The American Historical Association (AHA) is the professional association of U.S. history professors. In early January, it held its annual conference in New York City and became a site of argument over the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The AHA has 10,450 enrolled members. Nearly 4,000 came to the four-day conference. Day 3 (January 5) included the annual “business meeting,” which is open to members who choose to attend. Members can propose resolutions in this assembly if they get signature support from more than 2 percent of the membership three months in advance.
The meeting passed a resolution condemning the Israeli government for committing war crimes in Gaza, and the U.S. government for funding and supporting those crimes, by 428 votes to 88 (a majority of 83 percent). The resolution noted that the IDF destroyed 80 percent of the schools in Gaza, all 12 universities, and 227 mosques, and it called for a permanent ceasefire. It argued Israel has committed “scholasticide,” pointing out that the IDF killed 356 educators.
Five historians spoke for the resolution and five against. Those assembled voted. As the result was announced, many chanted, “Free Palestine!” The New York Timesreported the meeting overflowed its assigned room.
One of the five debate speakers defending the Israeli and U.S. governments, New School professor Natalia Petrzela, was quoted by the New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed saying that passing the conference resolution would confirm right-wing accusations of faculty left-wing bias.
Petrzela’s personal website describes her as a “scholar, writer, teacher, activist,” “consultant,” and contributor to “the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Atlantic,” as well as MSNBC and the BBC. She boasts that her work “has been supported by the Spencer, Whiting, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, the Carnegie Corporation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.” She is cofounder of a college health and wellness program. Between college (Columbia) and graduate school (Stanford), Petrzela worked for almost a year as “an investment-banking analyst” and about one year as a New York City public school teacher. She is currently serving as a prominent curriculum consultant to the New York City Department of Education and writing “a short history of the school culture wars and a history of the Hamptons.”
The New York Times published an op-ed by its former book review editor, Pamela Paul, calling the resolution “misguided” and “counterproductive,” and quoting another of the five pro-Zionist debate speakers, retired University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf: “If this vote succeeds, it will destroy the AHA.”
A third pro-government debate speaker was the incoming AHA president, Suzanne Marchand. She is the highest ranking humanities professor at Louisiana State University, formerly of Princeton.
The AHA executive director, James Grossman, a former University of Chicago professor of Black history, issued a finger-wagging statement during the resolution signatures submission period before the conference, in the style of a papal bull:
The AHA cannot, does not, and should not intervene everywhere. We don’t comment on controversies in other disciplines. As a membership association, we keep our distance from issues that are controversial within and among our members. And we keep in mind that our effectiveness rests on our legitimacy, our reputation for even-handedness, professional integrity, and appropriately narrow boundaries.
This is a barely veiled argument meant to keep professors formally loyal to bourgeois public opinion, the officials of U.S. imperialism, university administrations, and the capitalist media. “Our legitimacy” with whom? Someone who trumps 83 percent of voting members.
On January 17, with a four sentence “Business Meeting Resolution Update,” the 16-member AHA Council vetoed the Gaza resolution. They did not dispute that the IDF destroyed four-fifths of the schools in Gaza but implied that this may not have been “intentional.” They declared the resolution itself “outside the scope of the Association’s mission and purpose, defined in its Constitution.”
The leadership has two arguments against five-sixths of the AHA’s only members’ forum: collateral damage and political neutrality bylaws.
Under the bylaws, a Council veto (rather than “non-concurrence”) is also a decision not to hold a referendum vote of the general membership for or against the resolution.
The Council claims that the AHA is separated from questions of war by a constitutional wall. That magical force field has been opened before: in 2022 (with a resolution on Ukraine), in 2007 (on Iraq), and, with sharp internal conflict, in 1969 (over Vietnam).
The Council is an elected body, but it is also a small group of ultra-successful scholars from elite universities, overruling hundreds of representatives of academic workers’ opinion. The pro-Palestinian historians are not only more numerous. They are younger, less tenured, less securely employed, lower paid, and have fewer connections to the U.S. ruling class.
The veto is anti-democratic. The AHA Council is carrying water for the U.S. government. Its neutrality is a lie.
Is the AHA Council election process more or less participatory than the vote of 500 members who had to travel to New York, fit into a too small meeting room, and vote in a process that had to be prepared more than three months ahead of time in opposition to the executive director, incoming president, many senior members, and the disinterestedly interested New York Times?
