All Statements
On the NYU Faculty Arrested on 4/22
APRIL 23, 2024 — On April 22, 2024, a group of brave New York University faculty members took a historic stand against genocide by serving as a physical line of defense to protect students anticipating arrest. The following day, NYU students and faculty walked out of class in protest of the administration’s repressive crackdown. National SJP hopes that other faculty members across Turtle Island will follow the courageous lead of the NYU faculty members who put their bodies on the line for their students.
OPEN LETTER FROM Students for justice in palestine to universities
This letter was released on April 21, 2024.
To our universities,
We, the Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation, demand institutional accountability and immediate divestment from israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza. As our Palestinian counterparts face the systematic eradication of their homes, holy sites, and universities, the assassination of their professors, peers, and families, and the seizure of their homeland, we stand resolutely with their struggle for liberation.
NATIONAL SJP ANNOUNCES The Popular University for Gaza
APRIL 20, 2024 — Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters across North America have risen in defense of the Palestinian people, establishing autonomous zones on several university campuses to assert their strength and demands in the face of severe university repression. Today, April 20th, 2024, National Students for Justice in Palestine announces the Popular University for Gaza, a coordinated pressure campaign against university administrations and trustees to immediately divest from the israeli state. After hundreds of student government resolutions, meetings with administrators, and protests on campus, and following months of increased targeting, harassment, and arrests, the students are ramping up the pressure. We will not back down; we will reclaim our universities until administrators comply with our demands.
Solidarity with columbia students
On January 19, 2024, hundreds of Columbia students were attacked with Skunk spray by former soldiers of the israeli Occupation Forces (iOF) while protesting the continued genocide in Gaza on Columbia’s campus. Skunk, a chemical weapon, was developed by the israeli arms industry to suppress Palestinian demonstrations and later exported to militaries and law enforcement agencies around the world. Following this heinous attack, Columbia students have been hospitalized for chemical inhalation, requiring testing and treatments ranging from chest X-rays and nebulizers to EKGs. Students are experiencing severe symptoms, including chest pain, abnormal heart rates, difficulty breathing, nausea, burning eyes, debilitating headaches, and vomiting.
University Students Outraged at Blatant Administrative Overreach
Over the past four weeks, National Students for Justice in Palestine has witnessed the most blatant administrative and governmental assault on students’ political speech in recent history. We are deeply concerned with politically-motivated administrative retaliation against individual students and student organizations at universities across North America. This unconstitutional and immoral suppression of our students—students speaking out against the decades-old genocidal depravity of a US vassal state—has cast a dark shadow over our supposedly pluralistic institutions.
The Movement for Palestinian Rights will not be Silenced—NSJP, CAIR, and JVP Respond to ADL Attacks
At a time when the movement in solidarity with Palestinian liberation is unprecedented in its support — and facing increased attack — the Council on American Islamic Relations, Jewish Voice for Peace, and National Students for Justice in Palestine reaffirm our unwavering support of the Palestinian cause for justice and liberation. We unequivocally condemn the baseless allegations by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) against our organizations and are gravely concerned that the ADL’s attacks will distract from the real threat of white supremacy faced by all our communities.
The ADL’s latest intimidation campaign is based on a highly problematic definition of antisemitism that attempts to conflate criticism of the Israeli government or Zionism with anti-Jewish racism. This is as dangerous as it is baseless. Many people of various faiths and backgrounds--including Jewish scholars, rabbis, and activists--have long criticized and opposed Zionism. For the Palestinian community, Zionism is the political ideology that has enabled their violent subjugation and systematic dispossession. People must be able to discuss and debate these issues without being falsely smeared as antisemites.
Student Statement in Solidarity with Palestinian Liberation
As Israeli colonial violence intensifies across historic Palestine, Palestinians from the river to the sea demand an International Strike in solidarity with their liberation movement as they struggle for life and land against compounded attacks by the Zionist settler project. Today, May 18th, 2021, Palestine solidarity organizations across occupied Turtle Island reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people and their pursuit for liberation, self-determination, and decolonization.
