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.

Odds & Ends

???? Palestinian Youth Movement: ‘Demands for media workers in this moment’

???????? Palestinians in the U.S. are under attack

???? 20 Brown students were arrested for holding a sit-in in support of a ceasefire. The group refused to leave the school until university president Christina Paxson committed to taking steps to divest its endowment from any companies profiting off the attacks on Gaza.

???????? Palestinian-American author and physician Fady Joudah on Democracy Now:

We have had more than 50 or 60 people in our extended family killed by Israeli airstrikes. Some of them are in-laws of one of my cousins, and others are different families. Others were also killed by the dozens in one strike. One particular story is of a woman I knew since when I was a child in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And her brother’s grandkids were killed because Israel bombed the house next to them, and in the bombing, one of the walls — one of the walls of their house fell off on them. And they were sleeping, and it killed the three grandchildren and the parents. And only the grandfather survives. So this is also a different spectrum of what we hear about the children being the only survivors in entire families. There are also stories of elderly people who have survived 1948, the Nakba, and/or 1967, and they’re the only ones who are surviving or who have survived their families.

We try to keep in touch with some family members through social media or WhatsApp or what have you, but you know there’s no guarantee that there is regular access or regular communication. You can send a message and maybe get a response the next day. In the beginning of the war, we could get a few phone calls in. But the stuff now is just very difficult to access many people.

✉️ Alumni of Biden’s 2020 campaign have sent the president a letter calling on the administration to back a ceasefire, deescalate the situation, end unconditional military aid to Israel, and “take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this devastation.”

“There will be no justice, peace, or security for Palestinians or Israelis without dismantling the status quo of the past 75 years,” it reads. “As the President of the United States, you have power to change the course of history, and the responsibility to save lives right now. We are counting on you to take that power and responsibility seriously and to meet this moment with the urgency it demands. If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”

???? A new Brookings poll shows that Israel has lost much of the U.S. support it gained immediately after the Hamas attack. Here’s Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami summarizing some of the data.

“In the latest poll, the number of respondents wanting the United States to take Israel’s side dropped across the partisan divide. This was coupled with a slight increase in the number wanting the United States to lean toward the Palestinians,” he points out.. “Among Democrats, support for Israel dropped from 30.9% in the third week of October to 20.5% in early November, while support for Palestinians rose from 9.2% to 12.9%. During the same two-week period, the gap between Republicans wanting the United States to lean toward Israel and those wanting the United States to lean toward the Palestinians shrank from 70.7% to 60.8%; it likewise fell from 32.2% to 27.7% among independents. For all respondents overall, the gap decreased from 36.8% to 29.1%. At the same time, there was a rise across the board in the percentage of respondents who want the United States to take neither side, 53.5% overall, including 65.5% of Democrats, 31.6% of Republicans, and 57.5% of independents.”

“The two polls that we have conducted so far since the start of the war in Israel and Gaza show the biggest changes in attitudes that we have ever measured from poll to poll in years of tracking American public attitudes on the Israeli-Palestinian issue — and these changes are almost certainly related to the ongoing war,” he writes later. “As this war continues, grabbing significant national and international attention, attitudes may remain fluid. The question is: will some segments of the public form a hardened view based on what they observe that will outlast the war, making this war a paradigm-forming event for some Americans? This question remains open, but what we find so far is that much of the initial bump in support for Israel that the American public exhibited early after the Hamas attack has not survived the reactions to the Israeli attacks in Gaza. We will continue to track these attitudes in the weeks ahead.”

???????? The ADC’s Abed Ayoub on Twitter: “5 US Citizens from Pennsylvania are seriously injured after their bus out of Gaza was bombed. The family was on the State Department list of evacuees, and followed instructions. Your very own citizens are victims.”

???????? Another 200 people showed up outside Rep. Yvette Clarke’s (D-NY) office today to call on her to back a ceasefire.

???????? Protesters temporarily shut down Colt’s arms manufacturing plant in West Hartford, CT for supplying weapons to Israel.

???????? When asked about the possibility of a ceasefire today Biden said, “None, no possibility.”

“I like that he’s too old and tired to be able to sell this,” writes Will Sloan on Twitter. “A Clinton, a Bush, or an Obama would’ve deliver this with a lot of brow-furrowing and hedging and “I feel your pain”-ing, but it’s just pure sociopathy from Joe, which is much more clarifying.”

????️ Rep. Cori Bush talks ceasefire with Alex Kane on Jewish Currents‘ podcast.

???? Very strong statement from Queers in Palestine:

We refuse the instrumentalization of our queerness, our bodies, and the violence we face as queer people to demonize and dehumanize our communities, especially in service of imperial and genocidal acts. We refuse that Palestinian sexuality and Palestinian attitudes towards diverse sexualities become parameters for assigning humanity to any colonized society. We deserve life because we are human, with the multitude of our imperfections, and not because of our proximity to colonial modes of liberal humanity. We refuse colonial and imperialist tactics that seek to alienate us from our society and alienate our society from us, on the basis of our queerness. We are fighting interconnected systems of oppression, including patriarchy and capitalism, and our dreams of autonomy, community, and liberation are inherently tied to our desire for self-determination. No queer liberation can be achieved with settler-colonization, and no queer solidarity can be fostered if it stands blind to the racialized, capitalist, fascist, and imperial structures that dominate us.

We call on queer and feminist activists and groups around the world to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their resistance to displacement, land theft, and ethnic cleansing and their struggle for the liberation of their lands and futures from Zionist settler-colonialism. This call cannot be answered only by sharing statements and signing letters but by an active engagement with decolonial and liberatory struggles in Palestine and around the globe.

???????? From The Intercept: The Biden administration put out a three-page list of arms that they’re sending to Ukraine, but the information on weapons sent to Israel was just one sentence.

???????? ‘Senate should confirm new US ambassador to Israel ‘tomorrow,’ former US envoy says’

???????? Protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace showed up outside Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s office calling on him to back a ceasefire.

“We sang, spoke, and lifted up the memories of our ancestors as we loudly proclaimed, never again for anyone,” tweeted the group’s Atlanta chapter. “Jon Ossoff, as the first Jewish Senator from GA, we call on you to listen to your Jewish constituents. We refuse to allow genocide to be carried out in our name.”

????️ On Tuesday protesters demanding a ceasefire showed up outside Cambridge, MA polling stations where Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren usually votes, but she never showed.

????️ Ahead of Veteran’s Day Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) held a press conference with veterans calling for a ceasefire.

???????? Palestinians and their allies are protesting a Biden appearance in Chicago today:

The U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)-Chicago is a co-leader of the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine (CJP), and today will be CJP’s eighth mass mobilization of Palestinians and supporters since the Al-Aqsa Flood began on October 7th. Tens of thousands of protesters have descended on downtown Chicago every week to demand that Israel stop its killing, war crimes, and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank; and to expose cowardly U.S. legislators in Illinois – Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Sean Casten, Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, and others – for their complicity in the killings.

USPCN has also organized sit-ins to shut down both Schakowsky’s office in Skokie (she has not reopened it since) and Casten’s office in Glen Ellyn. Just two days ago, USPCN also organized, with 9th Congressional District constituents, a three-hour shut down of a major thoroughfare in Evanston in front of Schakowsky’s house, in protest of her support of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. 

Joe Biden, the “leader of the free world,” is the target of CJP’s protest this time, and plans have been in place for this rally and march ever since he announced this trip to Chicago 10 days ago. 

????️ Don Samuels will attempt to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in her Democratic primary again. You might recall that AIPAC secretly spent $350,000 on the race in 2022 and Samuels later complained he didn’t get enough support from pro-Israel groups.

???????? A Florida lawmaker openly called for genocide this week. State Rep. Angie Nixon passionately begged for a ceasefire on the House floor, wondering how many dead Palestinians would be enough. To which GOP State Rep. Michelle Salzman yelled back, “All of them.”

???????? ‘GW, Palestinian existence is not ‘terrorism”

???????? I was in Washington for last weekend’s massive protest. Here’s my report from DC and a blog I did on what I saw.

Stay safe out there,

Michael