Zahid Chaudhary

Overview

Zahid Chaudhary [Zahid R. Chaudhary] supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at Princeton University (Princeton), where he is an associate professor specializing in Postcolonial Studies, Visual Culture and Critical Theory.

Princeton Divests Campaign

In April of 2015, Chaudhary was part of Princeton Divests — a coalition of Princeton students and faculty "committed to divesting from companies committing human rights violations in occupied Palestine" — that initiated a BDS referendum at Princeton. The referendum, voted on by Princeton students, was narrowly defeated.

Faculty Divestment Petition

On November 5, 2014, Chaudhary signed a petition entitled "An Invitation to the Tenured Faculty at Princeton" that was featured in Princeton’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The petition invited tenured faculty to support divestment from companies “that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank until the State of Israel complies with UN Resolution 242, ends its military occupation of the West Bank and lifts its siege of Gaza.”

The faculty petition was rejected by the Resources Committee of the Council of the Princeton University Community, because it did not meet guidelines for consideration. It was reported that organizers of the faculty petition "plan to press on."

According to Professor Max Weiss, a co-founder of the faculty divestment initiative, the “faculty petition urging divestment set the stage for the student referendum.”

Pushing BDS and Rejecting An Anti-BDS Resolution

Chaudhary has signed a BDS statement put forward by the Modern Language Association Members for Justice in Palestine (MLA MJP), which calls on the MLA “to pass a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”

During the annual MLA meeting in January 2017, MLA’s delegate council rejected the resolution and instead voted to support Resolution 2017-1 (2017-1), which urged the MLA to refrain from endorsing an Israeli boycott.

In April of 2017, the anti-boycott measure was submitted to MLA’s nearly 24,000 members for ratification. On May 5, 2017, Chaudhary posted on Facebook “MLA friends: don't forget to vote NO” and linked to a MLA MJP post that encouraged MLA members to vote against 2017-1.

In early 2017, Chaudhary signed a Change.org petition targeting 2071-1. According to the text of the petition, “The very existence of 2017-1 is a blight on the the ethical orientations of the MLA.”

Supporting A Conspiracy Theorist

In 2016, Chaudhary signed a letter to Vassar College President Catherine Bond Hill, defending anti-Israel Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, who delivered a lecture at Vassar College in February of that year, titled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.”

Puar began her speech by calling for armed struggle against Israel and then continued to demonize Israel by suggesting that Israelis harvest the organs of dead Palestinians. She also claimed that Israel was maiming and "stunting" Palestinians via food restrictions.

Puar also opined that the reason Israeli Jews have not killed Palestinians is “[t]hey need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”

The letter addressed to President Hill slammed objections to Puar’s libelous incitement against Israel, as attacks on freedom of speech and the integrity of “an invited guest.”

The letter also cited an October 2015 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that conjured anti-Semitic conspiracies of a powerful Israel lobby controlling the U.S. government and silencing legitimate criticism of Israel.

The letter claimed that the report revealed "the ways in which ‘a network of lobbying groups... funded by, working in coordination with, and/or staunchly supportive of the policies and practices of the Israeli government primarily drives efforts to silence speech on behalf of Palestinian rights’."

The letter also claimed that "these groups… are supported or even initiated through many millions of dollars in donations from right-wing, hawkish Israel advocates."

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

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/zahidrc

Twitter:https://twitter.com/ZahidChaudhary1

University Website:https://english.princeton.edu/people/zahid-r-chaudhary