Janine Jackson interviewed Sam, representative from National Students for Justice in Palestine, for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There is a long and growing list of US college campuses where encampments and other forms of protests are going on, in efforts to get college administrations to divest their deep and powerful resources from weapons manufacturers, and other ways and means of enabling Israel’s war on Palestinians, assaults that have killed some 34,000 people just since the Hamas attack of October 7.
One key group on campuses has been SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s not a new, hastily formed group; they’ve been around and on the ground for decades.
We’re joined now by Sam, a representative of National Students for Justice in Palestine. Welcome to CounterSpin.
Sam: Thank you for having me.
JJ: I can only imagine what a time this is for you, but certainly a time when the need for your group is crystal clear. Individuals who want to speak up about the genocide in Palestine are helped by the knowledge that there are other people with them, behind them, but also that there are organizations that exist to support them and their right to speak out. I wonder, is that maybe especially true for students, whose rights exist on paper, but are not always acknowledged in reality?
S: Yes and no. I think a lot of people definitely want to support students, because what we’re doing is very visible, and also I think people are more willing to assume good faith from 20-year-olds. At the same time, also, free speech on college campuses, especially private campuses, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. So if you’re on a campus, that means that it is sometimes harder to speak out, especially because we’re seeing students getting suspended, and when they get suspended, they get banned from campus, they get evicted from their student housing, sometimes they lose access to healthcare. And, basically, the schools control a lot more of students’ lives than any institution does for adults in the workforce, for example.
JJ: Right. So what are you doing day to day? You’re at National SJP, and folks should know that there are hundreds of entities on campuses, but what are you doing? How do you see your job right now?
S: SJP is a network of chapters that work together. It’s not like they’re branches, where we are giving them orders; they have full autonomy to do what they want within this network.
So what we’re doing is what we’ve been trying to do for our entire existence, which is act as a hub, act as a resource center, provide resources to students, connect them with each other, offer advice, offer financial support when we can. One thing we’re really trying to do is pull everything together, basically present a consistent narrative to the public around this movement.
JJ: Speaking of narrative, the claim that anyone voicing anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian ideas is antisemitic is apparently convincing for some people whose view of the world comes through the TV or the newspaper. But it’s an idea that is blown apart by any visit to a student protest. It’s just not a true thing to say. And I wonder what you would say about narratives. It’s obviously about work, supporting people, but on the narrative space, what are you trying to shift?
S: I mean, I’m Jewish. I’m fairly observant. I was at a Seder last night. When people say the pro-Palestinian movement is antisemitic, they’re lying. I’m just flat-out saying I think a lot of people, on some level, know that this isn’t about Jews. This isn’t about Judaism. It’s about the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in our people’s name. And if you support it, that is going to lead people to make a bunch of bad inferences about you, because you’re vocally supporting a genocide.
This weaponization is meant to shift focus away from Gaza, away from Palestine, the people who are being massacred, the people whose bodies they found in a mass grave at a hospital yesterday. The point is to distract from the fact that there is no moral case to defend what Israel was doing. So the only thing that Zionists have going for them is just smears, attacking the movement, tone-policing, demanding we take stances that they’re never asked to take. No one ever asks pro-Israel protestors, “Do you condemn the Israeli government,” because Israel is seen as a legitimate entity.
First of all, I want to clarify, this is about Palestine. I don’t want to get too far into talking about how the genocide, the Zionist backlash to the movement, affects me as a Jewish person, because I have a roof over my head. There’s not going to be a bomb dropping into my home.
The narrative that we’re really trying to put out is this, what we’re calling the Popular University for Gaza, and it’s an overarching campaign narrative over this. Basically, the idea is that everything that’s happening is laying bare the fact that universities do not care about their students, or their staff, or their faculty, who are the people who make the university a university, and not just an investment firm. They care about their investments and profit and their reputation and, essentially, managing social change.
So what we’re doing is, as students, making encampments, taking up space on their campuses. And a crucial part of these encampments is the programming in them. It’s drawing on the traditions of Freedom Schools in the ’60s and in the South, and also the Popular University for Palestine, which was a movement, I think it’s still ongoing, in Palestine, basically educators teaching for liberation, teaching about the history of Palestinian figures, about resistance, about colonialism.
But the idea is that students are inserting themselves, forcibly disrupting the university’s normal business; and threatening the university’s reputation is a big part of it, and just rejecting their legitimacy, establishing the Popular University for teaching, where scholarship is done for the benefit of the people, not for preserving hegemony.
With this whole thing, we’re trying to emphasize, basically, that our universities, they have built all these reputations and all these super great things about them, but they don’t care about the people in them. So we’re going to take the structures that make up them, which are the people within them, and essentially turn them toward liberation, and against imperialism, against the ruling class.
