The Shift: Brandeis becomes first school to ban Students for Justice in Palestine on campus
It’s hard to keep up with all the McCarthyite backlash working its way through U.S. universities these days, but what’s currently happening to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) seems especially notable.
Last month Florida Governor Ron DeSantis coordinated with the state university system chancellor Ray Rodrigues to crack down on the campus organization. Rodrigues sent a letter to Florida universities claiming that the groups should be “deactivated” over their alleged support for terrorism.
The argument here is that National SJP sent out a toolkit that referred to the Hamas attack as “the resistance” and said that “Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” DeSantis and Rodrigues suggest that this is a felony because it knowingly provides material support to a designated terrorist organization.
In his letter Rodrigues says he will keep working with DeSantis, “to ensure we are all using all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups.”
Shortly after the DeSantis move, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Brandeis Center sent a letter to 200 schools calling on them to investigate their SJP chapters “for potential violations of 18 USC 2339A and B, and its state equivalents, that is, for potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has consistently smeared anti-Zionists as antisemites and has even compared anti-Zionist Jews to white supremacists in recent weeks. The Brandeis Center is a pro-Israel lawfare organization that aims to stifle Palestine activism via an unrelenting bombardment of dubious civil rights lawsuits. The group is run by former Trump official Kenneth Marcus.
Dozens of pro-Israel, Jewish groups also sent their own letters to universities. This one went to 500 schools and called for “moral accountability and official punishment” against SJP for alleged glorification of the Hamas attacks.
Last week, we saw the first private university ban the group on campus. Brandeis University sent a letter to the school’s SJP chapter informing them that the organization had been banned. The students were completely blindsided by the news, as there was no public investigation, and the group was never consulted or informed this could be a possibility.
A copy of the letter was obtained by Jewish Insider. “This decision was not made lightly, as Brandeis is dedicated to upholding free speech principles, which have been codified in Brandeis’ Principles of Free Speech and Free _expression_,” it reads. “However, those Principles note that ‘The freedom to debate and discuss ideas does not mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish, or however they wish,’ and that, ‘…the university may restrict _expression_…that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment..”
“The National SJP has called on its chapters to engage in conduct that supports Hamas in its call for the violent elimination of Israel and the Jewish people,” it continues. “These tactics are not protected by the University’s Principles. As a result, the University made the decision that the Brandeis chapter of the National SJP must be unrecognized and will no longer be eligible to receive funding, be permitted to conduct activities on campus, or use the Brandeis name and logo in promoting itself or its activities, including through social media channels.”
On the same day that Brandeis sent the letter, the school’s president Ronald Liebowitz published an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe insisting that “antisemitic” campus groups should be shut down. What constitutes antisemitism here? Calls for Palestinian freedom. Liebowitz claims that chanting “From the river to the sea” or “intifada, intifada” somehow, “echoes the Nazi strategy of killing all Jews.”
It’s certainly difficult to read the Op-Ed and believe that Brandeis’s decision wasn’t made lightly.
I spoke with the president of Brandeis SJP yesterday. They asked to keep their name out of the newsletter.
The SJP president told me that the group has remained fairly quiet since the Hamas attack, have never mentioned Hamas in a public statement, and hadn’t even held any meetings. There was a vigil for Palestine scheduled on Monday, but it was promptly canceled after they received the letter. This suggests that the group’s alleged support for terrorism boils down to them lighting candles in memory of the people Israel has killed.
“We have never been told we were under investigation in any way,” said the president. “We never notified about anything. The email came as a shock to us. It came from student affairs, it didn’t come from a student union or a department. It came from higher up and no one had a say in this.”
The president also said the administration probably didn’t need a lot of pushing to reach its conclusion.
“Brandeis has always been unsupportive of Palestinian students and one of our goals is to provide a safe environment for Palestinians on campus,” they said. “If they want to target Palestinian students then they might as well silence the only organization that supports them.”
“This is just showing that the United States is not supportive of Palestinian existence in any way” they continued. “The entire goal of governments, institutions, and organizations is to silence any Palestinian voice and dehumanize the Palestinian struggle. Florida is asking schools to ban SJP chapters. If it starts with SJP, where is it going to stop?”
Congressional staffers hold vigil
There are obviously heroic actions around the clock now, but I found one particularly interesting yesterday.
Over 100 congressional staffers held a vigil outside the Capitol Building calling for a ceasefire.
“We are congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, and we are no longer comfortable staying silent. We were horrified by the brutal October 7th attacks on Israeli civilians, and we are horrified by the overwhelming response by the Israeli government that has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” the statement from the vigil’s organizing group, Congressional Staff for Ceasefire, read.
Almost two-thirds of Americans support a ceasefire, but the amount of congress members who back one remains sickeningly small. These are the people who answer the phone calls of the constituents and hear their frustration. We’ve also seen former staffers of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and John Fetterman publicly call on them to act.
There seems to be a generational component at work here too. These staffers tend to be younger than their bosses. We see the same thing playing out at campuses across the country, where pro-Israel administrations are consistently clashing with their pro-Palestine students.
Polling shows that young people support a ceasefire at a much higher rate than other Americans. A CNN poll taken shortly after the Hamas attack found that just 27% of Americans aged 18-34 think the siege on Gaza was justified. Contrast that with Americans over the age of 65 who think it’s justified: a whopping 81%.
A more recent Quinnipiac poll found that about half of Americans approved of Israel’s response to the attack. 18-34? That number drops down to 32%.
None of this is surprising for those following polling on the issue in recent years. There’s a lot of surveys to choose from, but let’s take this 2021 Jewish Electorate Institute as an example.
The organization polled Jewish voters on their attitudes towards Israel. 38% of Jews under 40 said Israel’s an apartheid state, 43% think Israel’s racism is comparable to the United States, and 33% thought that the country was carrying out a genocide against Palestinian people. One wonders what those numbers look like now.