In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, illegal Jewish Israeli settlers continue to attack and torment Palestinian families with death threats, live ammunition, and physical violence to expel them from their homes and settle in their place. Palestinian home-defenders are confronting the violent occupation forces of a settler-colonial project against all odds, as they have done for decades, even as their occupiers and colonizers arrest their youth en masse, lynch them in the streets, assault them with skunk water and tear gas, and destroy their property. However, these tactics have utterly failed to stifle the Palestinian spirit and its longing for freedom, as has been magnified recently.
Students Outraged by Repression of Fellow Organizers
Campus organizing has always been a catalyst for social change. From the anti-war movement in the U.S. to the South African anti-apartheid movement, students' strength, tenacity, and steadfastness globally have aided the movement toward the destabilization, delegitimization, and even defeat of many oppressive systems and regimes.
Student voices are repeatedly met with institutional and systematic deplatforming, which strips students of their rightful expression, voice, and sense of safety. The history of repression of student activism––specifically of Palestine student activism––is the result of students challenging and building power. Over the past two decades, Palestine solidarity activists in the US have led more than 70 successful divestment campaigns on their campuses.
National SJP Statement on Annexation
The undersigned student groups are in fierce opposition to the Israeli-US annexation plan. With Trump’s blessing, the Israeli regime continues to steal more and more Palestinian land, tearing families from their homes and siphoning essential natural resources, maintaining its goal of Zionist supremacy from the river to the sea.
Illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank have stolen Palestinian lives, land, and livelihoods for over half a century, and Trump’s green light will formalize their theft. While this is indeed a moment of crisis, Palestinians have been resisting systematic Israeli violence for decades while the US bankrolls and politically enables Israeli atrocities.
National SJP Statement on Coronavirus
As institutions of higher learning shut down amidst the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus), National SJP wants to offer some thoughts on how this moment affects our movement on campuses across North America. National SJP wants to encourage student organizers to remain steadfast as we maneuver the many changes to our campus context. Israeli Apartheid Week - one of the largest coordinated political education campaigns on Palestinian liberation - was set to begin this coming week. Under health officials' guidance, most planned in-person events must be canceled or rescheduled. All of next week National SJP will be hosting a “virtual IAW,” and we encourage chapters to engage in virtual political education events and online organizing.
Despite the unprecedented setbacks to our work, we understand that agility and adaptability are vital in building our movement and uplifting calls for freedom, justice, and equality through BDS. As a dedicated group of student activists committed to the self-determination and liberation of the Palestinian people–as well as all marginalized peoples–it is imperative that we, like the organizers before us, rise to the challenge of the moment and demand what we have spent semesters fighting for. We must transform physical barriers to organizing into creative and accommodating methods of engaging students and community members.
SJP Condemns Trump's Executive Order
On Wednesday, December 11th, 2019, Donald Trump issued an executive order that would conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, thereby redirecting genuine concerns for Jewish safety by weaponizing anti-Semitism against pro-Palestine student organizations to stifle their organizing on campus. The undersigned coalition of student and community organizations nationwide explicitly condemns this executive order.
This most recent executive order adopted by the Trump administration attempts to redefine anti-Semitism by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition, which conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Through this definition, universities can unjustly interrogate, isolate, and nullify the rights of pro-Palestine groups on campus in the name of combating anti-Semitism. Additionally, this framework permits the revocation of federal funding to public universities if they don’t abide by these regulations. In turn, this incentivizes censorship and the denial of intellectual freedom of all students. Pro-Israel politicians and lobbying groups alike have relentlessly pushed for this redefinition in an attempt to delegitimize and silence Palestine organizing on campuses.
National SJP Endorses Freedom is the Future
National Students for Justice in Palestine proudly endorses Freedom is the Future as part of the Justice for All Campaign. We uplift the five demands made by Palestinians in the diaspora who have laid out a vision for justice that is grounded in the fullness of liberation– a vision that articulates what true justice will require. National SJP affirms Palestinian demands for freedom and self-determination, their right to return to their homeland, the space to thrive, and their right to resist for a better world.
