The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement
In late June, a company called My Israel Home hosted an expo at a Los Angeles synagogue catering to a specific clientele: Jewish Americans looking to buy a new home in Israel - or on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
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.
Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest.
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 regardsthe 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.
The landing page for My Home in Israel, which includes a listing for a home in Efrat, one of the largest West Bank settlements. Screenshot: My Home in Israel 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.
A Noam Homes listing for a house in the small Israeli West Bank settlement, Mitzpe Yericho, known for its hilltop views and religious community. Screenshot: Noam Homes 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.
Israel's War on Gaza 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.