This article was submitted to The Acorn by SJP and contains opinions and perspectives by that group.
Starting last Monday, March 18, Drew Students for Justice in Palestine hosted their third annual Israeli Apartheid Week. This event is held annually by student chapters around the country to raise awareness and educate university students about Israel’s apartheid.
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions website, a nonviolent Palestinian movement, describes Israeli Apartheid Week as “a tool for mobilizing grassroots support on the global level for the Palestinian liberation struggle against Israel’s decades-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid.” Typical week events include lectures, film screenings, and rallies.
Drew Students for Justice in Palestine kicked off the week with an unveiling of their “mock apartheid wall,” a representation of the Israeli West Bank barrier wall dividing Israeli settlements and indigenous Palestinian land. The group crafted four 8-ft tall wooden panels which were then decorated with various infographics, artwork and statistics — gathered from sources like Human Rights Watch and Visualizing Palestine — detailed the impacts of apartheid on Palestinian refugees. Highlights included a panel for Aaron Bushnell and a panel with painted dots representing every Palestinian martyr since Oct. 7 — over 30,000 martyrs were represented on the wall. The wall is stationed in front of the EC with a field of white flags to represent the martyrs.
On Tuesday, the group followed up with their Then & Now: Apartheid Divestment event. Hosted in the EC’s 1867 Lounge, members presented about the South African apartheid and Drew’s historic Anti-Apartheid Movement, which marshaled Drew into being one of the only universities to fully divest from the apartheid in the late 1980s. They invited guest speaker Marwan Kreidie, a former leader in the movement, to discuss the history of Drew’s investments and divestments in South African apartheid and the challenges that come with divestment campaigns both past and present, including the ongoing national university divestment campaigns regarding Israeli apartheid.
Wednesday featured Students for Justice in Palestine’s tabling event in the EC, where members distributed pamphlets detailing Israeli apartheid and occupation in Palestine. On Thursday, the group partnered with the Center of Middle East Studies to screen the film “Israelism”, a documentary that explores the rhetoric behind the Zionist ideology and its pervasive influence in indoctrinating individuals to support a settler colonial state in Palestine. The screening was followed by a Q&A session with the director/writer of the film Sam Eilertsen.
On Friday, the group held a Kaffiyeh Day, in which Drew students were encouraged to wear their kaffiyehs, traditional Palestinian headscarves that symbolize the resistance and the indigenous land sacred to the Palestinian people.