We, the Palestinian Historians Group, are outraged by the American Historical Association Council’s decision to veto two resolutions that members passed by 78 and 79 percent at the AHA Annual Business Meeting on January 10, 2026. The first resolution condemns Israeli scholasticide in Gaza and calls on the AHA to support our colleagues in Palestine. The second opposes attacks on core principles of education, including academic freedom at US universities and the freedom to criticize the US-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The AHA Council claims these resolutions fall outside the AHA’s mission and pose "institutional risk" to the organization. They are wrong. It is their vetoes that violate the AHA’s mission. These vetoes are an abandonment of the AHA’s democratic principles and a dereliction of the AHA’s duty to defend academic freedom. With these vetoes, the AHA Council has silenced Palestinian scholars and colleagues, placed historians of Palestine at greater professional and personal risk, and fed rising authoritarianism at home and abroad.
The AHA’s mission is to serve historians in “every historical era and geographical area.” Its guiding principles commit it to take a public stance “when public or private authorities, in the United States or elsewhere, threaten the preservation of or free access to historical sources.”
It has taken such public stances before in defense of institutions and scholars in the US and elsewhere. Yet it refuses to do so for Palestinians.
Over the past two years, Israel’s military has killed, injured, and displaced tens of thousands of our academic colleagues and students. It has severely damaged or destroyed Gaza’s seven universities, six university colleges, and five intermediate colleges, as well as over 100 major archaeological sites. At least 195 historic buildings, 12 museums, 3 historic shrines, 6 public libraries, and 8 publishing houses in Gaza, were destroyed, damaged or looted by Israeli armed forces between October 2023 and January 2024 alone. All of Gaza’s major university libraries were bombarded or burnt, and the same fate befell the major archival and manuscript collections, including the Gaza City municipal archives and the Great Omari Mosque collection. Shouldn’t the deliberate destruction of these irreplaceable historical sources, archives, libraries, and universities demand an institutional response from our professional association?
The Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza has called on us to support Palestinian historians as they retrieve what remains from Palestine’s cultural artifacts and rebuild Gaza’s universities. They have asked us to work alongside them and “to refuse all plans seeking to bypass, erase, or weaken the integrity of our academic institutions.”
The AHA Council’s decision to establish an “Ad Hoc Committee to Aid Palestinian Historians” has no legitimacy, substance or mandate. Without a democratic mandate, and without taking a clear, public stance against scholasticide, such a committee would bypass, rather than support, our Palestinian colleagues.
In contrast to such toothless efforts, genuine solidarity with Palestinians has come from principled historians across the profession: graduate students, early-career scholars, tenured and contingent faculty, K-12 teachers, education unionists, librarians, archivists, as well as museum and preservation experts and curators. In the face of doxxing campaigns, professional blacklisting, and other harms, they continue to speak up and organize against genocide. They understand the inextricable link between scholasticide in Palestine and the rising tides of authoritarianism in the US.
Palestine has become a test of institutional courage, and the Council members who vetoed these resolutions failed that test. They have revealed a disregard for our fellow Palestinian academics and a fundamental contempt for democratic processes. The leadership's message is clear: they seek to silence us so they can return to a comfortable status quo.
We refuse to be silenced, and 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.
Palestinian Historians Group