About Us
SOAS Students organising on our campus and beyond, for Palestinian Liberation.
Whether you have organised for Palestine for years or are engaging with these issues for the first time, SJP is a space to learn, organise, campaign and build solidarity across our university community.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a student-led society committed to organising, educating and campaigning for Palestinian liberation and building a wider movement for justice across SOAS.
We understand the struggle for Palestine as inseparable from the wider structures of settler colonialism, imperialism and militarism.
Our solidarity therefore does not exist in isolation. From Palestine to Congo, Western Sahara, Kashmir, and Sudan, communities continue to confront different forms of dispossession, exploitation and the denial of self-determination. While these struggles are not interchangeable, we recognise that the systems sustaining them often intersect.
Our politics are therefore internationalist and intersectional: none of us are free until all of us are free.
At a time when Britain is undergoing a wider process of militarised re-industrialisation, we believe students must also confront the growing relationship between universities, governments and the military-industrial complex. Higher education is increasingly being drawn into defence research, weapons development and national security initiatives, while students and workers simultaneously face cuts to courses, jobs and resources.
SJP seeks to challenge the militarisation of education and campaign against institutional and financial relationships that make our universities complicit in systems of war, occupation and oppression.
We also recognise the deep relationship between Palestinian liberation and climate justice. Colonialism, militarism and environmental destruction are interconnected through struggles over land, resources, displacement and extraction.
Climate justice cannot simply be about reducing emissions; it must also confront the political and economic systems that place profit, military power and resource extraction above people and planet.
At SOAS, we inherit a long history of student and worker solidarity with Palestine, expressed through demonstrations, occupations, encampments, campaigns and political education. Students and workers have repeatedly stood together in defence of their rights despite disciplinary action, legal challenges and restrictions on political expression. We seek to continue and strengthen that tradition.
Our aims and objectives:
• Build solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, justice and self-determination.
• Educate and organise through talks, teach-ins, workshops, cultural events, reading groups and political education.
• Campaign against institutional complicity, including financial, academic and institutional relationships connected to occupation, militarisation and the arms industry.
• Oppose the militarisation of higher education and challenge the growing relationship between universities, weapons companies and the state.
• Defend the right to protest and organise on campus, particularly in the face of increasing securitisation and restrictions on student and worker activism.
• Strengthen student-worker solidarity and work alongside trade unionists, campus campaigns and communities fighting for justice.
• Connect Palestine with wider struggles against colonialism, imperialism, racism, militarism, exploitation and climate injustice, while recognising the distinct histories and circumstances of each struggle.
• Create a democratic and welcoming organising space where students can learn, discuss, campaign and take collective action.