American Historical Association Members Challenge Veto on Palestinian Scholasticide

(Rebecca Karl, Margaret Power, Karen Miller, Prasannan Parthasarathi)

Rebecca Karl is a historian at NYU specializing in modern China. She was a vocal supporter of a 2025 resolution within the American Historical Association (AHA) condemning scholasticide.

Karen Miller, a historian at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, was a petitioned-in candidate in the recent AHA elections and won a seat as Councilor for the Teaching Division.

Margaret Power is the co-chair of HPAD and a Professor Emeritus of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has publicly supported the AHA resolutions condemning scholasticide in Gaza.

Prasannan Parthasarathi, a member of the steering committee of HPAD, is a professor of history at Boston College and has been involved in advocacy within the AHA related to defending academic freedom.

Introduction

At the annual conference in January 2025, the on-site membership of the American Historical Association (AHA) passed a resolution condemning the ongoing scholasticide in Gaza, the targeted destruction of Palestinian educational infrastructure. Despite overwhelming support (428–88), the AHA Executive Council vetoed the resolution, creating extensive criticism. This Q&A brings together four historians: Rebecca Karl (NYU), Karen Miller (CUNY), Margaret Power (Illinois Institute of Technology), and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston College).

Each of these distinguished panelists has long advocated for Palestinian academic freedom and institutional responsibility within the discipline of history. In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, they talk about the fight for more democratic participation, the so-called politics of neutrality, and the role historians must play in times of global crisis in addressing state violence.

The Veto

Daniel Falcone: In my last Q/A with Rebecca Karl, she stated that “condemning scholasticide cannot be controversial.” Given the overwhelming support for the resolution at the AHA’s annual meeting (428-88) and the fact that the Executive Council has yet to implement it, how do you evaluate the AHA’s current position and has the symbolic power of that vote translated into any institutional accountability?

Rebecca Karl: The AHA’s current Executive Council has been clear that the democratically passed resolution – passed by a landslide — to condemn scholasticide in Gaza at the January 2025 AHA meeting in NY will not be sent to the membership and even the fact of the vote has been erased from the website. For an association ostensibly concerned with history and American democracy – as evidenced in numerous interventions into the Trump administration’s increasingly bold tampering with history curricula and narratives in museums, public spaces, and so on — this erasure is beyond egregious.

It completely negates all credibility that this organization represents “history” or “historians.” The institutional accountability seems to have been nil, except that the nominate-by-petition movement gained steam and resulted in several notable victories. This makes one believe that, had the resolution been sent out to the membership after the January vote, the support for it would have been quite robust. Of course there’s no way to know that, since the EC was apparently afraid of its own shadow.

Margaret Power: The Executive Council’s veto of the scholasticide resolution represents a clear decision to ignore most of the membership that supported the resolution. The veto sent shockwaves through the organization, which translated into a widespread demand to democratize the AHA.

It also made many members realize that the AHA leadership should reflect and respect the expressed wishes of its members and be willing to stand up in support of Palestinians’ educational rights. Their failure to do so is in marked contrast to the Executive Council’s willingness to issue statements condemning the violation of other scholars’ rights in multiple countries around the world.

The AHA’s refusal to stand up for educational, let alone human, rights for Palestinians has a long history. Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD), the organization that sponsored the January 2025 Scholasticide Resolution, first submitted a resolution on academic freedom for Palestinians to the 2016 AHA Business Meeting. It lost by a vote of 111 to 51. HPAD then petitioned the Council to set up a committee to investigate Israeli denial of Palestinian educational rights. The Council refused to do so.

Over the next few years, we organized a series of panels about Palestine at the AHA annual meetings and at the January 2024 meeting we held the first ever vigil for Palestine at an AHA meeting. The AHA should stand up for the rights of Palestinians, even if doing so could anger some political forces in Washington. We must oppose the U.S. funded genocide that Israel is carrying out in Gaza, otherwise what kind of scholars and human beings are we?

Has the symbolic power of that vote translated into any institutional accountability? Not yet!

Karen Miller: The only public response that the AHA has had to the scholasticide resolution was to veto it in January. The 16-member council voted to veto 11 to 4 with one abstention and issued a statement claiming that the resolution lay “outside the scope” of the association’s mission as outlined in its constitution, which they quoted.

That mission is “the promotion of historical studies through the encouragement of research, teaching, and publication; the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts; the dissemination of historical records and information; the broadening of historical knowledge among the general public; and the pursuit of kindred activities in the interest of history.” This is a mission that we all support wholeheartedly. But, while I see the scholasticide resolution as squarely aligned with these priorities, most councilors rejected that claim and do not feel the need to be accountable to the large number of members who voted for it or to the democratic values of the organization.

Institutional Complicity

Daniel Falcone: Regarding the AHA Executive Council’s overruling of the democratic will of its members through veto, Van Gosse called this “institutional complicity” a betrayal of the AHA’s mission. Karen Miller described it as “anticipatory obedience” under political pressure. Talk about how historians should interpret the veto, which looks to be about preserving neutrality or maintaining silence. What are the ramifications of this for democratic participation within the AHA?

Rebecca Karl: On the one hand, this egregious contravention of democratic process seems to have galvanized a real movement within the membership to change the leadership and to challenge the EC to be bolder and better at meeting the difficulties of the present moment, whether the Israeli-perpetrated genocide/scholasticide/murder by starvation in Gaza or the assault on history by the current US government (among many other governments in the world).

On the other hand, the EC’s shameful actions seem to have alienated several members, who have let their memberships lapse and who will just drop out of organizational participation altogether. The veto and abrogation of democratic process is about silencing critique of Israel and abusing the power of the EC to prevent the association from moving into a more activist posture with regards to the challenges historians and scholars now face in the U.S. and all over the world.

Prasannan Parthasarathi: Ironically and justifiably, the veto sparked a drive to democratize the AHA. When faced with the stark denial of the vote, HPAD first organized a petition, which garnered over 1,800 signatures, demanding that the Executive Council send out the resolution to the membership for a vote. The Executive Council did not do so. We conclude that they feared that a vote of the membership would confirm that of the Business Meeting: most members support the Scholasticide Resolution.

As a next step, we decided to run candidates for various AHA positions. HPAD alerted its members to the election and urged them to vote for the candidates supported by HPAD, the Palestinian Historians Group, and Historians for Palestine. And the great news is that four of our six candidates won!

Karen Miller: The extremely uneven vote at the AHA Business Meeting in January suggests that many AHA members want to see their professional organization take a stand opposing Israel’s deliberate destruction of Palestinian historical institutions as well as the entire Palestinian educational infrastructure in Gaza. The Business Meeting and the vote were widely publicized at the conference, so those for whom these questions were important, including opponents of the resolution, prioritized coming to the meeting.

Israel’s massive destruction of Gazan civilians and civic institutions is deeply unpopular in the United States among people who also value the funding and maintenance of higher education, and we can thus assume that large numbers of AHA members share that interest.

As we are seeing as Trump goes after universities, “neutrality” does not protect institutions from right-wing attacks. Rather, the denial of the intense brutality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, which we are all witnessing unfold in real time day after day, and the denial that this destruction is relevant to the AHA’s mission to protect and promote historical studies and historical materials, feel like gaslighting.

However, we know that our institutions are important. Rather than standing by and encouraging our comrades to leave the AHA, we ran our candidates on a platform promoting the best things that the AHA has to offer, including a democratic voice for historians to use. The victories of three of our petitioned-in candidates show that historians do care and are interested in using our institutions and platforms to fight to protect history.

Electoral Organizing

Daniel Falcone: Describe the backlash your slate faced within the AHA, including accusations that the group was not committed to the profession of history. As historians actively countering Zionism, how do politics shape your work in these internal AHA battles and what does your recent electoral success mean for democratizing the organization and confronting the silence and “organized forgetting” around Palestine?

Prasannan Parthasarathi: Our candidates won for various reasons. They are all serious and respected scholars. In addition, they were willing to put themselves forward as historians who sought to democratize the AHA and to overcome the “Palestine exception.”

Margaret Power: In the face of the massive genocide that the United States government is funding and backing and Israel is carrying out, it is shocking and, frankly, revolting that the AHA, the world’s largest association of historians, did not dare to stand up and say we support a ceasefire, we support the rights of Palestinians, we will commit to helping to reconstruct Gaza’s devastated educational system. We hope that that will change, and we are 100 percent committed to continuing to struggle to see that it does.

Karen Miller: After the voting began, 27 historians, 13 of whom had been past presidents of the AHA issued a public letter calling on AHA members to vote only for those candidates who appeared on the ballot because they had been nominated by the nominating committee. Those 27 historians are or were all full-time professors, all but one are elite, R1 institutions, 5 are from Princeton, and 14 are emeritus. Many of them are “famous” in our small professional world, people we read in graduate school and have seen speak at the plenaries of large conferences. In general, they are some of the best funded and most secure among us.

Their careers do not represent a portrait of what is going on in universities today, even before Trump began to destroy them further. As the AHA’s own research suggests, most history classes at universities are taught by adjunct, part-time, and non-tenure-track workers. Funding for research and for conferences everywhere, and particularly at non-elite institutions has eroded precipitously over the past two decades. This situation is dire for the profession and dire for the AHA, which makes the prestige-forward letter I described above feel even more tone-deaf. As many have observed, what is happening in Palestine today is of central importance to us all. Some have called it the principal contradiction of our political moment.

A Democratic AHA

Daniel Falcone: Moving forward, what are your hopes for the AHA and given the internal divides over its mission amidst ongoing injustices in Gaza, how can academic communities continue pushing for greater ethical responsibility within the field?

Rebecca Karl: As has the AAUP, my hope for the AHA is that it becomes an activist organization that rises to the challenges of the moment and innovates new strategies for dealing with the dire circumstances of history/ historians in the US and the world more generally. AAUP’s new leadership has taken on some important tasks in the current moment; the AHA could do so both on its own and in concert with other professional organizations that are also under attack.

The time for the disciplinary isolation of each organization is long past: we need coalitions, blocs, solidarity, common initiatives that can help cope with the world of assault that is threatening all of us. Barring that, the time of the AHA will have passed and it will have become obsolete in every way possible.

Margaret Power: Our hope is that the AHA becomes more like the Organization of American Historians (OAH). At its annual meeting in March, the OAH passed the HPAD sponsored resolution on scholasticide in Gaza, which was similar to the one passed two months earlier at the AHA meeting. The OAH bylaws direct its Executive Council to either accept the results of the vote or send the resolution to the whole membership for a vote. There is no veto option. We ask, why can’t the AHA adopt the same procedures as the OAH?

Karen Miller: My hope is that our electoral win can make the institution more democratic and more relevant to historians. The association belongs to all of its members and needs to remain relevant to them, including to those who are the most vulnerable. I strongly believe that we can push for the kind of ethical responsibility that the field demands. We must understand that opponents of higher education and critical thinking will be against us no matter what we do, so we need have integrity and be accountable to the concerns of our members.

The Future of the AHA

Daniel Falcone: Three of the five petitioned candidates, including Karen, Van Gosse and Alexander Aviña, won seats in the recent election. Describe the significance of this outcome and what might it signal for the AHA’s future?

Rebecca Karl: We, the broader activist membership, are standing right behind the newly elected petition candidates, ready and willing to work along with them to help transform the AHA into the kind of organization that does not merely preserve but rather innovates at every level of institutional responsibility. The assault we are all under now – from Gaza’s unimaginable agonies to the US’s irresponsible use of weapons and power to underpin Israel and to pursue global hegemonies – and the astonishing complicity of our educational institutions in these assaults requires that we find other communities and groupings to help us meet the moment. The AHA could be that. It could also just fade into irrelevance and obsolescence.

Prasannan Parthasarathi: These victories show that the members of the AHA want change. The teaching and writing of history in the United States has gone global and is less centered on the US and Europe. The AHA’s membership has similarly gone global and is drawn from across the world. The current members of the AHA view defending history as a global task and they want the AHA, one of the largest associations of historians in the world, to rise to that challenge.

Karen Miller: We ran in response to the AHA’s veto of the scholasticide resolution and its implications for democracy in the organization. As councilors and as a member of the nominating committee, we will push the AHA to address the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life, educational institutions, historical materials, and the writing of history. We will also push to ensure that the AHA prioritizes the concerns of a broad range of historians. Our mandate is clear, and we hope to work toward it.

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