Unhinged student group at Massachusetts college promotes violence as ‘the only way to liberate Palestine’

A pro-Palestinian group at a Massachusetts college recently seemed to promote violence against Israel.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Mount Holyoke College (MHC) of South Hadley, Massachusetts, posted on Instagram on Feb. 19 a picture titled “The five points of al-Thawabet” that seemed to lay out key principles regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the SJP hold to.

“Thawabet,” an Arabic word that could be translated as “Constants,” has been used to refer to core demands of the pro-Palestinian movement, and to assert that Palestinians have a “right” to violent “resistance.”

The five points were: “1. A free Palestine is Arab from the river to the sea, with Al-Quds [the Arab name for Jerusalem] as its capital; 2. Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine; 3. All Palestinians have the right of return; 4. The Palestinian Arab people reject all normalization of the Zionist entity [Israel]; 5. The Zionist entity is a constant source of threat for peace in the middle east and the whole world.”

The SJP chapter’s Instagram account is currently listed as “private.”

In late February, the group hosted an event with pro-Palestinian speaker Dr. Umayyah Cable, who allegedly had previously spoken in support of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.

Cable, who identifies herself as “Palestinian-American, queer, non-binary,” states that her “research and teaching interests span the fields of race and ethnic studies, film and media studies, anti-colonial studies, and queer theory, with a particular focus on the roles that art, film, and media play in the mobilization of Palestine solidarity politics in the United States,” according to her website.

According to the event’s registration page, the event focused on “the life experience and political activism of Palestinian-American lesbian activist Huda Jadallah as a representative example of how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT/Queer) Arab Americans came out to both queer communities and Arab American communities in the 1980s and 1990s.”