SJP at Pace University

Written by Liliana Ingham

I started the SJP at my school unofficially in December of 2023, with a handful of classmates from my gender and race class. After October 7, we talked about and watched the horrors unfold against the Palestinian people on our phones under our intact roofs with food, water, and safety- a luxury to Palestinians.

My professor showed our class the documentary 1948: Creation and Catastrophe, knowing that nobody had received a non-Western education on the Israel-Palestine “conflict.” The president of our SJP is a young Palestinian woman, whose almost entire family has been murdered by the state of Israel in Gaza since October 7th. She found our club during its commencement before we even thought it was possible to become an officially recognized, student run organization. She immediately reached out to express not only her urgent want to join, but her gratitude that somebody had started just doing something in a time where our leaders did absolutely nothing.

 In this current political climate, I and those I know are constantly overcome with a feeling of weakness and inability to act or react in a meaningful way to the genuine horrors of reality that the media livestreams  24/7. Whether it's the genocide of the Palestinian people or  the unlawful and horrific kidnapping of community members by ICE, everything feels removed from our realm of control. This  creates such a strong urge to just detach and disconnect.

The SJP created an outlet for me and my peers to do something and act and speak on what we think is lacking from our leaders. To encourage our classmates and fellow humans as a whole to do the same. Our club became an official chapter in the transition between fall and spring semester of last school year, and within that semester students voted it the best new student organization of the year, noting that our “efforts have made a significant impact on student life during its first two years of existence.” Our activities fairs have been incredibly successful, with over 50 new members signing up, and a genuine interest within our student body  to help.

Our club continues to grow in membership and action. I truly believe this has caused, and will continue to cause, a chain reaction. None of this would have happened had me and my 2 other classmates made a group chat with each other and just said “This is so incredibly wrong and devastating and it feels like nobody is doing anything about it- we need to be the ones to do it.” As cliche as it sounds, existence is resistance. Especially when our government is actively using every leverage of power they have to destroy any political dissonance, and, more specifically, any pro-Palestinian activism.