JJ: Well, thank you very much. I want to say it’s very refreshing, and refreshing is not enough. A lot of folks are drawing inspiration from hearing people say, “The New York Times is saying I’m antisemitic. Maybe I should shut up, you know? Media are saying I’m disruptive. Oh, maybe I should quiet down.” I don’t see any evidence of shutting up or quieting down, despite, really, the full narrative power, along with other kinds of power, being brought against protesters. It doesn’t seem to be shutting people up.
S: No, because that’s the thing, is students have had enough, students are perfectly willing now to risk suspension, risk expulsion, because they know that, essentially, the university’s prestige has been shattered. Even me, I’m currently in school, I’m a grad student. I’ve realized, so far I’ve been OK, but even if I did get expelled, or forced to drop out of my program, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what people in Palestine are going through. We are willing to sacrifice our futures in a system that increasingly doesn’t give us a future anyway. I think that’s another big part of it, is the feeling that, basically, even if you get a degree, you’re still going to be living precariously for a decade.
And another thing is, also, that today’s college seniors graduated from high school in the spring of 2020. They never really had a normal college experience. Their freshman year was online, so they never developed the bonds with that university, traditional attachment to the university. And also, the universities, the way they handled Covid generally has been terrible, and just seeing them completely disregard their students during the pandemic, I think, has really radicalized a lot of students. Basically, they’re willing to defy the institution.
This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine. It’s not about standing with Columbia students. They have repeatedly asked: Don’t center them; center Gaza. And, basically, we reject the university system as the arbiter of our futures, the arbiter of right and wrong. And we’re going to make our own learning spaces until they listen to us and stop investing our tuition dollars in genocide.
So yeah, free Palestine.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sam from Students for Justice in Palestine, NationalSJP.org. Thank you so much, Sam, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
S: Yeah, thanks for having me.
It’s way past time to get the Biden Administration charged under 18 U.S. Code § 1091, which is the statute that incorporated the Genocide Convention in US criminal law. Members of this administration shouldn’t go a single day without having this statute in their faces, up front and center at every protest at every meeting, press conference, briefing, and trips home and abroad.
They may feel they are immune now, but let’s get them considering what is possible when they leave office, given they have set the precedent of charging former presidents. They should have visions of prison all the days of their lives.
And maybe the propagandists in the Mainstream Media needs to be encouraged to think about their culpability as well.
Let us find the way.
I am 100% in agreement with this. Biden should face capital punishment at the Hague.
“This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine”
NO, NO, NO This is first and foremost about sucking up and getting more and more George Sores MONEY
Who is George Sores and what is his connection with the mass slaughter being inflicted by fanatical Zionists on the Palestinian people?
Wow lots to unpack here. I suspect there is a host of reasons most of these white, privileged college protesters go on marches wearing Palestinian-style headdresses while calling for “intifada” role-playing. On the top and similar to little kids pretending to be princesses or pirates, this cossetted irliberal middle group of middle to upper class students seamingly love pretending they too are persecuted minorities. It’s yet another way to demonstrate how wonderfully empathetic and compassionate they are. Meanwhile as another commenter stated there is plenty of Rockefeller and Sores money to be had also,
So you would also have criticised T E Lawrence for wearing a kuffiyeh, or British troops in the Middle East during the 1920s, and described them as “Palestinian-style headdresses”? Intifada, which means “a shaking off”, is a necessary and rightful response to fanatical Zionists’ lethal oppression of the Palestinian people. Expressing solidarity with a suffering people and calling for the end of that suffering is what students have been doing since the 1960s. It’s pleasing that it angers rightwing and liberal commenters such as you, because that means it’s beginning to work.
Its soooooooo interesting FAIR (and media in general) is more focused on scrutinizing “Jewish people” in the current public discourse rather than Hamas, which perpetrated the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Given that it’s Zionists who are gleefully, joyfully inflicting hideous injuries and death by the thousand on the Palestinian people, not Hamas, it is indeed right that FAIR should be examining the role of the corporate media in assisting those heinous offences. That you – like the State of Israel – pretend that Zionists represent all Jewish people, to the delight of the far right, is a problem you should address.
True and related, I can’t wait to see the results of future historians studying why a bunch of purple-haired non-binary atheists are bowing to Allah at UCLA which I saw on Twitter earlier today. Its a strange world we live in and we are back to blaming the Jews for all the worlds evils.
That you still perpetrate the lie that the apartheid, Zionist State of Israel somehow represents all Jewish people is a problem you need to address, and soon. Few non-Zionists still believe it, not least because so many Jewish people have publicly declared it’s not true. What does the colour of someone’s hair or their gender have to do with the righteous nature of their demand to call Israel to account for its vast array of heinous offences against the Palestinian people?