The campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine will be allowed to hold an anti-Israel rally along the nine-acre main quad of the University of Maryland, College Park, on Oct. 7, the date marking the one-year anniversary of Hamas terrorists killing 1,200 people and abducting hundreds of others in southern Israel.
“We are approaching 11 months of genocide against the Palestinians,” the SJP posted on Instagram. “It has been almost a full year of genocide and terror as death tolls continue to rise. The zionist entity has committed some of the most egregious criminal acts of our century.”
Rabbi Ari Israel, director of the College Park Hillel chapter, told The Daily Wire news website that he voiced his dismay about the protest to university leaders, to no avail.
“We did voice our concerns with senior UMD leadership,” he said, “[and] apprised them of the emotional load SJP’s callous behavior will bear on our Jewish community if they protest on the greatest Jewish day of mourning and tragedy since the Holocaust.”
On Instagram, the Hillel chapter and the Jewish Student Union at College Park posted, “October 7 is a day of tragedy for the Jewish and Israeli community around the world. It is alarming to see that SJP has chosen this date, a day of Jewish mourning, to hold an event on campus.” They added, “While SJP followed university protocol in making this reservation, it is nevertheless condemnable that they did.”
The Jewish groups said their own Oct. 7 campus memorial program is in the works.
The SJP chapter confirmed to the Washington Post that it was planning an action on McKeldin Mall, the campus’s main green, for Oct. 7.
The university declined to comment by press time on Friday.
In a press release sent to state elected officials and media representatives, the Baltimore Zionist District expressed its dismay with the rally at College Park.
“The planned event, which openly supports anti-Israel sentiments and denies the right of Israel to exist, is a direct affront to the Jewish community and stands in stark opposition to the principles of respect, tolerance and academic integrity that the University of Maryland should uphold,” the statement read. “SJP’s rally, set to take place at the heart of the university’s campus, will undoubtedly create an atmosphere of hostility and intimidation for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. The rhetoric and actions of SJP, including their recent event on campus, have clearly shown that their agenda is not one of peaceful discourse but of incitement and division. This is not an issue of free speech; it is an issue of hate speech and discrimination.
“The Baltimore Zionist District calls on University of Maryland President Darryll Pines and the university’s administration to cancel this event immediately. Allowing it to proceed is tantamount to endorsing the glorification of terrorism and the perpetuation of falsehoods that seek to delegitimize the Jewish state. The university’s decision to permit such an event is a grave misjudgment that risks inflaming tensions and endangering the well-being of Jewish students on campus.”
Last Tuesday, Aug. 27, College Park’s SJP chapter held an anti-Israel protest and planted 15,000 white flags — as well as a large Palestinian flag and a “From the river to the sea Palestine is almost free” sign — in the center of campus to “honor the 150,000+ martyrs who have lost their lives within the past year.”
“As we come back to campus, we need to remember that there is no ‘back to school’ in Gaza,” the SJP said in an Instagram post. “The Zionist entity has demolished nearly all schools and universities and the future of tens of thousands of students.”
The Gazan health ministry estimates that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the conflict with Israel, but SJP stated it uses the larger figure of 150,000 because “the health ministry has been unable to keep count of the dead.”
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of the Lawfare Project, an international nonprofit legal think tank and litigation fund based in New York City, told The Daily Wire that the Oct. 7 protest at College Park violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“No campus should permit SJP or any similar organization to hold any kind of event on October 7th,” he said. “Would any university allow a student organization to burn crosses on its campus to celebrate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.? To celebrate the anniversary of 9/11 by calling for new Al Qaeda attacks? We all know the answer to those questions is an emphatic no.”
A College Park spokesperson said SJP has reserved the quad space, and permits were issued for Oct. 7 events at “several of our campus locations,” according to media reports.
“One event will be university-sponsored and will serve as a moment of reflection,” the spokesperson said. “Other events are sponsored by Jewish student leader organizations, and all are planned in accordance with our policies. For every one of these events, safety will be our priority.”
Read an open letter to the school’s senior leadership currently circulating among Jewish parents and faculty: “Any effort to celebrate the death of 1,200 members of our community on October 7, 2023, even within the context of celebrating ‘freedom fighters,’ ‘martyrs,’ etc., will be taken by the UMD Jewish community as a direct threat to the safety of the Jewish community at UMD.”
The letter opposing the Maryland permit, which does not publicly list its signatories, goes on to make specific recommendations and outlines areas of activism that community members say could veer into antisemitism. It pushes Maryland to adapt hate-speech guidelines recently unveiled at New York University that discourage students from targeting “Zionists.”
“To be clear, we are not asking that SJP be denied their right to assemble. But we cannot abide an event that demonizes our community, applies a double standard to our community that is not used with any other group, or calls for the destruction of our community,” the letter stated.
The letter also details other kinds of speech that, its authors say, “would contribute toward a hostile environment for the Jewish community on campus going forward.” Among the listed items: calls for “intifada”; use of the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; any accusations that Israel is committing genocide; any claim Israel is an apartheid state; and any recitation of a Gaza death toll number “that is not agreed to by the US State Department.”
Like many other schools, the University of Maryland recently revised its speech policies in anticipation of another semester of protest. It revised the rules to include stricter limitations around the posting of signs, flyers, chalk and other materials around campus and to emphasize that student groups should seek to schedule activities through the university’s formal procedures.
The permit is the latest example of concerns around renewal of student activism around the war in Gaza. As the fall semester begins, there have been arrests and some circulation of antisemitic material at various campuses, including a protest staged outside a Hillel center at Temple University (also organized by an SJP chapter).
The JTA global Jewish news source contributed to this report.
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