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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
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Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?
(JTA) — After Rep. Mike Collins won a hard-fought Republican runoff election in Georgia Tuesday for the party’s Senate nomination in November, his opponent wasted no time going on the offensive.
“Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate Mike Collins is a notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist,” Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff posted on social media on Tuesday night.
Ossoff, who is Jewish, did not elaborate on the antisemitism allegation in the post, which continued with other attack lines against Collins. But Collins and some of his senior staff members have faced well-documented past allegations of antisemitism in a state that’s home to an estimated 100,000-plus Jewish adults.
“Whether he’s socializing with a known Nazi, speaking in antisemitic dog whistles, or doubling down after targeting a Jewish reporter, Mike Collins’ record of bigotry and antisemitism speaks for itself,” Valeria Rivadeneira-Crandell, a spokesperson for Ossoff’s campaign, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement.
The Collins campaign did not return a request for comment for this article.
The Ossoff campaign provided links to multiple incidents. In one instance in 2024, Collins came under hot water after replying favorably to a tweet from an antisemitic account that appeared to reference a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish background. “Was never any doubt,” Collins, who has said he runs his own X account, wrote at the time.
Following backlash, including from some Georgia state lawmakers, Collins doubled down, writing, “I guess pointing out that a Washington Post journo excusing crime because she believes USA is on ‘stolen land’ makes her a garbage human is anti-Semitic? Y’all just see stuff that ain’t there.”
Collins, a Trump-endorsed MAGA loyalist with a trollish social media streak in a closely watched swing state, won his runoff with more than 55% of the vote, according to Associated Press tallies. His win came the same night as Trump’s preferred pick for governor of Georgia lost his own GOP primary runoff.
Collins has leaned heavily into nativist proposals and language, including sponsoring a bill to end birthright citizenship. He also approvingly shared a 2024 video of a University of Mississippi fraternity mocking a Black pro-Palestinian protester with monkey noises.
Collins also defended the New York Young Republicans shortly after that organization’s antisemitic group texts were leaked to the press. “I don’t care about some group chat,” Collins tweeted in October, accompanied by a picture of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student whose 2024 murder by an undocumented immigrant spurred a GOP-led push for harsher penalties on migrants.
Collins went on to attend a New York Young Republicans gala that also honored far-right German politician Markus Frohnmaier and featured appearances from several antisemitic figures, including the livestreamer Sneako.
The congressman has also come under scrutiny for some of his current and former staffers’ behavior.
Last month a report in Slate, citing leaked text messages, found that Collins’ chief of staff Kip Talley had participated in a group chat with white supremacist influencers Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Talley wrote in December chats that his goal was to “try and use the levers of the legislative branch” to help Holocaust denier and right-wing activist Charles C. Johnson, who was then incarcerated on contempt of court charges related to falsely presenting himself as an FBI informant.
Talley told his chat mates that he was “reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ” and “trying to get him out,” referring to Johnson. At the time, Talley was Collins’ deputy chief of staff. He was promoted to chief of staff in January. Johnson was released from prison in February.
Talley, who remains in his role with Collins, told Slate he had “acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.” He added that he “did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat.”
Collins also formerly employed William Paul, who last month made a series of antisemitic comments to Jewish GOP Rep. Mike Lawler. Paul, son of Sen. Rand Paul, had been Collins’ digital director in early 2025 but had not been on the congressman’s staff for nearly a year at the time of his altercation with Lawler.
Amid such comments and associations, Collins has also maintained a resolutely pro-Israel stance within a MAGA movement that is quickly fracturing over Israel. He spoke at a memorial event in his home state marking the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, vowing to “make sure that Israel has the resources to defend themselves,” and he has continued to refer to Israel as “our ally.” Prior to the 2024 election, he tweeted, “I bet money Iran wouldn’t be attacking Israel if Trump was president.”
Ossoff, too, has positioned himself as an Israel supporter, but he has recently voted against some weapons sales to the country. That has upset many Georgia Jewish organizations, who in 2024 penned an open letter — signed by several synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League and other groups — opposing the senator’s vote against arms sales.
The post Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why? appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him.
(New York Jewish Week) — Alex Bores, who’s running to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler in Congress, is threading a very delicate needle.
On the one hand, Bores, a two-term New York State Assembly member from the Upper East Side, has garnered support from a number of Jewish leaders and political moderates who tout his support for Israel. He marches annually in the city’s Israel Day Parade and has resisted growing calls for Democratic politicians to support conditioning military aid to Israel.
