Saba Mahmood

Overview

Saba Mahmood is an activist within the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and has called on the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to adopt BDS.

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

Mahmood is a professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Pushing BDS

Mahmood is a member of an “advisory group” that guides the organization “Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic institutions.”

In December of 2014, Mahmood sat on an AAA panel titled “What is the Role of Academia in Political Change? The Case of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Israeli Violations Of International Law.”

Mahmood spoke alongside BDS proponents Omar Barghouti, Richard Falk, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Noura Erekat and Daniel Segal.

During the panel, Mahmood discussed her support for BDS while demonizing Israel and Israeli universities.

Mahmood has also signed a statement calling on the AAA to boycott Israeli universities.

In June of 2016, the AAA announced that the 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 August of 2014, Mahmood signed a letter calling on “scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions.”

Signatories of 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.”

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.

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