JAZA condemns selling of illegal settlements in UK synagogues

Today, 14 June 2026, the Jewish Anti-Zionist Action (JAZA) group and others protested outside the so-called “Great Israeli Real Estate” event at Edgware United Synagogue. The event is selling off yet more stolen Palestinian land to would-be colonisers.

JAZA has joined hundreds of protestors from a variety of justice groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), in peaceful protest outside Edgware United Synagogue in London. The event was moved to the synagogue after a first venue pulled out.

Protesters held a prayer service in the street and held a banner stating ‘war crimes out of our synagogues’. Despite the peaceful, even sacred, nature of the demonstration, protesters were still attacked and violently arrested by the Met Police.

The event has generated widespread public opposition, along with condemnation even among MPs. Human rights organisations, legal experts, community groups and elected representatives called for its cancellation and for authorities to immediately investigate the legality of the event and those associated with the event under UK domestic law.

The group said, before beginning its protest, that it was “proud” to participate:

Alongside the more than 100 civil society organisations and the more than 100 MPs that have publicly opposed this event, we are proud to join the peaceful and public protest against the event this Sunday.

Jewish Anti-Zionists reject any attempt to provide a Jewish pretext or justification for these activities and refuse the use of our synagogues to legitimise them. JAZA are appalled that Edgware United Synagogue is hosting this event in the midst of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. That a synagogue would openly engage in enabling the further colonisation of Palestine by giving the event religious and cultural credence is unconscionable. We refuse to allow support for settlement expansion and land theft to be presented as a Jewish communal interest and we reject the conflation of Judaism with a political project built upon the dispossession of another people.

UN figures show that since October 2023, over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, 213 of whom were children, have been killed by Israeli settlers and military forces. Settler violence and access restrictions have also led to the displacement of over 1,750 Palestinians this year alone.

JAZA — Starmer targeting Jews

Following the usual pattern of the Starmer regime and its Israel lobbyists, anti-Zionist Jews were disproportionately targeted for arrest. Their prominent presence at anti-genocide and anti-apartheid protests disrupts the Israel lobby’s narrative that all Jews support Israel and its colonisation of Palestine.

Settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal under international law, and have been found by the ICJ to be in breach of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its civilian population into occupied territory, constituting a war crime.

JAZA’s Talia Woodin said:

As Jews, we are disgusted that companies involved in marketing and developing properties in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are hosted by a synagogue. These settlements are outposts of extreme violence and exist to terrorise Palestinians and eliminate the possibility of a future Palestinian state.

We are here to fight the false narrative that dangerously conflates Judaism and Zionism, and seeks to weaponise antisemitism to suppress peaceful protests.

We stand in a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionists who refuse to stand idly by as stolen Palestinian land is occupied, sold and promoted, from protests against settlement-linked property fairs in New York and Toronto to campaigns here in Britain. We are proud to uphold that tradition by joining the protest against the Great Israeli Real Estate Event.

Jewish Anti-Zionist Action is a group of UK-based anti-Zionist Jews acting in solidarity with the wider Palestinian liberation movement by taking direct action to dismantle Zionism.

Featured image via Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images