New York City — American Historical Association members attending the group’s annual conference voted 428 to 88 Sunday to approve a resolution opposing “scholasticide” in Gaza and the U.S. government’s funding of Israel’s war.
The move makes the American Historical Association the latest scholarly group to express a stance on the war in Gaza — despite conservative criticism, reaching all the way up to the president-elect, of pro-Palestinian advocacy in academe.
Scholasticide means the intentional eradication of an education system. The resolution, which says Israel’s military campaign “has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system,” calls for a permanent ceasefire and for the association to form a committee to help rebuild “Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”
The resolution passed after a boisterous, hourlong, standing-room-only meeting in a hotel ballroom that was so full some attendees couldn’t fit inside. Before members voted, they heard a structured debate on the resolution that included five people speaking for the resolution and five people against it. Throughout, there was raucous applause, cheers and standing ovations for the speakers who advocated for the resolution and more muted claps for opponents.
Before the debate began, one member, Rice University associate professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti, stood at the front of the room and accused the association’s executive director, Jim Grossman, of having made “a political statement” against the resolution in his report that began the meeting. (Grossman had said “we are not a political organization” but said afterward he was just giving his report.)
When it came time to vote, some members criticized the method of simply writing yes or no on note cards; attendees had been provided multiple cards. After the debate but before the outcome was revealed, one member pointed at another and accused him of recording the meeting against the rules, leading Grossman to search his phone and conclude that didn’t happen.
When the vote total was announced, the overwhelming majority was met with chants of “free free Palestine!” But Sunday’s vote is not the end of the process.
The resolution will now head to the association’s elected council, which can accept it, veto it or refuse to concur. That last option would send the resolution to the association’s roughly 10,450 members for a vote. Grossman said it would then take a simple majority of those voting to pass.
The debate going forward may mirror what was heard Sunday: arguments over when scholarly associations should speak out and, if they do, what they should say.
“History is screaming to the present,” said resolution supporter Sherene Seikaly, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The AHA has been deafeningly silent. Silence is complicity.”
But opponent Natalia Petrzela, a professor at the New School, noted the resolution doesn’t mention the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israelis or the hostages Hamas took.
“Passing this resolution as the view of the AHA stands to hurt the historical profession and academia writ large,” Petrzela said. She said it would only lend credibility to accusations of political bias in academe, and “these attacks will only intensify with the coming [Trump] administration.”
The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, whose annual meeting is later this week, has faced criticism for not letting that organization’s members even vote on a resolution that would also accuse Israel of scholasticide. The MLA resolution would’ve gone further than the American Historical Association’s by also endorsing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
The American Historical Association resolution quotes a group of independent United Nations experts who, according to a past news release from the UN, said, “It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system.”
That news release was from April, just six months into the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The UN release said that, by then, the last Gazan university had already been destroyed and “more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured.”
Historians for Peace and Democracy wrote the resolution. Van Gosse, a co-chair of the organization and an emeritus history professor at Franklin & Marshall College, said he and others founded the group 20 years ago to oppose the Iraq war.
Hours before the vote Sunday evening, another group called Historians for Palestine held a rally outside the conference hotel near Times Square. About 75 people listened to speakers, including Takriti, manning a bullhorn, standing next to people holding a banner reading, “Ceasefire Now!”
“There are deniers out there that deny reality and, importantly for us historians, they use historical falsification to promote that,” said Takriti, an associate professor in modern Arab history, to audience shouts of “Shame!” He said Sunday’s resolution was just a start.
“Nowadays, some of these people will read land acknowledgments here in this colonized space, but they don’t mean what they read,” Takriti said. “They haven’t internalized what they’re talking about. For them it is just words lacking meaning, and Gaza proves that. Because if they had any understanding, if they had any feeling for others, if they were not engaging in pure narcissistic — and violent narcissistic — behavior, they would have issued resolutions far stronger than the one that is being proposed from the very beginning of this genocide.”
The association has spoken out on current events before. In February 2022, it released a statement condemning “in the strongest possible terms Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. This act of overt military aggression violates the sovereignty of an independent Ukraine, threatening stability in the broader region and across the world.” It further said, “We vigorously support the Ukrainian nation and its people in their resistance to Russian military aggression and the twisted mythology that President Putin has invented to justify his violation of international norms.”
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