World’s largest body of historians condemns Israel’s Gaza ‘scholasticide’

The American Historical Association (AHA), said to be the largest body of professional historians in the world, has passed a resolution condemning Israel’s war on Gaza that has “effectively obliterated” the besieged enclave’s education system.

It says the destruction of educational infrastructure in Gaza – where Israel has killed nearly 46,000 people, mostly women and children, in the last 14 months – constitutes “scholasticide”, meaning the deliberate mass destruction of education in a specific place.

The term was first used by an Oxford professor in 2009 in connection with the destruction of Palestinian educational infrastructure by Israel between December 2008 and January 2009.

The AHA is the oldest learned society in the US with more than 10,000 members. It was founded in 1884 and incorporated in 1889 by an act of US Congress “for the promotion of historical studies”. It also provides Congress with briefings on issues of historical importance, like deportation, taxation and civil services.

“The AHA calls for a permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide,” stated the resolution that was approved by a vote of 428 to 88 in a business meeting in Manhattan this week.

The resolution also called for the establishment of a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s destroyed educational infrastructure.

As reasons for the condemnation of Israel’s scholasticide, the resolution cited Tel Aviv’s destruction of 80 percent of schools in Gaza, which has left 625,000 children with no access to education.

All 12 university campuses in Gaza have been destroyed in Israeli bombing along with all libraries, archives, cultural centres, museums and bookstores.

Israel has also destroyed as many as 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, three churches and the al-Aqsa University library, which preserved crucial documents and other materials related to the history and culture of Gaza.

The AHA resolution also condemned Israel’s “repeated violent displacements” of Gaza’s people, leading to the “irreplaceable loss” of educational and research materials that will “extinguish the future study of Palestinian history”.

While an overwhelming majority of AHA members voted in favour of the resolution, many historians opposed it on the grounds that the move fuels the ongoing partisan attacks on higher education by right-leaning groups aligned with President-elect Donald Trump.

The New York Times quoted Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a US history professor, as saying that the vote reinforces the idea that academics are “unapologetically political and are all on board with a pretty far left-wing view” of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“If a resolution like this goes through…, that’s really bad for us,” she said in the debate before the vote.

On the other hand, academics supporting the resolution said avoiding a clear position on the war on the pretext of the body’s so-called nonpolitical character would be wrong.

Speaking to a US media platform, New York University history professor Barbara Weinstein said the AHA was reluctant to take a stand on the Vietnam War, an issue the body addressed many decades later by condemning the US invasion of Iraq.

“There’s been more and more of a willingness to take a position on issues that relate directly to our roles as historians, as educators, as researchers, as archivists,” she said.

Sherene Seikaly, an associate professor at the University of California, said Israel has bombed “almost every single archive, library and bookstore” in Gaza. “This genocide is really attempting to destroy our capacity to narrate our past and to imagine our future.”

Historians should be ethical and stand against the Israeli genocide, which is “armed and abetted” by the United States, she added.

The AHA resolution also highlighted that the US government has underwritten Israel’s war on Gaza while supplying Tel Aviv with the weapons to commit the scholasticide.

US spending on Israeli military and related operations in the Middle East since October 7, 2023, is nearly $23 billion, substantially higher than in any other year since Washington began granting military aid to Israel in 1959, according to a research paper released by the Costs of War project by Brown University’s Watson Institute.

A wave of anti-Israel protests hit college campuses in the US last year as students demanded educational institutions cut ties with companies advancing Israel’s war on Gaza.