NSJP 'Antisemitic Force' Active At U.S. Colleges

Despite terror ties, SJP 'antisemitic force' active at Harvard, Columbia

BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

The National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is an “antisemitic force on campus,” according to a new 96-page report about the organization. 

The document, published by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in advance of NSJP’s annual conference being held November 1-3, tracks the history of the organization and highlights how NSJP “promotes antisemitic rhetoric” and is “associated [with] violence and terror, ideologically and politically.”
 

The study, titled “National Students for Justice in Palestine and the Promotion of Hate and Antisemitism on the University Campus: The Threat to Academic Freedom,” is authored by Charles Asher Small, David Patterson and Glen Feder.

“For centuries, the most violent antisemitic attacks on Jews, including expulsions and pogroms, were rationalized by a need to bring justice to other groups,” said ISGAP chairman Natan Sharansky. “Today, the new antisemitism is brought to the world of academia under the pretext of justice for Palestinians.”

In the report’s foreword, Sharansky says that demonization, delegitimization and double standards against Jews are now being applied to the Jewish collective in the State of Israel.

“All those who value both justice and academic freedom should be resistant to it,” he said.

The report cites dozens of incidents, mainly on social networks, in which traditional antisemitic tropes are used by NSJP local chapters.

In 2017, for example, Students Supporting Israel at City College in NY described on their Facebook page a reaction by SJP members to the visit of Dani Dayan, the Consul General of Israel in New York. According to the post, “Comparisons to Hitler and Nazis were hurled by students… Rather than listening to what the speaker had to say, they put their antisemitic hate on blast, demonizing the Jewish State of Israel and all who would support it.” 

Stony Brook University’s SJP also had multiple inflammatory posts, including one that noted, “Together we can create a domino effect to ensure Zionism is an extinct ideology.”

Small told The Jerusalem Post that within the Jewish community there is now widespread understanding that antisemitism is on the rise, aided by recent reports, such as one published this year by the Anti-Defamation League that found the US Jewish community experienced “near-historic levels of antisemitism in 2018.” He noted that on college campuses, as he believes his report proves, NSJP chapters are a big part of this problem.

Beyond traditional antisemitism, the report offers examples of how NSJP demonizes Israel, applies double standards to the Jewish state and even labels Jewish students and other Israel activists as racists, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. All these behaviors, ISGAP explains in the report, run contrary to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, as well.

NSJP at its annual conferences has hosted terrorists, including Rasmea Odeh as its keynote speaker in 2015. Odeh perpetrated a terrorist attack in 1969 at a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two Hebrew University students. She later immigrated to the United States but was caught and deported in 2017.

NSJP was founded in 2010 at a forum that was sponsored in part by the BDS National Committee, which is known to include multiple members who are designated as terror organizations by the United States. Its primary constituent, according to the report, is the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF), a coalition of member groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.