On June 14, the “Great Israeli Real Estate” event took place in London, hosted at Edgware United Synagogue. The event formed part of a wider series of exhibitions, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, marketing and facilitating the purchase of property in both Israel and Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That distinction carries significant legal consequences, particularly for states that have repeatedly affirmed that these settlements are unlawful under international law.
In the days leading up to the event, I helped draft legal correspondence, raising concerns with public authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Business and Trade through my work at the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians. Our concerns extended to the event’s legal and regulatory implications, including whether promoting property located in illegal Israeli settlements engaged domestic and international legal responsibilities.
Our demand was simple: This event should not take place. Stolen land cannot be advertised as property for sale.
For attendees, the legal character of the promoted settlements may not register as a central concern. Although these events advertise “dream homes” and services connected to relocation, investment and settlement life, what is being facilitated is not an abstract property market. In legal terms, these events concern the normalization of activity linked to unlawful occupation, including conduct that violates prohibitions on the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory and the commercial structures sustaining it. These properties are built on Palestinian land, often benefiting from access to land, water and infrastructure that Israel denies to Palestinians or permits only in severely unequal terms.
The questions raised by the London exhibition are not confined to the United Kingdom, nor was the event an isolated occurrence. Similar fairs regularly occur across the United States. In May, the same “Great Israeli Real Estate” event held exhibitions at synagogues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, generating public controversy, with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani questioning whether transactions connected to settlements regarded as unlawful under international law should be facilitated within the city.
For American readers, these developments cannot be separated from the broader trajectory of U.S. policy. During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. He abandoned the longstanding U.S. position that Israeli settlements are inconsistent with international law, presenting these decisions as transformative departures from previous policy. Yet neither recognition nor political rhetoric altered the legal status of the territory in question, nor did they positively change the realities impacting Palestinians living under Israel’s settler colonial regime.
Responsibility cannot be assigned to one administration alone. If Trump’s first presidency accelerated the political normalization of settlements, the following years demonstrated the continuity of American support across political parties. Palestinians witnessed former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration provide military, diplomatic and political support for an Israeli state that actively expanded settlements at historic levels while committing genocide in Gaza.
The recurring feature of great power politics is clear: Legal realities and the lives of millions can be reordered through declarations issued in distant capitals. But occupation does not end through rhetoric, nor does it legitimize it. A foreign government may recognize territory as Israeli. It may redefine diplomatic language. It may seek to erase the distinction between Israel and the OPT altogether. Yet none of these acts change the underlying reality.
Palestinians remain there. The occupation remains there. The settlements remain there.
The London and New York events raise another question: the extent of Israel’s settlement enterprise beyond Israel’s borders through both physical construction and international networks of marketing, investment, relocation services and political support. How deeply embedded are these transnational networks within the wider ecosystem that enables and sustains Israel’s occupation and annexation of the OPT?
That question is not abstract for me. I grew up in Jerusalem, a city often discussed in political or religious terms increasingly detached from its legal and lived reality. East Jerusalem remains occupied territory under international law, with Israel’s annexation unrecognized by the international community. Yet that legal position often contradicts reality on the ground.
Like many Palestinians from Jerusalem, I witnessed the transformation of its surrounding geography through settlement expansion. Israel redirected roads, fragmented movement and absorbed the hillsides into ever-expanding settlement blocks. What appears in planning documents or official announcements translates directly into how communities live, move and remain connected or disconnected from one another.
That lived reality matters. Among the properties promoted at the London and New York City events were homes in Ma’ale Adumim and Efrat, both central to the territorial fragmentation of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Ma’ale Adumim is one of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Of particular significance is the E1 area between the settlement and East Jerusalem. For years, governments, international organizations and legal experts have warned that development in E1 would further fragment Palestinian territory, severing East Jerusalem from the West Bank while undermining the territorial continuity required for a viable Palestinian state. That development is now moving forward.
For me, Ma’ale Adumim is not a distant legal reference. It forms part of the landscape surrounding the city in which I grew up.
The legal position on settlements is well established. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. The United Kingdom and the wider international community have consistently maintained this position in public statements across global contexts.
The International Court of Justice, in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, reinforced this framework, deeming Israel’s continued presence in the OPT unlawful. It held that all states are obligated not to recognize, aid or assist that unlawful occupation, nor contribute to its perpetuation through economic or trade relations.
Can states condemn settlements while permitting their promotion and commercialization? Can governments sanction individuals involved in settlement activity while allowing the marketing of property located within those settlements? At what point does condemnation lose practical meaning when it is not matched by constraints on the commercial and institutional mechanisms sustaining the very situation it condemns?
Regardless of how governments answer these questions, one conclusion is unavoidable: The gap between legal principles and political practice has widened. States like the United Kingdom continue to issue statements of concern and reiteratetheir commitment to a rules-based international order, yet refuse to match this language with action that influences conduct on the ground.
As lawyers, we understand that the legitimacy of law depends on consistency. Legal rules derive authority from both their articulation and application. Where principles are applied unevenly, their force weakens. Perhaps this explains Palestinian skepticism when international law is invoked in political discourse. It misses the point: Rhetorical clarity falls far short of enforcement.
The settlement enterprise illustrates this contradiction most clearly. The legal position is neither novel nor ambiguous. Governments routinely acknowledge that Israeli settlements are unlawful. Yet the commercial, financial and political structures sustaining them continue uninterrupted, resulting in a situation in which illegality is recognized, documented and condemned while simultaneously accommodated.
Where acknowledged legal violations carry no meaningful consequences, condemnation reinforces the machinery of normalization itself. States cannot credibly insist that settlements are unlawful while permitting the networks that promote, finance and expand them without restriction.
History suggests that entrenched systems rarely transform through criticism alone. Meaningful changes occur when the costs of maintaining the status quo begin to outweigh the benefits. So long as settlement expansion carries few practical consequences, there is little incentive for policy to change.
The question is not whether governments understand the legal position. They do. What remains uncertain is whether they are prepared to translate that understanding into meaningful action.