Students for Justice in Palestine

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a decentralized network of anti-Zionist campus chapters, coordinated loosely by a national steering body, that organizes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns and campus protest against Israel, and that responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre not with condemnation but with a toolkit calling it a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” It is not a single legal entity: individual chapters raise their own money, write their own bylaws and answer to no central authority, which is precisely what has let the network expand to hundreds of chapters while evading the financial disclosure rules a registered nonprofit would face.

Who founded it and who runs it

SJP was founded in 1993 at the University of California, Berkeley, by graduate student Osama Qasem, with early organizing help from lecturer Hatem Bazian. Bazian went on to co-found American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and chair its board, and AMP has functioned ever since as SJP’s closest institutional partner: it speaks at SJP campus events, republishes SJP statements, and runs the training seminars that produce new chapter organizers. A national coordinating body, National SJP (NSJP), formed the following year, 1994, run by a rotating steering committee of student volunteers rather than paid staff. NSJP does not hold 501(c)(3) status itself; instead the WESPAC Foundation, a Westchester, New York nonprofit, serves as its fiscal sponsor, receiving tax-deductible donations on the network’s behalf. That structure is why a federal judge in 2025 ordered AMP to disclose its donor base: without registration, the money trail otherwise stays dark.

What it does

SJP chapters organize the recognizable machinery of campus anti-Israel activism: BDS divestment resolutions in student government, “apartheid week” programming, rallies, and, since spring 2024, the encampments that spread across dozens of US universities. NSJP itself claimed credit for 127 encampments and the mobilization of “over 1,000,000 students” in a December 2024 report. Some of this is unremarkable campus advocacy that any honest article should concede is protected activity: students have a right to protest Israeli policy, and not every SJP member endorses the network’s most extreme rhetoric. The record below is about the organization’s institutional output, not about every individual who has attended one of its events.

Where and how large

By 2024 NSJP reported over 350 affiliated chapters, with independent counts putting active chapters closer to 275 across the United States and Canada. The network is concentrated at large public and private research universities, including flashpoint chapters at Columbia, UCLA, George Washington University, Rutgers and the University of Michigan. Funding for individual chapters flows from student activity fees, campus fundraisers, and grants routed through WESPAC: documented grants include $25,000 from the Solidaire Network in 2024, $25,000 from the Headwaters Foundation for Justice to SJP-Minnesota in 2023, and $20,000 from the Sparkplug Foundation to National SJP in 2022, on top of undisclosed AMP support.

What it said after October 7

Within days of the October 7 attack, National SJP distributed a “Day of Resistance” toolkit calling on chapters to hold coordinated rallies on October 12, 2023. The toolkit described the Hamas assault as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” framed the killings as legitimate “armed confrontation with the oppressors,” and called for “dismantling Zionism” on American campuses, days before the death toll of roughly 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, was even final. This is the pivot point of the organization’s modern record: it is the moment SJP moved from advocacy group to an organization whose national leadership publicly celebrated a massacre, and it is the language universities cited when they moved against the network. The rhetoric has continued: in October 2025, following Hamas’s extrajudicial executions of Palestinians it accused of collaboration, NSJP issued a statement declaring “death to all collaborators.” Individual chapters have echoed the same posture: a Columbia SJP account posted a quote from Leila Khaled, the PFLP hijacker, in December 2024, and a chapter hosted Mohammad el-Mezain in April 2024, a figure convicted in the federal Holy Land Foundation case for funneling money to Hamas.

The response: bans, suspensions and the terror-designated NGOs it echoes

The Day of Resistance toolkit produced the fastest wave of institutional discipline in the network’s history. Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter in November 2023; George Washington University and Rutgers followed in December 2023; Brandeis banned its chapter outright, the first outright ban by a US university. Florida’s state university system ordered its public universities to deactivate SJP chapters that same fall, citing NSJP’s own materials as “material support” for a Foreign Terrorist Organization under federal law, a designation Hamas has held since 1997. Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce built its “Columbia in Crisis” hearing record in April 2024 substantially around SJP’s campus role. NGO Monitor has separately traced SJP’s chapter network into the orbit of the six Palestinian NGOs Israel designated as fronts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the same PFLP whose 1970 hijackings and 1972 Lod airport massacre sit in that group’s own record; SJP itself has not been designated a terrorist organization by any government, and that distinction matters, but the overlapping personnel and messaging between SJP, AMP and PFLP-linked groups is the pattern watchdogs keep documenting, the same pattern that produced a national toolkit calling a massacre of roughly 1,200 people a “historic win” before the bodies were even counted.