The Politics of History

After 10 years of trying, Historians for Peace and Democracy passed a resolution condemning Israel at the American Historical Association

Image credit: Noel smiley/Shutterstock.com

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On Sunday night, the American Historical Association (AHA), the largest and most capacious history organization in the world, voted to condemn Israel’s destruction of Palestinian educational and scholarly infrastructure in Gaza, and to commit the organization to creating a committee to assist in rebuilding it. Whether the resolution will be ultimately adopted is unclear. The AHA, although it has an extensive committee structure, gives much of its policy-making power to the Executive Council, so the resolution has been endorsed but not adopted. Under the by-laws, the EC may take one of three paths in the coming weeks: adopt the resolution, veto it, or send it to the organization’s full 11,000-member roster for a vote.

Before I continue, I want to stipulate a few things. First, I find the abusive, and often dishonest, political style of the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States to be immensely disturbing; at the same time, I find the war in Gaza repulsive. I solved this problem by not attending the business meeting at all. Friends who spoke against the movement were booed and hissed at the meeting, and are being badly trolled online. So am I, and since you don’t have to do much to be bullied and characterized by these activists as a genocide enthusiast, I probably should have gone to the meeting.

OK—so, this is all to say, I did not witness what New York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler described as a “raucous” debate, “a new phase in the cultural battles over the Israel-Hamas war,” and “political and generational divides within the historical association.” Friends who were there described a scene that we have become used to in the past year and a half, with an abundance of keffiyeh scarves serving as an early sign that the motion would succeed.

As Schuessler wrote:

The overflow crowd, which spilled into the hallway outside the hotel ballroom where the vote occurred, was notably young and diverse. Some in attendance said that was particularly striking at a time of deep concern over the imploding academic job market and diminished prospects for newly minted scholars.

In fact, when someone explores the history of this social movement more deeply, I think we will find that the two things—employment precarity and a singular focus on Palestinian human rights—are interconnected. Even young scholars who have secure jobs have been deeply affected by the long-term employment drought that reshaped the historical profession after 2008.

The anti-Israel movement in the United States is populist in its character, exhibiting a radical disidentification with established institutions, an affinity for horizontal, peer-driven politics, and a predilection for strategic misinformation. At the same time,, the rise of campus unionization, mostly among graduate students and contingent faculty, has made horizontal solidarities tangible, action oriented, and cross-fertilizing. For example, except for the tents, flags, and the wording of the chants, last year’s Gaza protests at The New School were indistinguishable from the union picket lines that shut the university down in the previous two years.

Those of you who don’t follow the doings of academic organizations might also not be aware that the anti-Israel motion on the table at the AHA meeting, the “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” has a history that long predates Sunday’s meeting or the Israel-Hamas war. It begins twenty years ago, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement was founded as a non-violent human rights movement for Palestinians living in diaspora and in the Occupied Territories. In many ways, BDS embodies the tendencies that the Israeli right has organized against: the right to return, the illegitimacy of the state of Israel, and characterization of Israel as an apartheid state.

But, although Germany has designated BDS as a terrorist group, and Israel’s Shin Bet claims to have proven that the organization has ties to terrorists, in fact, the organization’s main purpose was cultural: to encourage the cultural and intellectual isolation of Israelis and Israel’s institutions (the inspiration for BDS is said to have been founded on similar international strategies to dismantle apartheid in South Africa); and to win over American intellectuals to the Palestinian cause.

Thus followed a spate of calls to exclude Israelis from cultural life in Europe and the Americas; prevent intellectual and cultural workers from appearing before Israeli audiences; and persuade high-profile academics like Judith Butler and Angela Davis to take leadership position in condemning the occupation. And, not inconsequentially, the rise of BDS parallels the rise of social media, blogging, and internet journalism, with news sites like Mondoweiss platforming movement content, interviews, and calls to action.

But friends, there’s an even older story—one that begins with New Left activists who were hired in history departments in the 1960s. At the 1969 AHA, at least two separate resolutions condemning the Vietnam War on two separate evenings were presented to the membership (radicals also tried to elect anti-war activists Staughton Lynd as president of the organization and failed.)

Raucus doesn’t even begin to describe it. In one of these sessions, “Howard Zinn grabbed a microphone and proposed postponing the remainder of the meeting, so that the radicals’ resolution could be heard the following evening. A debacle unfolded as Harvard historian (and AHA president in 1968) John Fairbank literally wrestled the microphone from Zinn’s hands.”

Then, on the following evening,

The Conference on Peace Research in History presented its own antiwar resolution that called the Vietnam War immoral and urged the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But thinking it was too mild, the radicals not only demanded withdrawal of American forces, but also condemned the war as imperialist, denounced the government’s repression of the Black Panthers, and demanded the release of political prisoners such as the Chicago Eight. The more temperate resolution was voted on first and defeated 611-642. Shortly thereafter, the radicals’ resolution was defeated by a wider margin of 493-833. The radicals complained that if the milder resolution had been presented after the radical one, it likely would have passed as many radicals who wanted to go on record in defense of the Black Panthers might have settled for the softer resolution.

