About Us

The Palestinian right of return is the principle that all Palestinians displaced or expelled from their homes by the Zionist project, between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the present day, have the right to return to their homes and places of origin, along with their descendants. This principle has been affirmed by international law, particularly the 1948 resolution United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which states that refugees wishing to return and live at peace should be permitted to do so. However, we do not rely on international law to judge the legitimacy of our principles. For Palestinians, the right of return is a necessary preliminary step to achieving justice, restitution, and self-determination.

The right to resist is the principle that Palestinians and all peoples living under conditions of occupation, displacement, military rule, and national oppression possess the right to struggle for their own self-determination, national liberation, and freedom. International law also recognizes the rights of peoples under colonial domination or foreign occupation to resist these forces. We recognize all forms of resistance as legitimate, including political organizing, labor action, cultural preservation, civil disobedience, international advocacy, and armed struggle. We assert that the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people alone have the right to determine their methods of resistance to the Zionist project.

The principle of Palestinian sovereignty holds that the Palestinian people possess an inherent right to govern themselves, exercise authority over their land and resources, and determine their political future, free from external domination or interference. We assert that the Palestinian people have the right to control the entirety of Historic Palestine, the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Palestinian people must exercise control over their own natural resources, political and civil institutions, and determine their own relations with international actors. We reject the version of “sovereignty” outlined in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995; sovereignty and statehood are not synonymous, and we view the creation of the Palestinian Authority as a comprador and an obstacle to the liberatory aims of the Palestinian people.

We oppose the global system through which one state, the United States, dominates, exploits, and controls other peoples, territories, and economies using its military, leverage over international bodies and the United Nations, and global economic monopolies. We uphold economic sovereignty and the right of all oppressed peoples to shape their own futures. We believe that unequal global power relations are maintained through military intervention, systems of economic dependency, political coercion, and cultural domination. We uphold that contemporary imperialism is synonymous with the U.S.-led international order, which sustains extensive military deployments, economic sanctions regimes, and political influence across much of the world. We believe that thorough, principled criticism of strong nations in opposition to the U.S. empire, such as Russia and China, should always be allowed, but we reject the theory of multi-imperialism that seeks to downplay or minimize the structural power of the U.S. and its global hegemony.

We believe that capitalism, the economic system in which production and social life are organized primarily around private ownership, profit accumulation, and market competition, is the enemy of the people of the world. Capitalism concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a small minority, generates inequality, exploits labor, commodifies essential human needs, and prioritizes profit over social and ecological well-being. We uphold radical visions and proposed alternatives of an anti-capitalist future: democratic control of economic resources, collective ownership, economic planning, or cooperative forms of production. SJP is home to those with a range of ideologies: those who identify with Indigenous Decolonialism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, orthodox Marxism, Social Democracy, Anarchism, Socialism, and Third Worldism are all welcome.

The principle of freedom from national oppression holds that all peoples and nations have the right to exist, develop, and govern themselves free from political domination, cultural suppression, economic exploitation, or forced assimilation by another nation or state. We oppose systems in which one national group exercises power over another through occupation, discrimination, unequal citizenship, territorial dispossession, or restrictions on language, culture, and political expression. Rooted in the broader principle of self-determination, freedom from national oppression seeks to ensure that all peoples can collectively shape their social, political, and economic futures with dignity, equality, and sovereignty. With our position on occupied land, within an institution actively engaged in displacement and economic warfare against the nationally oppressed groups of New York City, we uphold the right of all groups suffering at the hands of the United States (whether the political entity or the ruling class) to resist their national oppression and achieve national liberation.