The National Association of Scholars (NAS) condemns the “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” which the members of the American Historical Association (AHA) passed by 428 to 88 at the AHA’s business meeting on January 5. We urge the AHA Council to veto the measure. We urge all members of the AHA to turn out at all future business meetings, to ensure that what we sincerely hope is only a minority of the AHA’s membership, no longer can hijack the good name of the AHA to provide moral support for the mass-murderers of Hamas.
For that is what these activists have done. Let us put aside the impropriety of a professional organization interposing itself officially into a political matter best left to the individual judgment of America’s citizens. The “Scholasticide” resolution attacks Israel for conducting war in Gaza without mentioning that Hamas started the war, that Hamas has prosecuted the war by the mass slaughter, torture, rape, and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians, or acknowledging that to call for a “permanent ceasefire” is to call for Israel to lose the war with Hamas. Hamas is responsible for the consequences of its aggression against Israel, and the “Scholasticide” resolution is the more disgraceful for its unwillingness to state forthrightly Hamas’ culpability for the indeed lamentable destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure. It speaks badly of the moral judgment of any American to vote for any resolution. The resolution’s lack of historical perspicuity also speaks badly of the professional judgment of the historians who voted for it.
We say that we sincerely hope that only a minority of AHA’s membership actually support the “Scholasticide” resolution. We do not know. Perhaps the AHA Council would be truer to the sentiment of its membership if it accepted the “Scholasticide” resolution. American citizens and policymakers then at least would benefit from clarity about the moral and political commitments of the AHA’s membership.
The AHA, after all, has intervened ever more aggressively in recent years on domestic American political matters. In 2017, it condemned the Trump administration’s attempt to regulate immigration more effectively. In 2020, it jointly condemned George Floyd’s death and America’s “sordid national tradition of racist violence.” In 2023, it urged the Museum of the American Revolution not to host Moms for Liberty. In recent years, more directly concerned with its actual professional concern with the teaching of history, it has opposed a host of education reform measures. The AHA’s membership, alas, has not rebelled against any of these commitments. Indeed, when AHA President James Sweet tried in 2022 to insert a note of common sense into discussion of the 1619 Project, the AHA membership forced upon him a lamentably abject recantation. Absent good evidence to the contrary, we must take the AHA’s official position as reflecting the beliefs of its membership.
And the AHA has been wrong on the substance of a very large number of the political positions it takes. But now the AHA and its membership is in the process of fully discrediting its moral and political judgment before America’s citizens and policymakers. Why should Americans pay attention to the moral and professional judgment of an organization that provides moral support for Hamas in its savage, unjust, and indecent war against Israel? Shouldn’t American citizens and policymakers take as presumptively wrong any political position for which the AHA advocates?
The “Scholasticide” resolution displays the AHA’s broken moral compass with unusual clarity, but the AHA, and far too many of its members, do more damage by how they politicize their profession and misteach America’s own history. The true Scholasticide, after all, is what such radical activists do to America’s own educational institutions and America’s national memory.
America’s citizens and policymakers will know best what policy corollaries follow from AHA’s abdication of professional standards. But NAS urges America’s citizens and policymakers at the very least to ask the AHA and its representatives, whenever they speak on any public matter, Why should we trust the AHA’s judgment when it voted for the “Scholasticide” resolution?
Photo by Jonathan Stutz on Adobe Stock
