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Brian Boyd

Overview

Brian Boyd is a leader within the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement who was “instrumental” in passing a 2015 resolution encouraging the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Boyd frequently posts support for BDS on his Facebook page and has published a personal statement outlining his support for the movement.

Boyd is a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University (Columbia), where he is currently the program director at the Center for Archaeology and director of the M.A. in Museum Anthropology. He is also co-chair of the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Division, a committee member of the Center for Palestine Studies and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Human-Animal Studies.

Boyd is also co-director of a joint Columbia-Birzeit University anthropology project in the West Bank.  

Pushing BDS on Academic Associations

In 2015, Boyd co-authored a resolution encouraging the AAA to boycott Israeli academic institutions. In June 2016, the AAA announced that a resolution to boycott Israeli universities 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.

In 2016, Boyd co-authored another BDS resolution that was passed at the Eighth World Archaeological Congress (WAC-8). In addition to calling for “publishers to refuse to publish articles by Israeli and international scholars that relate to archaeological excavations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Boyd’s resolution called for Jordan to exercise exclusive authority over the Temple Mount.

Promoting BDS at Columbia

In March of 2016, Boyd 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.

Supporting A Would-Be Terrorist

On March 6, 2017, Boyd posted an article on Facebook praising would-be terrorist Basil Al Araj. 

Al Arajwas was killed in a shootout with Israeli security forces during an arrest raid. He was being arrested for allegedly belonging to a terrorist cell planning to carry out attacks on Israeli targets. An M-16 rifle and an improvised Carlo-style submachine gun was uncovered inside his home.

Supporting An Inciter to Violence

On July 12, 2016, Boyd shared an article on Facebook supporting Dareen Tatour, who was placed under house arrest for inciting violence in the fall of 2015. 

October 2015 saw an upsurge in violence across Israel incited by Palestinian political and religious leaders. The wave of stabbings, known as the “Knife Intifada,” saw young Palestinians throughout the country stabbing and attempting to stab scores of Israeli civilians. 

Tatour posted a Facebook status reportedly “calling for intifada on behalf of al-Aqsa mosque.” 

Tatour also posted on Facebook that “I am the next shahid [martyr]” under a picture of attempted-stabber Asraa Zidan Tawfik Abed. 

Tatour also posted a Youtube video, narrated with a poem that glorified violence and the eviction of Jews from “Arab Palestine.”

Demonizing Israel

In February 2009, Boyd signed a letter calling on Columbia 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 


Brian Boyd
Status:
Professor
University:
Columbia,
more...
Birzeit
Organizations:
BDS

Related Profiles:
Marianne Hirsch,

Last Modified:
06/23/2025

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