The American Historical Association Is Poised to Destroy Its Reputation and Drive Jews Out of the Field

On January 5, members of the American Historical Association (AHA)—the leading professional organization for academic historians—voted at an annual meeting for a resolution that would “oppose scholasticide in Gaza.” The crime of scholasticide, Jeffrey Herf notes, was concocted in 2009 by UN functionaries specifically to condemn Israel for, supposedly, deliberately destroying Palestinian educational institutions. A group of historians’ conclusion that such a systematic pattern exists, based on the dubious evidence of various UN reports—without considering Israel’s own claims—is, Herf notes, a failure to exercise the most basic principles of the discipline: