Agitprop at the AHA
If the American Historical Association formally adopts a resolution accusing Israel of “scholasticide,” it could destroy the organisation’s reputation for serious scholarship.
On 5 January 2025, at a business meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) held in New York City, the assembled members voted 428 to 88 in favour of a “resolution to oppose scholasticide in Gaza.” The resolution had been proposed by an organisation of left-wing historians calling themselves Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD). This was their first victory, after they failed to pass resolutions in 2015 and 2016 promoting a political agenda of antagonism to the state of Israel based on claims made by Hamas. This time, HPD took advantage of the ongoing Gaza war and the convention’s locale in left-leaning New York to mobilise an assembly overwhelmingly hostile to Israel and willing to support the “scholasticide” resolution.
During the debate about the 2025 resolution, opponents offered several rationales for rejection. As one of five speakers, I argued that it imports the biased views of a political institution, the United Nations Human Rights Council, into a scholarly organisation, and that the resolution’s contents do not meet basic standards of historical scholarship or, for that matter, of fair-minded journalism and political analysis. As such, it constitutes an assault on truth and on the skill and insight one expects from professional historians. The AHA leadership can now accept the resolution, reject it entirely, or send it to the whole membership for a vote. Pending this decision, the outcome is uncertain. Were it to be adopted, however, it would severely damage if not destroy the AHA’s credibility as a professional organisation devoted to the search for truth about the past.
The text of the resolution is based on a statement issued in April 2024 by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Last Spring, UN officials expressed “grave concern” over what they called:
the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip … which may constitute an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as scholasticide. … These attacks are not isolated incidents. They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.
The use of the term “systematic pattern” suggested that it was the policy of the state of Israel to destroy the education system in Gaza.
The term “scholasticide” was invented by UN officials in 2009 to describe Israel’s military response to one of the first, smaller wars launched by Hamas, just four years after Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. The term emerges from the UN Human Rights Council, which is rightly infamous for its anti-Israel bias. As the organisation UN Watch notes, these biases reflect those of the UN General Assembly. Since 2015, 156 of the UNGA’s 226 resolutions concerning human-rights issues have attacked Israel, compared with only eight against Iran, nine against North Korea, eleven against Syria, and 24 against Russia.
The AHA resolution adopts the terminology and the central accusation of the UNHRC’s April statement. It asserts that the basis for the charge of “scholasticide” was “the IDF’s [Israel Defense Force’s] destruction” of schools, university campuses, archives, libraries, cultural centres, museums, bookstores, heritage sites, and mosques in Gaza. It calls for a “permanent cease fire to halt the scholasticide” and for the AHA to “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”
The UNHRC’s April statement implies that Israeli aggression is the sole cause of the current Israel–Hamas war. Typical of its extensive reports on human-rights issues regarding Israel, it makes no reference to the part played by Hamas’s ideology, decisions, or conduct in the causal chain of events that led to the conflict. The AHA resolution follows the same path. It omits any mention of the word “Hamas” and its genocidal attack against Israel on 7 October 2023. It ignores historical scholarship about Islamist collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, the Holocaust, and its aftereffects in the Arab war of 1948. It says nothing about the virulent Jew-hatred in the 1988 Hamas Charter and the determination to destroy Israel by force of arms reiterated in Hamas’s subsequent statements. It fails to mention that Hamas uses the civilian population of Gaza as human shields as it fires weapons at Israeli population centres from headquarters located in and beneath schools, hospitals, and mosques. It remains silent about the massive tunnel system built for many years under the oblivious eyes of UN officials.
The UN Human Rights Council and the Historians for Peace and Democracy also ignore the statements made by the Israeli government after 7 October. After all, why pay attention to the views of a government that for years has been denounced by anti-Zionists at the UN and elsewhere for its alleged racism and criminality? So, in good conscience, Israel’s antagonists never bother to engage with the arguments and evidence offered by Israel in its own defence. Historians of antisemitism will recognise a familiar pattern here: outright dismissal of what the Jews have to say justified by attacks on their character and honesty.
The existence of the state of Israel has made this kind of dismissal more difficult than in the centuries of statelessness. Jews are no longer powerless in the face of their adversaries. This was evident in the opening statement to the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023 delivered by Tal Becker, the legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. In response to South Africa’s accusation that Israel was committing genocide, Becker referred to Hamas’s policy of “unlawfully” embedding its military operations “in homes, mosques, UN facilities, schools and perhaps most shockingly hospitals.” He continued:
37. This is not an occasional tactic. It is an integrated, replanned, extensive, and abhorrent method of warfare. Purposely and methodically murdering civilians. Firing rockets indiscriminately. Systematically using civilians, sensitive sites, and civilian objects as shields. Stealing and hoarding humanitarian supplies—allowing those under its control to suffer, so that it can fuel its fighters and terrorist campaign.
