BY ALAN PARKES
History is always political. Last month, the American Historical Association’s (AHA) leadership chose to override its own members for a second year, again vetoing a resolution on scholasticide in Gaza along with a resolution opposing attacks on academic freedom, especially those drawing attention to Israel’s US–sponsored genocide.
As the AHA fails its members, historians are wont to ask, what is the purpose of the AHA? While the organization acknowledges the fact that history is always political, its leadership is only sometimes prepared to recognize that the AHA acts politically.
Nearly 80 percent of AHA members who attended the organization’s business meeting at the annual conference in early January voted in support of the resolutions. The undemocratic nature of AHA leadership’s actions, clearly failing to offer support for Palestinian historians, students, archives, and institutions of education, calls into question the organization’s ability to uphold its stated objectives: “The promotion of historical studies through the encouragement of research, teaching, and publication [and] the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts.”
At best, AHA leadership’s disregard for its members marks the organization’s ineffectualness. At worst, the vetoes perpetuate racist perceptions of which history matters while offering implicit support for scholasticide. There is a lesson there for AHA leadership about the role historians play in defending history.
Beyond Israel’s scholasticide, AHA leadership routinely protects the historical discipline from overt attacks, and advocates ways to ensure that historical research, teaching, and interpretation is not compromised by political leadership. For example, in 2025, the AHA’s joint statement with the Organization of American Historians condemned efforts to censor historical content on federal government websites and at many public museums; in a second “Statement Regarding the White House Review of Smithsonian Institution Museums” in August of that year, AHA leaders spoke on our shared historical values. AHA leadership has made the collective voice of teachers heard in statements and campaigns that protect history education at the secondary and postsecondary levels. All of these acts were political, because advocacy is political.
Protecting the discipline and doing history necessitates dissecting conspicuous political decision-making to assess, as AHA leadership has, the ways that such overt political action, such as steps taken by the current Trump administration, undermine the ability for historians and teachers to do their critical work. Yet, the AHA leadership appears to find little value in consistency. In the council’s decision to avoid the politics involved in condemning Israel’s destruction, AHA leadership have positioned themselves as not particularly bothered by what it means for history and human life. By falling short of condemning scholasticide in the case of Palestine, AHA leadership’s politics thus offer tacit support for destruction of all the necessary elements of history within Gaza, including human life.
It’s important for all academics, historians, and AHA members in the US to appreciate the privileges afforded to us and use those privileges to bolster the work of teachers, professors, researchers, and students outside the US, affirming the value of the historical discipline. Shying away from either of those obligations diminishes the value of history.
Without a recognition of the US’s role in scholasticide, much less direction on how to approach the topic with historical clarity from the largest professional historical organization in the world, students and teachers may be left to wonder what their responsibilities are as part of the historical discipline.
But the 2026 resolution votes suggest that historians know their duties and are more confidently willing to promote the discipline and the AHA’s purported efforts to support and defend history. Undeterred by the suggestion that they are engaging in politics—knowing that politics are an inherent part of historicizing—historians are largely uncomfortable with the suggestion that their work should be inconsequential to major events of the day.
An irony of the situation is that AHA leadership seemingly wishes for this episode to be history, in some sense, for members to drop their demands to condemn scholasticide. As the genocide in Gaza continues even under the guise of a “ceasefire,” perhaps some of AHA’s leadership would like it to also be considered history, an event that has concluded. It can then be studied but not require the immediate condemnation signified by the resolutions. To cast aside either the votes and demands of members or the scholasticide itself as history in such a manner relegates the AHA to a level of ineffectualness that its members are not willing to accept.
As the Palestinian Historians Group asserts in response to AHA leadership, “we refuse to accept that our colleagues’ lives matter less than institutional comfort. We will win because history—and the majority of historians—are on our side.” Condemning the destruction of historical sites, archives, institutions of higher learning, and the murder of the people who use them to contribute to a broader understanding of history and the world comes naturally to many who take the discipline seriously.
Alan Parkes is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.
