New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.

The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.

Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.

That distinction is the legal center of the argument.

The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.

That is not what is happening here.

Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.

The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.

Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.

Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.

Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.

This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.

That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.