In the immediate wake of the incident, city council members introduced a motion to give $1 million to several Jewish security organizations that would expand their work around Jewish schools, religious institutions, and neighborhoods. 

Magen Am, a nonprofit that runs armed patrol services and firearm training programs for the Jewish community, was named as the recipient of $350,000 in the motion. The group is largely made up of former Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. military veterans, according to the group’s website and social media posts, and was founded by a former MMA fighter with ties to the National Rifle Association. The majority of the former Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the group are “lone soldiers,” according to several reports, the term for individuals with no direct ties to the state of Israel who immigrated there to serve in the nation’s military.

The city council has since introduced a new motion, which would give $2 million to various faith groups that want to hire additional security and does not mention Magen Am or any recipients by name. But LA activists are still concerned that city funds will go to an armed group with hard-line political stances.

“The fact that Magen Am was even named in that original motion as a recipient of money, that exposes the intention,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace. The group is alarmed that city leaders are choosing to fund individuals who served a military that commits ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. 

“It’s the same military that’s enacting this genocide, and we’re going to have them patrolling our streets with guns seems wild to me,” Camnitzer said. The group also notes that the new motion does not include any provisions for keeping the recipients of city money accountable to the public interest. “We’re talking about essentially a private militia that can use force and detain people, and has no accountability.”

Magen Am’s director for its veterans program, Leibel Mangel, who served in the IDF’s counterterrorism unit during the 2014 Gaza War, flew to Israel in the days following October 7 to join the conflict, according to a post on Instagram. He shared in a podcast interview that he was stationed with other reservists along Israel’s southern border with Gaza, and later, in the West Bank, “protecting communities there, trying to put a dent in Hamas infrastructure.” One post showed him carrying an assault rifle and looking out into a desert with the caption, “Their spilled blood will be avenged.”

Magen Am lists former U.S. Navy SEAL Jason Pike as a firearms trainer on its website. Advocates with Jewish Voice for Peace were troubled by Pike’s online presence, which was filled with violent, homophobic, transphobic, and extremist military content. 

In one post on his public Instagram account, which has nearly 15,000 followers, Pike shared a video showing him waterboarding his son, a torture practice widely utilized by the U.S. government on its detainees during interrogations. Using the torture method to train U.S. military soldiers was banned in 2007 by the Justice Department because it “provided no instructional or training benefit to the student.” Pike captioned the video, which drew nearly 800 likes, with the hashtags “mindgames” and “trainyourbrain.” 

In December, Pike posted a video purporting to show an Israeli soldier repeatedly slapping a blindfolded Palestinian man. Pike captioned the post by dismissing “Rules of Engagement” in war and wrote, “the crap we do is far worse … I know from first hand experience.” The former Navy SEAL added, “The truth would utterly put many of us under the prison.”

A separate post shared last month seemed to condone comments made by a U.S. veteran who threatened to shoot at anti-Trump protesters at a Veterans Day Parade and “wipe them all out.” Pike wrote he felt the nation was headed to where “we will be forced to do a reset,” referring to the veteran’s violent threats, and that the only thing that holds him back from doing so “is God Himself.”

Also on his Instagram account, Pike shared a transphobic meme that misrepresented a “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” song, a common reference by anti-trans groups. And in his podcast, Pike labeled homosexuality “a sin” that would keep people from heaven.

Mangel and Pike did not respond to requests for comment.

“An organization that thinks it’s appropriate to have that be one of their instructors who is going to then teach other people how to patrol our streets is really scary,” said Camnitzer, who is gay and whose father escaped Nazi Germany with his family in 1939. “The fact that then our city would think it’s appropriate to hire an organization that has those people among their staff is really concerning.” 

Magen Am leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city council offices that introduced the motions did not respond to requests for comment. LA’s city council is currently on summer recess but is expected to vote on the motion when their session resumes later this month.

The push to fund security firms for Jewish communities emerged in late June, when a group of protesters made up of a coalition of Jewish and Palestinian advocates, including members of Jewish Voice For Peace, lined the outside of the Adas Torah synagogue in LA. They were there to oppose a real estate event taking place inside the house of worship, in which companies marketed the sale of properties in both Israel and in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law.

