Students For Justice In Palestine Accidentally Boycotts Self

Those chapters will be hamstrung in their efforts to reestablish themselves as members of the organization in good standing.

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, July 13 – An anti-Israel student group sowed confusion today when the chapter president announced that, in what appeared to be a technical foul-up, the organization’s regional delegates had somehow voted to boycott themselves.

Students for Justice in Palestine, a group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel campus activists, held a conference for leaders of all Illinois chapters over the weekend to coordinate campaign strategies and discuss recruitment. SJP is formally active on two dozen campuses in the state, with informal associations at many more. Representatives of the official chapters gathered at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where they took votes on a number of issues facing the organization, most of which revolved around the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) strategy of undermining Israeli legitimacy through comparisons with South African Apartheid. However, the minutes of the proceedings show that the delegates voted unanimously to boycott their parent organization, a move that has generated anger, confusion, and frustration among the movement’s adherents locally and nationally.

According to attendees, a vote on policy may have been poorly phrased, but SJP’s bylaws do not allow a repeal of any motion that has been adopted at a statewide or regional conference unless delegates from the same chapters convene to do so. The belated release of the vote results means that more than half the delegates have since traveled elsewhere for the summer intercession, or are committed to summer jobs or internships that do not allow them to allocate another weekend to reconvene. In the meantime, those chapters will be hamstrung in their efforts to reestablish themselves as members of the organization in good standing.

One factor in that difficulty is the suspicious eyes other chapters and regions within SJP will cast on Illinois, given the results of the vote. The other, perhaps more damaging, factor, is that the boycott prevents those chapters from coordinating any effort to reconvene and repeal the motion, since doing so would by definition violate the boycott, as it would require access to, and use of, SJP resource and contact information.

Student leaders remain at odds over how the mishap occurred, but all agree that trading blame would not be a constructive response to the crisis. “What’s done is done – the only room for resentment in our movement is the kind directed at those fascist Zionists,” said University of Chicago chapter president Owen Gohl. “What we need now is a way to move forward – I, personally, favor ignoring or denying the legitimacy of the vote, which would be in keeping with our movement’s modus operandi in general.”

Others favor a more legally sound approach, which would involve setting up a new organization not subject to the boycott of SJP institutions and services, and then merging with the parent organization. The downside of that option, however, is that SJP, like the cause it represents, has been conditioned not to compromise, and letting go of the Students for Justice in Palestine flag, however briefly, would mean a concession to reality. “Concessions are not for Palestinians, or pro-Palestinians, to make,” noted Springfield College junior Arown Petard. “Concessions are what we wrest from the Zionists through uncompromising resistance.”