38. The appalling suffering of civilians—both Israeli and Palestinian—is first and foremost the result of this despicable strategy; the horrible cost of Hamas not only failing to protect its civilians but actively sacrificing them for its own propaganda and military benefit. And if Hamas abandons this strategy, releases the hostages, and lays down its arms, the hostilities and suffering would end.
Becker told the ICJ judges that:
43. The Applicant [South Africa] purports to describe the reality in Gaza. But it is as if Hamas, and its total contempt for civilian life, just do not exist as a direct cause of that reality. Hamas is widely estimated to have over 30,000 fighters and is known to bring minors no older than 15 or 16 into its ranks. They are coming for us. But, in South Africa’s telling, they have all but disappeared. There are no explosives in mosques and schools and children’s bedrooms, no ambulances used to transport fighters, no tunnels and terrorist hubs under sensitive sites, no fighters dressed as civilians, no commandeering of aid trucks, no firing from civilian homes, UN facilities and even safe zones. There is only Israel acting in Gaza.
Professional historians are frequently faced with the dilemma of assessing conflicting truth claims; an ability to scrutinise sources and evaluate their credibility is essential to the historian’s craft. What are the most reliable sources? Who is telling the truth and who is lying? Remarkably, both the UNHRC and HPD appear to place more credibility on the claims of the Hamas terrorist organisation and unaccountable “UN experts” than on the statements of the government of Israel, which is a parliamentary democracy with a vibrant and pugnacious free press and broadcast media.
Since the AHA resolution considers the UNHRC a credible source, it is important for professional historians to consult the letter of 28 December 2023 sent by Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, to the President of the Security Council. Erdan posed significant questions about the UN’s willingness to accept statistics on the number of civilian casualties being offered by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. He observed that when Israel submitted “concrete evidence of Hamas atrocity crimes, we are told that the United Nations needs to authenticate this information through its rigorous internal processes, including its ‘triangular verification’ process,” which could take several weeks.
In response, Erdan asked if information submitted by Hamas or other Palestinian actors “receives similar scrutiny and is subject to similar United Nations verification analysis” and the same “triangular verification.” He further noted:
As we count our injured, missing and murdered in the wake of the deadly 7 October massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli and other citizens in southern Israel, we are, quite tragically, learning just what a long, onerous, drawn-out process collecting evidence and analyzing it is for purposes of drawing up an accurate, objective, and reliable list of civilian casualties, even with the most sophisticated capabilities and technologies in place. Therefore, we are curious how it is, in the chaos of the Gaza Strip, that Hamas’ so-called Ministry of Health or other authorities are almost always able to determine the number of injured or dead within a matter of minutes after the incident, and how the United Nations often relies and reports on this information in real time given its rigorous verification standards that it cites repeatedly to us in Israel.
Erdan added that:
We understand that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has often presented casualty and injury statistics conveyed by the “Ministry of Health” in Gaza in the periodic reports that it has issued throughout the war upon which the relevant United Nations agencies rely. Is proper context provided to explain that these figures are those given by Hamas and may be grossly inaccurate and inflated?
Yet the UN and HPD—and too much of the Western press and broadcast media—have not treated Hamas’s casualty figures with the scepticism Erdan’s arguments suggest is necessary, and that the standards of historical scholarship and source criticism certainly require. The expertise of the UN Human Rights Council consists of waging political warfare against the state of Israel, not of offering balanced assessments of ongoing events.
The UN Human Rights Council is a partisan observer, not a neutral or objective one. Its bias is evident on its own website, where it itemises what it examines and what it chooses not to examine. In February 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza and one of the signatories to the UN scholasticide accusation in April, tweeted:
The ‘greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century’? The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression. France & the international community did nothing to prevent it. My respects to the victims.
In response to this and other comments from Albanese, the Israeli government banned her from entering the country, and Israel’s foreign minister, Isaac Katz, called on UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to fire her. In defence of this demand, Katz stated, “If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the ‘special envoy’—and fire her permanently. Preventing her from entering Israel might remind her of the real reason why Hamas slaughtered babies, women, and adults.” When Guterres refused to fire Albanese, the Israeli government understandably interpreted this decision as further evidence of the UN’s bias against it.
