In June of 2022, Representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.) were joined by 35 other colleagues in a bipartisan request to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security, and Director Christopher Wray of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their request was a call for federal law enforcement to investigate the malicious creation and use of “The Mapping Project.” The map provides information about Jewish businesses and people in and around the state of Massachusetts, and was created by anonymous activists who claim that their “interactive map illustrates some ways in which institutional support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing and systemic white supremacy here where we live, and to US imperialist projects in other countries.”
The signatories of Representatives Gottheimer and Bacon’s letter to the Attorney General, DHS, and FBI enumerated their concerns as follows:
“We fear that this map may be used as a roadmap for violent attacks by supporters of the [boycott, divestment, and sanctions] movement against the people and entities listed… We ask that you investigate the use of the Mapping Project by extremist organizations, provide any necessary enhanced security for targets listed in the project, and work with social-media companies and Internet service providers to prevent its further distribution. We must not turn a blind eye to this dangerous incitement.”
Less than two years later, violent anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have swept the nation, particularly on college campuses, led by a new project: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). SJP has defaced monuments, occupied buildings, set up camps, clashed with police, called for an “Intifada” (i.e., armed rebellion), and continues to do so. SJP also remains openly supportive of Hamas, a terrorist group, and questions about SJP’s organization, leadership, affiliations, and funding abound but have largely gone unanswered.
We sought to answer the first three of those questions—in regard to organization, leadership, and affiliations—by mapping out the Students for Justice in Palestine’s social network on Instagram, but unlike Students for Justice in Palestine and the creators of the aforementioned Mapping Project, we are not hiding behind anonymity. We are not calling for violence, the destruction of property, or the destruction of the United States and her government. Our efforts are intended to assist law enforcement and other investigative entities / interested parties (such as researchers like ourselves, or members of the public), who are rightfully concerned with SJP’s actions and rhetoric. We simply want to understand the organization of SJP, to identify SJP’s true leadership, and to determine the groups that SJP is most closely associated with and influenced by.
To accomplish this, we sampled 100 colleges and universities across the United States, as well as five geographic regions, and constructed a dataset of the “following” lists (as opposed to the “followers” lists) of 111 public accounts on Instagram that claim to be SJP chapters. Data collection and analysis took place from June to October of 2024, and while many of these accounts may have been deleted by their owners or removed by Instagram’s moderators since then, this new dataset provides the public with novel insights into Students for Justice in Palestine’s social network. The 100 universities we sampled were:
| American University | Claremont University |
| Arizona State University | Clark University |
| Bard College | Cleveland State University |
| Binghamton University | Colgate University |
| Boston University | Columbia University |
| Brandeis University | Cornell University |
| Brown University | Dartmouth College |
| Butler University | Drexel University |
| California State University - Channel Islands | Duke University |
| Emerson College | Temple University |
| Emory University | Texas Tech University |
| Fordham University | The New School |
| Gallaudet University | Tufts University |
| George Mason University | University of California - Berkeley |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | University of California - Davis |
| Georgia State University | University of California - Irvine |
| Georgetown University | University of California - Los Angeles |
| Hampshire College | University of California - Merced |
| Harvard University | University of California - San Diego |
| Howard University | University of California - Santa Cruz |
| Humboldt State University | University of Colorado - Boulder |
| Ithaca College | University of ConnecticuT |
| Kennesaw State University | University of Delaware |
| Kent State University | University of Georgia |
