S.J.P. chapters began to proliferate in the early two-thousands, during the early years of the Iraq War and amid the second intifada, a series of Palestinian uprisings against Israel. Global attention was focussed on Israel and Palestine, and students were looking for a way to get involved in the cause. But, at the time, student activists didn’t agree on how to interpret and talk about Israel and Palestine. Will Youmans, an associate professor at George Washington University, who helped organize a 2002 conference at Berkeley, told me that the students who came had a lot of political disagreements. “The East Coast groups were much more conservative,” he said; they wanted to see the end of Israel’s military occupation and the birth of Palestinian statehood. West Coast students “had more of an analysis of Israel as an apartheid state,” calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their homes within the borders of Israel. “We kind of all just came away with, we’re each on our own campus, and we can learn from each other, but we can’t have one national platform because everyone’s so different,” he said.
Over the years, S.J.P. has evolved. A national group, called N.S.J.P., formed to organize conferences, and later grew to be able to provide more robust support to students. But the decentralized spirit still exists. “I used to pay for flyers out of my pocket,” Youmans said. “There was a power in that. We didn’t need grownups sitting around telling us what to do.”
Bazian said that Students for Justice in Palestine has been most successful at creating “a localized engagement with Palestine.” It can be challenging to get Americans, and especially students, to care about foreign-policy issues “when you’re only debating what is taking place over there,” Bazian explained. So S.J.P.s have drawn attention to the ways that their campuses, and their country, play a role in the conflict. Chapters tend to focus on getting their universities to divest from companies that operate in or sell weapons to Israel, or that do business there. S.J.P. chapters have also strengthened the relationship between advocacy for Palestine and for other leftist social-justice issues. Since the nineteen-sixties, Black nationalists in America have expressed support for Palestine. The sense of common cause between anti-racist and pro-Palestine advocacy was strengthened in 2014, when Palestinians in Gaza reached out to Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and provided them with tips on dealing with tear-gas inhalation. The connection between pro-Palestine and anti-racist activism in the U.S. deepened in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd; there is a mural of Floyd on the border wall separating the West Bank from Israel. At the time, Eren was a student at a New England arts school, where an S.J.P. had recently been started. “Our chapter became pretty active on the scene, helping our Black comrades organize events and protests against our campus and local police,” he told me.
Today, the kinds of intellectual and political disagreements that divided early S.J.P. organizers have smoothed out. To borrow Youmans’s description, the West Coast won. It’s not just fringe activists who believe that Israelis are colonizers who have unjustly forced Palestinians from their homes. “The wellspring of criticism is far beyond the S.J.P.s,” Ziad Abu-Rish, the scholar at Bard, who was involved in S.J.P. activism for about a decade when he was a student, told me. The students who are showing up to rallies “don’t really attend meetings,” he said. “They might have come to one event in the past two months. But they hold a lot of the same views.” The appeal of activism for Palestine also seems to be growing. Zaremba told me that there were around two hundred and fifty S.J.P. chapters before October 7th; since then, the National S.J.P. has received more than eighty requests from students looking to form new groups at their schools. “There’s a whole new generation of people who are currently being politicized,” Abu-Rish said.
Jonathan Isla Rampagoa was filmed tearing down hostage posters near Hunter’s campus.
Some of the responsibility for S.J.P.’s rise lies with the group’s critics, who, in trying to discredit the organization, actually amplify its message. Many such critics have focussed on a tool kit circulated by the National S.J.P. in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, which called the attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” which broke down the “facade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The document provided tips on messaging and organizing events, and included a promotional graphic featuring a cartoon of a fighter on a paraglider, a reference to the militants who sailed into the Israeli desert and killed and wounded hundreds at the Nova music festival. Eren called the imagery “a little absurd” and “iconic,” and said he has no regrets about promoting its use. He also doesn’t think it’s relevant whether student activists support Hamas’s tactics, including on October 7th. “When students take to the streets in support of Palestinian liberation, when their families could be in the houses being levelled at that very moment, I think it’s really odd to question whether they supported the actions of an armed militia,” he said. According to Eren, Meta suppressed National S.J.P.’s Instagram posts promoting the tool kit, and Google restricted access to the PDF on Drive. But the conservative Web site the Daily Wire obtained and published a copy of the tool kit, which Eren credited with its wide circulation.
The heavyweight behind the efforts to take down S.J.P. is the Anti-Defamation League, or A.D.L., which was founded more than a century ago to document and combat antisemitism in America. At the end of October, the A.D.L., along with a legal nonprofit called the Brandeis Center, sent a letter to nearly two hundred college presidents condemning Students for Justice in Palestine for its “pro-Hamas” and “violent anti-Israel” rhetoric. “SJP chapters are not advocating for Palestinian rights; they are celebrating terrorism,” the letter said. It also urged colleges to investigate their chapters of S.J.P. for “potentially providing material support to Hamas,” warning that schools that do not do so may be “violating their Jewish students’ legal rights” under Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, and national origin.
“College presidents have a problem on their hands. The problem is named S.J.P.,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the A.D.L., told me. “Individuals who literally are willing to celebrate violence, to laud murder, and to celebrate terrorism—that is a big problem for these campuses that parents entrust with their children to create environments where they can learn and be safe.” When I asked Greenblatt what basis the A.D.L. has for alleging that S.J.P. chapters might be funding or receiving funds from Hamas, he said that the chapters “are mirroring the position of Hamas,” adding that “there are those who have said that the span of activities could constitute material support.” Whether or not they agree with this argument, some college presidents have acted against S.J.P. Before the A.D.L. letter was sent, the chancellor of the State University of Florida had already ordered that two S.J.P. chapters be “deactivated.” After the letter, three private universities—Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington—announced that they were suspending their chapters. Columbia also suspended its chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, which similarly supports Palestinian rights and the B.D.S. movement.