Students and Professors Maintain Solidarity with the Palestinian People

The extraordinary and totally unanticipated movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that emerged on US and international university campuses during academic year 2023-24 ebbed during the fall 2024 semester. But it remained remarkably strong.

Moreover, at the start of the new year, academics registered a big show of Palestine solidarity. On January 5, the business meeting of the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) voted 428 to 88 to approve a resolution opposing Israel’s “scholasticide” – the intentional eradication of an education system – in the Gaza Strip.

The resolution asserts that Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023 “has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system.” It calls for a permanent ceasefire and for the AHA to form a committee to help rebuild “Gaza’s educational infrastructure.” The AHA is the oldest society of historians in the United States and the largest in the world, with some 11,000 members.

The resolution cites an April 2024 statement by UN experts which concluded that Israel’s “pattern of attacks” amounted to “scholasticide” including:

- The IDF’s destruction of 80 percent of schools in Gaza, leaving 625,000 children with no educational access

- The IDF’s destruction of all 12 Gaza university campuses

- The IDF’s destruction of Gaza’s archives, libraries, cultural centers, museums, and bookstores, including 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques, three churches, and the al-Aqsa University library, which preserved crucial documents and other materials related to the history and culture of Gaza

- 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

The resolution also asserts that, “the United States government has supplied Israel with the weapons being used to commit this scholasticide.”

The landslide vote in favor of the resolution at the annual business meeting is a great accomplishment. However, its ultimate fate depends on the AHA’s elected council, which can accept it, veto it, or refuse to concur and submit it to a mail vote of the full membership.

The outcome of this process is uncertain. The AHA is changing. But it remains a relatively conservative academic organization compared to many scholarly associations that have previously adopted resolutions calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel (American Anthropological Association, National Women’s Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, American Studies Association, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literature Association, National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and others).

Previous efforts to pass resolutions at the AHA critical of Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip have failed. Consequently, Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD), which sponsored the resolution, refrained from characterizing Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch recently concluded, or asserting that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, as several Israeli (B’Tselem and Yesh Din) and international HRW and Amnesty) human rights organizations and the International Court of Justice have determined.

Some have criticized the restrained language of the H-Pad resolution. The drafters sought to enlist historians who do not specialize in the teaching and study of the Middle East and who may be uncertain about the evidence supporting the terms genocide and apartheid to support a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people. That strategy succeeded.

David Waldstreicher, professor of early American history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said that after several failed measures criticizing Israel, “Opinion is changing….This war is not like other wars. That is obvious to students of history.”

“It was a different and younger generation of historians that the AHA has nurtured and needs to continue to nurture and support,” said Atina Grossmann, professor of twentieth century German history at Cooper Union.

Many younger professors and graduate students who had not previously spoken out on this issue supported the resolution. This was arguably in part due to the sustained movement of Palestine solidarity on campuses last year and the contemptible efforts of academic administrators, municipal and campus police forces, and Congress to criminalize and silence the movement.

Supporters of the resolution rejected the admonitions of opponents that its adoption would encourage the Trump administration to escalate the political attacks on higher education that have been underway since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the avalanche of opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq on US campuses, which prompted the formation of H-PAD. Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, has warned we must not “obey in advance,” or moderate our political expression in anticipation of the dictates of authoritarian regimes.

The vote at the AHA annual meeting, underscores the persistence and broadening of expressions of Palestine solidarity in American academia despite the decline in the number of loud and highly visible protest actions (and attacks on them by police, university and college administrators and violent counter-demonstrators) this past fall.

From October 7, 2023 through May 2024, the Nonviolent Action Lab and the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, identified over 3,700 days with protest activity at 525 different colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and school district offices across throughout the United States, including solidarity encampments at more than 130 venues.

In fall 2024 there were 1,100 protests at 240 educational institutions. Had there not been a soaring Palestine solidarity movement of unprecedented proportions during the previous academic year, this level of political activity would have stood out as remarkable. Fall 2024 Palestine solidarity actions included vigils and "study-ins" in place of solidarity encampments which have been outlawed on many campuses.

During the holiday of Sukkot in October, Jewish students on over 20 campuses devised a new form of protest – the “Gaza Solidarity sukkah” – featuring messaging opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and demanding an arms embargo on Israel and that universities divest from investments in Israel. University police and staff, and in some cases counter-demonstrators, destroyed the sukkot at Northwestern, UC Berkeley, University of Washington, UCLA, UNC Charlotte, Yale, Swarthmore, NYU, and American University.

Jay Ulfelder, director of the Nonviolent Action Lab, assesses that the current trends in campus Palestine solidarity action, “reflect the creativity of student organizers in trying to sustain the momentum from the spring in the face of stricter campus rules and police repression.”

Despite heightened repression on many campuses, the Palestine solidarity movement continues to register significant gains. In August, following negotiations between administrators and the Palestine solidarity encampment, San Francisco State University became the first university to actually divest from weapons manufacturers including Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Palantir and Leonardo. In December, Yale undergraduate students voted overwhelmingly that the university should divest from weapons manufacturers, including those arming Israel. The same month, Stanford announced a post-doctoral fellowship in Palestine Studies, a significant step for an institution that has previously offered only minimal support for study and teaching related to Arab societies, politics, and cultures. And on Jan. 6 my friend and colleague spoke at a “Sick of Genocide” rally on the Stanford campus. You can read the text of his very moving talk on his Facebook page.

The student movement and, indeed, the majority of the American people who favor a ceasefire in Gaza and restriction of US military aid to Israel, do not (yet) have the power to change US government policy or mitigate the extent of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza. While the Biden administration has been unrestrained in its support for Israel’s genocide, confronting an authoritarian Trump administration will require even more tactical creativity and flexibility rooted in a deeper understanding of the character of the US-Israel alliance and the plutocrats who dominate our politics, economy, and public culture.