First—look how big that meeting was! Over 1300 people! Second, many of the people who were in that ballroom in 1969 became the nucleus of activist caucuses. They continued to bring political issues to the membership, as well as professional ones like the 1970 resolution that committed the organization to gender equality. In 2007, the AHA passed a resolution condemning the Iraq War (Barbara Weinstein, who spoke on behalf of Sunday’s resolution, was president of the organization at the time); and in February, 2022, the AHA issued a statement condemning the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s abuse of history to justify it.

It was, however, more difficult to strategize similar measures in relation to Palestinian politics. When the American Studies Association passed a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions and the intellectuals associated with them in 2013, it was wildly contentious, resulted in a lawsuit against officers of the organization, and—perhaps most importantly—tied BDS itself to the restriction of academic freedom. The first measure, brought to the AHA business meeting in 2015, was tabled in a failed vote to overcome technical flaws in its submission. The following year, the resolution came to the floor but was soundly defeated, as opponents successfully argued that boycotts restrict everyone’s academic freedom.

So, what allowed this new one to succeed?

First, I would argue, a decade of BDS-influenced activist scholars researching, writing, and moving up the academic ladder into positions of influence. Ten years ago, many of those 400+ members who voted for Sunday’s resolution were in graduate school: today, they are senior scholars who have the financing and professional incentive to attend the meeting and want to shape the future of the organization.

Second, years of failures resulted in the measure’s backers tailoring the measure quite narrowly to the term “scholasticide.” The resolution cites an April 18, 2024, press release from the United Nations. In the document, human rights experts employed by the UN asserted that more than 80% of Gaza schools are “damaged or destroyed,” and “ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’”

This allowed the organizers to make the argument that condemning Israel fell within the purview of the organization, which is to promote the practice of history. But what I find most interesting is that you won’t find BDS’s fingerprints on this resolution anywhere, or the concepts it was founded on and organized around. There are no references to anyone’s academic freedom, but rather the reframing of a violent war around specific deaths (scholars and students); specific destruction (school buildings); and specific cultural destruction (the loss of libraries and archives.)

The charges end with a specific call to the profession: “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.”

Would the resolution have been passed anyway, given the atmosphere? Maybe. But over fifty years of experience means that the backers have made it much harder for the Council to veto it or require a vote of the full membership. To do so would be an extremely heavy-handed move under the circumstances and invite a more serious challenge to the organization itself in 2026.

We will soon see. Follow this space.

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Short takes:

• At Abortion, Every Day, Jessica Valenti predicts a renewal of the so-called “mommy wars,” a grisly, internet-driven phenomenon from earlier in the in which stay-at-home mothers accused working-mothers of being shit mommies. “The idea was to diminish the very real policy issues women faced—like the lack of parental leave and affordable child care—and frame them instead as personal issues,” Valenti writes. The new struggle will feature “Conservative women sharing stories of refusing abortions in spite of fatal or devastating fetal diagnoses, all of them steeped in the language of mommy martyrdom. We’ll see social media captions insisting motherhood is about sacrifice, and columns explaining that risking their mental and physical health—or even their lives—is simply what good mothers do.” The discourse will frame “those who decide to end their doomed pregnancies are selfish—unwilling to put in the requisite suffering that ‘good’ mothers take on happily,”obscuring the real effects of GOP abortion bans on all Americans. (January 7, 2024)

• Have you wondered why Elon Musk spends all that time hanging out in the dining room at Mar-A-Lago looking bored while Donald Trump twerks to “YMCA?” Or what the $250 million was really for? At The Nation, Kate Aronoff says: driverless cars. As part of the push to deregulate, “Trump’s team is reportedly considering axing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s rule requiring that companies report crashes involving self-driving vehicles,” Aronoff writes, thus clearing the way for a vast expansion of driverless vehicles no one wants, but that will “fill the country up with more unnecessary, energy-intensive junk that’ll make a small subset of very rich people even richer and an already hot planet even warmer.” (January 7, 2024)

• In an interview with Geoff Bennett at the PBS NewsHour, tech journalist Kara Swisher discussed her motivations for trying to put together a group that would buy The Washington Post from Jeff Bezos. It’s a terrific listen that features Swisher at her best—serious, knowledgeable, and with a clear-eyed view of why a nation needs sustainable, excellent journalism. “I think he has business interests that are not aligned with The Post,” Swisher says of Bezos. “And some of his selections have been bad, including pulling the endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute. There's always some excuse. He didn't see it. He didn't read it.

  It doesn't really matter. He's involving himself in ways that are aren't working for The Post, which is also in distress as a business at this moment.” She could pull it off: don’t forget that her podcast partner is entrepreneur Scott Galloway. (January 6, 2024)