The demonstrators were met with opposition from pro-Israel counterprotesters, whose agitation led to several fights, multiple injuries, and a couple of arrests, authorities said at the time.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavksy, whose district includes the Pico-Robertson neighborhood where the protest took place, almost immediately started calling for armed guards to prevent future incidents. 

Later that week, Yaroslavsky and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield introduced the first motion, which would set aside $400,000 for the Jewish Federation, $250,000 for Jewish Community Foundation, and $350,000 for Magen Am. Nationally, Jewish leaders used the LA synagogue incident as a rallying cry to call for more funding for increased security. Religious organizations are able to apply for federal funding through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which got a $40 million boost in California in April.

“The threats are real and the fear of a proxy war for what is happening in the Middle East spilling onto our streets here in LA is real,” said Yaroslavsky at a July 2 council meeting. Her comments were met with a wave of “boos” from Jewish and Palestinian advocates who packed the council chambers to oppose the motion.

At the meeting, a Palestinian teenager who was at the synagogue protest told the council that she was attacked and harassed by pro-Israel agitators who followed her to her car and, after she got inside, went on to bang on her windows, blocking her from leaving.  

Magen Am’s armed units were present at the real estate event. The group admitted in a statement they were unable to control the crowd during the protest and misrepresented the demonstration, referring to it as “pro-Hamas protest.” The group was also present at the pro-Palestine student encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, where a group of dozens of counterprotesters who support Israel attacked students, leading to at least 15 injuries, according to campus officials. 

Jewish Voice for Peace feared that funding a pro-Israel group would only embolden violent agitators who align with the same pro-Israel leanings.    

“I’m just looking at the types of people that work at this organization, and I’m thinking, not only are they not going to keep me safe, but these are the types of people that generally put me in extreme danger,” Camnitzer said. “So who is the city trying to keep safe?” 

The post LA City Council Considers Funding Former IDF Soldiers to Patrol Its Streets appeared first on The Intercept.

“We’re here today because Russia … attacked a children’s hospital,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Even uttering that phrase sends a chill down my spine.”

Thomas-Greenfield went on to list a string of Russian attacks on other Ukrainian hospitals throughout the war. She described Russia’s aggression as a “campaign of terror” and labeled its attacks on civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. Representatives of other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, echoed Thomas-Greenfield’s denunciations. (Russia’s ambassador denied responsibility for the Monday bombing.)

The moral clarity of her comments was striking to observers and experts of international law, who contrasted it to U.S. rhetoric and actions concerning Israel. The U.S. has stood by Israel militarily and diplomatically as it has consistently attacked civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, in Gaza since October 7, in a brutal campaign that the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide. 

“I’m very glad the U.S. is coming out and so vocally condemning all of those actions,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, referring to Thomas-Greenfield’s comments toward Russia. “But at the same time, we don’t get any language anywhere near as strong as that when we’re talking about Palestinian hospitals, or Palestinian schools, or Palestinian children.”

A Very Stark Difference

The U.N. Security Council’s near-unanimous criticism of Russia this week mirrored another moment from earlier this year, with one stark difference: the U.S. response. 

The council met on April 5, just days after Israel bombed a convoy of aid workers with World Central Kitchen, and following the end of Israel’s siege of Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, during which the Israeli military killed 400 Palestinians. Council members took turns condemning the attacks, urged Israel to do a better job at protecting aid workers and civilian infrastructure, and called the attacks “clear violations of international humanitarian law.” 

The U.S. joined the calls for protections of aid workers. But it also withheld any criticism of the Al-Shifa Hospital attack, and instead shifted the blame to Hamas. “We must not ignore how Hamas’s actions have put humanitarian personnel at risk,” said U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood. “Tunneling under and storing weapons in hospitals is a violation of the laws of war, and we condemn it.”

The differing and uneven responses from the U.S. toward the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has long been a point of criticism from those pushing for peace in both contexts.

