Jews: The real students for Palestinian justice
With the new school year upon us, this is a message for pro-Israel students on campus: You are the real “Students for Justice in Palestine.”
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is the preeminent anti-Israel group on American college campuses. It was they who primarily ran the infamous encampments in the spring. SJP is a harmful organization, but you have to hand it to them, they do at least have a good name. Unfortunately, that self-appointed title as the defender of justice is wholly inaccurate.
It has long been argued that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman, and was not even an empire. It might similarly be said that SPJ in Palestine is neither student-driven nor seeking justice; it’s also not concerned with the residents of the region that some call Palestine. By contrast, pro-Israel students check all of those boxes.
Let’s examine the words, one by one.
Let us take the word students, which these activists claim to be.
While the activists involved in the pro-Israel campus movement are students, many of the activists involved in SJP are not students at all. Rather, they are shady, quasi-professional agitators. Impervious to university sanction or discipline with no homework to complete and no exams to cram for, the non-student ranks of SJP can dedicate themselves, full-bore, to sewing discord and unrest while brazenly violating university policies without fear of reprimand.
These off-campus agitators borrow upon the legacy of pure student activism, as they cynically invoke the legacy of campus protest movements to advance their extreme, inorganic agenda. Pro-Israel campus clubs are entirely composed of enrolled students and reflect the feelings of a distinct, organic stakeholder group among the broader student body.
While SJP claims the mantle of the defenders and seekers of justice, pro-Israel students seek genuine justice.
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What does “justice” look like in the context of SJP? Given the group’s longstanding and well-documented history of supporting, excusing and condoning Hamas terrorism, we can surmise that wanton murder and kidnapping is part of the “justice” SJP claims to promote.
We can also gather that for SJP, “justice” means the wholesale destruction of Israel. Indeed, its chapters routinely refuse dialogue even with local Jewish groups on campus. Their refusal to “normalize” relations with their peers and classmates evidences their utter eliminationism when it comes to the State of Israel itself.
What about “justice” for Palestinians? Well, SJP has consistently failed to criticize Hamas’s murder of Palestinian political opponents, its open oppression of Palestinian women and the group’s tendency to throw Palestinians convicted of religious offenses off of tall buildings. We may conclude all this, too, fits within the perverse SJP conception of “justice.”
By way of comparison, pro-Israel campus clubs invariably support dignity and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians, while celebrating diversity, empowered women, religious pluralism and thriving minority communities within Israel.
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Let’s consider the elephant in the room: the use of the word “Palestine” in SJP’s name.
This may throw off some pro-Israel readers. In some pro-Israel circles, “Palestine” is not preferred. Palestinian solidarity advocates, for their part, refuse to say “Israel” or “Israeli” at all — instead referring to the state as “the Zionist entity” and to its citizens simply as “colonizers.”
Yes, Palestine was a retronym applied to Judea by the Romans.
•Yes, Palestine invokes the ancient and long-extinct Philistines (to whom present-day Palestinians bear no connection).
•Yes, Israel is a state that must be recognized and deserves to be called by its chosen name.
But like it or not, old place names die hard. Mumbai and Bombay. Myanmar and Burma. Istanbul and Constantinople (there’s a song or two about that one). Many well-meaning, reasonable, intelligent people call the region, the whole region, comprising Israel and the Palestinian areas, Palestine. For a long while, so did the early Zionists. Palestine is often used as a primarily geographic, not political, descriptor.
Differing names for the same area ought not obfuscate the reality: that pro-Israel students seek justice for all those in the region be they Arab or Ethiopian, Israeli or Palestinian, Christian, Muslim, Bahai, Druze or Jew.
Were pro-Israel groups on campus to start self-identifying as “The Real Students for Justice in Palestine,” I’m certain that SJP wouldn’t appreciate it. There might well be some Old West-style, “There’s no room in this town for the both of us” type showdown —a showdown that pro-Israel students should embrace.
Any open debate between “The Real Students for Justice in Palestine” and SJP would readily expose which group is composed of students, which group possesses a legitimate conception of justice and which group seeks the well-being of all people in the region some know as Palestine.
Julian Ross Markowitz is a marketing and public relations executive based in Los Angeles.
