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GUEST COMMENTARY - President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Congressman Ted Lieu, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and politicians of both parties are condemning the pro-Palestinian activists who protested at the Adas Torah Synagogue Sunday. Major media outlets and Jewish, Israeli, and conservative leaders and spokespeople are calling the pro-Palestinian protest a “pogrom.”
Newsom says, “Such antisemitic hatred has no place in California” and "There is no excuse for targeting a house of worship.”
Except, in this particular case, there was a legitimate reason for holding a protest outside a Jewish house of worship. While many news reports barely mention it, the protesters outside the synagogue were not there to protest Jews, the Jewish religion, Zionism, or even Israel’s current actions in Gaza, they were there to protest the sale of land in illegally occupied Palestinian territories to Americans.
The target of the protest was not the synagogue, it was the controversial group My Israel Home, which was holding a real estate marketing event at the synagogue. As Forbes notes, the group ran an advertisement in the June 21 issue of the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles offering for sale “housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel.”
The Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations explains that the synagogue event promoted “racially segregated settlements, where only Jewish people are allowed to live, on illegally-occupied Palestinian land.”
Journalist Brooke Anderson wrote that a “review of the website My Home In Israel shows multiple properties advertised in parts of the West Bank.”
At the Adas Torah Synagogue protest, one Israeli pro-Palestinian demonstrator held up a sign saying “Israeli Jew against land theft”. The Instagram announcement of the protest stated “Our land is not for sale” and called on demonstrators to “Stand against settler expansion at Sunday’s real estate event.”
According to United Nations Security Council Resolution 446, passed in 1979 and reaffirmed in 2016, the UN “determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity.”
Nonetheless, according to a 2023 study commissioned by the UN, “the first six months of 2023 saw Israel advance record rates of settlement housing units…a total of almost 30,000 proposed new housing units in the Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.”
Many Israeli organizations and individuals, including The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem), condemn both the occupation and settlements as illegal and violative of Palestinians human rights. Israel contests this, but whether one agrees with the UN characterization of Israeli actions or not, the pro-Palestinian protesters had ample reason to believe they were acting in good faith in protesting the sales event held at Adas Torah.
Biden, Newsom, and others have also condemned the protests as being held against a Jewish “house of worship” and/or Jewish “congregants.” But Sunday is not the Jewish day of worship–the Jewish Shabbat runs from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. Sunday’s demonstrators were not interfering with Jewish religious services, they were protesting a sales event.
While it was inappropriate for Adas Torah to host such an event, this does not mean that protesters’ legitimate grievances can't at times spill over into inaccurate, overblown, or offensive rhetoric, or even violence. But this goes both ways–the low-level but regrettable violence at the protest were clashes between protesters, not anti-Semitic attacks.
According to TRT World, “Pro-Israeli counter-protesters were filmed attacking the crowd and violently pushing protesters.”
Numerous media outlets have said that there was one arrest made at the protest, of a demonstrator arrested for carrying a “spiked post.” What most outlets don’t say is that it was a pro-Israel demonstrator who was arrested for carrying it.
The reaction from both politicians, Jewish leaders, and the media follows a familiar pattern–pro-Palestinian protesters are libeled as anti-Semites, and their worst moments are falsely portrayed as being indicative of the whole movement. Palestinians' very legitimate grievances are dismissed.
Both of my grandfathers escaped the pogroms in Tsarist Russia in the early 1900s–massacres perpetrated by Black Hundreds thugs and egged on by “Bloody Nicholas”, Tsar Nicholas II. That prominent people today make an analogy between Sunday's legitimate protest and the pogroms demonstrates how unreasonable and overblown the American reaction to pro-Palestinian protests has become.
(Glenn Sacks teaches high school social studies in the Los Angeles Unified School District. His columns on education and politics have been published in dozens of America's largest publications.)