Nate Evans, a spokesperson for Thomas-Greenfield, told The Intercept that the ambassador “has condemned loss of Palestinian civilian lives many, many times in the Security Council,” while adding that the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are “two very different wars.” Evans noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” while Israel launched its assault in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

Related

Medical Workers Evacuated From Gaza, but 3 Americans Refuse to Leave

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Monday similarly contrasted the two wars, asserting that the Ukrainian military isn’t “headquartering itself in hospitals, under hospitals, in other civilian sites, in apartment buildings,” but accused Hamas of doing so. The U.S. has consistently repeated Israel’s refrain that Hamas is using hospitals for military operations, a claim for which neither party has provided credible evidence. Israel’s war has decimated Gaza’s medical sector and killed more than 200 medical and humanitarian workers, the most ever recorded for a conflict in a single year, according to the U.N.

There are indeed significant differences between the circumstances surrounding the wars, including, significantly, that Russia is a longtime U.S. adversary while Israel is one of its closest allies and a recipient of billions of dollars in military aid each year. 

But there are also clear parallels in human rights abuses and violations of international law in each respective war, said Peake, who called the U.S. government’s handling of the conflicts “hypocritical.” 

“What we see from the U.S. is a very stark difference in how they are choosing to handle its involvement in pushing for an end to those conflicts,” said Peake, who is also assistant director of UCLA’s Promise Institute for Human Rights.

“On the one hand, you have the U.S., in Russia and Ukraine, playing a very central role within international efforts for seeking an end to the conflict and also accountability,” she said. “And in the case of Gaza, it’s vetoing resolutions, it’s watering down statements that are put out by U.N. bodies. The U.S. is acting to have those statements be softer to make Israel appear a more reasonable party.”

Hiding Behind Diplomacy

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the U.S. has vetoed three separate U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have called for a humanitarian pause or immediate ceasefire. In contrast, the U.S. has backed similar peace resolutions for Ukraine, many of which were in turn vetoed by Russia.

In March, the Security Council managed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. But the U.S. abstained from the vote because “certain key edits were ignored,” such as a request to add condemnation of Hamas, Thomas-Greenfield said at the time. 

U.S. officials have said they opposed ceasefire resolutions because they failed to stand by Israel’s apparent right to defend itself and argued diplomatic approaches would be more effective than public censures. And the U.S. continues to point to its leading role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as proof that it is serious about ending the conflict in Gaza. 

But even as negotiations continue, Israel is ramping up its bombardment in Gaza, focusing most recently on Gaza City, where Israeli forces on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of Palestinian civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed, an implausible condition. 

This week, Israeli strikes have killed dozens, including a school near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where at least 27 people were killed, mostly women and children, according to reports citing Palestinian medics. And over the weekend, separate Israeli strikes at other schools in Gaza City and a U.N.-run school in Nuseirat, killed 20 others. Strikes also hit a home in Deir al-Balah, which was inside Israel’s “humanitarian safe zone” where Palestinians have been told to flee, the Associated Press reported. 

The U.S. has yet to condemn the recent spate of attacks. On Wednesday, however, the Biden administration agreed to send hundreds of 500-pound bombs to Israel, the AP reported. The U.S. previously withheld the munitions in May as Israel readied for an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were sheltering.

“It’s really just not enough to say ‘We’re pursuing diplomacy’ when we’re talking about any level of civilian casualties, but particularly when we’re talking about almost 10 percent of the population of Gaza,” Peake said, referencing a recent report from The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, which issued a “conservative estimate” that the Gaza death toll is 186,000.

“If Biden picked up the phone to Netanyahu this afternoon and said, ‘We’re cutting off your weapon supply,’ that would bring it to a close,” Peake said. “If the U.S. said, ‘We’re cutting off funding to Israel until there’s a ceasefire,’ that would end this conflict.”

The post Russia Attacks Hospitals in Ukraine. Israel Does the Same in Gaza. The U.S. Response Couldn’t Be More Different. appeared first on The Intercept.

Similar real estate fairs have popped up across North America this year, in places such as Montreal, Toronto, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Brooklyn, and several have faced protests as the war on Gaza has brought the issue of Israeli settlements and Palestinian sovereignty to the fore.

An outbreak of violence at the LA event thrust the incident into the national spotlight. Protesters at the Adas Torah synagogue, who decried the sale of what they called “stolen land,” were met by pro-Israel counterprotesters on the West LA streets. Fights broke out among demonstrators, LA police said, while protesters reported being beaten by police with batons. The fracas was cast in the national media as an incident of violence at a place of worship, rather than a political protest at a corporate event, prompting political leaders from both parties, including President Joe Biden, to characterize the demonstration as antisemitic. The Justice Department said it is investigating the incident.

