The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) believes that higher education is under attack from the right, but the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) demonstrated once again that the most dire threats to academia come from the left.
The leadership of the "Student Intifada," the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), has released an 85-page "position paper" justifying violence (no surprise) and offering a childish formula for the dissolution of the university system. Most alarmingly, however, it elaborates on the group's newest strategy of targeting its most vulnerable "enemies" - college and university trustees.
Marxist Palestinianism
Photo: June 5, 2025 National SJP Instagram post.
The document dated 2025 but released on June 3, 2026, reads like a verbose AI-assisted master's thesis on a Palestinian Communist struggle against capitalism. References to the pantheon of Communists (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao) and quotations from their writing permeate the text as it attempts to illustrate the "intersection" (academia's most popular fad at the moment) of Marxism and Arab Palestinianism. It is the embodiment of what David Horowitz called the "red-green alliance."
It includes the usual unrealistic demands of Palestinian Arab nationalists. In fact they don't differ substantially from the demands that Hamas, the PLO, and the PFLP have made for decades: "an end of the Israeli occupation," "an end to the Israeli system of Apartheid," and "a recognition and implementation of the right of return for all Palestinian refugees."
The group's "7-Point Political Program" is the usual combination of confrontation with university decision-makers, disruption of normal academic life, and efforts to force colleges and universities to divest from "the Zionist entity."
Two Kinds of Universities
In spite of its claims that universities are "parasitic fronts for a ruling class dedicated to the preservation of a racial-capitalist system built on land theft, class warfare, and, globally, imperial domination," NSJP does not believe that all universities are bad.
Only in "settler states like the U.S. and Canada" are universities bad, because, as "an enthusiastic arm of the global U.S. Empire," they "serve to reproduce the capitalist-imperialist system on behalf of - and directed by - the ruling class."
Using the fashionable "decolonial" terminology, NSJP describes American and Canadian universities as "settler institutions" functioning as "weapons of war in an ongoing genocide against not only the Indigenous nations of the continent, but the Black nation and all nationally oppressed peoples residing within the empire."
Palestinian Arab universities, on the other hand, are good, because, "[i]n Palestine, universities like Birzeit, An-Najah, and Bethlehem University intentionally foster national consciousness, defend and propagate national identity, and have historically served as flashpoints for resistance."
In other words, universities aren't inherently bad for fostering national consciousness or serving the ruling class. It's a matter of which national consciousness is fostered and which ruling class is served.
Trustees Targeted
The most significant tactic of NSJP's new Marxist Intifada is its target. Point number 7 in the 7-point plan is unequivocal in its goal "to unseat our Boards of Trustees as the dictators of our universities."
While drawing inspiration from the divestment campaign against Apartheid South Africa, NSJP now claims that "divestment using the South African model cannot meaningfully disrupt the economic base of the Zionist project." What is instead required is confrontation with "the board of trustees, and the financialization of the university."
Perhaps NSJP believes that the trustees are the most vulnerable targets. It certainly perceives them as the top of the capitalist hierarchy, fuming that "Countless BOT members at 'prestigious' American research universities are themselves members of the ruling class."
Boards of Butchers
Photo: February 11, 2025 Instagram post calling to disrupt the CUNY Law School board of trustees meeting.
NSJP began targeting college and university trustees in 2025. Its SJP affiliate's disruption of the City University of New York (CUNY) law school's board of trustees on February 11, 2025 is among the first.
In October 2025, to commemorate the second anniversary of October 7, NSJP launched an Instagram campaign that began calling the boards of trustees the "Boards of Butchers."
NSJP's template appears to have been distributed to its subservient chapters, each of which added distinguishing details about locations and events. NSJP then posted them on its own Instagram account, amplifying the messages.
Photo: National SJP Instagram screenshots, left to right: UC Davis, MacEwan University, Cleveland State, and University of San Francisco.
The group soon escalated tactics by identifying individual board members, as it did to the trustees at George Washington University.
Photo: November 15, 2025 National SJP Instagram post targeting George Washington University board members.
In January 2026, NSJP went after Shirley Stancato, a member of the board of governors at Wayne State University, claiming she endorses genocide and portraying her as demonic.
Photo: A National SJP January 28, 2026, Instagram attack on Wayne State University board of governors member Shirley Stancato.
Stancato is an African-American Democrat whose Wayne State bio describes her as "a prominent civic leader, expert on race relations and social justice advocate." Apparently, her position on the board of governors nullifies that. So much for the "intersectional struggle."
Insane Conclusions
Of all the utopian fantasies in the NSJP position paper, its plan for "the de-commodification and de-privatization of land and the transfer of public or state-owned land back to the stewardship of indigenous nations" is the most insane.
How does the NSJP propose to bring about its new Marxist Palestinian utopian university? "[D]ismantling ruling-class hegemony requires the mass suicide of faculty and their encouragement of the production of organic intellectuals from the ranks of the student body and the surrounding communities."
Leave it to a Palestinian organization to advocate mass suicide.
Logical Conclusion
With every new Instagram post, campus event, statement, and now "position paper," SJP identifies itself as dangerous and violent in all its iterations, from the NSJP leadership down to all subservient campus SJP chapters, including the Faculty for Justice in Palestine members.
Now that every board member and every trustee at every American college and university is a target of the Student Intifada, maybe we'll finally see some progress in shunning, defunding, and expelling them from campuses.
Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.
Article reposted from The Investigative Project on Terrorism.