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.
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