Activities

• SJP is the campus organization most directly responsible for creating a hostile campus environment saturated with anti-Israel events, BDS initiatives, and speakers. Each SJP chapter operates independently and is responsible for forming its own constitutions, finding funding sources, and organizing activities. (Read NGO Monitor’s report “BDS on American Campuses: SJP and its NGO Network”)
• In October 2023, in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attack, SJP published a statement referring to the violence as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” SJP additionally claimed, “This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”
• In November 2023, three universities (Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington)  suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) due to violations of  campus policies,“chants and social media posts calling for violence against Jews,” and “openly support[ing] Hamas.”

Political Advocacy

• In December 2022, SJP tweeted, “As we commemorate the 35th anniversary of the First Intifada, we honor the Palestinian people as they build a new generation of freedom fighters challenging Zionist colonization in the name of liberation and self-determination.”
• In June 2022, a SJP protester was charged with a hate crime for throwing rocks at Jewish students at the University of Illinois.
• In April 2022, SJP held an event to discuss “how Israel’s process of ethnic cleansing takes form on college campuses.”
• In June 2021, SJP activist Nerdeen Kiswani participated in a conference, “Challenging Apartheid in Palestine: Reclaiming the Narrative, Formulating A Vision,” hosted by the Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. Conference organizers and sponsors, as well as other participants, were linked to various terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
• In June 2021, SJP held “Student Strategizing Sessions” aimed at “Develop[ing] the tools, resources, and coordination for chapters to collectively pursue campaigns and direct actions in the upcoming academic year⁣” and to “Ground our organizing in an analysis of the popular uprising in Palestine, this current moment of political reckoning, and the role of students in the imperial core⁣.”
• In October 2020, SJP was a signatory on a statement claiming the “IHRA-WDA will not stop Palestine solidarity…The threat therefore remains that the IHRA-WDA may still be used by government agencies against supporters of Palestinian human rights, be they academics, activists, public employees or others.”
  • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly 30 countries and counting, represents the international consensus definition of antisemitism, as well as how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. An example of the latter includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• On April 24, 2014, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at New York University distributed “mock eviction notices” to two residence halls known for their high concentration of Jewish students. 

BDS Activities

• In December 2023, SJP tweeted, “The Zionist regime has destroyed every university in Gaza. Why are there academic associations that have endorsed the boycott but have yet to denounce this scholasticide? What is the use of passing BDS within your institutions if you are not going to mobilize right now?”
• In November 2023, SJP was a signatory on a joint statement calling on “U.S. labor unions to cut all ties with Israeli unions…We additionally call on U.S. unions and our employers to divest from Israeli bonds and from the military, extractive, and technological industries connected with the Israeli occupation and U.S. imperialism…Failure to do so amounts to organized labor’s complicity with, and support for, the ongoing genocide.”
• In October 2021, SJP participated in a “National Week of Action to #DivestFromDeath” calling to “pressure institutions to divest from war profiteers.”
• In August 2021, SJP called on Congress to “end the U.S. military funding that’s fueling ethnic cleansing.”
• In 2015, WESPAC CEO Nada Khader was a panelist at an event at Pace University’s “Israel Apartheid Week.” The goal of the panel was to “introduce SJP to campus…There will be a strong focus on the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign.”
• In 2012, SJP published a “media handbook” to train BDS activists in public advocacy. The handbook includes pro-BDS talking points, promotes apartheid rhetoric, adopts the Nakba narrative, and contains suggestions interacting with the media. 

Officials

• SJP Founder Hatem Bazian (lecturer at University of California, Berkeley) is also the co-founder of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). According to AMP, “We also work in broad-based coalitions and support campus activism through Students for Justice in Palestine.”
  • On October 31, 2023, the Attorney General’s Office of Virginia announced an investigation into AMP, stating that there is “reason to believe that the organization may be soliciting contributions … without first having registered…. In addition, the Attorney General will investigate allegations that the organization may have used funds raised for impermissible purposes under state law, including benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations.”
  • In March 2020, President of AMP Hatem Bazian submitted an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in support of ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes. The brief consisted of an irrelevant diatribe about events in the 1910s and 1920s, with the conclusion that “Not only that I urge the court to recognize Palestine, as a State, but the time is right for London to publicly admit that the Balfour Declaration was a major historical crime against the Palestine, was illegal, led to ethnic cleansing and created a 12-million member Palestinian diaspora. Achieving peace is contingent on justice and can begin to take shape only when this original sin is admitted and recognized as such. This Chamber must correct the record and begin by recognizing Palestinians statehood as a first step toward addressing the systematic denial and obfuscation of their rights.”
  • In 2018, Bazian retweeted several times the hashtag #PalestinianHolocaust and claimed that Gaza is a “concentration camp.” On June 13, 2015, Bazian tweeted “Gaza: an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked-up this time around.”
• Leila Abdelrazaq, Communications Coordinator for Friends of Sabeel North America, served “on the National SJP Ad-Hoc Steering Committee” in 2015.
  • In 2021, Abdelrazaq participated in a panel hosted by Brown SJP on “Palestine and Everyday Resistance.”
  • Abdelrazaq has supported  Rasmea Odeh, a PFLP operative convicted for immigration fraud after concealing her role in two terrorist bombings in Israel, referring to her as “one of my personal sheroes (sic).”
  • In 2013, Abdelrazaq designed a comic pamphlet for “educating the general public about the boycott Israel campaign.”