On May 26, 2026, the six officers on the AHA Council’s Executive Committee issued a “A Message from the Executive Committee: Crucial Information for Members on the AHA Election.” This was not an official communication from the sixteen-member Council; nonetheless, it was sent to all AHA members, which constitutes elections interference. Since it directly attacked HPAD, we would like to point out the misstatements, omissions, and errors it contained.
HPAD has been entirely supportive of AHA efforts to challenge the Trump Administration’s attack on honest history, including its participation in the suit to restore NEH funding led by the ACLS. Not only is the AHA acting in defense of history and historians, it is also upholding a key element of democracy. We are running a slate of candidates who support this work and also want to ensure that the AHA functions democratically and respects decisions for which members have voted democratically, according to the AHA’s own guidelines.
The Executive Committee asserts our running candidates is unprecedented. Their letter states “your ballot will look a little different. In addition to two candidates for each slot selected by the member-elected Nominating Committee, the ballot will also list several `by petition’ candidates.” In fact, last June 1, AHA members received a ballot with five “by petition candidates” put forward by HPAD and allies, three of whom won election. All we have done is use procedures mandated in the bylaws to run candidates, but the Executive Committee’s letter implies these candidacies are illegitimate. The Executive Committee further underlines that “The petitions for their nomination were signed by about 200 members (less than two percent of our over 10,000 members).” The bylaws only require a specific number of signatures (100) so it is a red herring to claim that the number of signatures indicates the degree of support for our candidates. Let’s keep in mind, several of our candidates did win!
The Executive Committee asserts that HPAD wants the AHA to engage in an “aggressive stance on specific, political matters.” But the AHA does engage in highly aggressive politics in ways we support, challenging the Trump Administration’s “wanton mutilation of institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Park Service.” Speaking frankly, it’s not political engagement the Executive Council objects to but the resolutions on scholasticide in Gaza that members overwhelmingly voted for. In other words, the Palestine Exception. It would be more honest if Executive Committee members admitted that denouncing the violence of the Israeli government funded by our tax dollars is the “political” stance they oppose.
In that context, the Executive Committee describes HPAD as “a 501(c)(4) (political) group” versus non-political 501(c)(3) groups like AHA. This assertion misstates the tax code regulating nonprofits. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of 501(c)(3) organizations, the category to which the AHA belongs, that are eminently “political,” doing everything except endorsing candidates. The Executive Committee has created a straw man, again suggesting that HPAD and the candidates we support are illegitimate.
The Executive Committee acknowledges that the crux of our disagreement is HPAD’s successful resolutions to the 2025 and 2026 Business Meetings that censured Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza, which Council vetoed. They quote the AHA’s 1889 Congressional charter as the basis for those vetoes. Here is what they leave out. In both cases, HPAD was operating under the Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance issued by the Council in 2007 and revised in 2017. What we did not know, because it only became operative on January 12, 2026, after the Business Meeting, was that in December 2025 Council abrogated those Guiding Principles. The Executive Committee created an ex post facto rationale for their veto.
Instead of vetoing the resolutions, the Executive Committee could have sent them to the full membership of 10,000-plus people for an online vote. In 2007, Council did exactly that when a resolution censuring the war in Iraq passed at the Business Meeting. They could have respected the membership and acted democratically. Far from having a negative effect, we believe doing so would reinvigorate the AHA and attract new members, especially younger historians and historians of color who frequently feel unwelcome and unrepresented in the AHA. Instead, they invoked a quasi-legal argument: that passage of the resolutions “would have jeopardized our nonprofit and nonpartisan status, and therefore the legal and institutional foundations that make the AHA’s work possible.” There is no evidence for this assertion. No other association has had its nonprofit status revoked for taking a stance regarding Israel’s war in Gaza or any other matter.
The Executive Committee claims that “In response to the resolution, we created a committee that we hoped could do concrete good to support educational programs in the region, help preserve archives, and to aid Palestinian historians. But HPAD leadership and the groups that had proposed the resolutions have declined to participate, unless and until we accept their specific language.” This is grossly inaccurate. In October 2025, two leading Palestinian historians and Margaret Power, HPAD Co-Chair, were invited to join said committee. They agreed, but were not told that Council had already voted to bar the resolution from the January 2026 Business Meeting. When that was announced they withdrew. (Only under intense pressure did Council accept, at the last minute, an amendment to the agenda to allow the resolution’s consideration). To date, not a single Palestinian historian has agreed to join the committee. For the Executive Committee to cite this as evidence of working “diligently to address the resolutions’ central demands” is an instance of bad faith.
Finally, we believe that advocating for our profession and denouncing scholasticide in Gaza carried out with our tax dollars are entirely compatible. We do not agree that the AHA needs to be more cautious since it was created by an act of Congress. If anything, that means the AHA has a greater responsibility to speak out.The Executive Committee’s letter to the members violated ethical and professional norms and constitutes elections interference. We endorse its call to members to “carefully examine your ballot with the context provided above in mind.” As of June 1, you, the members will have a say, and we hope you will support the Democracy Slate of highly-qualified scholars committed to the AHA as an organization that represents all historians, including those who work on the Middle East and oppose scholasticide in Gaza.