During its annual meeting earlier this month, the American Historical Association, the oldest and most prestigious body of professional historians in the country, voted to approve at its business meeting a resolution to condemn Israel for committing “scholasticide” against Palestinian Gaza. The meeting, ordinarily a yawn-inducing discussion of the AHA’s budgets and expenditures on various programs, was attended by a surprisingly large number of members, more than 500, who nevertheless represented only 12 percent of the 4,000 historians who attended the annual meeting, and 5 percent of the organization’s total membership. The meeting voted 428 to 88 for acceptance of a resolution, sponsored by the pressure group Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD), “to oppose scholasticide in Israel.” The resolution then came before the AHA’s elected council which, as reported by The New York Times, “under its bylaws can endorse the measure, veto it or decline to concur.” If it endorses the resolution, it will be sent “within 90 days to the entire membership for ratification.” The Council, however, punted on the decision, agreeing to reconsider the question at its next meeting in a few weeks.
The Times’s reporting is accurate, though the story is already being misrepresented by less scrupulous media and H-PAD itself, as though the AHA membership as a whole had already endorsed the measure. It is hardly surprising that media outlets aligned with the pro-Palestinian left would be eager to present the resolution as a done deal. It has long been a strategy of the BDS movement, which is fully aligned with H-PAD’s resolution, to present Israel as a “terrorist state” or an “outlaw state.” The goal is to delegitimize the 76-year old country via “anti-normalization” campaigns. Anyone opposed to BDS’s agenda by definition may not be numbered among the great and the good.
A number of academic institutions, including many student associations, have not been able to endure the threat of moral marginalization, and a considerable number have already endorsed BDS’s various campaigns. Nevertheless, there is a notable absence of endorsements from the largest professional associations. Among the older and larger associations representing entire academic fields, only the American Studies Association, some 5,000 members strong, and the American Anthropological Association, which claims around 10,000 members, have formally endorsed BDS. Will they be joined by the 10,000 members of the AHA?
That is certainly a possibility. The pro-Palestinian left’s relatively new campaign to condemn Israel’s “scholasticide” is carefully crafted to appeal to academics and educators. It complements BDS’s existing sponsorship of academic boycotts of Israeli scholars, scientists, and institutions of learning, justified on the grounds that “Israeli universities are major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.” The brainchild of a former PLO official, Karma Nabulsi, now a teacher at Oxford, the term “scholasticide” refers to the serious damage done to schools and universities in Gaza as a result of the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza that began after Oct. 7, 2023. Now the accusation of “scholasticide” has been packaged as a resolution and is being shopped by activists to various academic institutions and organizations. One such campaign, at Brock University in Canada, was recently described in Quilette. The tactics used there resemble the ones used by H-PAD to get the scholasticide resolution passed at the AHA business meeting last week.
It is by no means certain, however, that the full membership of the AHA will vote in favor of the resolution, should it be brought to a vote. The AHA previously, in 2015 and 2016, rejected other attempts by the BDS movement to get it to endorse its campaigns, and by 2-to-1 margins. Now, a decade later, the membership may be more inclined to favor a resolution backed by BDS, given the more radical political complexion of the profession’s younger members. Moreover, the scholasticide resolution on its face is less controversial than previous resolutions. It is worded in such a way as to elicit sympathy and outrage from persons who have dedicated their lives to university teaching. Nevertheless, it is vital that the membership not yield to emotion and look more carefully at what it is being asked to endorse. There is a real danger that the AHA will damage its prestige and effectiveness as a professional organization if either its elected council or, worse, the membership at large, should it vote in favor of the resolution.
“The resolution as worded is hardly a model of careful scholarly research.”
The resolution as worded is hardly a model of careful scholarly research, detachment, and even-handedness. Let’s suppose that a student or junior colleague presented me with this statement and asked me to evaluate the accuracy of its claims and to endorse it. A number of questions and uncertainties would spring to mind. I would want more context, and I would want to hear opposing views. I would like to know the sources of the statistics cited in the resolution. Were there multiple independent and corroborating witnesses, or did all the data come from a single source (as close reading suggests)? Was that source trustworthy? I would want to hear testimony and be able to cross-examine those accused of committing crimes against education as well as their accusers. I certainly would not be willing to endorse the statement without a fuller grasp of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and without hearing opposing views.
The destruction of so many schools (the resolution claims 80 percent of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed) and multiple sites and facilities associated with the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), founded in 1978, is indeed an appalling tragedy. Even more appalling is the death, reportedly, of more than 100 academics, unknown numbers of students, and the interruption and crippling of education at all levels in the Gaza strip. So much has been largely confirmed by many sources, including multiple Israeli news media across the political spectrum. Any historian is bound to be especially distressed to learn of the destruction of the al-Aqsa University Library’s collections, archives and research materials.
The resolution’s claim, however, that the losses “will extinguish the future study of Palestinian history,” seems exaggerated. The library has been set on fire before, once during a struggle between Hamas and the PLO in 2007, and again by the Israeli airforce in 2008. Palestinian historiography will not stop owing to the loss of paper sources in the Gaza strip. IUG’s library holdings, roughly on a par with a medium-size US community college, can be reconstituted and much will already be available via the cloud. But unique sources and research materials may well have been lost, as happens in war, and that is regrettable. It would be a worthwhile charitable act, and more in keeping with the AHA’s purpose, to offer its financial and technical support to rebuild libraries in Gaza. With that part of the resolution one can agree.
