Unmasking SJP

Key Findings:

Did years of US campus support for Hamas help pave the path to October 7?

Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel and its massacre of more than 1,200 civilians and soldiers, and its kidnapping of 250 more, was a “strategic surprise” as military literature would define it, hearkening back to Imperial Japan’s historic Pearl Harbor attack. Terrorist atrocities such as Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 in New York and Washington, DC, in 2001; the 7/7 London train bombings in 2005; and the March 2004 Madrid train bombings are contemporary examples of strategic surprise. But the Students for Justice in Palestine’s public and popular antisemitic incitement across the United States on some 250 university campuses has not constituted a strategic surprise. 

SJP has openly supported Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations under the sanction and protection of some of America’s leading universities. Western academic bone fides helped Hamas gain international legitimacy, even for its terror actions, to which global condemnations of Israel’s war against Hamas attest.

The October 7 massacre only served to energize SJP’s genocidal libel. Days after the atrocities, SJP hosted a National Day of Resistance throughout the United States. Protest leaders declared: “Gaza broke out of prison” and breach(ed) the illegitimate border fence back into ’48 Palestine.” Recent sanctions of SJP by Columbia, Brandeis, and Rutgers, and most recently, university administrators suggest a newfound understanding of the deepening and palpable threat this mainstreamed organization poses to Diaspora Jews and Israel alike. 

Despite these sanctions, Hamas’s political strategy has been widely witnessed in action since 10/7 and has further metastasized across US university campuses. Pro-Hamas demonstrations across scores of American universities were shocking in both their public affirmation of Hamas’s genocidal mass murder and in their use of Hamas language, expressions and rhetoric. Chants and incantations in Arabic, many explicitly religious, were chanted by both Muslim and non-Muslim protesters:“Takbir!” calling for the glorification of God; “Allahu akbar” (“God is greater”); “There is no god but God,” in Arabic; and references to “the martyrs...those who have died in Gaza and Palestine.”

In 2018, a New York SJP chapter at CUNY rebranded as the extremist Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Its student leader, Nerdeen Kiswani, was recorded at a protest in 2021 declaring, “We want all of it” – meaning all of “Palestine” – including modern-day Israel. Kiswani’s rhetoric paralleled the Islamist Hamas 1988 charter, which calls explicitly for the murder of Jews and the establishment of an Islamic trust over geographical Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, the ubiquitous incantation at SJP protests. Likewise, in 2021, WOL launched a campaign to “Globalize the Intifada,” which “comes from the urgent need to defend our lands, resist our oppressors, and break free from the genocidal grip of US imperialism and Zionism.” 

At a rally at Cornell University organized by SJP, Prof. Russel Rickford said that Hamas’s acts “exhilarated” and “excited” him. SJP chapters posted pictures and graphics on social media of invading Hamas paragliders, celebrating its deadly assault on young Israeli party goers on the Simchat Torah holiday weekend. Hours after the 10/7 massacre, George Washington University SJP issued a statement justifying the massacre, reflecting the student group’s ever-increasing radicalization. The Columbia University Social Workers 4 Palestine referred to the Hamas massacre as a “counteroffensive and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism.”

SJP’s jihadi narrative has whitewashed terrorism and mass murder, transforming the student organization into a conduit for pro-jihadi activism, while academically intellectualizing and equivocating Hamas massacres. SJP’s nationwide aggressive actions, initiatives, and programming have signaled to Hamas and other colluding terror organizations that they could carry out the mass murder of Israelis with limited repercussions in the West. 

Taking immediate action is particularly pressing in view of the refusal of university presidents representing Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania in a December 5 congressional testimony to define, prohibit, or condemn genocidal declarations against Jews on campus as “harassment” in violation of their universities’ code of conduct. 

Countering the current Hamas-supporting antisemitic crusade should include prohibiting genocidal speech targeting Jews or the Jewish state; enforce title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect Jews and Israelis on campus as ethnic minorities; remove the nonprofit status of universities refusing to cooperate; and turn back billions of dollars in Qatari funding of Middle East studies programs.