At the same time, he’s being backed by a number of the left-wing groups and individuals calling for those very conditions.
Those two camps seldom coexist on a single candidate’s list of endorsements, especially as Israel has become a major wedge issue this midterm election cycle. But Bores, who has put a promise to regulate artificial intelligence at the center of his campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District, has managed to maintain the coalition.
“You could make a sitcom,” said Cameron Kasky, a former candidate in the race who’s now backing Bores, referring to what he called the “Boalition.” “If you put 12 Alex Bores endorsers in a mansion together and showed up with a reality TV crew, you could make the most must-watch television in the entire world.”
Scroll through the “Endorsements” page on Bores’ campaign website and you’ll find Chi Osse, the democratic socialist City Council member who’s called for divesting city pension funds from Israel bonds, just a couple rows down from Carolyn Maloney, the former Upper East Side representative who was a staunch supporter of Israel in Congress.
Progressive groups such as Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution and PSC-CUNY, the City University of New York’s staff-faculty union, are backing the same candidate who drew the support of ActJew, which supports more centrist candidates and calls itself “a response to a political and social landscape that normalizes antisemitic and anti-Israel activity and rhetoric.” (ActJew endorsed both Bores and Micah Lasher in the race.)
Bores’ endorsers include some of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political allies, such as failed City Council candidate Lindsey Boylan, and vocal critics of the mayor including Fabien Levy, a Jewish spokesperson for Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
“I can’t imagine the Bores campaign hasn’t occasionally looked at each other and been like, ‘What is happening right now?’” Kasky said.
So how is Bores pulling it off?
For progressive groups, the answer lies, at least in part, in Bores’ work on AI.
“He put forward the country’s strongest regulation of the AI industry to protect Americans from those who want no rules and only care about unfettered power and profit,” wrote Our Revolution’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, in an endorsement announcement. Geevarghese was referring to the RAISE Act, a state law that Bores introduced to impart transparency and safety regulations on AI models.
As an elected official, Bores is no political outsider, though the 35-year-old’s background in the tech industry differentiates him from fellow frontrunner Lasher, who’s spent decades working for politicians such as Nadler, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor.
Bores’ resume includes a nearly five-year stint at the tech company Palantir, starting as a data scientist in 2014 and working his way up to become the U.S. government lead. That gig has complicated how some progressives see Bores, given Palantir’s work with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that Bores himself has called to abolish. He has repeatedly said that he quit Palantir over its contract with ICE back in 2019, and that he chose “principle over my career and millions of dollars.”
Pundits such as center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias — who has also joined the Bores coalition — say there is a “unique value” to him winning because of his promise to enforce AI regulations and the message that it would send to the anti-regulation PACs that have been spending against him. Yglesias added that Lasher, too, would be “an above-average House member.”
But in a race with little daylight between the two frontrunners — particularly regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship — Bores’ AI focus is setting him apart. And rather than sit out the race due to differences on Israel, a number of progressive groups are backing him anyways.
“I think progressives see something in Alex that is a testament to a resolve he’s going to bring,” said Kasky, who has advocated for policies such as an arms embargo on Israel. “And I think that that is enough for progressive groups to cede ground on the issue of Israel-Palestine, and frankly the issue of Israel and the Middle East region as a whole, which is getting increasingly severe.”
The makeup of the district itself plays a role as well: As one of the country’s most heavily Jewish districts, NY-12 is seen as less hospitable than other deep-blue districts for a “Squad”-type insurgent candidate. John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg is the only major candidate who calls for conditioning aid and blocking weapons sales to Israel, but he has dropped in recent polls as he’s faced questions over his lack of experience.
Bores, Lasher and Schlossberg are all listed as “primary approved” candidates by J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization.
Bores has confirmed that Our Revolution asked him about Israel and gave him its endorsement despite not being aligned on the issue. During a candidate forum in May, he said that “we need to make it acceptable for there to be people in progressive spaces that still believe in the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself.”
Michael Miller, who was CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York for 36 years, is endorsing Bores and wrote in a Facebook post that Bores is a “steadfast supporter of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
In an interview, Miller — whom Bores named in a recent Temple Emanu-El forum as a Jewish American that he admires — said he felt assured that Bores’ support from groups such as Our Revolution had mostly to do with his AI work.
“The fact that he’s receiving support from a coalition that includes decidedly left-wing supporters doesn’t trouble me for as long as the issues of central concern to me — antisemitism and support for Israel — are those issues where he has given his support, and with which he has identified,” Miller said.
