If you sat in on a weekly meeting of the University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club last spring, you’d likely have found between five and ten attendees. If you sit in on a meeting this spring, you’ll find closer to 20 people.
SJP has survived several challenges, including a brief hiatus during COVID-19. A handful of students, including graduate student Batya Kline ’23, revitalized the club as the pandemic receded. The leaders of the club were committed, but sparse membership and attendance limited the group’s ability to effect the changes that they wanted to see.
“We had such a struggle to get new people into the group,” Kline said. “We put on a lot of great events with the capacity that we had, but they were mostly just political education.”
This all changed last fall. The Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, and the ongoing violence against Palestinians that has followed, has brought in a new wave of support. Now, with a larger support base and more urgent circumstances, the group’s members not only lead political education events but consistently organize direct actions including rallies, die-ins, and vigils on behalf of the Palestinian cause. One of their central goals is for the University to divest from companies that they believe are funding the Israeli state’s killing of Palestinian civilians.
“We have very much expanded,” Kline said.“[Some] of us have been involved for around two years, [or] for longer. But this year, we have folks who have been [involved] just for a month or a few months, and they’re taking on responsibilities and doing a lot of amazing work. So it’s really cool to have new people in the group.”
According to Aurora Guecia ’25, a long-time leader of the group, this strength in numbers has made it easier for the club to carry out more significant, large-scale work.
“We’ve seen a really big change in what our capacity is for organizing,” Guecia said. “It’s really hard to put things together when only three people have all these responsibilities, but now that we have so many more people coming, we can delegate what everyone’s doing, and have everybody participate in different ways to make bigger events or actions.”
The increase in membership has also given the club’s leaders the opportunity to put current events into historical context and educate those who knew little about the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians before last October.
“We’re using this moment to kind of teach people about the ongoing Nakba [mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians] and what Palestinians see as a continuity, but people who are just following the news in itself, don’t see it,” Fiona O’Reilly ’26, another leader, said. “We do these political education events to kind of give more of a background and show how connected all of this is.”
It has also enabled them to expand their organizing beyond the campus context.
“We’ve set it up as our goal to be working with and be in solidarity with the community, in Connecticut,” Kline said. “And so we’re very much doing that. As a part of a few coalitions that are formed in Connecticut, we go to those events, and they help us out with ours.”
Yet, while the rise in members has increased SJP’s capacity significantly, the club still faces challenges, including pushback and hostility from other students on campus.
“What I have mostly experienced is individual people reaching out and harassing me because I’m a Jewish person, being like, ‘You’re a self-hating Jew, you’re making all of us unsafe,’” Kline said. “And because I’m a queer person, they say, ‘You should go to Gaza so that Hamas can kill you.’”
The group is also frustrated by the University’s lack of transparency and responsibility, especially in regard to their demands for divestment.
“We have no idea what the endowment is invested in, which is obviously very convenient for the University,” O’Reilly said. “It’s hard for us to make calls for divestment when we have no specific idea of which companies the University is invested in.”
The club’s members argue that this lack of clarity is purposeful and suspicious.
“If we’re calling for divestment, and they were actually not invested in any of these companies, wouldn’t it make sense for them to just be like, ‘Oh, we’re not actually invested in them?’” Uday Narayanan ’24, a longtime SJP member, said. “Their silence speaks volumes.”
However, Kline and other members maintain that they have privilege compared to other universities and colleges, where repression of pro-Palestine student activism is far more intense.
“I really do feel grateful for the campus climate in a lot of ways,” Kline said. “Looking at Columbia and Harvard, where students were slandered on the side of a truck and called antisemites…. I think some of that does happen here, but we have been incredibly lucky.”
The members agree that they feel a responsibility to use this privilege to their advantage in their efforts.
“I remember [President] Michael Roth [’78] questioning the fact that we were witnessing a genocide from Middletown, and weaponizing our relative privilege and saying, ‘You know, we’re so far from that—[why do] you feel it so personally, that this is happening?’” O’Reilly said. “But I feel like that’s exactly why we should be organizing: because we have so much safety, relative to [what] other campuses—but also obviously, mainly Palestinians in the U.S. and in Palestine—are facing.”
The group’s members are eager to maintain and build upon group momentum, especially as many face graduation in the coming few years. They hope that their work will carry on via underclassmen, as well as supportive faculty, including members of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine and the ad-hoc network. They also hope to continue expanding their work beyond the university and collaborating with other groups with the same cause. This work, they say, will still be necessary even after a potential ceasefire.
“I’m just very hopeful that our capacity is just going to continue to grow and grow. And that hopefully, we can make some more structural changes at the University specifically, achieving some form of divestment from the top where…that has never been done before,” Kline said.
Just last week, the club led a host of events and actions for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), including a vigil, a group visit to the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Conn., a cooking workshop, as well as a trip to a larger, Connecticut-wide protest.
On Friday, the last day of IAW, the group led a rally during WesFest, the University’s three-day event for admitted students. A large group of students gathered next to large banners while prospective students sat nearby. They chanted, banged on drums, and heard speeches from several members of the group, who addressed the prospective students directly.
“We are excited for you to come here and be anti-Zionists,” Kline proclaimed during her speech.
The crowd of current students cheered in unison.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a quote to Jesus Martinez Montes ’25. The quote was from Uday Narayanan ’24. The article was updated to reflect this on April 29, 2024.
Lula Konner can be reached at lkonner@wesleyan.edu.