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Students for Justice in Palestine, the national organization founded in Berkeley, is calling for a “Week of Rage” starting Oct. 7, coinciding with the anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel and ending the day before Yom Kippur on Oct. 12.

“Renewed anti-Israel protests are likely in the coming weeks, and we understand the emotional impact they can have, especially amid the Oct. 7 anniversary and fears of a wider war,” said Rafael Brinner, head of the Community Security Program of the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund.

He recommended that people not engage with protesters. 

“You’re not going to alter firmly held viewpoints, every phone is a recording device, and verbal confrontation risks dangerous escalation if police presence is sparse,” he said. “Free speech has its limits, so do not hesitate to call 911 if protesters are acting in a threatening manner, trespassing on private property, or interrupting religious services.”

SJP’s “Week of Rage” Instagram post ends with a call to “rise to end our universities’ complicity in this genocide, to fight for the end of the colonization of Palestine, and to fight for the complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.”

“Endorsers” listed on the post include Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network, which has UC chapters at Berkeley, Davis and Santa Cruz, among others, as well as at San Francisco, San Jose, Sonoma and Sacramento state universities.

The faculty group supports an academic boycott, saying “Israeli universities have been fully complicit in the Gazan scholasticide; not a single one is on record as opposing the genocide, let alone calling for a ceasefire.”

Several other Bay Area protests have been called for that week, although it’s unclear what if any affiliation they have with the SJP project.

In the Bay Area, a call for walkouts and protests on Oct. 8 was posted by an S.F. State University group called Students for Gaza “to work towards shutting down their campuses, through things like teach-outs and picketing.”

Among their demands: “that the money that SFSU, the CSU, and the U.S. had invested towards Israel’s genocidal campaign and all human rights violations be reinvested in the people’s university; in our classes, specifically in Palestinian and Arab Studies, faculty and university staff.”

Roger Feigelson, head of San Francisco Hillel, told J. he’d heard of the walkout planned for Oct. 8 but not the rest of the week.

According to Students for Gaza, the walkouts and strike actions were voted on at the Bay Area Popular Convention for Palestine, which was held on Sept. 15. Social media posts about the convention say around 700 attended.

The Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights is holding a vigil on Oct. 7, and a march is set in San Jose on Oct. 6 to ask the city council to divest from Israel; both seem to be unaffiliated with SJP.

As reported in the Forward, SJP was founded at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s. Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian faculty member at the university and prominent activist, has sometimes described himself as a co-founder. Today the group has chapters across the U.S. and Canada that are loosely connected by the national coordinating group, which has no staff or headquarters.