Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on an Edward Shapiro article in Academic Questions.
On 5 January 2025, attendees at the annual convention of the American Historical Association (AHA) in New York voted to approve a resolution denouncing Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. A group called Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD), created in 2003 to oppose America’s war in Iraq, sponsored the resolution. HPD had submitted anti-Israel resolutions at the 2015 and 2016 conventions of the AHA that were voted down.
The 2025 resolution accused Israel of committing “scholasticide” in Gaza, attacked the United States for providing Israel with the weapons used to destroy the region’s educational system, calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza war. Barbara Weinstein, a Latin American historian at New York University and a former president of the AHA, spoke in praise of the resolution. “Over the years, it has become increasingly clear that we can’t have a narrow definition of what our roles are as historians.” Those with memories of the chaos in higher education in the 1960s caused by its politicization could only shake their heads in bewilderment.
After the vote, supporters of the resolution broke into shouts of “Free Free Palestine.”
The resolution and its supporters omitted any mention of the 7 October events that led to Israel's actions; they merely accused Israel of genocide. Few of the resolution’s supporters were specialists in the history of the Middle East or even familiar with its contemporary political and military developments. HPD presented no evidence that Israel was guilty of any form of genocide. In fact, although Hamas has diverted aid away from civilians—even stolen it and sold it back to the intended recipients—since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Israel has facilitated the transfer of tens of thousands of humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza, delivering food, shelter, medical supplies, water, and educational materials to the battle-torn region.
Opponents made a convincing case.
[The Arab-Israeli conflict] is probably the most intensely debated historical question confronting us today…and [if Historians for Peace and Democracy] want to present their own simple-minded version of history, in which Israel is always the villain, they are free to do so under their own imprimatur. But they have no right to speak for the rest of us in the AHA.
Jonathan Rose, Drew University
Anne Hyde, a University of Oklahoma history professor and a member of the AHA’s council, worried that such resolutions undermined the AHA’s reputation for impartiality, noting:
[The war in Gaza] is not settled history, so we’re not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began, even, so it isn’t something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet.
Five speakers spoke against the resolution at the general meeting. The most important critique was by Jeffrey Herf, a University of Maryland emeritus professor of history and a prominent authority on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. The resolution, he said:
[did] not meet basic standards of historical scholarship or, for that matter, of fair-minded journalism and political analysis. As such, it constitutes an assault on truth and on the skill and insight one expects from professional historians…. Were it to be adopted…it would severely damage, if not destroy, the AHA’s credibility as a professional organization devoted to the search for truth about the past. [The resolution] lent credence to the view that historians in the United States see no distinction between partisanship and scholarship.
The resolution, Herf observed, was based on the conclusions of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Council, two notorious anti-Israel bodies. Their reports regarding Gaza both before and after the 7 October attacks ignore the virulent antisemitism of Hamas, the extensive tunnel system Hamas built in Gaza under the noses of UN officials, Hamas’ practice of hiding its troops in homes, mosques, schools, UN facilities, and hospitals, and take at face value unverified reports and data from Hamas.
After the vote, the association’s elected council received the resolution, which would decide whether it would become the AHA's official position. By a vote of 11 to 4, the council rejected the resolution, stating that it lay outside the Association’s mission and purpose.
As a membership organization, 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.
James Grossman, Executive Director of the AHA
The council’s vote outraged Daniel A. Segal, a professor at Pitzer College in California. “In a time of emerging fascism,” he avowed, the AHA should be “an active part of the democratic resistance” rather than caving in to the powers that be in this Age of Trump. The council’s vote, he asserted, was part of a campaign to silence those dissenting from sunny views of American history. “The best U.S. history,” he said, “teaches that sexism, racism, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are central to US history and society.”
Yet this oppressive Hell has, at least for the last 150 years, been the chosen destination of the largest portion of the world’s migrants.
The AHA council, despite its vote, accepted the unproven charge of scholasticide, stating that it “deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities and archives in Gaza.” There is no evidence that the Israeli military intentionally targeted educational sites in Gaza, or that the destruction of such sites was something other than collateral damage caused by Hamas’ practice of hiding within civilian institutions.
The charge of scholasticide was a red herring.
