American Historical Association resolution condemns Israeli ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza
Motion, opposed by some leading figures in the AHA, now goes to Council for approval or rejection

The American Historical Association on Sunday passed a resolution that condemns Israel’s “scholasticide” in Gaza, accusing it of intentionally destroying the Palestinian enclave’s education system amid the 15-month war against Hamas.
The resolution, which was approved 428-88 at the AHA’s annual conference, said Israel’s campaign “has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system.” It will now go to the AHA Council, which will need to decide whether to approve it, veto it or declare nonconcurrence.
Some of the AHA leadership expressed opposition to the resolution, including its president-elect Suzanne Marchand.
The resolution accused Israel of destroying “80 percent of schools in Gaza, leaving 625,000 children with no educational access… all 12 Gaza university campuses… Gaza’s archives, libraries, cultural centers, museums, and bookstores, including 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, three churches, and the al-Aqsa University library.”
It also condemned “the IDF’s repeated violent displacements of Gaza’s people, leading to the irreplaceable loss of students’ and teachers’ educational and research materials, which will extinguish the future study of Palestinian history.”
The resolution called for “a permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide documented above” and vowed to “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.”
Israel has repeatedly denied targeting Gaza’s civilian infrastructure without military justification, saying Hamas and other terror groups routinely base their operations in civilian sites including schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. It says it has not choice but to strike such sites when they are used for military purposes as it pursues its war aim of toppling Hamas.

According to Inside Higher Ed, resolution backer Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a Rice University professor, bashed “deniers” among historians who “will read land acknowledgments here in this colonized space, but they don’t mean what they read.”
“If they had any understanding, if they had any feeling for others, if they were not engaging in pure narcissistic and violent narcissistic behavior, they would have issued resolutions far stronger than the one that is being proposed from the very beginning of this genocide.”
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor at the New School who opposed the motion, said: “This feeds directly into the idea that academics are unapologetically political and are all on board with a pretty far left-wing view of the Israel-Hamas war.
“There are plenty of us who have a diversity of viewpoints. But if a resolution like this goes through at the biggest organization of historians in America, that’s really bad for us,” she argued.

The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a devastating attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Terrorists also abducted 251 people to Gaza, of whom 96 remain in captivity, many of them no longer alive.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 45,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 18,000 combatants in battle as of November and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
The war has led to widespread condemnation of Israel in the Western world, with American academics often highly critical of the Jewish state’s actions. Last year saw a wave of anti-Israel activities on university campuses throughout the US, amid a surge of antisemitic incidents.