But homebuyers interested in purchasing a property in the occupied West Bank have a more convenient option for making an offer: a simple scroll through online listings. 

On websites largely tailored for Jewish American buyers looking to move to Israel, prospective homeowners can browse properties that include listings for homes in settlement communities, which offer the typical trappings of suburban life. 

Around a dozen real estate firms have participated in real estate fairs organized by My Israel Home across North America this year. Six of these firms are actively marketing at least two dozen separate properties for sale located within eight different West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, according to their online listings. Other real estate firms commonly list dozens of West Bank properties on their sites. The firms mentioned in this story did not respond to requests for comment.  

They listed homes for sale in Ma’ale Adumim, Efrat, Mitzpe Yericho, Ramat Givat Ze’ev, Har Adar, Hashmonaim, and Ariel — all West Bank settlements located within a one-hour drive of Jerusalem — as well as Givat Hamatos, which is in East Jerusalem.

West Bank settlements have long drawn criticism from the international community, which regards the settlements as illegal, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli government disputes their illegality, however, and recognizes 146 settlements as legal, according to Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that tracks and opposes settlement expansion. The Israeli government leases land exclusively to Israelis, the group said, as Palestinians are barred from using the new plots the state has usurped in the West Bank.

Criticism of settlements have only intensified in recent months amid a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory, as Israel’s war in Gaza rages. And on Friday, Israel announced its plans to adopt five illegal outposts in the West Bank as settlements, which has also invited international condemnation. 

On its website, My Home in Israel, which helped organize the LA event and runs a team of U.S.-based real estate agents, posted photos from its other conventions in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Montreal, showing the interior of synagogues lined with booths manned by real estate firms, mortgage companies, and law firms, sitting and talking with prospective buyers. “Find your dream home in Israel,” reads one booth’s banner. “Live the American dream in the heart of Israel,” another reads atop a rendering of luxury apartments.

“A lot of people want to live out there — it’s beautiful, the mountains, it’s scenic,” said Baruki Cohen, a real estate agent, referring to West Bank settlements. His firm, Israel Home, did not participate at the LA event, but markets similar properties to Jewish Americans, selling property within Israel alongside houses in East Jerusalem. He plans to list properties in an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the future. A native of New Jersey who grew up visiting family in Israel, Cohen bought a second home in 2014 in Jerusalem. 

Cohen said real estate conventions, such as the LA event, have been going on for at least the past decade. Conventions are commonly hosted in hotel conference rooms and in people’s homes, in addition to synagogues. He estimates as many as 100 different real estate conventions take place across North America each year.

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank],” Cohen said. “I would live there myself if I felt it was safe. Anyone who wants to move there, we’re happy to facilitate it.”

“I have no moral or legal qualms selling property [in the West Bank].”

Since the early years after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the country has invited the immigration of Jews from across the globe. Immigration beyond the Green Line — the border between Israel and the West Bank that was drawn after the Israeli-Arab War of 1948, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes as a part of an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Nakba — boomed in the 1980s, as settlements expanded from small illegal outposts into suburban cities with the help of the Israeli government’s funding and military support. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to evict Palestinians from their land and homes as settlements expand.

Most Jewish Americans who exercise their right to emigrate to Israel don’t move to the West Bank, experts say, but hundreds still make the choice to do so each year.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a visiting professor at the University of Haifa and an expert on Jewish American settlers, estimates that among the 3,000 Jewish Americans who move to Israel each year, about 15 percent of them are moving into settlements. There are about 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. About 60,000 are American, according to Hirschhorn. This excludes the more than 200,000 Israeli settlers who live in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1967. 

To the majority of American immigrants, Hirschhorn said, the border between the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank still matters. But the real estate firms profiting off the modest yet steady stream of American migration are less discerning.

Jerusalem-based Noam Homes, which was part of the LA real estate event, lists properties within Israel, in cities such as Tel Aviv, alongside homes beyond the Green Line, in major settlements like Efrat and Ma’ale Adumim, which boasts a population of more than 30,000 with little recognition of their status as settlements. Most listings for settlement communities show an address in Israel and at times refer to the region with the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, the Israeli government’s preferred term for the West Bank.

