Hundreds of people marched through the suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey, on Sunday, in protest of a real estate fair held in the Keter Torah synagogue that featured an Israeli company pitching properties in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Organized by several Jewish organizations including the Northern New Jersey branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, along with Teaneck for Palestine, the protestors marched 1.4 miles from the Teaneck Armory to the synagogue, waving flags, beating drums and chanting “Free Palestine!”
The real estate company, called My Home in Israel, has organized several exhibitions across cities in Canada and the US, including Teaneck, a commuter town on the outskirts of New York City. According to its website, the company boasts luxury apartments, mini penthouses and villas for sale across Israel and the occupied West Bank. At least two apartment complexes offer an “urban living experience in a perfect environment” in the settlement of Ariel, near the West Bank city of Nablus.
In its Frequently Asked Questions page, the company says that a foreign resident “can carry out a real estate transaction in Israel, from start to finish, even without coming to Israel”.
Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are widely considered illegal under international law. The US recently restored its position that they are “inconsistent” with international law, a position it had abandoned under the Trump administration.
The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” has inflamed existing tensions in Teaneck, a town of approximately 41,000 residents and home to large Jewish and Muslim populations that has seen a series of protests and counterprotests since the 7 October attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza.
In a video that has racked up 1.9m views since 29 February, Rich Siegel, a 65-year-old Jewish resident from Teaneck, condemned the planned event at a recent township council meeting. “There’s a genocide going on,” he said. “People in this community are in deep mourning … What this real estate event is going to do is it’s going to fan the flames.”
Siegel attended Sunday’s event. “I think that Zionism is Jewish supremacy and Jewish entitlement and I think that this event is an expression of that,” he told the Guardian. “It’s obscene to have an Israeli real estate event while Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
The New Jersey chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and American Muslims for Palestine have called for a federal investigation into the event, saying that it is “deeply concerning to see anyone use a house of worship to allegedly flout international law by selling off stolen land”.
In response to calls to halt the event, Teaneck township manager Dean Kazinci said in a statement last week: “The township has not received any complaints of either local ordinances or state law being broken and so it does not have the jurisdiction to interfere with this private event.”
Protesters on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in the last five months.
Draped in keffiyehs and Palestinian flags and joined alongside families with children and dogs, protestors chanted: “Settlers, settlers, what do you say? How much land did you steal today?”
Around a dozen counter-protestors flanked by heavy police presence waved Israeli flags across the road from the Teaneck Armory. One counter protestor yelled: “Please, I’m begging you. Just say Hamas is bad,” in reference to the group behind the 7 October attacks that killed approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel. Others chanted, “Free, free the hostages.” Roughly 130 hostages are still being held in Gaza.
Yigal Gross, a spokesman for the Bergen County Jewish Action Committee, told NorthJersey.com that the demonstration was a “cynical attempt to target a religious institution under false pretenses as part of a coordinated and malicious campaign to harass Teaneck’s Jewish community”.
Protesters rejected charges of antisemitism. “There is a direct connection to sales like this being held here and the violence that Palestinians are facing in the West Bank,” said Adam Weissman, a spokesperson for Northern New Jersey’s Jewish Voice for Peace and Teaneck for Palestine.
“Ultimately the goal of these events is obviously to make money but the synagogues are hosting them as an ideological project with the intent of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
“I’m Jewish. I’m not antisemitic,” said Stephen Shalom of Montclair, New Jersey. “Jews believe two things of relevance here. One is that thou shalt not steal and it’s not antisemitic to say that. And two, we believe in social justice so dispossession is a crime,” Shalom added.
Hala Al Ahmed, a 53-year-old resident from Boonton, New Jersey, brought what she said was her grandfather’s original Palestinian land deeds to the demonstration to “show the world that this is stolen land”, she said. “This is 150 years old,” she continued, waving yellowed pages protected behind a plastic film.
My Home in Israel and the Keter Torah synagogue did not respond to requests for comment before publication. The company is planning on holding two more events in New York this week.
