Historians Against Israel’s Genocide

In early January 2025, at the American Historical Association (AHA) conference in New York City, over five hundred members of the organization filed into a hotel ballroom to attend the annual business meeting. It was standing room only, with an overflow crowd that couldn’t even walk in the door. All participants were vetted: we stood in line while a small crew of workers looked everyone up in a database to confirm that memberships were up to date. Those who were eligible were handed a packet of index cards held together with a paperclip.

For me, and in that context, the index cards were a throwback. My first visits to archives were in the early 1990s, before laptops and cellphones. Someone must have told me to use index cards. I was trying to develop a system for organizing what I knew would be a sea of information. I read original documents that I pulled out of neatly ordered boxes, having found guidance from the archivists and finding aids at the Walter P. Reuther Library. I tried to type up my thoughts and observations on the index cards, but they didn’t end up working for me. I switched to notebooks pretty quickly, ordered lots of photocopies, leaned into multi-colored Post-it tabs, and made myself a giant spreadsheet.

By January 2025, every single university in Gaza — as well as most of its libraries and archives — had been destroyed by Israeli aerial bombing, ground-based assaults, and a massive Israeli military campaign of bulldozing and blowing up infrastructure that had merely been damaged in previous attacks. Those original documents, those climate-controlled storage units, those finding aids and reading rooms are gone. Those classrooms, those overhead projectors, those lecture halls have all been targets of this ongoing genocide.

While Gazans and Palestinians will certainly remember and continue to write their histories, these material losses are devastating. And as historians, we know that intimately. This does not even account for the breathtaking human loss. By the 2025 AHA meeting, Israel had assassinated at least 161 professors and more than 903 university students in Gaza and thirty-six in the Occupied West Bank.

Coming into the 2025 AHA conference, Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD), had proposed a scholasticide resolution calling on the organization, “which supports the right of all peoples to freely teach and learn about their past,” to condemn “the Israeli violence in Gaza that undermines that right” to call for “a permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide,” and to “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.” As H-PAD reminded us, “this scholasticide is fueled by US taxpayer money as well as military and diplomatic support, and it is justified by spurious historical arguments.”

Some academic professional organizations had aligned themselves with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement since before 2023, including, among others, the American Studies Association, the Asian American Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association. The H-PAD resolution was comparatively modest. It was more like the resolution passed six months before by the American Library Association, which condemned the “damage and destruction of libraries and other cultural institutions” in Gaza.

AHA business meetings are not usually well attended. The throngs of people — I’d guess about 10 percent of conference attendees — were a testament to the organizing that had been going on leading up to and during the conference. H-PAD had organized a petition to get the resolution onto the business meeting agenda and had been sending out emails encouraging supporters to attend the AHA and vote for the resolution. Alongside members of the Radical History Review editorial collective and the newly formed Historians for Palestine, they flyered and tabled during the conference, held an organizing meeting, and took the time to have one-on-one conversations with anyone who wanted to talk. This was democracy in action: encouraging members to take ownership of the organization, get more involved, and signal its relevance in an era characterized by massive land-grabbing and dispossession alongside brutal, autocratic, and racist attacks on vulnerable populations that we see playing out in Gaza.

Here I was again, more than thirty years later, sitting down with a handful of index cards. Five people supporting and five opposing the resolution spoke during the meeting. The short speeches for the resolution were extremely moving. In 2022, the AHA released a statement condemning “in the strongest possible terms Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine,” as well as the “twisted mythology that President Putin has invented to justify his violation of international norms.” There was no debate about this issue, and I imagine there was no dissent. Now, three years later, the scholasticide resolution passed by a landslide. Four hundred twenty-eight, or 83 percent of the 516 members who voted supported it.

The AHA council had three options. It could adopt the resolution, send it out for a vote, or veto it. Council members made the least democratic decision: they aligned themselves with the resolution’s opponents in the extreme minority and vetoed it. Opponents of the resolution who spoke at the business meeting argued that its passage would open up the organization for attack in this increasingly autocratic political climate, but we believe that the veto is a signal of anticipatory obedience — something that will neither protect us nor allow us to fight for what is just and fair.

