Indrani Chatterjee

Overview

Indrani Chatterjee is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and has defended disgraced anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita. 

As of March 2020, Chatterjee is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas, Austin (UTA). She was also formerly an associate professor of History at Rutgers University (Rutgers). 

Supporting BDS

Chatterjee signed her name to a letter, published on February 9, 2012, “to congratulate The Daily Pennsylvanian for its coverage of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions conference, the University of Pennsylvania for hosting the conference, and most of all, the organizers of the conference for their courageous and hard work.”

The letter went on to state that “BDS is a tool that — as in the case of the movement against apartheid in South Africa — challenges racial inequality, dispossession, displacement and genocidal violence.”

Chatterjee signed a petition to the New York Times, published by Change.Org and Electronic Intifada (EI) on April 30, 2012, condemning anti-BDS activism. Signatories defended BDS activists, characterizing the BDS movement as an expression of “Free speech and thought.”

The petition signed by Chatterjee was reportedly started by Snehal Shingavi, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas (UT) who co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with Hatem Bazian in 2001.

Defending Steven Salaita

Chatterjee signed a petition published on August 21, 2014, by the BDS movement titled:“A Call to People of Conscience Not to Speak at the University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Until Chancellor Wise Honor [sic.] the Contract to Hire Professor Steven Salaita.”

In 2014, The University of Illinois withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” In 2017, Salaita posted to Facebook: “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not…I will die unapologetic.” In February 2019, Salaita stated that he had become a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C., area.

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.