Two pro-Palestinian activists wounded in attack outside Israeli expo in New York
Activists who demonstrated outside an Israeli real estate expo in Brooklyn on Tuesday said that they were attacked by “Zionist mobs” after they left the area.
In a post on X, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, Pal-Awda, said it organised a protest that “peacefully protested the illegal sale of stolen Palestinian land at a real estate event”, but that Zionists “spat on, kicked, harassed, maced and even physically struck and punched” some of the protest attendees.
It said one group of protesters, including “several Jewish allies” were approached by several assailants, including a “Zionist with a metal stick”. The attackers encircled the protesters, threatened them and ultimately assaulted them, resulting in “two young men” being taken to hospital.
A website advertising the Getter Group Israel Real Estate Expo in Borough Park, Brooklyn said the event on Tuesday promised to offer opportunities to hear from developers “about the latest projects going up in all parts of the country”.
An article in The Jerusalem Post, which was listed as a partner by the event organisers, said the “expo website didn’t offer holdings in disputed territories, but Getter does seek out real estate on behalf of its clients depending on their requests, which could include settlements”.
An Israeli-Palestinian film got an Oscar nomination, but can’t get a US distributor
No Other Land, a documentary by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers set in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank, is one of the most talked about films of the year. It won the Documentary Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival last year and it was nominated for an Oscar.
Masafer Yatta lies in the south of the West Bank and is home to 2,500 Palestinians living across 12 villages. But they have faced decades of Israeli attempts to force them off their land and regularly have their homes demolished by the Israeli military, or face attacks from settlers.
The film on their plight is showing in select movie theatres in the US, but no American distributor has been willing to pick it up. The filmmakers and protagonists, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, have called out US studios for their lack of courage.
“People should be aware of this, because … they have a responsibility,” Adra told Democracy Now. “In the US, it’s the tax money that the people are paying there. It has something to do with the home destruction that we are facing, the settlers’ violence, the building of the settlements on our land that does not stop every day.”
“We worked five years on this and Basel risked his life — I saw him almost get shot two times or three times,” Abraham said in comments to The New York Times. “It’s just a minimal amount of courage to give it the stage that we believe it deserves, that the people of Masafer Yatta deserve. But we still hope that it’ll change.”
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