The American Historical Association (AHA), “the largest membership association of historians in the world” with 10,500 members, is close to betraying its core function and many of its members.
Participants at its annual meeting voted 428 to 88 to condemn Israel for committing “scholasticide,” a made-up word describing Israel’s supposedly “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system.” The resolution lacks the words “October,” “7,” and “Hamas,” while somehow overlooking the terrorists who hide in Gaza’s educational institutions.
The AHA’s council can block the resolution – unless a full membership vote ratifies it. If they succeed, the academic intifadists pushing this sloppy, ahistorical, resolution will have committed “historicide,” my term for trying to kill a people’s history – or so distorting history as to kill the truth.
Congress incorporated the AHA in 1889 “for the promotion of historical studies,” which should help “us understand people and societies,” its website explains.
The resolution, therefore, violates the AHA’s mission. Unfortunately, I quit this self-sabotaging organization years ago – leaving me without a membership card to burn today.
The resolution exemplifies the anti-Zionist Jew-haters’ triple double cross. They throw the Jews under the bus – that’s an old story – what self-respecting Jew wants to belong to such a biased organization endorsing this one-sided, anti-Israel narrative? So much for inclusion or diversity of thought! They betray liberalism, which emerged from the Enlightenment’s pursuit of truth in all its messiness. And they betray themselves – historians are trained to pursue facts, accept complexity, explain context, and avoid slinging their biases around like short-order cooks slinging hash in a diner.
The resolution uses historical sorcery – where you start the story shapes your conclusion. Had the resolution started with Hamas’s anti-Zionist, Jew-hating, genocidal charter, October 7, Hamas’s undemocratic takeover of Gaza, or its decision to use Gaza as a launching pad to try killing Jews, it could have generated a pro-Israel or balanced statement. (And, predictably, last year’s meeting ignored Hamas’s massacre just weeks earlier.)
Instead, the resolution begins: “Whereas the US government has underwritten the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign in Gaza with over $12.5 billion in military aid between October 2023 and June 2024” – ignoring why America armed Israel. It adds: “Whereas that campaign, beyond causing massive death and injury to Palestinian civilians and the collapse of basic life structures, has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system....” By forgetting that historians’ favorite “text” is context, the Big Lie emerges: while causing “massive death and injury,” Big Bad Israel targets “Gaza’s education system,” too.
Scholastitoxis
Of course, since 2005, AHA’s crusaders never condemned what they could have called “scholastitoxis” – poisoning academic institutions by turning schools into terror bases.
After detailing the destruction evil Israel wrought, the resolution adds a final distortion: “The IDF’s repeated violent displacements of Gaza’s people... will extinguish the future study of Palestinian history.” This accusation exposes these fanatics as being terrible forecasters, not just dogmatic academics and sloppy analysts. As Israel-bashing and Palestine-worship became popular extracurricular activities on campus, interest in classes about Palestinian history has spiked. Columbia University, in all its wisdom, is allowing an outspoken Palestinian anti-Zionist to teach a course on Zionism – another assault on scholarly norms the AHA overlooks.
The New York Times quoted James Grossman, the AHA’s executive director, explaining that the group’s political advocacy was “limited to history itself.” In opposing the resolution, Grossman warned: “We are not a political organization, which is essential if we are to have any standing to provide Congress with briefings on such issues as the histories of deportation, taxation, civil service, and other pressing issues.” Other historians cautioned that the resolution confirms the stereotype of academic ideologues imposing their orthodoxies whenever possible, defying the truth or common sense.
That zealotry makes this one-sided anti-Israel resolution antisemitic, too. Obsessiveness has long been the Jew-haters’ trademark. “Obsession” means “persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” In demonizing Jews, Judaism, the Jewish state, Jew-haters become so preoccupied with Jew-hatred that they betray who they are and their best interests.
In ignoring the history explaining Israel’s actions, in mindlessly bashing Israel, these academic activists acted obsessively, violating professional protocols while threatening their organization.
RECENTLY, A colleague challenged my charge to professors to keep classrooms free of partisan politics. “What should my colleagues do,” he asked, respectfully, “when they feel there’s a genocide going on in Gaza, and they feel compelled to mobilize their students?”
My response to him is my response to the AHA and the other academic intifadists obsessively building their identities around Israel-bashing while sacrificing core values. “Our job as academics isn’t ‘to feel there is a genocide,’ but to assess what the word ‘genocide’ means and whether it is applied accurately.
“And,” I added, “if two colleagues were protesting Syria’s abuses, two China, two Russia, and even three or four protesting Israel,” I’d say, “let’s discuss boundaries in the classroom, defining just when a moral emergency becomes so great we override our obligation not to turn our educational podiums into political platforms. But the fact that the one country they all target, the one country that gets them to trash professional discipline, teaching ethics, and their or their organizations’ best interests, is Israel, the Jewish state, is obsessive. And being obsessed with the collective Jew crosses redlines and becomes antisemitic.”
Shame on them. And shame on the American Historical Association’s many anti-Zionist activists. They are doing a disservice to America, to history, to historians, and their organization’s mandate.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.