On 24 February 2024, a bipartisan group of eighteen members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to Guterres and Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, urging them to fire Albanese and disband the UN’s Commission of Inquiry into Israel. They wrote in part:
Ms. Albanese has repeatedly refused to condemn terrorist attacks against Israelis while continuing her condemnations of Israel. For an official tasked with serving as an independent, neutral, and expert voice on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, her inexcusable silence against terrorism targeting Israelis and her outrageous and prejudicial remarks clearly reflect the irredeemable bias of her mandate. … Ms. Albanese’s more recent comments only reaffirms and strengthens [sic] our assessment that the UN system is riven with bias. Her biased behaviors should have no place at the United Nations and clearly demonstrate the lack of impartiality.
The members of Congress urged Guterres and Turk to “recommit to a United Nations system free from antisemitic and anti-Israel bias.” Instead, Albanese retained her position, and the Commission of Inquiry continued to focus on criticism of Israel, saying little about the threats facing Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Members of Congress are political figures, but so are the governments represented in the United Nations. It is unacceptable that members of the AHA treat the UN Human Rights Council as a reliable source of information about the war in Gaza but not the government of Israel or US Congressional representatives. All are political actors responding to an ongoing war, yet it strains credulity that the benefit of the doubt should go to Hamas, a Jew-hating terrorist organisation, and the UNHRC, which is accountable to no one, but not to representatives of two democracies that are accountable to their fellow citizens.
It is not only Israeli officials or members of the US Congress who have noticed the habit of writing as if “there is only Israel acting in Gaza.” On 4 January 2025, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the New York Times:
But fundamentally, look, one of the things that I found a little astounding throughout [the course of the war in Gaza] is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender—I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on! Now, again, that doesn’t absolve Israel of its actions in conducting the war. But I do have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.
Searching questions like these ought to be pondered by serious historians, political analysts, officials, and journalists everywhere. The point is not that the AHA as an organisation should engage in “condemnation and pressure” on Hamas, for doing so would be the action of a political organisation. Rather, as historians, members of the AHA should recognise the validity of Blinken’s challenge and refrain from lending the prestige of their organisation to politically motivated silence. The path to “peace and democracy” in Gaza does not lie in support for one-sided and biased resolutions from the United Nations or the AHA.
Exculpating Hamas for the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza during a war that it started and refuses to end serves neither peace nor democracy. It simply aids the strategy of a terrorist organisation that believes Palestinian life is expendable in pursuit of its eliminationist goals. Repeating Hamas propaganda is not the purpose of an organisation of professional historians.
No matter how indignantly the anti-Zionist faculty deny it, support for this resolution raises the issue of left-wing antisemitism in the humanities and social sciences. It takes the form of either support for or indifference to the destruction of the state of Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and/or Iran. The debate about whether attacks on Israel are “merely” expressions of a supposedly legitimate “anti-Zionism” or manifestations of antisemitism will rage on. Nevertheless, 35 governments—including that of the United States—have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, according to which such efforts do indeed constitute a form of antisemitism.
Furthermore, the Hamas Charter, the group’s many public statements and proclamations before and after 7 October, and its celebration of the mass murder on that day provide unambiguous evidence of the Jew-hatred central to its ideology and actions. Its terrorist campaigns since the 1990s and the massacre of 7 October were the logical consequence of those hatreds. Anyone still unconvinced of this fact has either not read Hamas’s statements, or stubbornly underestimates the impact of its ideology on its policy and actions.
Jeffrey Herf
The attack of 7 October vividly illustrates how radical antisemitism can lead to mass murder. Since 1988, Hamas has proudly, frequently, and vehemently proclaimed its hatred of Jews and its determination to destroy Israel by force of arms. Whether or not the AHA leadership or the membership decides to adopt the “scholasticide” resolution will be determined in the coming months. If the organisation does so, it will have to ignore the Islamist antisemitism that fuels Hamas’s wars against Israel, the terrorism it has waged against Israeli civilians since the 1990s, and its persistent efforts to destroy the possibility of a peaceful compromise that would end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Antisemitism also involves paranoid and conspiratorial theories of Jewish power and influence that bear little relation to the reality Israel faces in international fora. The Jewish Agency in Israel estimates that there are 15.3 million Jews in the world, seven million of whom live in Israel. The world population is just over eight billion people. That tiny number of Jews is reflected in the preponderance of Israel’s adversaries at the UN, embodied in a bloc of nations from the global south and the Middle East that consistently proposes and votes for anti-Israeli resolutions. Forty-seven of these countries belong to the UNHRC. At the United Nations—and especially in its branches devoted to examining the Middle East—Israel is vastly outnumbered by countries with the power to mobilise partisans eager to use the UN’s imprimatur to launch ideological assaults on Israel.
