UNC Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) launched a boycott campaign on Jan. 26. against UNC Hillel’s Perspectives Trip. “UNC Skips the Trip'' calls for support from students, community members and other Palestine solidarity organizations.
UNC Hillel’s Perspectives Trip is a free 10-day trip to Israel and Palestine for selected students. According to North Carolina Hillel’s website, participants will learn through firsthand experiences and have open discussion about different people, cultures, and political opinions of Israelis and Palestinians.
Michelle Brownstein Horowitz, North Carolina Hillel’s campus director at UNC, said Hillel stands by the trip and its goals in light of the recent controversy about the trip.
The orientation for participants going on the Perspectives Trip is scheduled to occur Feb. 9. Because of the approaching date, SJP wanted to act quickly in order to potentially make students reconsider their involvement, Co-President of SJP Aisha Jitan said.
“People really need to be more critical and understand the implications of their actions, how identities are politicized, how we are situated and positioned in larger global structures of oppression and to actively dissociate from that if it causes harm to others and arguably ourselves by feeding into these oppressive structures,” Jitan said.
SJP mobilized support for its boycott campaign primarily via social media, Jitan said. The group is circulating a petition that has gained more than 150 individual cosigners and 22 organizational cosigners to date from various colleges and states.
“If we changed one person’s mind on this, then that’s all that we could ever hope for,” Jacquelyn Hedrick, a member of SJP’s executive board, said.
According to a two-page statement the group posted on Facebook, SJP opposes the trip, "on the basis of false advertising, morally-deficient funding sources, normalization of the occupation of Palestine and its ultimate goal of silencing calls for Palestinian freedom."
“I think it really exploits people’s unfamiliarity with the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis and kind of takes advantage of the financial burden that international travel can place on college students,” Hedrick said.