| Louisville University | University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign |
| Loyola Marymount University | University of Maryland |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | University of Massachusetts - Amherst |
| Miami University (Ohio) | University of Massachusetts - Lowell |
| Middlebury College | University of Michigan - Dearborn |
| New York University | University of Michigan - Flint |
| Northeastern University | University of Mississippi |
| Northwestern University | University of Montana |
| Oberlin College | University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill |
| Occidental College | University of Oregon |
| Ohio State University | University of Pennsylvania |
| Pennsylvania State University | University of Pittsburgh |
| Princeton University | University of Southern California |
| Purdue University | University of South Florida |
| Rice University | University of Tennessee - Knoxville |
| Rutgers University | University of Virginia |
| San Francisco State University | University of Washington |
| Sarah Lawrence College | University of Wisconsin - Madison |
| Seattle University | University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee |
| Skidmore College | Vanderbilt University |
| Smith College | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Stanford University | Wellesley College |
| Stony Brook University | West Virginia University |
| Suffolk University | William and Mary College |
| Swarthmore College | Yale University |
| Syracuse University | Youngstown State University |
And the five geographic regions were:
Students for Justice in Palestine - Chicago Coalition
Students for Justice in Palestine - Colorado Coalition
Students for Justice in Palestine - DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) Coalition
Students for Justice in Palestine - National Coalition
Students for Justice in Palestine - Southern California Coalition
With these lists of SJP-followed accounts—over 32,000 objects across 111 lists—we built an association matrix (sometimes referred to as a link-analysis matrix) by looking at the duplicates in the data set. The more SJP chapters follow one account, the more we should be able to confidently conclude that entity’s importance and influence within Students for Justice in Palestine’s social network. The entire de-duplicated list is available below, but for our purposes here, if one account is followed by 20 or more distinct SJP chapters, the entity affiliated with that followed account is likely quite essential and influential to Students for Justice in Palestine’s network as a whole, and deserves further investigation.
Sure enough, the account that appeared most often across all lists was @nationalsjp, the National Students for Justice in Palestine coalition. The Columbia University SJP chapter placed third, with Harvard and Boston University chapters placing seventh and eighth, respectively. Excluding the trends of SJP chapters following each other—a trend that appears to reveal the relative importance of individual SJP chapters in the eyes of SJP’s (inter-)national leadership and membership—the data also reveals several journalists and various organizations that SJP appears to hold in high regard, as each account was followed by at least 20 of the 111 SJP chapters. By order of appearance, and thus presumed importance and influence to SJP leadership, they are:
- Palestinian Youth Movement (@palestinianyouthmovement)
- Eye on Palestine (@eye.on.palestine)
- Jewish Voice for Peace (@jewishvoiceforpeace)
- Palestine Legal (@pal_legal)
- IMEU (@theimeuVerified)
- US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (@uscpr)
- Mohammed El Kurd (@mohammedelkurdVerified)
- Bisan Owda (@wizard_bisan1Verified)
- Motaz Azaiza (@motaz_azaizaVerified)
- Noura Erakat (@nouraerakat)
- Let’s Talk Palestine (@letstalkpalestine)
- BDS Movement (@bdsnationalcommittee)
- The Electronic Intifada (@electronicintifada)
- Palestinian Feminist Collective (@palestinianfeministcollective)
- Adalah Justice Project (@adalahjusticeproject)
- Al Jazeera English (@aljazeeraenglishVerified)
- Mondoweiss (@mondoweiss)
- US Palestinian Community Network (@uspcn)
- Visualizing Palestine (@visualizing_palestine)
- Hidden Palestine (@hiddenpalestine)
- Plestia Alaqad (@byplestiaVerified)
- Palestine Action (@pal_actionus)
- Watan (@watanpalestine)
- subhi (@sbeih.jpgVerified)
- Coalition for Peace (@fsucfp)
- Palestine Solidarity Committee (@psc_atx)
- DISSENTERS (@wearedissenters)
- Institute for Palestine Studies (@palestinestudies)
- Al Jazeera AJ+ (@ajplus)
- American Muslims for Palestine (@ampalestine)
- Eyewitness Palestine (@eyewitnesspalestine)
- Muna ElKurd (@muna.elkurd15Verified)
- Palestine Community Initiative (@pcihouston)
- (u)PAO (@up.against.the.occupation)
- Law Students for Palestine (@lsfpnational)
- Miko Peled (@mikopeled)
- Addameer (@addameer_pal)
- PaliRoots (@paliroots)
- The People’s Forum (@peoplesforumnyc)
- Scientists for Palestine (@scientists4palestine)
- #freepalestine (@savesheikhjarrahnow)
- Wear the Peace (@wearthepeace)
- Writers Against the War in Gaza (@wawog_now)
- @disorientalizing
- Gaza Poets Society (@gazapoets)
- Museum of the Palestinian People (@museumpalestinianpeople)
- Palestinian American CC (@paccusa)
- alQaws (@alqaws)
- Chicago Palestine Film Fest (@chipalfilmfest)
- Democracy Now! (@democracynow)
- Marc Lemont Hill (@marclamonthill)
- Remi Kanazi (@remikanazi)
- CODEPINK (@codepinkalert)
- Gaza Mutual Aid Collective (@gazamutualaid)
- Ahmed Eldin (@ahmedeldin)
- The Mapping Project (@mapping_project)
- Middle East Monitor (@middleeastmonitor)
- Palestine Solidarity Working Group (@palestineswg)
- Palestine Writers Festival (@palestinewrites)
- #Africa4Palestine (@africa4palestine)
- Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour)
- The Red Nation (@rednationmovement)
- Slow Factory (@theslowfactory)
- We Are Not Numbers (@we_are_not_numbers)
(Notice that “The Mapping Project” ranked 56th, justifying the early concerns of Congress.)
In addition to determining which SJP chapters, other organizations, and individual persons are seemingly most important and influential to SJP leadership at the national level, SJP leadership of local chapters often followed their leadership, as well as faculty and staff sympathetic to the SJP movement. This is not to say that every local account followed by individual SJP Chapters is sympathetic to the SJP movement. After all, it is not only possible, but likely, that more than a few people are followed by SJP for the purposes of terroristic intimidation. This is only to say that, based on our sampling, such sympathy toward SJP appears most often the case. Further research at the local level of who these leaders are is warranted, but not within the scope of this brief report on the analysis of this dataset.
Finally, in addition to the full and de-duplicated datasets (available for download here, and here, respectively; the latter of which serves as the association matrix), we have also visualized the data by creating an interactive network graph of the entire dataset—available to view and download here—which we invite the public to further explore. Additionally, the script needed to recreate the graph is available for download here, but one will also need to have installed the bokeh, matplotlib, networkx, numpy, and pandas libraries for the Python programming language, as well as have a fairly powerful computer, as it took ours a half hour to render graphic below:
The local accounts (such as SJP Chapter affiliates and leaders, sympathetic faculty and staff, and innocents who have no further connection with SJP) are often clustered around the edges of the network web, as these are the accounts followed by only one SJP Chapter, most often their local SJP Chapter. Figure 4 below zooms in on the network of @wvufriendsofpalestine (the West Virginia University SJP Chapter), which is the southernmost cluster in the visual above—the cluster sitting just above this paragraph.
It has been just over a year since the October 7th attacks in Israel occurred, and Students for Justice in Palestine has celebrated the anniversary of the slaughter. The SJP Chapter at Swarthmore College posted a link on Instagram, with the caption: “Happy October 7th everyone! In honor of this glorious day and all our martyred revolutionaries, donate here.” Brown University suspended its SJP chapter due to the “severity of alleged threatening, intimidating and harassing actions,” and many other universities have done the same. A similar student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CAUD), openly praised Hamas and called for additional violence, prompting Senator Joni Earnst (R-IA) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the CAUD’s activities and affiliations.
The SJP camps may have been cleared out, and the intensity of their protests may have waned, but this organization’s presence on campuses and the threat it presents has gone nowhere. There is still much left in the data to be explored, too much to do on our own. With the creation and release of this original dataset, we hope to offer other researchers and law enforcement officials an extensive list of leads for further inquiry into the organization and leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine, its ties to other organizations, and persons of interest.
“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.” — Proverbs 6:16-19
Photo by Beck & Stone
