A resolution from the American Historical Association condemns Israel’s “school murder” in Gaza
The American Historical Association passed a resolution on Sunday condemning Israel’s “school murder” in Gaza and accusing Israel of deliberately destroying the Palestinian enclave’s education system amid the 15-month war against Hamas.
The resolution, adopted by a vote of 428 to 88 at the AHA’s annual conference, said Israel’s campaign had “effectively wiped out the education system in the Gaza Strip.” It now goes to the AHA Council, which must decide whether to approve it, veto it or declare the nonconformity.
Some members of the AHA leadership expressed opposition to the resolution, including its president-elect Suzanne Marchand.
The resolution accused Israel of “destroying 80 percent of Gaza’s schools, depriving 625,000 children of access to education… all 12 university campuses in Gaza… Gaza’s archives, libraries, cultural centers, museums and bookstores, including 195 cultural sites, 227 mosques , three…”churches and the library of al-Aqsa University.”
It also condemned “the IDF’s repeated violent displacements of the population of Gaza, which resulted in the irreplaceable loss of teaching and research materials for students and teachers, which will undermine the future study of Palestinian history.”
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The resolution called for “a permanent ceasefire to put an end to the scholasticicide documented above” and promised to “form a committee to help rebuild educational infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel has repeatedly denied attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure without military justification and said Hamas and other terror groups routinely base their operations at civilian sites such as schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. It says it has no choice but to attack such sites if they are used for military purposes, as it pursues its war aim of toppling Hamas.
People inspect a destroyed classroom after the Israeli bombardment of the disused Muscat Palestinian government school in Gaza City on October 2, 2024. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP)
According to Inside Higher Ed, revolution proponent Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a professor at Rice University, criticized “deniers” among historians who “read land acknowledgments here in this colonized space but don’t mean what they read.”
“If they had had any understanding, if they had had any compassion for others, if they had not engaged in purely narcissistic and violent narcissistic behavior, they would have passed far stricter resolutions than those proposed from the beginning of this genocide.”
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor at the New School who spoke against the proposal, said: “This directly feeds the idea that academics are unapologetically political and all agree with a fairly far-left wing,” Blick on the Israel-Hamas war.
“There are many of us with different points of view. But when a resolution like this gets through the largest historians’ organization in America, it’s really bad for us,” she argued.
To illustrate: Palestinians search through rubble in the courtyard of the UNRWA-run Asma School in Shati Camp in Gaza City after an overnight Israeli attack that targeted Hamas terrorists, according to the IDF, on June 25, 2024. (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP)
The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a devastating attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Terrorists also kidnapped 251 people into Gaza, 96 of whom are still in captivity and many of whom are no longer alive.
According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, more than 45,000 people in Gaza have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far. However, the number cannot be verified and does not distinguish between civilians and fighters. Israel says it killed around 18,000 combatants in combat as of November and killed another 1,000 terrorists in Israel on October 7.
The war has led to widespread condemnation of Israel in the Western world, with American scholars often highly critical of the Jewish state’s actions. The past year has seen a surge in anti-Israel activity and a spate of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses across the United States.
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