Stathis Gourgouris

Gourgouris has written a personal statement encouraging the Modern Language Association (MLA) to adopt the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Gourgouris is a professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University (Columbia). 

In July of 2016, Gourgouris submitted a personal statement urging the MLA to adopt a resolution, to which he was a signatory, that would boycott Israeli academic institutions. 

In his statement, Gourgouris accused Israel of “systematically” killing Palestinians who, according to Gourgouris, have been “dispossessed, expelled, and exterminated” by Israel.

Gourgouris concluded his statement arguing that “BDS is the very least we can do in this climate of both overt and tacit support (especially in the US) of Israel’s abhorrent policies of extermination of Palestinian life.”

During the annual MLA meeting in January 2017, MLA’s delegate council rejected the resolution and instead voted to support Resolution 2017-1 (2017-1), which urged the MLA to refrain from endorsing BDS. 

During an April 2013 lecture at the Edward Said Memorial Conference, Gourgouris claimed that Israel repeatedly demolished the infrastructure of Beirut “beyond the purposes of strategic interest” because Israel is unwilling to “accept the capacity of Arabs to blossom as a modern secular society.” 

He went on to allege that “Israel would always prefer the image of Arabs as a fanatic and uncivilized mob incapable of creating and managing any conditions of autonomy.”

In March of 2016, Gourgouris signed a petition created by a student initiative to rebrand BDS at Columbia as: Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). 

CUAD is comprised of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members, who joined forces in February of 2016. The group called upon Columbia to divest its equity holdings and endowment funds from companies that — in CUAD’s words — “profit from the State of Israel’s ongoing system of settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid law.” 

CUAD lists eight target companies that it believes “*likely* to be invested in by a university like CU,” without knowing whether Columbia actually had holdings in the corporations.

In February 2009, Gourgouris signed a letter calling on Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to “make public [his] opposition” to Israeli security measures in the West Bank and Gaza. 

The letter was sent one month after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead (OCL), which was launched to stop Hamas weapons smuggling and rocket fire from the Gaza strip targeting Israeli civilians.

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

University Website:http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/416