It’s easy for dedicated activists to pack a meeting. And the dishonesty starts here when Parkes asserts as a given that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza. That’s not a given, it’s an anti Israel propaganda lie. But that’s par for the course for the Israel haters these days.
An overwhelming number of experts consider it a Genocide, so it seems unfair to call me dishonest. I wonder if you have any substantive critiques.
Alan Parkes: I agree that it is unfair to implicitly attack your character or imply that you are dishonest. Perhaps the word “misinformed” would have been a more accurate adjective to use. Still, Professor Nadel’s greater point should not be lost because of an imprecise word choice. And that greater point is simply that the term “genocide”- as applied to Israel’s war efforts in Gaza – is not a given fact as your writing wrongly asserts.
You defend by noting that an “overwhelming number of experts” believe Israel’s actions constituted genocide. Unfortunately, using this reasoning to persuade is fallacious. Widespread belief is not any justification for a claim. It simply does not equate with the truth.
If you are seriously after the truth, here it is:
1. Genocide requires both mass killings and “intent.” Israel had no intent to wipe out Palestinians. Mass killings in a defensive war is not genocide.
2. After Oct 7th, Israel had absolutely no choice but to eradicate Hamas (an existential threat).
3. Hamas intentionally put its citizens in harm’s way. Hamas’ war strategy (operating in tunnels; using civilians as shields; firing from schools, residences, and hospitals) made any destruction in Gaza greater than it had to be and lay bare the damning fact that blame for civilian loss and infrastructure demolition belongs solely to Hamas.
4. Under no law or moral code does Hamas get to attack Israel with impunity because it hides behind its citizens. That is not how war works.
5. There isn’t a country on this earth with an army that can only kill the bad guys. Still, the IDF’s remarkably low combatant-to-civilian death ratio is an extraordinary achievement and belies the perniciously misapplied “genocide” label.
6. If you are looking for genocide, look to Hamas’ actions and its Charter.
Hi Bob, Israel’s mass killing and the genocidal intent, expressed by officials in the government, is pretty well documented.
Alan Parkes: One would think that an aspiring scholar would actually want to address the points that were made and not deflect using a lame, non-responsive, “well documented” reply.
If you are going to take that route, then what is equally “well documented” is the rank antisemitism that animates the “genocide” libel and the Hamas propaganda machine that inverts morality.
You would be well-advised to examine some more “documents” and look to the multiple steps that Israel took to minimize civilian causalities. Such inconvenient and dispositive facts, unfortunately, are lost on biased “experts” whose sanctimonious conclusions ignore world history and reality.
Perhaps you and others, who are quick to impute evil to Israel with the “genocide” label, might engage in a thought experiment.
Ask yourself: Why is it that you and all the other arm-chair strategists think there must be a better military way to fight urban terrorists than that of the tactics used by the highly experienced IDF? On what basis would you and others make such a presumption? Indeed, what country can you cite – in the history of all mankind – that has fought a defensive war more virtuously than Israel and supports your implied theory?
If you and other critics cannot name such a country or dazzle the world with a military plan that would both eradicate Hamas and improve on Israel’s commendable low combatant-to-civilian death ratio, then perhaps you might want to re-think the libelous position you adopted.
The 428 members who voted for this measure do not represent the 10,000+ membership.
If you believe that, don’t you think the council should’ve sent the resolutions to be voted on by the entirety of the AHA membership? Instead, leadership chose to undermine its constitution and bylaws and democracy
Should the council violate it’s mission statement to appease antisemites? I should hope not.
You’ll be pleased to know that none of the people involved in passing the resolutions are antisemitic. The resolutions are linked and show no signs of antisemitism.
Alan Parkes reproaches the AHA for refusing to endorse a vicious canard, namely the baseless assertion that the military response which followed Hamas’s 10/7/23 one-day genocidal massacre of more than 1200 ranging in age from infants to the elderly, its horrific sexual assaults on Israeli women, and the taking of 250 hostages and their captivity and torture was a “U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.” Such a colossal lie would be disservice to the discipline of history and those who take it seriously.