An illegal auction of stolen Palestinian land at an elite Upper East Side synagogue, and the swift condemnations from groups like J Street launched against New Yorkers who attempted to protest it, reveal the Zionist rot at the heart of the American Jewish elite establishment that is bastardizing and corrupting the religion from within, and why liberal Zionist groups present only an impotent challenge to it.
“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” held last Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was organized to assist prospective buyers in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. purchase land in the occupied West Bank, with the expo’s website advertising land for sale in Gush Etzion, a cluster of West Bank settlements illegal under international law. At least one company present, Harey Zahav, displayed maps and brochures advertising properties in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other West Bank settlements. Karnei Shomron is the subject of a $633 million Israeli government development agreement to nearly triple its population, an effort that Israeli Construction Minister Haim Katz called “a clear policy of settlement and building the land of our forefathers,” with a separate land designation designed to prevent Arab construction in the area.
In response to those illegal land sales, New Yorkers used their First Amendment rights to congregate at Park Avenue Synagogue to protest the contentious practice, with demonstrators arguing that it is inappropriate to use a religious institution to shield what is purely a political activity.
As Jewish Voice for Peace explained in their call to action statement, such “events are attempting to cynically shield themselves from protest by holding their sales at a synagogue. No one should enable the sale of stolen land, let alone a religious institution.”
Though instantly labeled antisemitic – the label reflexively deployed against any criticism of Israeli policy regardless of the identity of the critic, and one applied with particular cynicism given that many of the demonstrators outside Park East were themselves Jewish – those protesters were fairly targeting what has become the broader ideological capture of elite American Jewish institutions by a foreign government engaged in genocide and apartheid, and their transformation into a financial backbone for the Greater Israel Project.
Since 2023, American synagogues and Jewish federations have raised millions for ZAKA – founded by an accused serial rapist known in Jerusalem’s Orthodox community as “the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” exposed by Haaretz for defrauding the Israeli government, and the originating source for the beheaded babies hoax Joe Biden and Donald Trump continue to repeat – and for its rival United Hatzalah, whose director told a room of Republican Jewish donors in Las Vegas that Hamas had baked a baby alive in an oven. The Jewish National Fund, a tax-exempt American nonprofit institutionally embedded in synagogues nationwide, has for decades purchased land from which Palestinians are legally barred. Hillel International sponsors American Jewish college students on trips that include volunteering at IDF military bases. The Central Fund of Israel, JGives, and Israel Gives conduct tax-deductible fundraising for IDF units in Gaza and the West Bank through similar Jewish institutional networks that gathered at Park East last Tuesday to sell stolen land.
Israel has always depended on diaspora wealth for its survival, which is precisely why its sprawling and aggressive lobby exists. Under those conditions, what B’Tselem, Israel’s own leading human rights organization, has called “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea” cannot be seriously challenged without directly confronting the American Jewish institutional infrastructure that bankrolls it, which is precisely what New Yorkers attempted to do last Tuesday at Park East Synagogue.
But those New Yorkers, including many Jewish ones, who showed up to protest those illegal land sales were swiftly condemned – including by J Street, the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby that has pitched itself as the liberal alternative to AIPAC. “Two things can be true,” J Street wrote. “Protests that glorify violence, wave Hezbollah flags and chant for the destruction of Israel are wrong. Using our synagogues to promote home sales in West Bank settlements is also wrong.”
Americans are, of course, free to “glorify violence, wave Hezbollah flags, and chant for the destruction of Israel.” That is all permissible speech which anyone on American soil has the constitutionally protected right to utter, despite an intense ongoing effort by the Israel lobby to criminalize it.
But J Street’s response to those protests – condemning both the protesters and the land sales in equal measure – is indicative of the balancing act the organization has attempted to manage, one that is unstable and contradictory, with its guiding (or rather, mis-guiding) principle that Zionism can ultimately be reformed into something that is morally good, that the solution is a better Israeli government, and that the American Jewish elite institutions which have funded settlement expansion, armed soldiers to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and laundered Israel’s atrocity propaganda bears no meaningful responsibility for what Israel does.
That incoherence was highlighted by a recent memo put out by the group that ostensibly calls for an end to unconditional U.S. aid to Israel which, even while calling for an end to certain weapons transfers, insists that the United States should continue to “sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel,” including Iron Dome and David’s Sling and Arrow, interceptors and other system components, which J Street says are “purely defensive and have saved countless civilian lives by intercepting attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and others.”
If the purpose of J Street’s new position is to change Israeli behavior, it is not a serious one; the Iron Dome system is what allows Israel to wage its wars of aggression across seven fronts simultaneously without fear of costly retaliation from the populations it targets.
Just as unserious is J Street’s neutered and impotent critique of Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon as “Netanyahu’s and Smotrich’s” war.
“Netanyahu and Smotrich,” the group’s Senior Vice President Ilan Goldenberg wrote in a May 1st statement, “are carrying out their West Bank and Gaza playbook in southern Lebanon. We’re failing to stop them.”
Since March 2, Israel has killed over 2,700 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 1.2 million. Israel’s defense minister demanded for southern Lebanon to be ethnically cleansed following “the model of Gaza” and images published by local journalists demonstrate that is exactly what IDF soldiers have done, with complete U.S. backing. Haaretz reports that Israeli soldiers are engaged in extensive looting of private homes and businesses in southern Lebanon, with many soldiers justifying theft by telling themselves the property will be demolished anyway. As Haaretz puts it, the soldiers are “stakeholders in destruction and in prolonging the war.”
Yet one would believe from J Street’s statement that Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich are single-handedly demolishing entire villages in southern Lebanon — and not the conscript army and Israeli civilian volunteers who are committing those crimes on a daily basis.
The conclusions that J Street cannot bring itself to reach are now being stated openly by a growing number of American Jews, particularly younger ones, who have watched their communal institutions mobilize in defense of an apartheid state and the genocide it has just committed. That the protesters outside Park East are labeled antisemitic is a measure of how completely the establishment has fused Jewish identity with Israeli state policy – a fusion that younger American Jews are increasingly rejecting. Until American Jewish institutions can separate themselves from Zionism, the antisemitism charge will only grow cheaper, and the religion it has been weaponized to protect will grow hollower.
Harrison Berger is a correspondent at The American Conservative. He has contributed to Drop Site News, The Nation, and Responsible Statecraft. Previously, he was a researcher and producer for System Update with Glenn Greenwald. His work focuses on civil liberties and U.S. foreign policy. He studied Political Science and Russian Studies at Union College (NY).
