New president of activist group envisions changed message

Ryan Branagan, who led a pro-Palestinian campus advocacy group at Pitt until he graduated in the spring, said that more than once, he ran into people who questioned how much he knew about the region because he is neither Israeli nor Palestinian and because he has never been there.

“But somebody like Mahmoud [Yacoub],”  Branagan said of his successor, who is of Palestinian descent. “He’s been there. He’s had an AK-47 in his face at a checkpoint.”

Yacoub, a senior English writing and philosophy major, said that when he visited the West Bank in 2008, he and other members of his family were stopped at an Israeli security checkpoint. Passengers had to get off the bus and walk through a metal detector.

Yacoub, who was 15 years old at the time, helped his 11-year-old brother with their bags as the boy walked through the metal detector. The soldiers got angry and started yelling at both of the boys. When Yacoub continued helping his brother, the soldiers pointed assault weapons at them because they appeared to feel that the two boys were taking too long to pass through the metal detector.

Now, as president of Students for Justice in Palestine, Yacoub wants to educate the public about the grievances of the Palestinian people. He plans to implement changes in the organization in hopes of increasing the group’s advocacy efforts in order to enact change in Israel and the Palestinian territory. But, although Yacoub said he wants SJP to be seen less as a radical protest organization and more as a human rights organization, he said has no interest in open dialogue with campus organizations that support Israel.

Branagan said that even though he has researched the issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict extensively, many opponents of the organization questioned his credibility simply on the basis that he was not Israeli nor Palestinian, and has never visited the region. Although he disagreed with this criticism, he said opponents could not raise these same objections against Yacoub.

Structural Changes

Yacoub said he would make SJP more inclusive by running the club alongside officers and other members. He said that he respected Branagan’s work as an activist, but he wanted to focus more on raising awareness about the issues related to the Palestinian cause. But Yacoub also said Branagan, who was president of SJP for two years before he graduated, was known too much to outsiders as the “face” of the pro-Palestinian movement at Pitt.

Although Branagan agreed with Yacoub’s plan to make the club more participatory, he denied that he intentionally took the spotlight.

“Some of our opponents focused their eyes on me instead of what I was saying,” Branagan said. He also acknowledged that at one point he became burnt out when he tried to take on too much organizational responsibility by himself.

Branagan agreed that SJP would probably benefit from Yacoub’s plans to share responsibility with officers and members of the organization in preparing and organizing events.

Yacoub also said that he wanted SJP to distance itself from its image as a radical or “protest” club by portraying itself instead as a human rights group.

Yacoub said he wants to educate Pitt students about how Israeli policies, such as frequent security checkpoints, affect Palestinians’ daily lives. Along with checkpoints, he listed Israeli-only roads for Jewish settlers in the West Bank, separate bus lines for Palestinians in Israeli territory and a security barrier Israel has been erecting in the West Bank as major factors that cause ordinary Palestinians to live in fear.

In order to relate to U.S. college students, he said the group will tailor its message to compare the current state of Israeli-Palestinian relations to the Jim Crow laws that suppressed blacks in the American South before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Although Yacoub said he wanted to change SJP in order to make the club’s leadership more inclusive and less radical, he emphasized that he’s not interested in opening dialogue with pro-Israel groups on campus, insisting that Israel is the oppressor and Palestine is the victim.

But Alex Bryant, who will take over as acting president of Panthers for Israel in the fall, said dialogue is the only means of achieving progress in relations.

“Open dialogue is always the best solution, and Panthers for Israel has said that over and over again,” Bryant said in an email.

Bryant has been in Israel since late May and will stay there until early in August. There, she’s interning with the Ethiopian National Project, an educational and outreach program aimed at youth in Ethiopian-Israeli communities.

Bryant also said that comparisons between Israeli policies and segregation laws in the American South were unwarranted because Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. The Palestinian Authority governs the West Bank, while Hamas governs the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli government does maintain two bus lines for Palestinians who live in areas in the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority but work in Israel, though this is not a segregationist policy, Bryant said. Palestinians, along with anyone else who enters Israeli territory, are legally entitled to use the country’s public transit.

“This is nothing like pre-Civil Rights America, where buses were separated and segregated; there are no ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ sections,” Bryant said in an email. “There is just one bus where everyone sits side by side.”

Facilitating Activism

Last November, Israel conducted air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, militants linked to Hamas retaliated by firing rockets into Israeli territory. Yacoub said that during this period, SJP organized a protest against Israeli operations.

Although more than 100 attended the demonstration, which was held in Oakland, few or none of the attendees went on to become involved in SJP, which only has about 25 active members. Yacoub said he wanted to build an organization that could retain outsiders.

“When Palestine was on the mind of everyone, we could have capitalized on it,” he said. “But instead, [the opportunity] was just wasted.”

Few or none of those who had shown up for the demonstration remained active in the club.

SJP is not, however, the only advocacy group in modern times that has suffered from a phenomenon Yacoub labeled as “slacktivism.”

Jackie Smith, a professor of sociology at Pitt who co-authored an article detailing the “tyranny of structurelessness” that plagued Occupy Pittsburgh, said she has heard the term “clicktivism” used to describe fleeting, web-based interest in social movements. She said that, in general, activism is ineffective without strong organization.

“This is not something that’s unique with the [pro-]Palestinian movement,” she said. “This is a huge problem with social movements.”

In order to retain members, she said, activist groups need to combine web-based and informational campaigns with face-to-face interaction.

Yacoub said that he wanted to find ways to combine educating the public with cultural events through which  members could enjoy themselves and draw more attendees from outside SJP.

“We’re college kids,” he said. “We’re privileged kids. We have lives. I would like to mesh our lives with these issues.”