How a Student Group Is Politicizing a Generation on Palestine
Activists with Students for Justice in Palestine have mobilized major campus demonstrations in support of Gaza—and provided an intellectual framework for protesters watching what’s happening in the Middle East.
...steering-committee member, told me that “S.J.P. is oriented in a special way. The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing... [Chapters start] small, with more tangible, visible elements of the Palestinian struggle,” and link those to prominent historical episodes elsewhere, such as apartheid in South Africa or the oppression of Native Americans in the U.S. “We go from apartheid to understanding what settler colonialism means. And then, from settler colonialism, we move to imperialism...”
[At a CUNY protest] Everyone involved seemed to be deeply invested in telling the true story of what had happened in Israel on October 7th, and since 1948, and since Biblical times. A graduate student at a different school, who just happened to walk by the protest, insisted that the images of Israeli civilians murdered on October 7th had been Photoshopped or generated by A.I. The chai-necklace woman claimed that “Palestine” was a term invented by the British in the twentieth century. Another protester, from the cuny group, responded that Zionism had been founded as an antisemitic ideology following the Protestant Reformation. None of these claims are true.
