The American Historical Association’s resolution in Chicago this January landed with the weight of history. Historians — people who understand what it means when archives vanish — finally acknowledged that the destruction of Gaza’s knowledge system — its universities, scholars, students, books, records, and memory — has forced a reckoning that can no longer be postponed. While Israel maintains that such destruction stems from targeting Hamas infrastructure embedded in civilian areas, the scale and pattern of attacks on educational sites point to a broader assault on Palestinian intellectual life.

This moment marks the culmination of a long, uneven transformation in the academy’s understanding of its own freedom, responsibility, and limits. It also shatters the mythology of neutrality that once governed our professional lives.

The arc from the American Studies Association’s historic 2013 boycott vote to this moment has not been linear. It is a story of rupture, backlash, silence, and finally an atrocity of such scale — documented by UNESCO as the near-total erasure of Gaza’s educational infrastructure — that it has exposed the fragility of the mechanisms designed to contain academic dissent on Palestine. What is unfolding is a crisis of legitimacy for the scholarly profession itself: can it continue to claim guardianship over knowledge while refusing to name and indict the forces annihilating it in Gaza?

The First Rupture: The 2013 ASA Boycott and the Price of Dissent

In December 2013, the American Studies Association crossed a line American academia had been trained for decades not to cross. In the largest vote in the organization’s history, its members endorsed a boycott of Israeli academic institutions by a margin of 66 percent. The ASA’s National Council grounded the decision in a clear ethical framework:

“Israel’s violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights.”

Its resolution concluded that there was “no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation.”

Critics, led by the American Association of University Professors, charged that the boycott violated academic freedom by collectively punishing Israeli scholars regardless of individual position. ASA president Curtis Marez rejected that framing, arguing that the boycott was in fact “the best way to protect and expand academic freedom and access to education.” The vote cracked open the academy’s unspoken rules about what could and could not be said concerning the erasure of Palestinian knowledge and the institutions enabling it.

The backlash was immediate and severe. More than 200 university presidents and major academic bodies publicly condemned the ASA. Media campaigns amplified the outrage. Pro-Israel organizations mobilized donors. Four universities withdrew their institutional membership. ASA members were, in Marez’s words, “savaged in the press,” and targeted with “threatening emails and phone calls.” Beginning in 2014, outside organizations launched lawsuits intended to bankrupt the ASA and intimidate its leadership — an early and influential experiment in academic lawfare. Sunaina Maira, a member of the ASA National Council, was personally named in a prolonged legal campaign.

The chilling effect was both profound and deliberate. Reports by the Middle East Studies Association documented declining grant prospects and intensified tenure scrutiny for scholars involved in Palestine-related work, with junior faculty especially vulnerable. Palestine became professionally radioactive — an informal loyalty test embedded within the university. The system’s message was unmistakable: this line of inquiry would be met with isolation, career damage, and legal harassment. The objective was exemplary punishment.

That pressure was enforced by a dense alliance of external political organizations, university administrators, donors, and media platforms. Pro-Israel advocacy groups such as StandWithUs and the AMCHA Initiativeorchestrated smear campaigns and targeted lawsuits. Risk-averse presidents and boards publicly condemned the boycott while privately signaling that Palestine research constituted institutional risk. Major donors threatened to withdraw funding from departments, faculty, and universities alike.

For a decade, this enforcement regime largely held.

The Second Rupture: Gaza and the Era of Scholasticide

Then came Gaza.

What has unfolded is the systematic annihilation of an educational system— what scholars have rightly named scholasticide. UNESCO and other monitoring bodies report that 95 percent of Gaza’s higher-education campuses have been damaged, with 22 of 38 completely destroyed. Israeli officials attribute much of this devastation to military operations against Hamas, alleging the use of civilian infrastructure as shields. Human-rights organizations, including Amnesty International, argue that the pattern reveals disproportionate and targeted destruction.

UN experts, including Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education Farida Shaheed, describe a near-total eradication: more than 90 percent of schools rendered inoperable, every university razed, and historical archives spanning 150 years destroyed. Of 206 university buildings assessed, 195 are destroyed or severely damaged. Six hundred and twenty specialized laboratories are gone. Approximately 120,000 computers and servers have been lost.

