The American Historical Association votes to condemn “scholasticide” in Gaza

From the AHA website:

Whereas the US government has underwritten the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign in Gaza with over $12.5 billion in military aid between October 2023 and June 2024;

Whereas that campaign, beyond causing massive death and injury to Palestinian civilians and the collapse of basic life structures, has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system;

Whereas in April 2024, UN experts expressed “grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip” including “the killing of 261 teachers and 95 university professors . . . which may constitute an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as scholasticide.”

The bases for this charge include:

• The IDF’s destruction of 80 percent of schools in Gaza, leaving 625,000 children with no educational access;
• The IDF’s destruction of all 12 Gaza university campuses;
• The IDF’s destruction of Gaza’s archives, libraries, cultural centers, museums, and bookstores, including 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, three churches, and the al-Aqsa University library, which preserved crucial documents and other materials related to the history and culture of Gaza;
• The IDF’s repeated violent displacements of Gaza’s people, leading to the irreplaceable loss of students’ and teachers’ educational and research materials, which will extinguish the future study of Palestinian history;

Whereas the United States government has supplied Israel with the weapons being used to commit this scholasticide;

Therefore, be it resolved that the AHA, which supports the right of all peoples to freely teach and learn about their past, condemns the Israeli violence in Gaza that undermines that right;

Be it further resolved that the AHA calls for a permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide documented above;

Finally, be it resolved that the AHA form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.

Over at The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler has it covered:

Members of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of professional historians, approved a resolution on Sunday evening condemning Israel’s military action in Gaza. It argued that the destruction of most of the enclave’s education infrastructure, along with many archives and libraries, amounted to “scholasticide.”

The vote came during the group’s annual meeting, which drew nearly 4,000 of its more than 10,000 members to Manhattan for four days of scholarly panels and discussions. Several members described raucous debate over the measure, which was approved by a vote of 428 to 88, despite signals that it was opposed by some of the group’s senior leadership.

On Monday, the measure moved to the group’s elected council, which under its bylaws can endorse the measure, veto it or decline to concur, which would send it within 90 days to the entire membership for ratification. Later that afternoon, the group’s executive director, James Grossman, said that the group “had a vigorous discussion of the resolution, and has postponed a decision on how to act until its next meeting, which will be within a few weeks.”

The resolution’s passage suggested a new phase in the cultural battles over the Israel-Hamas war, which began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the intense Israeli military response that has left much of the enclave in ruins. Fallout has rocked campuses and cultural organizations across the United States, and contributed to the resignations of a number of university presidents.

And this:

David Waldstreicher, a professor of early American history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said the resounding vote at the historical association, after years of failed measures condemning Israel, reflected shifts in the profession.

“Opinion is changing,” he said after the Sunday vote. “This war is not like other wars. That is obvious to students of history.”

But some members said the vote would only fuel continuing political attacks on higher education, which many fear will escalate in the second Trump administration.

“This feeds directly into the idea that academics are unapologetically political and are all on board with a pretty far left-wing view of the Israel-Hamas war,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor of 20th-century American history at the New School who spoke against the resolution.

“There are plenty of us who have a diversity of viewpoints,” she said. “But if a resolution like this goes through at the biggest organization of historians in America, that’s really bad for us.”

Read the entire piece here.

I would prefer it if the American Historical Association did not get involved in political matters, but this statement is generally limited to the war’s impact on historical sites and history education.

Having said that, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is correct. After the November presidential election, historians should be thinking long and hard about how to educate all Americans, especially those who, for good reasons, do not trust intellectual elites. This resolution suggests just how tone deaf the profession is right now.