Miller added that he believes Bores’ Jewish family — his wife, Darya (who recently appeared in a campaign ad), and son, Charlie, are both Jewish — plays a “large role in how he thinks about matters of concern to the Jewish community.”
A number of Jewish celebrities in the district have embraced Bores. The Oscar-winning songwriter Benj Pasek and Jewish cookbook author Jake Cohen posted photos on social media showing them at a Bores event in a private home that included a conversation with journalist Laurie Segall about AI.
On the same day, Miller and more than 20 other local Jewish leaders and elected officials signed a letter endorsing Bores. The letter emphasized his record of combating antisemitism, pointing to measures such as securing funds for Holocaust survivor programs, funding security for synagogues and Jewish institutions, and organizing trips for students to Jewish museums.
But for some Jewish groups, Bores’ support from left-wing groups critical of Israel has given them pause.
Moshe Spern, a board member of the group ActJew, called on Bores to drop his PSC-CUNY endorsement back in March, saying the union is “consistently calling for divestments from Israel” and has “downplayed and ignored Jewish students/faculty experiences since 10/7.” PSC-CUNY revoked a pro-BDS resolution against Israel in February 2025, after its initial passage sparked backlash, including from Hochul and CUNY itself. Spern told JTA he pushed for the group to rescind its endorsement, but was outvoted.
Bores replied to Spern’s tweet, writing that “every major candidate pursued” PSC-CUNY’s endorsement, and that his endorsement interview focused on funding public education and regulating AI. Bores added that he has “spoken out against antisemitic incidents on campuses (including CUNY specifically) and will continue to do so.”
Meanwhile, some progressive groups have refrained from endorsing Bores because of his pro-Israel politics.
“It’s pretty much a non-starter for us to endorse someone who wouldn’t sign on to the Block the Bombs,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of communications of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, referring to the Block the Bombs to Israel Act that would prohibit certain weapons sales to the country. She added that Bores also voted for a statewide “buffer zone” bill meant to curb protests outside houses of worship, which Lasher introduced, and which JFREJ has vehemently opposed throughout the year.
According to the latest polling data, despite Bores’ greater support from the left, there’s been little difference in the number of voters who are responding to each candidate.
“You go into any Jewish WhatsApp chat — I see this as an Upper East Side resident myself — and there’s no consensus,” said Michael Harris, ActJew’s CEO. “The consensus is Bores or Lasher.”
The post Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him. appeared first on The Forward.
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Organizers of London Israeli real estate fair apologize after West Bank properties surface despite denials
(JTA) — Organizers of the Great Israeli Real Estate Event held in London on Sunday have apologized amid revelations that the event showcased offerings in the West Bank, contradicting their assurances that it would not.
The owner of a real estate agency that had a booth at the event, meanwhile, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she had obscured the name of a city in the West Bank from a poster but also passed “two flyers under the table” to attendees who expressed interest in properties in contested areas of Jerusalem.
Ahead of the event, the organizers along with the synagogue that hosted the event and the Board of Deputies of British Jews publicly rejected claims by pro-Palestinian activists that properties beyond Israel’s internationally recognized borders would be promoted.
They had faced sharp pressure over the claims from dozens of British lawmakers and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and had to find a new space after the venue that was initially set to host the event pulled out abruptly.
Following a protest outside the synagogue where the event took place, the Board of Deputies’ acting president, Adam Cohen, said the event organizers had “publicly refuted claims that it was marketing real estate over the Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and alleged that the claims were being used to justify antisemitism.
The “false pretenses seem to be little more than an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community,” he said.
The Board of Deputies declined to comment on the subsequent revelations that West Bank properties were advertised at the event.
But the organizers, who have staged similar events in the United States, issued a statement to the U.K.’s Jewish News that both apologized for mentions of East Jerusalem settlements in a brochure distributed at the event and rejected the idea that British Jews should face constraints in where they are offered property.
“We would like to re-emphasise that the venue made it clear to us that we were not in any way to promote the sale of Israeli real estate over the Green Line, and all participating vendors agreed to abide by that requirement,” the statement said. “At the same time, we believe it is outrageous that in this day and age, anyone would seek to deny British Jews the right to purchase property anywhere in the world, whether in Paris, New York, or Israel.”
The statement also described social media claims that “stolen Palestinian land” was being sold at the event. “These allegations are simply untrue. No one at the event promoted or spoke about properties in the ‘disputed territories’, such as Givat Zeev or Kfar Eldad,” two East Jerusalem settlements, the statement continued. “Their mention in the event brochure was made in error for which we apologise.”
