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Gil Anidjar

Overview

Gil Anidjar is an activist with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and led an anti-Israel divestment campaign at Columbia University (Columbia).


Anidjar has stated that the struggle for Palestinian rights “is—or it should be—the struggle of all students and all teachers, of all adjuncts and lecturers, of untenured as well as—believe me—tenured faculty.”

Anidjar is a professor of Religion, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia, as well as the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Mischaracterizing Jews and Israel

In an interview about his book, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Anidjar argued that “the last Semites and the only Semites” are Arabs.

Anidjar claimed that “the Arabs have become the race that is still attached to its religion, whereas the Jews have in fact become Western Christians, and therefore are no longer marked, neither by race nor by religion”.

Anidjar also claimed that Jews have become “white”.

Anidjar insisted that “it is absolutely essential to continue to insist on the colonial dimension of Zionism, and colonial in the strict sense, absolutely… So Israel is absolutely a colonial enterprise, a colonial settler state, to be precise.”

Campaigning for BDS at Columbia

In November 2002, Anidjar led an anti-Israel divestment conference at Columbia titled “National Day of Action Against Israeli Apartheid.” The conference took place several weeks after a campaign was launched to pressure “Columbia to divest its funds from all firms that produce or sell arms or military hardware that is used by the state of Israel.”

In March 2009, Anidjar was a featured speaker at a “teach-in” on boycotting Israel as part of a divestment campaign at Columbia. The teach-in also featured representatives from Adalah-NY, a BDS advocacy group that defines itself as “The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel.”  

In March of 2016, Anidjar 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 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.

Promoting BDS in Academia

In 2014, Anidjar signed a letter calling on “scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions.”

The letter pledged "not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.”

Pressuring Columbia’s President

In February 2009, Anidjar 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.

Slamming Former Columbia Chancellor

In December 2012, Anidjar signed a statement against UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, a former vice president of Columbia's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for raising questions about the BDS campaign at Columbia.

In November 2012, Dirks gave an interview in which he implied that a 2002 Columbia divestment campaign was a factor in creating a difficult atmosphere for Jewish students at Columbia.   

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.



 


Gil Anidjar
Status:
Professor
University:
Columbia
Organizations:
BDS

Related Profiles:
Marianne Hirsch,

Last Modified:
06/23/2025

Photos & Screenshots

16 images

Infamous Quotes

“… the Jews stopped being Semites. After World War II, all kinds of complicated things happened between race and religion around the Jews. Most of all, race becomes a word that cannot speak its name when one speaks about the Jews … the last Semites and the only Semites became the Arabs. … the Arabs have become the race that is still attached to its religion, whereas the Jews have in fact become Western Christians, and therefore are no longer marked, neither by race nor by religion.”
Gil Anidjar, asiasociety.org, 2003