On May 5, 2026, the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan hosted this year’s “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” an annual affair that facilitates the sale of stolen Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. For years, this event and others like it have operated in New York City (NYC) with the quiet, unremarkable efficiency of a hundred other real estate expos. A table, a glossy brochure, a handshake, transactions as banal as they are brutal. Gwyneth Paltrow appeared recently in an advertisement promoting a real estate “project” in Herzliya, Israel. This unremarkable nature is precisely the point. Historically, these were just real estate events, seamlessly stitched into the fabric of a capitalist system that commodifies everything, allowing the violent dispossession at their core to be depoliticized and ignored.

That invisibility has been shattered. Due to the tireless organizing of groups like the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation Al-Awda (PAL-Awda), these events have been launched into mainstream discussion in NYC politics, to the dismay of the Zionist political bloc. The response from the city’s establishment has been swift and revealing.

Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani condemned the event, with a spokesperson saying, “Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” adding, “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”

The New York City Council passed two bills to curtail the rights of New Yorkers to protest.

The first, vetoed by the mayor, was not overridden and never took effect.

However, after pressure from labor unions and civil rights organizations, a strengthened bill, rewritten to focus on K-12 schools and early education sites, but excluding colleges and universities, was passed and signed by the mayor. This second bill, while originally designed to create a distance requirement for protests at houses of worship, was heavily watered down to merely mandate that the NYPD create a safety plan. While this may seem like a win for Zionism in NYC, it is actually a sign of heightening contradictions. The state is now forced to explicitly legislate protective bubbles for a political project it once implicitly protected through public indifference. The very act of repoliticization has forced the hand of power, making the machinery of settler-colonial facilitation visible to all.

Zionist settler colonialism: an active process

We must understand these real estate events not as an aberration, but as a crucial, active node in the continuous structure of Zionist settler colonialism. Zionist settler colonialism did not end in 1948 or 1967; it is a continuous process that operates daily through land confiscation, home demolitions in Masafer Yatta, the Judaization of Jerusalem, and the ongoing siege of Gaza. The 1948 Nakba is a present-tense reality.

The transaction in a Manhattan synagogue is merely the finishing step of a process that began with a military order on a Palestinian hilltop. To comprehend this, we must reject the bourgeois legal and media framework that divides Zionists into two categories: the active Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) “soldier” and the passive “Israeli civilian.” The settler is not a byproduct of the movement but its essential building block. The act of moving onto conquered land to claim it as one’s own is the fundamental political act of the settler-colonial project. A “civilian” in the occupied West Bank, protected by the IDF, carrying a state-issued M16, and committing violence to seize land, performs a function indistinguishable from a state military agent. They are the vanguard of dispossession. Their very presence in a home built on the ethnically cleansed ruins of a Palestinian village constitutes the successful completion of a military operation.

The people buying a plot of land in the West Bank are not innocent victims of misleading advertising. They are conscious political investors, providing the capital and international legitimacy that sustains the project. They materialize the claim “this land is ours to sell,” even from thousands of miles away. When research shows that U.S. citizens make up 15 percent of the settler population — a wildly disproportionate figure — the direct chain of responsibility from a Manhattan ballroom to a stolen hilltop becomes undeniably clear.

Our communist duty: from a commodity to a crime scene

The struggle begins in the terrain of consciousness. The primary ideological function of a land sale in a Long Island hotel or a Manhattan synagogue is to perform an alchemy that transforms a crime scene into a commodity. The glossy brochure, the payment plan, the promise of a “luxury apartment in Israel,” these are the tools that scrub away the blood, the military order, and the displaced family. Our first task is to reverse this process, to repoliticize every square inch. This means forcing a confrontation with the truth behind the transaction: naming the Palestinian village of origin, displaying the map of its destruction and popularizing the reality of Palestinian refugees. We must make it impossible for a single sale to occur without the public seeing the demolished home that stands in its place.

This framework logically dictates our demands, which cannot fall into the trap of liberal humanitarianism. There is no such thing as an ethical land sale on stolen Palestinian ground. Our demand is not for a more humane management of occupation, but for the total decolonization of Palestine and the full right of return for all refugees. This demand clarifies the political reality in Palestine and separates the struggle for liberation from the machinery of compromise that sustains the settler colony.

This clarity must manifest in concrete, disruptive action here and now. These real estate sales cannot simply be protested; they must be physically disrupted to the point of non-functionality. The organizations profiting from these sales must be exposed, their leaders named, their financial infrastructure made toxic and unusable, and their event spaces rendered permanently unavailable. There is a direct, successful, and prominent anti-imperialist organizing campaign in our community of which we need to be a part. Any place that chooses to host a land sale must face immediate, sustained political consequences, making the cost of facilitating dispossession too high to bear.

Conclusion: break the chain of settlement

A land sale in a Manhattan synagogue is not a sideshow to the conflict; it is a direct and active link in the chain of Zionist settler-colonialism. The buyer, the seller, the broker, the hosting institution, and the city and state that protect it with “buffer zones” are all political agents in the ongoing crime of the Nakba. There is no neutral ground, no passive participant, no innocent transaction. The chain stretches from the ruins of a Palestinian village to the polished floors of a New York City real estate fair, and every link must be broken.

These sales are a test for our city, just as Palestine is a test for humanity. To be a communist is to be an unflinching enemy of this project, from the West Bank to the West Side of NYC. Our mandate is clear: organize and agitate ceaselessly, never allowing a single square inch of stolen Palestine to be quietly traded as a commodity behind the thin veil of a “real estate event.” We cannot rest until the chain is broken, the land is returned, and this system of dispossession is condemned to the trash bin of history. The answer to the settler’s deed is the refugee’s return, with Palestinian self-determination. Our task in this city, and in the United States, is to build the power to help the peoples of Palestine make that return a reality, including ending U.S. funding for Israeli arms, and ending U.S. integration with the IDF.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Free Palestine rally in Downtown Dallas on October 15, 2023  by KERA News (NPR). End the occupation by CPUSA.