NATIONAL SJP 

Today, Palstinians observe Eid al-Adha while continuing to endure a genocide, and over 1 million people in Lebanon observe the holdiay while displaced by zionist bombardment and occupation. Last night as people in Gaza went out in prepration for Eid, they were met with zionist bombardment. The airstrikes on rsidential building in the al-Rimal neighborhood killed 6 people and wounded 20 more. While in Lebanon, the zionist entity continues to expand its occupation, issuing evactation orders in Tyre. Bombardment and forced displacement on EId is a long standing tactic of the zionist entity to break the spirit of those who suffer under their brutal occupation. Eid is more than a celebration, it’s a chance to reflect and to reground ourselves in causes that exist beyond us. It gives us an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the struggle for liberation, and to sacrifice that which we are materially attached to, to advance the cause, as those in Palestine, Lebanon, and throughout the region have done and continue to do. May this Eid bring us one year closer to the day we can pray Eid in a liberated Palestine, and may we one day get to hear the takbirat echo throughout our liberated land, with chants echoing from Gaza all the way to Al Aqsa.

On this day 26 years ago, the illusion that zionist occupation was a permanent inevitability was shattered, and the inevitability of decolonization and liberation was proved in the south of Lebanon. Following decades of occupation, the Lebanese people broke down the indestructible facade of zionism and won liberation through their own terms, not through diplomacy, normalization, or international appeals. Liberation was struggled for by the people and succeeded only through them. Today, the memory of the liberation of the South serves as a sobering reminder that the dismantling of zionism is not only possible but inevitable, and that the Lebanese people will never bow to occupation - 26 years ago, today, or tomorrow.

As another school year comes to a close, we remain steadfast with the understanding that our universities remain complicit in the zionist imperialist expansion currently being waged throughout Palestine and beyond. Though we may face repression on our campuses, it pales in comparison to the conditions imposed upon students in Gaza. To be able to attend university is a privilege those in Gaza don’t enjoy, and thus it’s our responsibility to use our privilege to continue to heighten the contradictions on campus and escalate. Though another year has ended, our mission remains the same. We reaffirm that our struggle will continue until divestment, the dissolution of zionism, the establishment of a popular university, and the liberation of Palestine.

Today, we recognize 5 years since the Unity Intifada, a moment which brought the Palestinian cause to the forefront of popular consciousness and one which shifted the terms of engagement through all of occupied Palestine. Sparked by displacement efforts in Sheikh Jarrah, the movement spread quickly into global protests expressing solidarity with both Sheikh Jarrah and all of Palestine. This moment served as a prelude to the current political moment we find ourselves in now, and we understand that the popular movement and mobilization from 5 years ago lives on now through our continued struggle. From Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza, the Intifada lives!

Yesterday’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego is the product of decades of coordinated anti-Arab and Islamophobic propaganda, surveillance, and dehumanization normalized by the U.S. and Western powers. This agenda of violence has cultivated the conditions that target Muslim communities, from our masjids and neighborhoods within the diaspora to ethnic cleansing and siege abroad. National Students for Justice in Palestine stands with the San Diego community grieving the devastating loss of their loved ones. We mourn and honor every one of our martyrs, from the martyrs of the ICSD attack to Wadea al-Fayoume to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians martyred in Gaza.

THE NAKBA NEVER ENDED: AIRSTRIKES IN GAZA CITY As Palestinians marked the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, Gaza once again endured a night of relentless bombardment. IOF airstrikes targeted residential buildings in Gaza City overnight, killing at least 9 Palestinians and injuring more than 40 others according to initial reports. Omar Hamad, a writer from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza and founder of The Phoenix Library, described arriving near the site of the attack, “Today, before I even reached the bombing site, and from 200 meters away, I smelled the scent of blood, as if my mind knew it and could distinguish it among so many others odors of dust, sulfur, rubble, and gunpowder. Instantly, my mind flashed back to the countless scenes of blood I lived through during the genocide.” As Western institutions and governments continue to bankroll the ongoing siege, displacement, and genocide, our responsibility in the imperial core continues to grow. From the airstrikes on residential buildings paid by university endowments to the research our universities produce for weapons manufacturers, our institutions remain materially tied to the destruction of Gaza. The violence of the ongoing Nakba must not be normalized or allowed to continue for another generation. The Nakba must not remain continuous. We must unwaveringly resist and commit to Palestine’s liberation.

Today, we commemorate the 78th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba. The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” marks the mass dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1948, when the zionist entity forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, brutally and systemically emptied 530 villages, and carried out over 70 massacres in its campaign to establish a settler colony on Palestinian land. Though the Nakba is commemorated on May 15th, we understand that the ethnic cleansing campaign has never ended—it remains continuous and ongoing. Throughout the past 78 years, and more recently the past 31 months of heightened decimation, Palestinians have remained steadfast in the face of relentless violence and attempts of erasure, from enduring genocide, displacement, and siege in Gaza to escalating settler violence, land theft, incursions and raids, and detainment in the West Bank. Despite the colonizers’ persistent attempts, they will not, and will never, succeed in erasing Palestinian people. Despite the Nakba continuing for 78 years, the Palestinians’ desire to return to their home is not a dream but a future to be achieved through the struggle to free their land from zionist occupation. This future can only be achieved through the steadfast resistance, achieved through struggle, from the homeland to the diaspora. Generation after generation, until liberation and return.

Over the last 3 years, Gaza’s universities, libraries, and scholars have been systematically targeted in a deliberate attack on Palestinian life itself, all bankrolled by complicit Western institutions we attend and are graduating from. As students across North America graduate this Spring, we remember the thousands of Palestinian students in Gaza who shared our dreams and hopes, who we now continue the struggle in honor of. These are the names of a small fraction of the martyred students who would have graduated this year. We refuse to forget our martyred peers. No graduation until Gaza’s liberation.

Over one year has passed since the arrest of Tarek Barzouk. National SJP and the entire student movement stands firmly in solidarity with Tarek and every other political prisoner targeted by the state. To find out more ways to support Tarek and the campaign advocating for his release, follow @freetarekbazrouk to stay up to date. Free our prisoners, free them all, break down the prison walls!

Today is May Day, otherwise known as International Workers Day. First started to commemorate the Haymarket Affair, a date in which strikers in Chicago were bombed while protesting for the eight hour work day, the day has come to be recognized internationally as a testament to the strength, victory, and struggle of the working class. The fight of the worker amidst class struggle can be found in its most potent form in national liberation struggles across the world. The struggle to liberate one’s land from foreign occupiers is the most potent manifestation of class struggle, manifesting as a struggle between the occupier and the occupied. This can take the form of economic subjugation, as we see today across Africa and Latin America, or the form of settler colonialism, which we see today in Palestine and Lebanon. The global liberation of the working class will not be achieved without first the guaranteed right of national sovereignty granted to all oppressed people across the world, from Palestine, to Lebanon, Iran, Cuba, and all victims of imperialism. Our struggles should not be understood as disparate struggles but rather must be viewed as interconnected fronts in the same struggle against a global system of imperialism which places the class interests of a few over the rights of those across the world. Workers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains.