American Historical Association members voted on Sunday to approve a resolution accusing Israel of committing “scholasticide” in Gaza.
The resolution at the annual business meeting of the AHA, which bills itself as “the leading professional association for historians in the United States,” makes no mention of Hamas or hostages in its condemnation of Israel and the United States, and its call for an immediate ceasefire.
“The U.S. government has underwritten the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign in Gaza with over $12.5 billion in military aid between October 2023 and June 2024,” the resolution says. “That campaign, beyond causing massive death and injury to Palestinian civilians and the collapse of basic life structures, has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system.”
It quotes a group of U.N. experts who said in an April 18 press release that Israel’s actions in Gaza “may constitute an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as scholasticide.”
Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, critics of Israel’s military campaign against the terrorist groups have accused the Jewish state of novel -cide “crimes.” In September, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestinian rights and one of the authors of the April U.N. press release, accused Israel of “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and more recently ecocide.”
The AHA resolution, which calls “for a permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide,” passed in a vote of members present at the business meeting in New York by 428-88.
According to one attendee, speakers who opposed the resolution on the grounds that it failed to mention Hamas were booed and hissed by attendees, and the conclusion of the vote was reportedly met with cheers of “free, free Palestine.”
The resolution will now be taken up on Monday by the AHA’s elected council, which can accept, veto or refuse to consider the measure. If the council refuses to concur, the AHA’s more than 10,000 members would vote on the resolution.
