Anupama Rao

Overview

Anupama Rao is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at Columbia University (Columbia) and Barnard College (Barnard), where she is an associate professor of History.

During the second intifada, Rao signed a statement calling on Columbia to “(1) to use its influence — political and financial — to encourage the United States government to suspend its military aid and arms sales to Israel, and (2) to divest from all companies that manufacture arms and other military hardware sold to Israel.”

In February 2009, Rao 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.

Pushing BDS on Academic Associations

In 2015, Rao signed a petition encouraging the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to pass a resolution that would boycott Israeli academic institutions. In June 2016, the AAA announced that the resolution was defeated but that there are “other actions planned.”

The AAA vote on the anti-Israel resolution took place from April 15 to May 31, 2016, with approximately half of the AAA membership voting on the resolution. Of the half that voted concerning the resolution, 50.4% voted against it, meaning that only one quarter of AAA’s membership — at most — voted in favor of the resolution.

Rao also signed a petition calling on professors to boycott a June 2016 academic seminar at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem focusing on Indian history.

Promoting BDS at Columbia

In March of 2016, Rao signed a petition created by a Columbia 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 2016. The group called on 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.

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.