In view of the undemocratic council veto, those activists who had introduced and organized for the resolution jumped into action with a new campaign to democratize the AHA via its annual elections. The association uses a parliamentary procedure that allows members to nominate candidates for office by petition. Petition candidacies make visible the democratic potential embedded in the AHA bylaws — a potential that allows members to have a say in the direction of their professional organization. This kind of participation strengthens the association by inviting both long-standing and newer members to build a more participatory and democratic professional culture.

Members of H-PAD, Historians for Palestine, and the Palestinian Historians Group ran a successful grassroots campaign to nominate five additional candidates via petition; each one needed one hundred AHA member signatures to appear on the ballot. These candidates included Annelise Orleck for vice-president of the Association, Sherene Seikaly for vice president for the Professional Division, Alexander Aviña for the nominating committee, Van Gosse as councilor for the Research Division, and myself as councilor for the Teaching Division. Prasannan Parthasarathi, a longstanding member of H-PAD, was also on the ballot, through the nominating committee process. It was this spirit of defending democratic practice, moral courage, and clarity around authoritarianism at home and abroad, that inspired us all to run.

As a counterexample, in April, H-PAD brought a similar resolution to the Organization of American Historians, the professional society for the teaching and study of American history. After it passed overwhelmingly at the business meeting, like it had at the AHA, the OAH Executive Committee simply adopted the resolution and is forming a committee to “assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”

In early June, opponents of our candidates made two principal arguments. The first was that the nominating committee had chosen people who took the association seriously and cared about its values. By implication, the five petitioned-in candidates held neither of these qualities. Had H-PAD, Historians for Palestine, and the Palestinian Historians Group abandoned the AHA in frustration and encouraged their colleagues to quit, the claim that they were not interested in the health of the association would have made sense. But instead, these activists were working to make the AHA more robust and accountable — to make sure it was living up to its own stated principles. Our campaign brought people into the organization who had either fallen away or had never been members.

The second claim leveled against us was that we did not support the rights of Jews as well as Palestinians to live in peace and security. Aligning themselves with the Trump administration, AIPAC, and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s deeply flawed definition of antisemitism, proponents of this argument suggested that any defense of Palestinian lives, even in the face of genocide, was an inherent threat to Jews.

I am Jewish and deeply familiar with this lie. I grew up in the post–Yom Kippur War echo chamber of American liberal Zionism. I believed the mythologies that I was fed about Israel as a refuge. These stories were all around me. They were hanging in the air at my suburban Hebrew school. They were brought to me by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who taught me Israeli dances at my Jewish day and sleepover camps. They were an unquestioned part of the world I occupied.

I went to college nine months after the first intifada began, and my worldview changed. I attribute this shift to the inspiring activists with whom I started to organize, but it also happened in no small part because of the history of the region I was learning (a first semester class with Middle East historian Juan Cole definitely helped). I learned to proudly claim the anti-Zionist mantle of my ancestors who knew that an ethnonationalist state could never be good for Jews. I learned that it is incumbent upon me to fight against the Zionist crimes committed in my name.

Before the AHA meeting, I heard from an old friend who let me know that he had just re-upped his AHA membership to vote for me and our slate. He hadn’t even known that there was an AHA election. He, like me, is a professor at a community college and cares deeply about history. He chose to join the AHA this year because what we are doing matters. Because fighting for democracy and inclusion, and taking a stand against authoritarianism and genocide are what historians need to do to remain relevant.

Ultimately, our coalition had a strong showing. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Alexander Aviña won seats on the nominating committee and Van Gosse and I will be AHA councilors beginning in January. The AHA is a member-run organization, and what we do with it is up to us. That the majority of the petition candidates won their seats shows, just like the resounding support of the resolution at the 2025 business meeting, the real desire that many historians have to build an association that is responsive to the will of its members and to courageously address the crises and precarity we are facing here, which is tied to the genocide we are witnessing abroad.