Overview: Zainab Bahrani supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at Columbia University (Columbia), where she is the Edith Porada professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology.

During the second intifada, Bahrani signed a statement calling on Columbia to “(1) to use its influence — political and financial — to encourage the United States government to suspend its military aid and arms sales to Israel, and (2) to divest from all companies that manufacture arms and other military hardware sold to Israel."

In February 2009, Bahrani 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.

Promoting BDS at Columbia
In March 2016, Bahrani signed a petition created by a Columbia student initiative to rebrand BDS at Columbia as: 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 2016. The group called on 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 lists eight target companies that it believes “likely to be invested in by a university like CU," without knowing whether Columbia actually had holdings in the corporations.