The revelations came after attendees photographed flyers promoting West Bank settlements and posted them on social media.
The Guardian reported that it had obtained brochures from the event advertising properties not just in Givat Ze’ev and Kfar Eldad but also in Ma’ale Adumim and Teneh Omarim in the West Bank and Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem.
Guy Zilberman, a member of the pro-Palestinian group Jewish Anti-Zionist Action, posted a video showing footage from inside the event where he received brochures from companies selling homes in several of those locations. He said a salesman “directly offered us properties in ‘Judea and Samaria,’” the Israeli term for the West Bank.
The footage showed Zilberman then revealing himself in a conference room and denouncing the event while exhorting attendees in Hebrew not to steal, before being removed by security.
REVEALED: Jewish activists @JAZA_UK have shown us material from inside an Israeli property event in London yesterday, which shows that illegal settlements on Palestinian land were on sale in the UK.
Activists gained access to the event, spoke to numerous developers about the… pic.twitter.com/WsJ1hC1GlZ
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) June 16, 2026
An unnamed member of Jewish Anti-Zionist Action told Sky News, “I visited Tivuch Shelly’s stall and was given a leaflet advertising properties in Ma’ale Adumim, which is an illegal West Bank settlement.”
The locations cited highlight the complexity of Israel’s geography — and the pressures facing those trying to sell property in the region.
The U.K. considers expansions of Israeli settlements as a violation of international law, posing potential legal challenges to efforts to sell homes there. The United States does not consider the settlements illegal, making real estate events there less vulnerable to legal scrutiny even as they have drawn fierce protests.
Settlements that are part of the municipality of Jerusalem, such as Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos, pose another wrinkle. While Israel recognizes that the West Bank is disputed territory, it does not consider any part of Jerusalem as such. East Jerusalem was incorporated into the State in1980, and under Israeli law both West and East Jerusalem form the state’s complete and undivided capital.
Ma’ale Adumim, meanwhile, is a city of approximately 40,000 that is located in the West Bank and has long been seen as likely to remain under Israeli control if a Palestinian state is created through negotiations in the future.
Tivuch Shelly’s owner and founder, Shelly Levine, told JTA in a phone interview that her company never actively promoted properties in Ma’ale Adumim at the event. She said the words “Ma’ale Adumim” were covered up with tape on their booth.
But she said they gave out “two flyers under the table” with Ma’ale Adumim properties because the company had received emails in advance of the event from people who said they were specifically looking for properties in that area. She said she did not recall the names of the people but said she had handed over the brochures “in a bag and we told them they were not allowed to take them out or look at them in this building because we are not selling Ma’ale Adumim at this event.”
Levine said she now believes those emails were “a setup” to trick her into sharing incriminating material that could be handed to the media.
Unless people went to Tivuch Shelly’s website, Levine said, “Nobody would know that we advertise in Ma’ale Adumim. We did not break our word to the event organizers; we posted no brochures, put nothing out on our tables.”
Even before the revelations, the lead-up to the event had been fraught for weeks, with the original venue pulling out of hosting less than 48 hours before Edgware Synagogue agreed to host it. And while the venue remained secret until less than 24 hours before the event, almost 1,000 demonstrators showed up outside the synagogue — from both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel camps.
Despite police being deployed to the scene to keep the groups separate, 14 people were arrested, including seven pro-Israel and six pro-Palestinian supporters, for offenses including ncluding violent disorder, assault and public-order offenses.
More than 100 members of parliament and peers wrote to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper ahead of the event, calling on her to halt the event because selling properties in the West Bank is a violation of international law.
On Tuesday, Cooper told members of Parliament that the government had asked a national regulator to look into complaints connected to both the advertising of the event and promotional material.
“We have asked the authority to urgently look into the matter and reassure us that, if there is any evidence of the advertising or promotion of property in illegal settlements at that event or any others, it will uphold the law, regulations and guidance that apply,” Cooper said in response to a question from a local lawmaker about why the government had allowed the Great Israeli Real Estate Event to go on.
“It is extremely important that those standards are met in the UK, and that is exactly why we have raised the matter so seriously with the Advertising Standards Authority,” she continued.
That was not enough for Zack Polanski, the anti-Zionist Jewish leader of the Green Party, who sent a letter later on Tuesday to Khan demanding action, including from London’s police force.
“This needs to be escalated to the Metropolitan Police Service immediately,” Polanski wrote. “Anything less fails to reflect the seriousness of the situation.”
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