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For decades, historians of the Middle East have navigated the scholarly politics of the “Palestine Exception”—an unspoken expectation that the right to practice history without ideological constraint stops at the borders of our field. It is a reality where the protections of academic freedom are often suspended, based on little more than the institutional discomforts of the discipline.
In January, historians at the American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting in Chicago confronted the Palestine Exception head-on when they approved two resolutions: the first criticizing Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestine’s education sector, and the second condemning attacks on academic freedom in the U.S. and affirming the right to history broadly. Together, these resolutions chart a path forward toward better stewardship of academic freedom, giving formal charges to two new committees focused on Palestinian higher education and academic freedom, respectively.
The mandate was overwhelming. By consecutive 4-to-1 votes, AHA members communicated to leadership: Serve member historians as stewards, or step aside. However, the AHA Council vetoed both resolutions the next day. Marshalling a weakly articulated defense citing fiduciary responsibility, the governing council claimed that honoring the will of its membership would risk the association’s Congressional charter by inviting political retaliation. Asserting that the “two resolutions go beyond a specific focus on history and thereby fall outside the scope of the AHA’s mission,” the council foreclosed the possibility of an all-member referendum on them. Instead, it argued that AHA members hold “divergent views about how to identify, prioritize, and respond to threats to our discipline” while invalidating votes that instead illustrate broad consensus.
The vetoes beg a fundamental question: Who determines what counts as history? Can a scholarly society for historians function without the historians who comprise it? Without defending history as a discipline? What do we lose when our leadership cedes our most imperative work—defining history for the broader public—to the implied whims of political parties, federal bureaucrats or emboldened authoritarians who might come for us?
When our professional body retreats into a self-imposed politics of institutional neutrality to avoid a heckler’s veto, it doesn’t protect the discipline; it abandons it. The AHA Council’s decision fails the first basic test of academic freedom: the expectation that historians set the discipline’s agenda, advocacy and public efforts. By denying its full membership a referendum vote on the resolutions, AHA leadership has taken a deeply ideological turn against the entire discipline. The vetoes concede that it is ultimately the federal government that defines what is “historical,” not historians themselves.
AHA leadership has operated in this epistemological double-standard for decades, choosing to prioritize and center a limited, “safe” vision of history while occupying the space set up for the discipline in its fullness. AHA advocacy efforts are laudable but also telling in whose work they exclude. To conduct research, teaching or service in relation to contested histories is to be ideologically abandoned by AHA.
AHA’s charter demands stewardship of the discipline, advocacy for the right to history, and partnership with AHA members in its mission. By refusing those imperatives, AHA’s leadership has fallen back to an old preoccupation with delimiting who “belongs” to the discipline rather than advocating for historians as a diverse multitude. This politics overlaps the Palestine exception by marking some AHA members as politically expendable. It’s a politics that will come for all of us if we let it.
In the wake of these vetoes, colleagues have asked: Why not quit the AHA? Why not build something new instead?
It’s a fair question, but the answer lies in the same Congressional charter the council has weaponized. That charter means the AHA occupies the space meant for all of us. AHA sets the tone for historians nationally, whether we are members or not. If we leave, we cede authority to those who would use it to continue to marginalize us.
The 2026 resolution votes demonstrate that another AHA is possible. Historians are within an election cycle of genuinely changing the AHA into the organization we need: an AHA that stewards our discipline, facilitates courage and partners with us as we confront multiplying challenges to the right to history. And more, quitting the AHA performs the same work that the council’s vetoes do: It condones an American historical discipline that can abandon practitioners when their work is under political attack.
Now is a terrible time for AHA to retreat from its mission; it’s a terrible time for AHA members to retreat for the same reason. Palestinian historians have refused the AHA’s silencing. We must also refuse. In the end, the AHA vetoes present an urgent question to historians nationwide: Who decides our value, as a discipline? If the answer is “we do,” then the next step is to reclaim the AHA and insist on institutional courage.
