Students for Justice in Palestine fundraised this summer to help victims of genocide

This article’s source chose to remain anonymous and is referred to as a representative

UC Santa Barbara’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter has spent the past summer working on two fundraising campaigns to help Palestinians gain access to higher education and clean drinking water. 

Israel established itself as a sovereign state in May 1948, displacing an estimated 700,000 Palestinians from their homes between 1947 to 1949. This event is known as “al-Nakba,” which translates to “the catastrophe” in Arabic. Palestine has remained under Israeli occupation since. 

On Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. In the three years since the attack, Israel has committed a genocide of the Palestinians, killing a confirmed 73,000 people, while some outlets claim the deathtoll is underreported. 

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has hundreds of chapters on campuses around the nation, calling for a free Palestine and an end of the genocide. In an interview with the Daily Nexus, an SJP representative said that the group uses Palestine to show how the struggles of the Global South are connected to U.S. foreign policy. 

“Students for Justice in Palestine is a really intersectional line of work that uses Palestine as the compass to intersect with various different struggles situated in the Global South and here domestically in the United States,” the representative said.

They went on to emphasize that they believe many U.S. institutions are complicit in the genocide, including the University of California system. 

“[It is] to shed light on the U.S. foreign policies and how that affects students domestically in the United States, and how our tuition dollars and how UCs and institutions across the United States are heavily invested in genocide, in occupation, and how our the military industrial complex is connected and so heavily entrenched in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and SJP’s role in that is sort of combating it, shedding light on it and connecting it with various different struggles across the world,” the representative said.

For years, SJP chapters across the UC have called for the UC Board of Regents to divest from weapons manufacturers which supply the Israel Defense Forces with weapons. According to the SJP representative, that remains a central goal of the organization. 

“This is a UC-wide call for divestment, and that still remains a really strong primary mission for national SJP, to be entirely removed from weapons manufacturing and violence and occupation and genocide, and to ensure that our access to education isn’t being equated to destroying another person’s access to education elsewhere,” the representative said. 

This summer, SJP fundraised $17,500 for a teenager in Palestine who has recently been accepted to a university in France. The legal battle for evacuation out of Palestine is still ongoing, but the organization hopes their fundraising efforts can help the teen access higher education. 

“I think that there are a million different ways every single day that even myself am reminded of all the ways that I get to enjoy privilege. I reckon that a lot of people feel very similar to me, that [it’s important] using your privilege to champion the struggles of others who don’t receive those same luxuries as us,” the representative said. 

The representative emphasized the important role student activists have played in fighting a history of global inequality. 

“We tend to think of ourselves as powerless, but we’re really not. If you think about when these moments of momentum happen, I think about during the Vietnam protests and during like [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] protests and the encampments that happened on campus, I think about how it’s typically in these university settings that it’s usually students who are on the forefront of making change, in terms of U.S. policy,” the representative said.

Another major fundraising event SJP conducted this summer is to help combat Gaza’s water crisis. The organization has partnered with the Anfiqou Foundation to help provide clean drinking water and medical supplies to Palestinians in the displacement camps of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. 

In the midst of a three-year-long genocide and over 75 years of occupation, clean water has become a scarce resource for Palestinians living in Gaza. According to the United Nations (UN), over 1.3 million people in Gaza have access to less than six liters of water per day for drinking and cooking, while the humanitarian standard for minimum water access is 15 liters per day. The UN has also reported that Gaza’s water access has been “weaponised and severely undermined by the Israeli authorities since October 2023.”

“Through our connection to Anfiqou, we were able to supply people in Gaza with water and other medical supplies, which I can’t even emphasize enough how much of a serious need that is,” the representative said. 

The representative emphasized that SJP wants UCSB students to understand that conflicts, genocides and wars across the world do impact their lives, and draws direct connections to the material conditions of those living in the U.S. to those living in countries with humanitarian crises. 

“I think understanding that nothing exists in any part of the world within a vacuum. Everything is a symbiotic relationship,” the representative said. “That the luxury that we receive here, and all the infinite sort of privileges that we have that are completely endless. The fact that I can turn on my water in my kitchen and I have a home and I can walk to school. All these privileges come, I understand, at the expense of how the United States and Israel takes away all those privileges from the rest of the world and the Global South at large.”

A version of this article appeared on p. 3 of the Oct. 15  print edition of the Daily Nexus.