By Mike Coté
Sunday, January 19, 2025
By pushing an absurd resolution against Israeli
‘scholasticide’ in Gaza, the American Historical Association has further proved
why academic history is a dying discipline.
During the first weekend of the new year, the
American Historical Association (AHA) held its annual conference in New York
City, where the 40 percent of members who chose to attend were regaled by panels with the politically neutral titles of
“Navigating Current Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as Historians,”
“Disrupting History: Incorporating a Native Lens in Museums,” “Can Capitalism
Be Ethical?,” “Teaching Trans History in the Undergraduate Classroom,” “From
Rights to Lives: The Evolving Black Freedom Struggle,” “50 Years after Roe v.
Wade: Reproductive Rights in Peril,” “How Historians Can Respond to the US
Supreme Court’s Originalist Turn,” “Rightwing Extremism across Borders: New
Perspectives on the Transnational Far Right,” and “Trans and Queer Histories
between Germany and the US: Against Whitewashed National Exceptionalism.”
Academic history has been a bastion of leftism and progressive politics for at
least the past half century, but this year’s AHA meeting took the cake, and not
merely because of its incredibly one-sided panel discussions.
On January 5, the business meeting of the AHA, where the
group votes on member-submitted resolutions about the operations and stances of
the organization writ large, considered a highly contentious issue and,
naturally, wholeheartedly embraced the far-left position. The “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” proposed by a
subgroup named “Historians
for Peace and Democracy,” was approved by a sizable margin of 428–88. In
the resolution itself, Israel is accused of deliberately destroying the Gazan
education system in a genocidal plot to eliminate the Palestinians entirely. It
describes the IDF’s defensive war as “causing massive death and injury to
Palestinian civilians and the collapse of basic life structures” and
“effectively” obliterating “Gaza’s education system,” with nary a mention of
the Hamas atrocities of October 7 or of the continued plight of innocent
Israeli and American hostages. It parrots the propagandistic lies, taken
directly from Iran and its terrorist proxies and proffered by the United Nations and the pro-Palestinian
activist class, amplifying the claim that Israeli military action has been
intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure for no purpose other than
infliction of pain on the population.
The statements made in support of the resolution were
even more inflammatory. One supporter, UC Santa Barbara associate professor
Sherene Seikaly, claimed that Israel had been carrying out a “genocide” for
15 months, conveniently dated to October 2023. She continued, saying,
This genocide targets the
Palestinian people, our peoplehood, our capacity to narrate the past, and to
imagine the future. History is screaming to the present. The AHA has been
deafeningly silent. The task of the historian is to ask the hard questions, to
take the difficult positions, not when the dust settles, but as the fire rains
down. Silence is complicity.
Woke signaling has been prevalent in the AHA since at
least the 2020 George Floyd summer, but this version is perhaps at the furthest
remove from the mission of the organization. Various anti-Israel measures had
been proposed before, but this is the first time one has succeeded. Its margin
was provided by widespread support from the younger members of the association,
those without tenure, and graduate students. This new generation of
scholar-activists may not represent the AHA yet — the resolution may now be
considered by the full membership — but it bodes poorly for the future of the
profession in the public mind.
The problem with this resolution is twofold: it distorts
reality by deliberately ignoring context in an attempt to unfairly smear
Israel, and it exposes the blatant, disqualifying bias inherent in the modern
historical academy.
Israel’s war in Gaza, the target of this resolution, was
not unprovoked; it was the retaliation for the worst massacre of Jews since the
Holocaust, a truly historic atrocity characterized by barbaric antisemitism
that would be more at home in the 14th century than the 21st. Yet this inciting
incident is entirely unmentioned in the resolution, which shears the issue of
any sort of pro-Israel context. Pro-Palestinian context is, of course,
presented — namely, the supposed horrors of the decades of Israeli control over
former Mandate Palestine — but Israel’s far more direct motivation is not. When
labeling the IDF’s actions as “scholasticide” — defined as “an intentional
effort to comprehensively destroy” an “education system” via the “arrest,
detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of
educational infrastructure” — the resolution fails to mention the facts of the
matter. Hamas’s proven colocation of military bases within educational
institutions renders them legitimate military targets under international law.
Similarly, the large personnel overlap between UNRWA schools and terrorist
organizations discredits the claim that teachers were targeted without just
cause. The schools themselves, which the resolution demands the AHA help
reconstruct, have been teaching virulent antisemitic propaganda and inciting
violence against Israel for decades. This critical context is deliberately left
out in an effort to paint the Israelis as uniquely evil in their prosecution of
a just war against murderous, antisemitic terrorism.
The depiction of the war in Gaza as unjust and criminal
is necessary for the resolution to be even remotely appropriate for a
purportedly neutral academic association. One supporter of the resolution
quoted by the New York Times said: “This war is not like other wars.
That is obvious to students of history.” Urban warfare experts disagree,
arguing, with a great deal of evidentiary support, that the IDF’s conduct in
Gaza has been exemplary. Given the challenge of fighting an irregular force
deliberately seeking civilian casualties and hidden in dense underground
warrens, the comparative lack of collateral damage has been astounding. If
anything is historically unique about the war in Gaza, it is the exact opposite
of what the pro-Palestinian scholar-activists contend.
When seeing the panels discussed earlier, most Americans
would hardly view them as politically unbiased, but the blatantly one-sided
language of the resolution is even more at odds with public opinion. According
to Pew Research, only 31 percent of Americans believe that
Israeli conduct in the war is “going too far,” as compared with 32 percent who
see Israel’s action as either about right or too lenient. In contrast, the
AHA’s voting shows a supermajority of over 82 percent in favor of that
proposition. In a profession that is already seen as out of touch and
politically biased, this increasing radicalism during a period of pushback to
woke excesses will be disastrous. This attitude not only betrays a
sanctimonious, holier-than-thou approach that is off-putting to the general
public. It reveals an intense bias. Far more devastating humanitarian crises in
Sudan and Ethiopia are set aside, while the repression of the Venezuelan,
Iranian, and Chinese regimes are glossed over, all in favor of lambasting the
world’s lone Jewish state. The bias here is clear to all but the most blinkered
observers. In a profession where neutrality and scholarly credibility are
paramount, the promotion of this interventionist left-wing politics on Israel is
highly destructive.
The public’s interest in history has not waned, but
interest in academic history, both as a profession and a respected institution,
has. The decline in undergraduate history majors has been consistent
and significant, even as total college enrollment has risen. Part of this
cratering results from the perception that history in the academic setting is
hopelessly biased toward left-leaning ideas, a contention supported by survey data that show more than 70 percent of
historians identify as liberal versus a mere 10 percent as conservative. The
scholarly output of these historians, as evinced by the panels at the 2025 AHA
conference, speaks to no one but other elite progressive academics. A good
historian abstracts himself from the present and seeks to commune with the past
as it was, not as current leftist politics wishes it to be. Sadly, this seems
to be the antithesis of modern academic history.
The approval of this resolution displays a disqualifying
dedication to the falsehoods of the present, not the truth of the past. If the
members of the AHA wish to improve the declining trust in their profession,
soundly rejecting this ridiculous resolution would be a good start. It surely
couldn’t hurt.
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