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.