The “scholasticide” resolution is just one demonstration of how the actual balance of power in the arena of global political warfare is weighted heavily against Israel. Yet the antisemitic imagination suggests that the power relations are just the reverse. Jews have been accused of murdering the innocent and causing various human catastrophes since time immemorial. Christian accusations of deicide grew to encompass medieval blood libels and accusations of well-poisoning. A theory of cosmic Jewish malevolence was then elaborated and codified in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903. A few decades later, Nazi propaganda blamed Jews for World Wars I and II and various other social ills—accusations repeated verbatim in the Hamas Charter of 1988.
Postwar antisemitism re-emerged in descriptions of Zionism and Israel as emblematic of racism, aggression, apartheid, and genocide. But the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 granted sovereignty to the Jewish people for the first time in 2,000 years. This meant that Jews joined the normal world of power politics and had the capacity to wield armed force to defend themselves. In this way, the creation of a sovereign Jewish state evoked one of the antisemitic imagination’s deepest nightmares—that of the armed Jew.
The willingness of the UNHRC and HPD to ignore the moral responsibility of Hamas and focus exclusively on the culpability of Israel constitutes a new episode of this longstanding antisemitic habit. As does the refusal to address the arguments and evidence offered by the government of Israel. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has offered a comprehensive statement answering the many allegations about its conduct of the war in Gaza. Anyone seeking a fair account of this conflict should include it among the sources they consult.
The refusal to address or even acknowledge the arguments Israel makes in its own defence follows decades of attacks on Israel’s moral and political legitimacy. While it was once customary to “disbelieve the Jew or the Jews” now it is acceptable to “disbelieve the Zionists or the Israelis.” For the historian of antisemitism, this is an old and familiar pattern.
The 5 January vote to condemn Israel for the crime of “scholasticide” was informed by UNHCR biases uncritically imported into the AHA resolution. This has already inflicted great damage on the AHA’s reputation as an organisation dedicated to uncovering the truth about the past and present. The meeting in New York lent credence to the view that historians in the United States see no distinction between partisanship and scholarship.
The packed meeting erupted into cheers when proponents of the resolution approached the microphone and merely stated their names, and their statements evoked further cheers and standing ovations. When I described the historical scholarship that the resolution ignored and referred to the biased nature of UN reports, hissing and jeering filled the room. Celebratory chants of “Free, free Palestine!” rang out when the lopsided vote results were announced. An AHA discussion had degenerated into a political rally. The hatred of Israel and, yes, of those of us who defended it, was intense.
If the AHA leadership now adopts the resolution, or if the wider membership votes to ratify it, many historians who are currently members of the AHA (myself included) will resign as it will be clear that the organisation is now willing to endorse political propaganda. The public outside the universities and colleges may conclude that historians who vote for such resolutions are no longer credible as scholarly professionals in their own specialties. This would inevitably call the raison d’être of history departments in American universities and colleges into question. That would be a tragic loss for the many historians in the United States who do not want to see their profession hijacked by political activists.
Finally, adopting this resolution sends a clear message to anyone, Jewish or not, who supports Israel’s efforts to defend itself and rejects the propaganda war waged by Hamas and UN institutions. That message is: there is no place for you in the American historical profession and, if you are young or in mid-career, your chances of securing an academic position in a history department in the United States or advancing from your current position are zero. So, you should probably get out of the profession. In the current environment, all young Jewish academics are likely to be presumed guilty of Zionist sympathies until and unless proven otherwise, so saving their careers will require disavowing their beliefs and joining the condemnations of “scholasticide” or genocide placed before them by their peers. It is even possible that some departments of history will decide not to hire Jews at all.
Will American historians resist antisemitism in the name of anti-Zionism, or will it become an enduring feature of American intellectual and scholarly life? Will the members of the American Historical Association decide that it should be associated with fine scholarship or with propaganda parading as such? Will historians, as they have done occasionally in the past, recall their deepest values, summon their courage, display their skills at searching for the truth, and thus reject the voices of the activists that rang through the AHA Business Meeting in New York on 5 January? Their discipline provides the necessary tools, but will they use them at this critical moment?
