---
title: "Academic boycott of Israel"
chunk: 4/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_boycott_of_Israel"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:27.825907+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Following Operation Cast Lead ===
In March 2009, shortly after the Gaza War, a call for an academic boycott in France was published on the web with over 50 signatures, including Daniel Bensaïd, Gérard Toulouse of the Académie des sciences, coauthor in 2003 of Les scientifiques et les droits de l'homme with Lydie Koch-Miramond who had also signed and defended the boycott of Israel in 2002, Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, and Roland Lombard, President of the Collectif Interuniversitaire pour la Coopération avec les Universités Palestiniennes. They called "in the first place to impose a program of boycott, divestment, and sanctions," following the creation of the French organization BDS France.
In the spring of 2009, the Association of Academics for the Respect of International Law in Palestine (AURDIP) was created by the group of academics who had initiated the 2002 call, in alliance with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel PACBI and with the British organization British Committee for the Universities of Palestine. AURDIP was created with two primary missions:  (1) To promote the application of international law in Israel and Palestine; specifically to oppose Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and Israel’s settlement policy, which fly in the face of international conventions on human rights, United Nations resolutions, and decisions of the International Court of Justice; (2) To defend Palestinians’ right to education and to support students and staff of Palestinian universities in the defense of this right.

== United States ==

=== Boycott campaign ===
Haaretz reported in 2009 that a group of American professors had joined the boycott call in the wake of the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict:

While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America.
The group's name is "U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel". (USACBI)

=== Support and successes ===

==== Associations ====
In April 2013, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) voted to boycott Israeli universities and academic institutions. It was joined in December by the American Studies Association (ASA). In a vote in which 1,252 of its 5,000 members participated, 66% voted in favour of a boycott. The reasons given were "Israel's violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights," and thus "negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students". Many proponents of the ASA's boycott, including Yale professor and past president of the ASA Matthew Frye Jacobson, argue that the action can be seen as "symbolic", as it is such defined by the ASA council statement. In response to the resolution, a number of organizations and politicians accused the ASA of applying a double standard towards Israel. Opponents of the boycott called the resolution antisemitic and anti-Israel.
Israel is the only nation ever boycotted by the ASA in the 52 years of the organization's existence. The New York Times reported that ASA's president Curtis Marez argued that America has "a particular responsibility to answer the call for boycott because it is the largest supplier of military aid to the state of Israel". Marez acknowledged that the United States has previously, and is currently, the largest supplier of military aid to many governments, including some with poor human rights records, but explained that Israel is the only country in which "civil society groups" had specifically asked the ASA to launch a boycott. Further responding to accusations that the ASA was singling out Israel while ignoring many other nations that have comparable or even worse human rights records that Israel (including many of Israel's neighbors), Marez replied: "One has to start somewhere."
Over 700 new members joined the organisation between the December vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions and April 2014. The ASA subsequently released a statement that said it had "collected more membership revenue in the past three months than in any other three-month period over the past quarter-century" and that their organization is "thriving".
In December 2013, the council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association voted unanimously in favor of the academic boycott of Israel, becoming the third American academic association to participate in PACBI's Call to action. NAISA made an official declaration of its support for the academic boycott of Israel, choosing to create an original document of declaration in order to protest, "the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly, which [it] uphold[s]." The declaration "encourages NAISA members to boycott Israeli academic institutions because they are imbricated with the Israeli state".
In November 2015, the annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association voted to join the academic boycott campaign, by a margin of 1,040 to 136. In 2016 the resolution was put up for vote by all the members of the Association and was rejected. In July 2023, the American Anthropological Association again voted on the resolution and it passed.
In March 2022, the Middle East Studies Association voted to endorse BDS, by a margin of 768 to 167. A full membership vote was taken from 31 January to 22 March, and 80 per cent of members voted in favor of a proposed resolution endorsing the Palestinian call for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel.

==== Academics ====
In a speech given at Brooklyn College in 2013 with BDS founding member Omar Barghouti, prominent American academic Judith Butler commented on the reasons behind her support of the academic boycott campaign of the BDS movement stating: 