April 20, 2024

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters across North America have risen in defense of the Palestinian people, establishing autonomous zones on several university campuses to assert their strength and demands in the face of severe university repression. Today, April 20th, 2024, National Students for Justice in Palestine announces the Popular University for Gaza, a coordinated pressure campaign against university administrations and trustees to immediately divest from the israeli state. After hundreds of student government resolutions, meetings with administrators, and protests on campus, and following months of increased targeting, harassment, and arrests, the students are ramping up the pressure. We will not back down; we will reclaim our universities until administrators comply with our demands.

Columbia University President Shafik’s cowardly testimony to Congress heralds an unfortunate shift: university administrators will surrender to the pro-israel lobby and allied right-wing, selling out the Student Movement to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of the state and the public at large. Recent escalations have forced administrators into a fragile position: catering to the corporate model while maintaining the educational institution's legitimacy and public image is unsustainable in the face of mass student action. The Popular University for Gaza will make the administration’s position completely untenable.

We understand that universities no longer operate as places of learning but instead as for-profit entities, managing billions of dollars of endowment funds to increase the university’s wealth. These vast corporations are controlled by boards of trustees who not only disregard the lives of the Palestinian people and the will of their students but actively threaten them. We assert our willingness and undeniable ability to dismantle the system itself, forming a mass of students, faculty, and staff who choose their dedication to Palestinian liberation over their image, reputation, and future careers.

Palestine has made the battle lines on campus clearer than ever. In the footsteps of our comrades at Rutgers-New Brunswick SJP, Tufts SJP, Columbia SJP, Yalies4Palestine, and many more, SJP chapters across the nation will seize the university and force the administration to divest for the people of Gaza! We will not stop until our universities disclose all information related to their investment portfolios, divest from genocide and colonial complicity, and defend Gaza, Palestine, and all students, staff, and faculty who stand up to Zionist ideology at all levels of the university.

Disclose, Divest, Defend Gaza! All power to the Student Movement!

Steering Committee, National Students for Justice in Palestine