Do history professors want their AHA Council to veto a supermajority political decision on a bloody U.S.-backed war, or do most members view the Council as an administrative body?
A written public resolution is a first and minimum step in international labor solidarity, the first rung of a ladder of actions to connect with other sectors supporting liberation for the Palestinian people, including U.S. students, European transport workers, the violently silenced working class of Egypt, and many more.
The AHA resolution is an echo of the spring 2024 campus Palestine protests. The Council performs the role of university administrators and police.
“When we agree, you decide. When we disagree, I decide.” Why else does the Council explicitly block a membership referendum to decide the issue?
The AHA Council and the NFL Commission would hypothetically seem to be from two totally different ends of American life, one ultra-macho and ultra-nationalist, and the other the pinnacle of culture, one super-capitalist, and the other a redoubt of respected shared governance. Why in 2025 do both of these committees have the same policy toward pro-Palestinian protest: tackle and ban?
The Executive Council of the Modern Language Associate (U.S. literature professors) also precluded that organization’s Delegate Assembly from voting on a resolution accusing Israel of genocide and endorsing BDS during its annual convention.
The day before the AHA veto, Joe Biden admitted in his last presidential interview with MSNBC that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him in October 2023 that he would carpet-bomb Gaza.
Then Donald Trump declared from February 4 onward that the U.S. would annex Gaza and permanently deport its entire population into Jordan and Egypt.
With U.S. backing, the Israeli government continually threatens to break the ceasefire. The Israeli occupation attacked Jenin in the West Bank and has restricted deliveries of food, medical supplies, tents, and concrete-moving machinery into Gaza, as well as entry of outside medical personnel and outside observers.
Opponents of the Gaza resolution make frequent appeals to stay out of politics, but this only thinly covers up their unwillingness to directly discuss the genocide itself. This is understandable.
At the end of 2024, Omer Bartov, an Israeli senior professor at Brown University, concluded in an interview with Democracy Now! that the Israeli government had carried out “a systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable” by bombing public buildings, homes, and infrastructure, and had starved and bombarded the north of the strip for purposes of ethnic cleansing. Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and the German army. He was an IDF captain during the 1970s (and fought in Egypt).
It is not only anti-nationalist Israeli dissidents who say this. In December 2024, Moshe Yaalon, a former head general of the IDF (2002–5), also head of IDF military intelligence (1995–98), and later minister of defense under Netanyahu (2013–16), said on television, “The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse… What’s happening there? There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating in Jabaliya. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs. … At the end of the day, they’re perpetrating war crimes.” Yaalon said he spoke from conversations with IDF officers in Gaza. The New York Timespublished his comments based on his former position and from a desire to pressure Trump to deescalate the war.
An IDF refuser named Yuval Green testified in in mid-2024 to +972 Magazine that in Gaza his unit sprayed bullets “just to relieve the boredom” and entrenched itself in homes of civilians whom Israel forced to flee, as operating bases, before burning those homes for “revenge” (when officers could not get bulldozers or bombs to demolish them).
The UN Satellite Center estimated in December from images from space that 69 percent of all buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed (at least 60,000 buildings are destroyed).
The AHA Council can read this history of 15 months. They are not confused. They acted to support the U.S.-backed genocide with liberal methods.
The brutal colonial situation of Palestine, with massive U.S. arms deliveries and political intervention, is deeper than ever. The threat to ethnically cleanse Gaza, via arrangements with subservient Arab dictatorships holding down the will of their own populations, implies more disasters and conflicts.
Full-time, adjunct, and graduate historians should rebel against the Gaza veto.
There must be a full membership vote on the Gaza resolution. The 10,000, not the 16, should decide. Both sides can anticipate that a referendum would result in public solidarity with the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocide. That is the reason the Council blocked it from being held.
In July 2024, the membership of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) participated in a referendum voting 2,016 to 835 declaring Israel “an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and endorsing academic BDS.
Getting an AHA Gaza referendum would require local and regional action committees to organize groups of activists and agitators in history departments. They could launch statements, hold public meetings, and connect with students, labor, and social movements including immigrant defense.
An opposition faction working to kick the AHA Council out of office is needed. They could connect with their siblings in other academic fields.
Workers in all countries, including academic workers, need to organize against the oppression of the Palestinian people and name who is ultimately responsible: all wings of the U.S. government. Universities can connect with workers via youth opinion, internationalism, anti-racism, and solidarity — sparks the AHA Council tried to stomp out.