The Palestinian struggle is part of a broader transnational struggle for collective liberation. We share this statement of endorsement as a call for individuals and organizations to educate, organize, and advocate to demand that elected representatives end the U.S. government’s longstanding, direct support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.
National SJP Condemns Firing of Marc Lamont Hill
On November 29th, CNN announced that political contributor Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s contract had been terminated. This came after his speech at the UN in which he condemned the illegal 50-year military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinian citizens of Israel through apartheid laws to call for global support for Palestinian resistance in their struggle for basic human rights. National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) stands in solidarity with Dr. Hill, commending his bravery and resilience in challenging the status quo and speaking out against the continued oppression, colonization, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland. Furthermore, NSJP strongly condemns CNN’s disturbing attempt to stifle free speech and its active contribution to censoring political activists of color who denounce the evils of settler colonialism and racialized violence. Terminating an employee for condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians underscores the troubling and widespread trend of silencing critics of state power, which brutalizes and subjugates people of color worldwide.
National SJP and The Palestinian Youth Movement Condemn Repression, Racism, and Islamophobia During National SJP Conference at UCLA
On November 16th-18th, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) hosted its annual conference at UCLA. This year’s theme was “Radical Hope: Resistance in the Face of Adversity.” Unfortunately, while the theme is certainly fitting for an event exploring the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice, many organizers, presenters, and attendees realized that it was also unexpectedly fitting for the simple attempt to hold the conference itself at an institution of higher learning. The “adversity” against which we needed to shoulder just to be able to hold a convening (which should be the unquestioned right of students and community members) came from all levels, from the political to the administrative as well as in the form of intense, militant harassment and intimidation from off-campus, Zionist vigilante groups.
National SJP Rejects Attempts to Chill Free Speech and Reaffirms Commitment to Palestinian Freedom
Over the past several months, students and recent graduates have volunteered countless hours of their time and energy in preparation for the 8th annual National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) Conference, which will be hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from November 16-18. In an effort to suppress our work for Palestinian rights, organizations, groups, and individuals who support Israel have engaged in a hateful and targeted harassment campaign against our members on social media. We have even received death threats.
Rather than supporting us, the UCLA administration issued a cease and desist letter, which inaccurately asserted that the SJP chapter at UCLA and National SJP violated the university’s trademark on its name and the Bruin Bear. The letter also demanded the bear not be "associated with a Palestinian kite, which some may interpret as an intention to endorse violence."
Statement in Support of Rabab Abdulhadi
We, the undersigned student organizations and organizers, extend unconditional solidarity to Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora (AMED) program at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and faculty mentor for the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) at that institution.
For the past several years, external Zionist organizations, including AMCHA, Canary Mission, and Campus Watch, have carried out a coordinated attack against the scholarship and social justice work of Professor Abdulhadi specifically and Palestinian organizers, students, and scholars at SFSU more generally. These organizations have resorted to a wide range of disgraceful behavior to censor the protected speech of advocates for Palestinian rights on SFSU’s campus.
Letter in Support of the Movement for Black Lives
Black Lives Matter.
We, the undersigned chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)*, unequivocally support the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and its newly released policy platform for “Black power, freedom, and justice.” We fully endorse M4BL’s demands and take this moment to renew our commitment to fighting antiblackness and all systems of oppression that disenfranchise and oppress Black communities.
Students for Justice in Palestine stands in
solidarity with GUPS SFSU
Chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and campus justice groups across the nation stand in solidarity with the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) at San Francisco State University as they endure heavy backlash from both their administration and Zionist organizations. GUPS at SFSU was founded in 1973 and is one of the oldest and most significant campus organizations fighting for justice and liberation for the Palestinian people. GUPS, along with a coalition of student allies, faces increased intimidation efforts after their protest against the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, on April 6th. Barkat has implemented racist, discriminatory, and violent policies that amount to ethnic cleansing in the city of Jerusalem. Examples of his endorsed or approved policies cited by GUPS include: