A resolution introduced by Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Illinois that denied that anti-Zionism was equivalent to anti-Semitism caused an uproar among Jewish groups on campus.
The resolution was in response to the university's chancellor's mass email that accused SJP of promoting anti-Israel propaganda.
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The resolution accuses Chancellor Robert Jones of having "improperly characterized" an SJP presentation in his Oct. 9 mass email to the university community, even though the presentation, titled "Palestine & Great Return March: Palestinian Resistance to 70 Years of Israeli Terror," included libelous statements with one of the slides headlined "Brief History of the Palestine-Israel 'Conflict' " that stated that in 1917 the "British signed away Palestine to Zionist entity," when the Balfour Declaration that year declared that the right of the Jews to have a state in their homeland from which they were exiled thousands of years earlier.
Nearly 600 people attended the meeting, with hundreds of Jewish students walking out of it to a rally cry of "We do not negotiate anti-Semitism!"
"We are using our position as student leaders to define what the Jewish community goes through," said student-body vice president Jack Langen. "I believe this is wrong, and we would be speaking for a community that has publicly disagreed with how we would be representing them."
Seth Israel, a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow at the University of Illinois, condemned the passage of the resolution without consulting the school's Jewish community.
