Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a radical activist group with chapters on college campuses throughout the United States and Canada. Contrary to its name and the common belief that it is a grassroots student organization, SJP is a terror-supporting antisemitic network that harasses and intimidates Israel-friendly students.

Anti-Zionism is the core of SJP’s agenda, which falsely claims that Israel is an apartheid state, advocates for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and campaigns against the existence of the Jewish state. SJP is not shy about demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, frequently using the slogan, “from the river to the sea SJP supports a Palestine that is free,” which calls for replacing all of Israel with a Palestinian state.

Various members and chapters have expressed either bias against Jews or blatant Jew hatred, such as idolizing Adolph Hitler, Nazi Germany, or holding the Jewish people accountable as a collective for the actions of the State of Israel. SJP’s denial of Jewish rights violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which was adopted by the U.S. State Department, as well as Article I of the U.N. Charter, which states that a country must develop friendly relations among “nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of people.”

Many of SJP’s announcements, social media commentary, and cartoons have also trafficked in Jew-hatred, and several of its members and supporters, including both students and faculty, have been accused of creating an unsafe space for Jews, Jewish-Israelis, and supporters of Israel on college campuses. SJP holds national conferences where it is known to host and glorify jihadists and convicted terrorists, including Khader Adnan, past spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Rasmea Odeh, member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who was convicted of murdering two students before being deported to Jordan, Ghassan Kanafani, a PFLP leading member, and Leila Khaled, a PFLP member and the first woman ever to hijack an airplane. The PFLP has been involved in multiple civilian airplane hijackings, shootings, and bombings, leaving countless civilians dead.

SJP conferences serve as conduits to drive radical terror discourse, violence, and Jew hatred at colleges and universities across the United States. On the website for its 2018 national conference, it stated that “Zionism is a human ideology and a set of laws that have been challenged and can be destroyed” and that “Zionism is ethnic cleansing, destruction, mass expulsion, apartheid, and death.” Several of SJP’s financial patrons have been linked to designated terror organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP. SJP founder, Hatem Bazian, is a professor at U.C. Berkeley who has been outspoken in his anti-Zionism and bias against Jews and has been documented trafficking in antisemitic tropes and inciting violence, including explicitly promoting an intifada against Jewish-Israelis and falsely accusing Zionists of having collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

SJP supporters continue to exploit the discredited “Deadly Exchange” antisemitic blood libel that Israel trains U.S. police forces to harm minorities. SJP frequently partners with other anti-Israel groups, such as Americans for Muslims in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime, as well as progressive clubs on college campuses, in order to push its hate-filled agenda, which has resulted in several student governments passing anti-Israel resolutions, leaving many Jews and Israel-supporters feeling marginalized on campus.

Despite SJP’s inflammatory rhetoric and its embrace of Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism in the form of advocating for the wholesale destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, it rebuffs the claim that it is antisemitic by frequently partnering with anti-Zionist, terror-supporting Jewish outfits such as B’Tselem, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace. SJP has also advocated for boycotting courses about Israel and boycotting Israeli academic fellows.  “Don’t take sh*tty Zionist classes,” the University of Chicago SJP said in one Instagram post. “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows. By attending these classes, you are participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into the University of California Los Angeles for possible discrimination against Jews for hosting SJP’s national conference.