“These are not like tiny hilltop outposts; these are massive settlement blocks that are contiguous with and integrated into Israeli state proper,” said Rachel Feldman, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College who specializes in Judaism and Israel and Palestine. “I spoke to American Jewish settlers here who don’t even have a sense that they are living beyond the state’s borders.”

Parents often send their children there for a gap year or seminary school, she said, treating the settlements as part of Israel. She said that during the Trump era, even more American Jews were emboldened to ignore the Green Line. 

Their studies predate the October 7 attacks, so Hirschhorn and Feldman could not quantify the impact of the Gaza war on American interest in West Bank homeownership. 

But Cohen, the real estate agent, said that he’s seen demand for Israeli property increase since the war began. Before October 7, he would receive about four or five inquiries from homebuyers each week. While the immediate weeks after the attacks were quiet, interest has picked up over the last three months, parallel to a series of settlement expansions announced by the Israeli government. Cohen said he now gets 15 inquiries per week. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest. 

“Although we are in the midst of the Iron Sword war,” said the Meny Group in promotional material on their website, using the Israeli government’s official name for the campaign, “the real estate market is booming.” Several other firms argued that investing in housing is a way for Jews to support Israel in times of conflict and instability. Firms also cited the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic as another crisis that the Israeli economy survived due to support from foreign and American buyers. 

Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest.

Most firms’ marketing materials appeal more broadly to Zionist ideals of supporting the homeland and its economy, pitching owning “a piece of the Promised Land for themselves and future generations.” One such firm, the Meny Group, which was also present at real estate conventions across North America, notes the rise in antisemitism across the globe, painting Israel as “a beacon of security for Jews.”  

The real estate companies also highlighted economic concerns for American buyers. The Meny Group’s website highlights public education options that teach the Torah, in an appeal to Orthodox families who struggle to meet religious education costs in the U.S. One real estate agent who made the move from the U.S. wrote that tuition for his four children cost roughly $17,500 per child. In Israel, his costs in a single year for his children was $3,000.  

Hirschhorn said even though housing is expensive in Israel and the West Bank — like in the U.S. — the overall lower cost of living made possible by a state-sponsored Jewish infrastructure allows for life to possibly be more affordable. Health care is also socialized in Israel, and new arrivals may also receive small stipends or tax incentives and deductions to buy a new car or appliances for a new home.

“Cost of Kosher food is a lot less, you don’t have to worry about sending your kids to Jewish day school, cost of college in Israel isn’t going to be too much,” she said. “Being a part of Jewish community just really isn’t as expensive or difficult.”

The properties in the settlements are hardly cheap, but they are less expensive than homes within Israeli cities. The price for a condo in the popular Gush Etzion group of settlements ranges from $500,000 to $1 million, for properties with around four to six bedrooms and more than 1,000 square feet. Cohen said a similarly sized home in central Jerusalem may run for as much as $3 million. 

One listing shows a 2,000 square-foot penthouse in a suburban enclave of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, east of Jerusalem, for $1.2 million. The space, listed as a “Stunning Penthouse” has five bedrooms and two “generously sized” balconies with panoramic views. There is also the assurance of plenty of storage space. However, the penthouse also includes one other amenity less common in American homes: “a dedicated safe room for your peace of mind.”    

“American Jews might want to maintain a certain kind of middle-class living standard if they’re imagining moving to Israel, and that actually might not be possible inside Israel proper,” Feldman said. “And so they start to look to the West Bank. What looks like a nice, spacious middle-class house with a yard starts to look nice compared to a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.”

Settlements often have their own schools, parks, swimming pools, supermarkets, dry cleaners, sports facilities, hairdressers, and synagogues. 

On the website for Nefesh-B’nefesh, a nonprofit that encourages and facilitates Jewish immigration from the U.S. to Israel, users are able to read neighborhood profiles to compare settlements’ educational and religious options. The profiles also mention whether there are other English speakers in the area. The online portal is often the starting point for Jewish Americans who look to immigrate; the organization assists with paperwork and other bureaucratic steps. 