The human toll is catastrophic. Over 1,112 university staff — more than one-fifth of Gaza’s academic workforce — have been killed, detained, or injured. At the primary and secondary level, over 97 percent of schools are damaged or destroyed. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documents the targeted killing of more than 100 academics.

In tent classrooms, children study without textbooks, notebooks, or electricity. A mother in Gaza City said, “My son can’t read. He can’t write… Some children have fallen four years behind.” This is the material reality of scholasticide: the severing of generational continuity itself.

The scale and visibility of this destruction have fractured the post-2013 enforcement regime. The old mechanisms — procedural delays, appeals to neutrality, “both sides” rhetoric — now appear not cautious but obscene in the face of leveled universities and murdered professors. Silence itself has become a political act.

The Reckoning: The AHA Vote and the Crisis of Institutional Legitimacy

This collision between unprecedented destruction and entrenched institutional caution reached a breaking point at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January 2026. In a packed, electric session, members voted 428 to 88 to condemn the scholasticide in Gaza, call for a permanent ceasefire, and establish a committee for reconstruction.

Palestinian historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti framed the vote as professional obligation, detailing the devastation: “195 faculty and staff killed… the destruction of all institutions of higher education… the incineration of 250,000 library volumes and 16,000 dissertations.” The hall erupted in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”

Then came the veto.

The AHA’s sixteen-member Executive Council refused to transmit the resolutions to the full 11,000-member body, citing institutional risk and claiming the resolutions fell outside the organization’s mission.

Historian Van Gosse called the move “institutional complicity.” Karen Millerdescribed it as “anticipatory obedience.” The Palestinian Historians Groupaccused the Council of “complicity in genocide denial.” Rebecca Karlobserved that the Council even erased the overwhelming floor vote from its website — an act she called “beyond egregious” for an organization devoted to historical record.

This was not the first such intervention. In 2025, the Council had blocked a nearly identical resolution by an 11–4 vote, citing constitutional scope. The result was a collapse of trust and a public legitimacy crisis.

Margaret Power captured the contradiction succinctly: the AHA’s refusal stood in “marked contrast” to its willingness to condemn violations of academic freedom in multiple other countries. The association had issued rapid statements following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gaza, by contrast, remained subject to what many now call the Palestine exception.

Parallel struggles unfolded in other associations, including the Modern Language Association, where Gaza resolutions encountered procedural obstruction despite majority support.

The Shift: From Isolated Dissent to Collective Reclamation

Although repression has intensified since 2013, its effectiveness has eroded. The backlash now targets collectives — student encampments, unions, entire departments — yet it has also produced a new internal counter-movement.

The AHA veto sparked a democratic insurgency. Historians for Peace and Democracy organized a petition signed by more than 1,800 membersdemanding reversal. When the Council refused, organizers ran an opposition slate for leadership positions against establishment-backed nominees, including thirteen former presidents. Four of their six candidates won.

The Organization of American Historians soon approved a comparable Gaza resolution and created a reconstruction committee, highlighting divergent models of professional responsibility. Across the academy, similar shifts are underway. Associations from Middle Eastern Studies to Sociology, Latinx Studies, and Library Science have issued statements condemning the destruction of Gaza’s educational system. Librarians and archivists are digitally preserving Gaza’s cultural record. Legal scholars are challenging new speech codes. Students are building transnational solidarity networks.

What we are witnessing is the construction of counter-institutions — an attempt to reclaim the academy’s moral core from within its own bureaucratic shell.

Conclusion: The Future Decided in the Ruins

The contradiction exposed by the ASA in 2013 has been rendered unsustainable by Gaza. When education itself is reduced to rubble, academic freedom ceases to be an abstract principle debated in committees. It becomes the right of a child to a notebook, of a student to a lecture hall, of a people to their own history.

The AHA crisis — the vote, the veto, the insurgent elections — captures the profession’s struggle over its own legitimacy. The old regime of managed neutrality is eroding. A new ethical order is emerging, built by scholars and students who refuse to let knowledge be erased.

Palestine has become the site where academic freedom is being redefined, because it is where the assault on knowledge is most complete. The future of scholarly integrity is being decided in the recognition that knowledge under attack cannot be defended by silence.

The ruins of Gaza’s universities are now the ground zero of that reckoning.

There is no turning back.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. Visit the author’s blog.

She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from the author

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