Vanessa Guaraca
Overview
Vanessa Guaraca was co-chair of a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter that justified Hamas terrorism and spread hatred of Israel in late 2023 during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, following the October 7, 2023, terror attacks.Guaraca served as co-chair of the SJP chapter at The New School (The New School SJP) in October 2023. In her role, she also promoted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at The New School, which is in New York, New York.
Guaraca’s SJP chapter showed support for Hamas following a series of Hamas terror atrocities and war crimes against Israeli civilians, including mass murder, torture, rape, beheadings and kidnappings, which were executed on October 7, 2023.
The Hamas terror attacks left over 1,200 Israelis dead, hundreds kidnapped and thousands wounded. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.”
Justifying Hamas Terrorism and Spreading Hatred of Israel
On October 11, 2023, while Guaraca served [00:00:20] as co-chair of The New School SJP, the chapter released a “Statement of Solidarity” about October 7, 2023.The statement said: “We demand that The New School Administration acknowledge Israel's role as the aggressor in regards to this week's violence.” It said: “What Israel has described as ‘defensive counter-terrorism’ has resulted only in countless unprovoked acts of violence on the Palestinian people...”
The statement further said: “The New School Students for Justice in Palestine firmly supports the Palestinian people in their steadfast resistance against apartheid, colonization, and the enduring 75-year-long Israeli occupation marked by violence.”
Among Palestinians and anti-Israel activists, the term “resistance” can be a euphemism for nationalistic terror. It is often used to excuse or even glorify anti-Israel and anti-Semitic violence.
On November 9, 2023, The New School SJP wrote an open letter to then-interim president of The New School, Donna Shalala, with a list of demands.
The letter stated: “We, the undersigned are students of the New School who refuse to accept this University’s complicity in the genocide of the people of Gaza.”
The letter also referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as “The State of Israel’s war against the Palestinian People,” and further accused Israel of being “engaged in a genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza and the West Bank.”
The letter stated: “Categorizing Palestinian resistance to genocide under the umbrella term ‘Hamas’ dismisses entirely the context of historical and systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. The New School must affirm: this is no war, this is genocide.”
The letter also claimed that “international law is the basis for fundamental Palestinian rights:* the right to return to their homes,* the right to self-determination, and the right to resist the regime by any means necessary.”
The “right of return” is a Palestinian demand discredited as a means to eliminate Israel. International law mandates no absolute right of return and UN Resolution 194, which defined principles for “refugees wishing to return to their homes,” was unanimously rejected by Arab nations following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The same November 2023 letter demanded that The New School end its partnership with the Israel Conservatory of Music. The statement said: “We reject normalized collaboration with educational and cultural institutions of the genocidal apartheid State of Israel, which are inherently complicit in the legitimization of the occupation of Palestine and oppression against Palestinian people. Israeli universities are willing and reliable accomplices in Israel’s settler-colonial agenda to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland.”
Proponents of the “anti-normalization” policy seek to police all interactions between Israelis and Palestinians and shut down all conversations and interactions perceived as being ideologically unaligned with their own agenda.
The November 2023 letter demanded “financial transparency and that the University’s Board of Trustees disclose whether or not the endowment fund includes investments in companies that are complicit in and profiting from apartheid and genocidal policies in the West Bank and Gaza.”
The letter then listed 14 companies, including Google and General Electric, that The New School SJP claimed could be “relevantly involved in the campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land of its indigenous population.”
Anti-Israel Activism (SJP, BDS)
On December 16, 2023, Guaraca spoke [00:25:21] at a panel hosted by Tempest Collective NYC, titled: “STOP GENOCIDE! FREE PALESTINE.”At the event, Guaraca said [00:25:52] that the ultimate goal of SJP is “to get our universities to boycott and divest from corporations that are complicit in and profiting from the genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank.”
Guaraca also said [00:26:03] she joined The New School SJP in her freshman year, in 2021. In June 2021, she tweeted about her plans to join SJP once she went to college.
On October 17, 2023, Guaraca and The New School SJP hosted an event titled: “Genocide, Colonization & the Propaganda War on Palestinians,” which featured a speech by anti-Israel professor Ilan Pappe.
At the event, Guaraca said [00:02:56] “We can expand support for Palestine through… boycotting.”
Biographical Information
Guaraca is a supporter of the BDS movement. While she served as co-chair of The New School SJP, the group promoted [00:02:56] BDS campaigns in October and November 2023.As of October 2023, Guaraca was an organizer with New Student Workers Union (NewSWU), which released a statement on October 10, 2023, in support of The New School SJP.
On November 9, 2023, NewSWU’s organizing committee co-signed the The New School SJP’s list of anti-Israel demands.
In December 2023, Guaraca said [00:32:55] that the NewSWU organizing committee held and passed a vote to implement BDS.
As of January 2024, Guaraca’s Facebook page said she had been a student at the New School, studying philosophy since 2021. As of December 2023, she was a junior studying [00:02:19] philosophy.
In October 2023, Guaraca interned at Global Americans, a think tank that “operates from Washington, DC and New York City, and provides content virtually to remain accessible for leaders, thinkers, and other stakeholders across the Western Hemisphere.”
Full Profile Coming Soon
SJP
SJP is a student organization engaged in anti-Israel activity on North American college and university campuses.
The first chapter of SJP was founded in 2001 at the University of California at Berkeley by Professor Hatem Bazian. Bazian has spread classic anti-Semitism, reportedly promoted religious anti-Semitism and defended the Hamas terror group. In 2004, Bazian called for “intifada” in America.
SJP organizes anti-Israel campaigns, including running annual Israel Apartheid Weeks, often in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) campus chapters.
SJP has been a major force in pushing the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement on campuses. Chapters have initiated dozens of BDS resolutions in student governments, which have been proposed on or around Jewish holidays, a time when many Jewish students are off-campus.
SJP activists have reportedly physically assaulted, intimidated and harassed Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israel campus events and demonized pro-Israel campus organizations.
Chapters have often endorsed and campaigned for numerous terrorists and whitewashed terrorism.
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
Social Media and Weblinks
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/vanessa.guaraca.121Twitter:https://twitter.com/nessawaraka
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/vanessaguaraca/
TikTok 1:https://www.tiktok.com/@vanessaguaraca [Private]
TikTok 2:https://www.tiktok.com/@nessawaraka [Private]
