National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), an umbrella organization with multiple chapters across US campuses, shared a message last week written by alleged anti-Israel activists at Columbia University which states: “Divestment [against Israel] is not an incremental goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and the American empire itself. To divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.” NSJP’s post was deleted shortly after it was posted for unknown reasons, yet screenshots were saved and are still available online.
The post used similar language to that of a post on the Telegram channel of a radical violent group formerly known as “Palestine Action US” recently rebranded as “Unity of Fields” (UoF).This group describes itself as a US-based “militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of imperialism,” and claimed responsibility for a wide array of vandalistic actions across the US, including placing dog feces near the entrance to the AIPAC offices in Washington DC, releasing cockroaches and worms in hotels and shops accused of being ‘complicit’ with Israel, painting the Alma Mater statue in Columbia in red paint, vandalizing banks and plants across the US, and more.
The group is apparently named after a doctrine led by the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which called during the 5-7 August 2022 Operation Breaking Dawn for a “unity of the battlefields” between armed Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel proper and abroad. The group’s Instagram account was just recently removed by META, which they denounced in a message on their Telegram channel on Friday, rejecting the fact that “a week after launching, [it] has already been suspended by zionazi Instagram.”
Who are NSJP?
The relationship between NSJP and Unity of Fields is unclear. However, this is not the first time in which the renowned student organization promotes violence. In April 2024, at the height of the student encampment endeavor, NSJP helped instate a Telegram channel to unite and coordinate efforts of the movement, which included sharing a dossier instructing how to violently obstruct police officers from doing their job, including pushing officers and breaking their grip, forcefully opening the doors of police cars, and carrying handcuff keys and wire cutters to release suspects.
NSJP was founded in the mid-1990s, one of their founders being Hatem Bazian, now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, who this year called for an intifada in the USA, and is deemed to have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Bazian and NSJP are both part of a list of anti-Israel actors against which a civil lawsuit was filed by families of victims of the October 7 massacre, for damages under the federal anti-terrorism act.
NSJP is apparently not an officially registered NGO in the US, and its hierarchical structure is non-transparent; though local chapters in multiple universities across the US have been found to receive some funding from universities, and the New York-based WESPAC Foundation has been found to serve as NSJP’s fiscal sponsor through which funds are donated and collected.
The group has had many collaborations with pro-terror groups such as the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and has taken a hardline attitude even towards elected officials who lead an anti-Israel policy, such as Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, deeming them “our enemies.”
“SJP has openly supported the October 7 attack on Israel, and over the past decade broke every rule on our universities”, said the pro-Israel campus organization Students Supporting Israel (SSI) in a new statement. SSI also called for universities across North America “to ban SJP which undermines every American value and principle as they announced war on the United States”.
Notably, many US-based groups who call for the destruction of the US, including NSJP, have recently turned to Telegram to coordinate their actions, since META’s Instagram and Facebook tend to shut their activity. During last year’s campus riots and encampments, many anonymous “campus channels” popped up on Telegram where they give instructions to anti-Israel protesters, which include incitement of violence against police officers and law enforcement officials.
Due to Telegram’s settings that allow channels’ administrators to remain anonymous, users can create and manage channels where they disseminate instructions and information to thousands of followers. The lack of familiarity with Telegram among the American public and the US police may contribute to these groups’ plans and mobilization “under the radar.”