Since March 2025, the repression, targeting, silencing, detaining, and deporting of people who criticize genocide and stand for Palestinian liberation has intensified. The network of FSJP chapters remains committed to our principles, even as some university presidents and trustees have sacrificed their students, faculty, and staff in misguided acts of preparatory obedience. Palestinians teach us that you cannot stave off danger by courting it. The danger is here. The blindfolds are off, and university administrators, leaders, and boards must stand for, or concede basic principles of academic freedom. We have long understood the repression of criticism of Israel as inextricable from critical inquiry on anti-blackness, settler-colonialism, racism, police brutality, and incarceration here in the U.S. The events of the last three months are an escalation and broadening of these links. Palestine-related scholarship, teaching, and advocacy represent one major focal point of a multi-pronged assault, led by the federal government, on higher education in the US. Palestine is fundamentally connected to threats of federal funding cuts; attacks on research and teaching ethnic and gender and sexuality studies and critical race theory; the bludgeoning of speech rights on campuses; racist police and ICE violence; and anti-immigration actions including visa revocations.

FSJP members around the country are at the forefront of the efforts to stop Trump. We cannot fight against the draconian and punitive policies of the US government without continuing to fight for Palestine.

As Trump commands the news media from dawn to dusk, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza continues apace. In addition to the relentless bombardment and mobilization of starvation, officials have normalized the language of self-deportation and evacuation. In the West Bank, Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams camps are being turned into wastelands, the rate of settler land grabs has accelerated in Areas B and C, and the proliferation of new checkpoints has made travel from town to town even more arduous and dangerous. The Israeli military has established a semi-permanent illegal presence, occupying unprecedented expanses of sovereign territories of Syria and Lebanon, and settlers are clamoring to follow suit.

The historical record teaches us that Israeli authorities seldom miss an opportunity to take advantage when the rest of the world is distracted. They are also keenly aware that “genocide fatigue” can take its toll on public attention, allowing them to prolongue the murderous assault on Gaza and its people. Yet Palestinians remain steadfast, and continue to resist erasure and elimination.

We cannot allow our fatigue or our fear, in the face of what sometimes feels like an assault from all sides, to prevail.

The bravery and ingenuity of our students over the last nineteen months propelled U.S. colleges and universities to the forefront of the anti-genocide fight. In response, administrations turned campuses into heavily patrolled citadels, and installed advanced surveillance techniques redolent of the Israeli security apparatus. Now, these institutions are under attack from government forces intent on reprogramming their operational “software”—the ecology of liberal education and academic freedom that hosts and supports the modern university. Not all these assaults are driven by the defense of Israel, but they are fueled by strategic pressure from the advocates of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

The national FSJP network of chapters emerged to stand by students as they opposed pro-Israeli policies during a Democrat-led federal government. We are now operating in an environment of incipient fascism, and we must learn how to organize under an openly authoritarian regime, as so many others have done across the globe. This is the time for those with the protections of secure US citizenship to stand at the frontlines. Our primary guiding lights, as always, are Palestinians, whose steadfast example over seventy-seven years of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid, and incarceration continues to inspire and motivate us. FSJP voices have played and must continue to play an important role in helping to amplify their struggle for liberation from the river to the sea.

We cannot, and will not, rest until Palestine is free.

NFSJP Steering Committee