Jewish supremacist ideology and centers the State of Israel in its mission, programming, and funding strategies. On their website, under a page called “social justice”, they explain: “We believe in and are committed to the State of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people and as a democratic, pluralistic state.” Almost three years into the world’s first livestreamed genocide, in which a majority of Jewish Israelis have revealed their inherent genocidal desires, suggesting the State of Israel is or has the potential to be a “democratic, pluralistic state” refuses to acknowledge the reality of what the State of Israel is and has always been.

Temple Sinai is both a member of and a donor to the Association of Reform Zionists of America. On their website, ARZA explains that the organization “represents the American Reform Movement to the Israeli National Institutions – the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish National Fund, and the Jewish Agency for Israel.” While institutions like Temple Sinai and ARZA are “liberal” Zionist institutions, meaning they frame themselves as “anti-occupation” and believe in Palestinian “human rights,” they are still Zionist and their direct support of and association with the WZO, the JNF, and the JAI reveals their fundamental support for the colonization of Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel as a theocratic ethnostate, and the theft of land by ethnically cleansing and committing genocide in Palestine. Just as planting pine forests over the graves of Palestinian olive orchards is part of this work, so is the sale of illegal settlements to North American Jewish investors. In this way, there is very little difference between far-right institutions that actively support the sale of stolen Palestinian land, like Park East or Young Israel, and liberal Zionist synagogues like Temple Sinai. Viewing protests of these institutions in light of the Zionism that ties them together reveals that US-based synagogues are political and ideological spaces where faith has been replaced by Zionism, and God has been replaced by Israel. 

Synagogues are only one of many sites that make up an ecosystem of Zionist institutions in the United States. For over twenty years, students, academics, and other college and university workers have been demanding that US-based institutions of higher education divest from the State of Israel and cease relationships with Israeli universities that, as Maya Wind’s work so clearly reveals, are central to the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine. Similarly, synagogues that continue to partner with any Israeli institution should be held to the same standard. The Zionist capture of Jewish synagogues in the United States is also a matter of strategic concern – these are spaces of Israeli ideology and propaganda, masquerading as religion. Just as Israeli universities are not neutral spaces of learning, US-based synagogues are not simply neutral spaces of faith. 

For example, Temple Sinai has partnerships with Israeli institutions in the occupied Palestinian Bedouin city of Bir al-Sabi, renamed “Be’er Sheva” by Zionist settlers:

This partnership, both with Congregation Ramot Shalom and Ben Gurion University in the Negev, is central to ensuring U.S. support for furthering Israel’s imperial project in occupied Palestine. And this is just one example, replicated in many of the thousands of synagogues across the United States.

In the end, the protests in New York have helped reveal how Zionism is now baked into Jewish identity and institutions in the U.S.. Given the overwhelming rejection of Israel and its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, it reasonably follows that there would be protests outside every Zionist institution in the country, including synagogues. Instead, to say the truth aloud and condemn institutions that support Zionism, the State of Israel, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, including Jewish ones, results in accusations of “antisemitism,” as well as potential police brutality, incarceration, disappearance, and deportation. Still, people of conscience will continue to protest. If Jewish people and Jewish institutions want these protests to stop, the easiest way to make that happen is to stop supporting the settler colonial theocratic ethnostate of Israel and its imperial project of land theft, genocide, and wars of aggression.

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Maura Finkelstein Maura Finkelstein is a writer and anthropologist. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her recent essays have appeared in The Markaz Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, and the New Arab.

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