EDITOR’S NOTE: 

The activities of scholarly organizations do not typically elicit general interest, even for many inside the discipline. Annual meetings are places to test-drive new ideas, see colleagues, and scout publishers. Until Zoom came along, they were mainly job fairs where newly minted PhDs lined up to be grilled by search committees.

Occasionally, however, these meetings explode over political debates that can’t be ignored. That was the case at this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), the nation’s most venerable learned society, chartered by Congress in 1889, boasting Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt as presidents. On two previous occasions, the organization I cochair, Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD, formerly Historians Against the War), gathered sufficient signatures to put resolutions censuring Israel’s violations of Palestinian educational rights on the agenda of annual business meetings. In each case, our resolutions were voted down. Some argued that Israel was being unfairly singled out, while others maintained that the AHA must avoid “politics.”

In 2025, it was different. HPAD crafted a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” citing UN documents. “Scholasticide” refers to the intentional obliteration of a people’s cultural and historical apparatus: their archives and libraries, their universities, the bodies of their educators. We anticipated that this charge would have deep resonance with historians, since our professional lives focus on bringing the past into the present, and this proved to be correct. HPAD mobilized intensively, as did our allies in Historians for Palestine.

The January 5 AHA Business Meeting saw more than 500 members crowd a ballroom at New York’s Midtown Hilton, with more kept out by fire marshals. After a debate pro- and con-, the vote was overwhelming: 428–88 in favor of the resolution. The next day, The New York Times reported on the meeting in detail, and extensive coverage followed both here in the United States and in Israel.

And yet, 12 days later, the AHA’s elected council exercised its authority to veto the resolution, refusing to allow the membership to vote. Its single contention that the resolution “contravene[d] the Association’s Constitution and Bylaws, because it lies outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose” was at odds with previous practice. The obvious precedent was the 2007 business meeting, where members passed a resolution brought by our organization that was critical of the Iraq War, and which urged historians “to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.” At that time, members of the council did not suggest this measure was outside the organization’s mission or constitution. Instead, they submitted it to the membership for a debate followed by an online vote, where it passed by an overwhelming margin.

In recent years—and without consulting the membership—AHA’s council has criticized multiple foreign governments. In February 28, 2022, it released a statement “condemn[ing] in the strongest possible terms Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine” and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “distorted and tendentious misreading of history” as justification for the attack.

Indeed, the resolution on scholasticide is clearly consistent with the AHA’s “Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance.” Action is appropriate: “When public or private authorities, in the United States or elsewhere, censor or seek to prevent the writing, publication, exhibition, teaching, or other practices of history or seek to punish historians.”

HPAD does not believe that a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza or anywhere else is “outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose.” It is our understanding that council’s real concerns were more practical: first, that going on record criticizing the government of Israel will materially damage the Association’s advocacy work in Washington, DC, pioneered by retiring executive director James Grossman; second, that any such action could result in the loss of the major foundation grants which pay for many of the AHA’s programs.

Historians for Peace and Democracy would have welcomed a frank debate over those institutional concerns versus the need to speak out about the horrifying violence directed at our fellow scholars, their students, and the 12 universities in Gaza that now lie in ruins.