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‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

Israeli real estate companies are marketing land belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank to Jewish American buyers. We spoke to the Palestinians who are being displaced in order to make way for new Jewish settlement construction.

Mondoweiss By Majd Jawad  July 17, 2026 

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it…………………………………………………………………………………………

Palestinians forced out, Jewish settlers brought in

……………………….At the start of this year, the Israeli government decided to confiscate approximately 700 dunams (70 hectares) of Palestinian land for the construction of a new settlement neighborhood in Karnei Shomron, built east of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank and overlooking the Mediterranean coastal plain 10 to 15 kilometers away.

This confiscation falls within what Israel calls its “Roof plan,” an all-encompassing agreement for expanding the settlement by adding 6,000 new housing units and accompanying infrastructure in the northern West Bank…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

How land goes from ‘state land’ to the real estate market

Khalil Tafakji, a researcher specializing in settlement and Jerusalem affairs and director of the cartography department at the Arab Studies Society, told Mondoweiss that Palestinian land is seized in a way that often takes roundabout legal avenues to strip Palestinians of their rights to it before it is offered for sale on the market.

“At that stage, the land is not offered for sale directly,” he explained. “Rather, it is excluded from the scope of private Palestinian ownership altogether.” The Israeli state does this by declaring the land “insufficiently cultivated to establish ownership,” Tafakji said, or by sealing it off and designating it a closed military zone reserved for army training. These areas are rendered  “state lands” under the administration of the Israel Land Authority.

The first administrative step in this designation process rests on Israel’s interpretation of Ottoman land law, which has historically governed land ownership in Palestine. . Only then are properties marketed to potential homebuyers ahead of construction. The state effectively leases the land to prospective homeowners, and what buyers acquire is the property, not the land itself. “A buyer can own the property for 99 renewable years, while the land remains in the state’s name under what is called a land leasehold arrangement,” …………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Jerusalem as a settlement magnet

In settlement promotional campaigns, proximity to Jerusalem is often a cornerstone of their marketing strategy, presenting settlement properties in the Gush Etzion bloc as a natural geographic and urban extension of the city. This falls under Israel’s “Greater Jerusalem” project, which has necessitated the ethnic cleansing of countless Palestinian communities stuck in administrative “no-man’s-lands” inside the West Bank. These areas technically fall under the jurisdiction of Israel’s Jerusalem municipality, yet receive virtually none of its services. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/sip-your-coffee-while-watching-the-sunrise-how-israel-is-colonizing-the-west-bank-by-selling-palestinian-land-to-jewish-americans/

July 22, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Israel