Timothy Mitchell

Overview

Timothy Mitchell is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he has promoted at Columbia University (Columbia). He has also been accused of promoting an anti-Israel agenda in the classroom.

Mitchell is the William B Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia.

As of December 2021, Mitchell was listed online as being married to Lila Abu-Lughod who is a leader within the BDS movement. In 2015, she co-authored a BDS resolution at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) calling on the AAA to boycott Israeli academic institutions.  

Supporting BDS

On August 6, 2014, Mitchell signed a petition of Middle East scholars and librarians, calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The petition accused Israel of carrying out an “ongoing siege” and “ongoing massacres” and concluded with a “pledge 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.”

Pushing BDS at Columbia

Mitchell expressed his support for BDS at Columbia by signing the “Columbia University Apartheid Divest: Faculty Petition,” authored by 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 of 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 listed eight companies that it believed “*likely* to be invested in by a university like CU,” without knowing whether Columbia actually had holdings in the corporations.

Signatories of the petition declared that they “take issue with our financial involvements in institutions associated with the State of Israel's military occupation of Palestinian lands, continued violations of Palestinian human rights, systematic destruction of life and property, inhumane segregation and systemic forms of discrimination.”

Signatories went on to state that they “now stand with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine as well as with Jewish Voice for Peace in calling upon the University to take a moral stance against Israel's violence in all its forms.”

The petition concluded with a “demand that the University divest from corporations that supply, perpetuate, and profit from a system that has subjugated the Palestinian people for over 68 years.”

In February 2009, Mitchell 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.

Anti-Israel Bias in the Classroom

Mitchell’s hiring to Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies department and his appointment as director of the department’s graduate studies program received widespread criticism concerning his anti-Israel bias.

In an article published on September 12, 2008, Mitchell’s pro-BDS activism was cited as a concerning addition to the department “which has come under scrutiny in the past over allegations of political bias.”

This concern was echoed in another article, published on September 14, 2008, in which the author argued that because of Mitchell’s vocal anti-Israel position, he “would be prone to bias against Zionist students and especially students, professors and other scholars from Israel.”

The article went on to state that “since he is for the boycott of Israeli universities and their personnel, he will not abide by the traditions of the tolerant and free American scholarly world.”