Like the real estate companies, the nonprofit does not honor the Green Line, listing unlawful settlements in its neighborhood profiles as a part of Israel. The site also links users to Yad2, similar to Zillow and Craigslist, which shows dozens of housing listings across Israel and on settlements.

During the research for her book on Jewish American settlers, Hirschhorn said a woman told her that the settlement community she lived in “was the place I could get a bagel on Sunday morning, but also know that I was going to be in the right place when the redemption of the Jewish people and the messiah came.” 

In late June, the Israeli government seized an additional 3,000 acres of West Bank land for other planned settlements, barring Palestinians from using it. The land seizure, made public last week, is the largest by Israel since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Peace Now said. The government has taken more than 5,000 acres of land in the West Bank this year, the group said, the most in any single year during the same 30-year span. In March, the Israeli government also approved the construction of 3,400 new homes in settlements, the majority of which will be built in Ma’ale Adumim. Most of the companies attached to the real estate events list properties in the settlement. 

The Jewish real estate market in the West Bank remains an important piece of the current Israeli government’s expansion into the occupied territory. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who oversees the office that handles new housing developments, celebrated the project and declared on X, “The enemies try to hurt and weaken, but we will continue to build and be built in this country.” He lives in the settlement of Kedumim, though his home, built outside of the settlement proper, appears to violate even Israeli law, according to reports.

Smotrich most recently made statements that reveal his long-term goals of annexing the entirety of the West Bank away from Palestinians, and expressed his support of legitimizing newer, illegal settlements. 

“We will establish sovereignty … first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalize the young settlements,” Smotrich said last week during a meeting, according to Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The 2.8 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank already face restrictions on day-to-day movement throughout the territory. And since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has resulted in the killings of more than 500 Palestinians, 133 of them children, by Israeli military forces or settlers, according to the United Nations’s top human rights official and an Intercept investigation. The 2023 death toll was the highest since 2005 when the U.N. started tracking casualties in the West Bank. 

“As the world’s eyes has been primarily focused on Gaza, the settler movement has continued unabated and pushed even harder to establish illegal settlements, to further develop settlements, to take more land,” said Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, which opposes West Bank settlements. “They’ve pushed whole Palestinian communities off of their land almost every day, certainly every week.”

His colleagues at their Israel-based counterpart, Peace Now, which tracks the settler movement, have reported incidents of violence from Jewish settlers, harassment, burning olive groves, and stealing sheep from Palestinian farmers. In 2023, settlers built 26 new illegal outposts, the most since the group starting keeping track in 2002, the group reported. So far this year, 14 additional settler outposts have been built.  

Americans, even outside the Jewish community, play a major role in supporting the expansion of settlements, Susskind said. He pointed to evangelical Christian groups that pump millions into pro-settler causes. In February, one American Christian pro-settler group, HaYovel, raised $3.5 million to buy hundreds of vests, helmets, binoculars, flashlights, and security drones for settlers in the West Bank. The group looks to raise an additional $25 million.

Americans for Peace Now has urged the U.S. government to do more to stop the flow of such funds. Susskind credited Biden’s executive order that allowed the State Department to sanction certain organizations and individuals for violence committed in the West Bank. So far the government has sanctioned Israeli Jewish settlers Zvi Bar Yosef, Moshe Sharvit, Neriya Ben Pazi, and Ben Zion Gopstein for repeated attacks and threats against Palestinians; the organizations Mount Hebron Fund and Shlom Asiraich, which raised funds for that fueled further settler violence; and Tzav 9, an extremist Israeli group that has attacked aid convoys in the West Bank on their way to Gaza. 

“Palestinians are going to continue to have all the day-to-day problems, and they certainly are not going to have justice and equality until the occupation ends,” Susskind said. “You have to deal with people’s immediate needs, but the big picture there is only one answer, which is an end to the occupation.”

Correction: Tuesday, July 9, 5:11 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Rachel Feldman as an anthropologist at Dartmouth University; she works at Dartmouth College. A quote from Feldman was incorrectly transcribed to state that West Bank property “starts to look nice compared to a tiny, affordable apartment in Tel Aviv.” Feldman’s comparison invoked a tiny, unaffordable apartment in Tel Aviv.

The post The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement appeared first on The Intercept.