There is, to be sure, good reason to believe that Hamas has an outsized influence at IUG—one of its future founders and some current board members belong to that entity. IUG faculty have been accused, not without evidence, of acting as the “brain trust” of Hamas. Many university faculty and officials no doubt still sympathize with the organization, despite its many acts of terrorism. But it is hard to doubt that, whatever their political sympathies, the primary commitment of many if not most of IUG’s faculty—its teachers of medicine and nursing, its engineers, scientists, literary scholars, historians, and computer technicians—is to educating the young in their fields of study. No decent person, surely, would say that IUG faculty, administrators, and students deserve to become military targets because of their political opinions.
If the AHA, in keeping with its own mission, wanted to pass a resolution designed to promote peace and protect academic study in the Gaza strip, it might urge the university to build trust with the Israelis by publicly distancing itself from Hamas and declaring that it will not allow its facilities to be used for military purposes by any armed forces, whether Palestinian or Israeli. That sort of resolution American academics might legitimately support.
Wars are always disastrous for formal education, as historians know. In the periods of Italian history I study, the most predictable result of a war breaking out is the immediate closure of the belligerents’ universities. What is different in this case, and potentially much worse on a moral plane, is the charge of “scholasticide,” which includes the claim that the Israelis intended, and still intend, to destroy the cultural life and historical memory of the Palestinian people.
“The authors of the resolution present no proof.”
Supporters of the present resolution, to be sure, claim only that the Israelis “may have” such an intention, employing a softening subjunctive not commonly employed in similar accusations of scholasticide. Whether in declarative or subjunctive mood, however, the charge is extremely serious, tantamount to charging the Israelis with an intention to commit cultural genocide. Yet for this extremely serious charge the authors of the resolution present no proof.
Admittedly, and for obvious reasons, an intention to commit cultural genocide is not likely to be publicly acknowledged. There may well be those in Israel who harbor the implausible hope that Palestinian historical memory will be eradicated by the Gaza invasion. Some may feel that the IUG faculty and officials deserve punishment for giving aid and comfort to terrorists. But to my knowledge, no journalist has provided a shred of evidence that the Israeli government or the IDF have been actuated by such motives. Israeli public statements about the campaign describe its goals as protecting Israel’s citizens through the military defeat and eradication of Hamas. Confronted with so serious an accusation as cultural genocide, a fair judge has to declare non liquet: There is insufficient evidence to decide the case, at least at present.
There is another side to the story, too. Israeli officials and journalists claim that Hamas has concealed military assets in hospitals, mosques, and educational institutions to protect them from attack, using non-combatant personnel as human shields. Sometimes these claims are accompanied by photographs and corroborated by reports from professional journalists. The IDF claims that Hamas uses IUG as a recruiting center and to train intelligence officers. Palestinian sympathizers dismiss such claims, making the counter-claim that the IDF is using university campuses as military bases. Such statements are difficult for those without local expertise or reliable sources to assess, especially given how easy it is, using AI, to generate convincing but fake replicas of news reports and official statements. The AHA membership by and large does not possess the expertise and personal connections on the ground to evaluate conflicting evidence. I certainly do not. What historians do possess is an obligation to tell the truth about the past in those subject areas where we are competent, and not to pretend to expertise when we have none.
If historical study has a single overriding purpose, it is to provide contemporaries with practical wisdom by extending our natural memories into a deeper past. That has been a principal motive for historical research and writing since Herodotus. What is happening in the Gaza strip, terrible as it is, is part of a much older and wider tragedy which has been going on for well over a century. The last 15 months of that story—what has happened in Israel and Gaza since thousands of Hamas fighters, violating cease-fire agreements with Israel, invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering, beheading, raping, and mutilating hundreds of Israelis and taking 240 hostages—is surely among the worst scenes in that larger tragedy. But historians should understand better than most that the calamities reported in H-PAD’s resolution need to be understood in the wider context of past events. Moral evaluations of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza will inevitably vary depending on different experiences and convictions. It would be unjust and irresponsible for an organization representing the historical profession as a whole to endorse a single, biased, and unverifiable version of events.
Historians know that events change their meaning over time, and how judgments about events can change as better information emerges and the long-term outcome of events becomes clearer. What is happening now in Britain with regard to the “grooming gang” scandals of the past decades—now increasing referred to as “rape gang” scandals—reminds us that consensus views can change. Time, new information, or shifting political circumstances can undermine or even reverse previous moral polarities. The AHA membership is undoubtedly aware of how the illiberal progressive activists who came to power in many large corporations and cultural institutions in the past decade are currently on the defensive in many universities, including mine. Historians should be better able than the average educated person to imagine alternative futures and to grasp how actions that seemed irreproachable at one time and place may come to be perceived as cowardly, conformist, and morally benighted at another.
Ultimately, whether the AHA endorses the resolution should be a question of practical wisdom. Decision makers, whether the council or the membership at large, must consider first the good of the institution they have inherited. They have the obligation to protect its prestige so that it can continue to perform its many admirable functions such as upholding professional standards, providing useful resources to history teachers, and supporting worthwhile research. The Council in particular has an obligation to make the mission of the institution its primary concern.
If it should endorse a partisan political statement peripheral to the AHA’s common good, it in effect forces the entire membership to endorse principles that a substantial portion of it may not accept. Even if a Council decision is endorsed by a majority of members, the Association will inevitably alienate many of its members and a large percentage of the general public. One can predict mass resignations, the formation of rival groups (as has happened previously in the AHA’s existence), and a further loss of public trust in academics. The AHA membership needs to resist the temptation to moral exhibitionism and confine its activism to matters within its competence and consistent with its purposes.