The American Historical Association Council’s decision to veto our resolution is a shocking decision. It overturns an unprecedented landslide vote at the January 5 Business Meeting, where 82% of the 520 members present voted for our resolution.  Given that Council itself was clearly divided, with four of the sixteen members opposing the veto and one abstaining, Council should have allowed the entire membership to vote, as was the case with the 2007 resolution opposing the war in Iraq. Instead, the Council majority have arrogated the decision to themselves in a profoundly undemocratic way.

This veto is also in bad faith:  if Council believes this resolution violates the AHA’s Constitution, it should not have let it come to a vote in the first place.  To decide that after the fact—and after Council put considerable effort into structuring a democratic process for handling resolutions—is just wrong.  It suggests that the actual reasons for overturning the members’ decision are unstated, and the continuing weight of the “Palestine exception” to free speech, as we have seen on campuses across the U.S. in the past year, is also inside our own Association.

Further, if this resolution violates the Constitution, then so do the following:

• The 2007 decision to censure the war in Iraq, which the membership approved overwhelmingly after Council sent it out for a vote;
• Council’s March 2022 statement condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine;
• Other statements Council has made in recent years, including criticisms of the governments of China and Poland.  

We do not accept in any way the false argument that our resolution lies outside of the AHA’s purview and mission.  We are defending the right of Palestinians and people everywhere to study their own history.  We are denouncing the crime of Israel’s scholasticide— the deliberate destruction of universities, schools, libraries, archives and cultural sites. We believe Council’s majority has acted in this way because they have good reason to believe the membership as a whole would support our resolution, and therefore they suppressed a democratic decision-making process. Let us hope this is not a foretaste of the “anticipatory obedience” to the current wave of authoritarianism that is sweeping our campuses. 

We will urge our members to write Council directly calling for an immediate reconsideration. In the next week we will also convene an online mass meeting of our 1,950 members to discuss further action.

Steering Committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy