Overview: Ziad Abu-Rish is a leader within the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and led a teach-in for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UCLA.

In 2012, Abu-Rish moderated an SJP BDS panel featuring anti-Israel professors Robin D.G. Kelley, David Lloyd, Gabriel Piterberg and Sondra Hale.

Abu-Rish is also a supporter of disgraced professor Steven Salaita,

Abu-Rish is an assistant professor of History at Ohio University (Ohio U) and a board member of the Arab Studies Institute. He was member of SJP during his graduate studies at Georgetown University.

Pushing Academic BDS

During the annual 2014 conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Abu-Rish proposed a resolution that defended “the right of scholarly associations to boycott Israel."

The resolution called on MESA to “provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume."

MESA is considered “the most important association of Middle East Studies."

Depicting Israelis as “Jewish Immigrant Colonist Settlers"

On January 19, 2012, Abu-Rish led a SJP teach-in where he framed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as between “oppressor and oppressed, between colonizer and colonized, between settler and native, between Zionist immigrant and between indigenous Arab."

Abu-Rish then instructed SJP members to “typologize" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “settler-colonial conflict" which is principally between “Jewish immigrant colonist settlers" versus the “indigenous Arab inhabitants".

Abu-Rish also described the founding of Israel as a “settler colonial conflict that is part of a larger trajectory of white European settler colonialism" in world history, such as the founding of United States, Algeria, Australia, Ireland and South Africa.