John Maynard Keynes believed that the history of ideas was crucial for understanding the contemporary world.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
The resolutions presented at the AHA convention did not emerge de novo from defunct economists and political philosophers, but from ideas propagated by academic historians and social scientists, namely…
Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism claims that the most important theme of the history of the last several centuries has been the dispossession of native peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas by “white” settlers from Europe and the United States. A profoundly anti-Western theory, it targets the prosperous countries of Europe and North America, such as Great Britain, Holland, Canada, and the United States. Among the earliest founders of settler-colonialist theory was the Anglo-Australian historian Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016), author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics of an Ethnographic Event (1999) and Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (2016). Settler colonialism differs from traditional colonialism because it features not only the control of the economy and government of a foreign land by the imperial power (the British in India and Holland in the Dutch East Indies) but also the mass migration of settlers from the imperial country. The Boers in South Africa and the British in North America and Australia are models of settler colonialism. Believers hold that there is a fundamental difference between traditional colonialism and settler colonialism. Traditional colonialism seeks to exploit the native population; settler colonialism seeks to replace it either by forcing it to move or by exterminating it.
Adherents often use “genocide” in connection with settler colonialism.
For a half-century, “Palestine” cheerleaders have used settler colonialism to frame their cause as part of a much larger and more significant story: the global conflict be- tween Western imperialists and their native victims. As Natan Sharansky has noted, the ideology of settler colonialism has “galvanized public opinion against the alleged crimes of the ‘settler colonialist’ Zionist oppressor.” Those who voted for the 2025 AHA resolution view Israel as a prime example of contemporary settler colonialism and the genocidal tendencies inherent in it. They often hold that the most important theme of Israel’s history has been the forceful displacement by Westernized Jewish immigrants of the native Arab population of “Palestine” who now live under intolerable social, economic, and political conditions in Gaza, refugee camps, and settlements in the West Bank.
As Adam Kirsch points out in his book On Settler Colonialism, “For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.” Hamas is thus no longer an antisemitic gang of murderers, rapists, and kidnappers; they are merely responding to Israel’s settler colonialism. Congress asked the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during their testimony, whether calling for the killing of Jews violated their campus rules. They responded it would depend on the magical concept of “context” that turns lies into truth and black into white.
“Settler colonialism” provided the context, and its popularity among progressive historians explains the efforts to bend over backwards when discussing the barbarism of Hamas on 7 October; so does historian’s malpractice. When he heard of the idea that American troops had come to Europe not to fight the Germans but to put down a left-wing English revolution during World War II, one Englishman supposedly remarked:
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.
George Orwell
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
Writing history has always depended on the best sources interpreted for what they are, not pushed through a filter of pre-existing ideas and undemonstrable theories about what others did before the historians were born. Historians can prove facts; they can only hold opinions.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 22 August:
1485: The Battle of Bosworth Field results in the death of King Richard III. His death, and the end of the Plantagenet dynasty that had ruled England for two centuries. Richard’s death makes Henry VII king of England, beginning the Tudor dynasty.
1771: Henry Maudslay is born in Woolwich, Greater London. Maudslay, said to be the father of machine tool technology, invented the screw-cutting lathe, which enabled standard screw thread sizes, thus interchangeable parts and mass production.
And today is NATIONAL BE AN ANGEL DAY, dedicated to performing random acts of kindness, selflessly helping those in need, and brightening the lives of others. On the other hand, there’s no “be a devil day,” so make the best of this one.
I will not wade into the geopolitics issue. No one cares what I think.
What I will say as a publisher is that many authors fail to realize that they have worked hard to build their brand, they are a business, and their public actions create a perception in the minds of potential purchasers of their work product of who they are and what they believe.
When historians (anyone, really) who writes books want to sell them but decide simultaneously to take firm political positions (in either direction) and advocate for those beliefs, they are effectively cutting their buying audience by half. Do they have the right to do so? Of course. Is it wise if you want to sell your book(s)? No. Is it fair for your publisher who invested time and money in you and your work product? No.
At some point I will be writing an article on this issue for The Publisher's Brief.
The professional historian class, just like the legal field, is committing professional suicide by straying too far away from its original mission. Authors should take heed.
Hamas occupied Gaza. It has no more legitimacy in Gaza than Israel.