Editorial Perspective
Presenting different responses to the American Academy of Religion resolution in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
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The Resolution in Solidarity with Gaza was proposed by AAR members and then debated and adopted (98% vote in favor) during the Annual Business Meeting on June 23, 2026.
Whereas the U.N. Special Committee on Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People; leading international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Al-Haq, and B’Tselem; and the International Association of Genocide Scholars and prominent genocide scholars and historians have concluded that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza;
Whereas U.S. military and diplomatic support enables Israeli actions, including providing Israel with over $30 billion in funding since October 7, 2023;
Whereas U.N. experts have raised alarm over the “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’” This includes bombing Gaza’s 12 universities; destroying over 90 percent of its schools and most archives, libraries, and museums; and killing, starving, and displacing thousands of students, faculty, and staff;
Whereas academics in Gaza have declared their refusal to allow this “continuous Nakba” to “extinguish the flame of knowledge and resilience,” and Gaza university presidents have called for “immediate international mobilization to support and protect Gaza’s higher education institutions,” stating: “We are more than buildings—we are academic communities, comprised of students, faculty, and staff, still alive and determined to carry forward our mission”;
Whereas Gaza’s nonprofit universities have established a unified Emergency Committee that has articulated concrete priorities for international support;
Whereas widespread destruction of sites of worship has occurred and UNESCO has identified damage to 157 religious, cultural, and archaeological heritage sites;
Be it resolved that the AAR, which supports the right of all peoples to freely teach and learn, condemns Israeli scholasticide against Palestine;
Be it resolved that the AAR, with representatives of universities in Gaza, will work to ensure the survival and rebuilding of Palestinian higher education by forming a committee to pursue the objectives specified in this resolution.
Responses
Genocide/Holocaust Usage
Zev Garber, Los Angeles Valley College
During the first Trump Administration, likening immigrant detention camps on the US border to Nazi concentration camps, and invoking the phrase “Never again,” were to emphasize the horrid conditions at migrant detention centers, such as, overcrowded living conditions, separating families, drinking water from toilets (claimed but denied), and on. This did not dent the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum official statement that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
Nonetheless, some 375 scholars and academics who strongly support and utilize its resources criticized the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for its “unequivocal” rejection of analogies between the Holocaust and other events. An open letter published in the New York Review of Books (July 1, 2019) said the museum is taking a “radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.” The letter surmises that rejecting any possible analogies and events related to the Holocaust is ahistorical. “It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies,” they wrote. “The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task.” And the intent of AAR Resolution includes comparing and condemning the State of Israel’s perpetual Nakba, scholasticide, and genocide in Gaza. Accusatory labels say nothing of the perpetual evil leashed on the Gazan people by its own Hamas terrorist leadership.
Hitler(ism), Nazism, Holocaust, Fascism, and “From River to Sea” slogans are bounded about these days in the political arena, social media, academic conferences and classroom without restraint, meaning, and purpose. Clarification, accuracy, objectivity in reporting and transmission are sina qua non for proper learning, teaching, and transmission. For example, travel bans to individual Muslim countries mirror Nazi Germany policy in its day; train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau interweave with stoppage points at the US southern border; illegal immigrants held in detention camps on the Texas border are liken to victims of Nazi death camps; minimalizing the incarceration, rape and murder of Jewish children and adults on the Black Sabbath (Oct. 7, 2023) to illegitimatize concern of Israel at Gaza’s border, and the analogies go on ad absurtum. We believe strongly that the Holocaust as Shoah is not to be taken lightly, summarily, analytically. Zachor and Never Again are cautionary reminders to cleanse the ugliness of current politics and mudslinging but not to taint the memory of the Nazi Judeocide with the today’s crisis in and outside the borders of Texas, Gaza and on. Proper remembrance of the Shoah includes concern for and respectful legal action in behalf of migrants and residents not mixture. AAR perspectives on IDF activities in Gaza are undocumented and falsely proscribed and meshes into a Holocaust screen/scream.
Israel: Guilty of Genocide?
Eugene J. Fisher, Saint Leo University
Supporting education for those in Gaza is a good cause. But this statement crosses the line by accusing Israel of "genocide." Genocide, the murder of an entire people, is what the Nazis were aiming to do to the Jewish people. One can criticize Israeli actions in Gaza, as in fact many Israelis do, but to attempt to equate the Jews with the Nazis is, frankly, antisemitism at its worst. This AAR resolution should be condemned by anyone who opposes racial hate and who supports human rights and the safety of all humanity.
AAR Resolution: Scholarly Integrity at Stake
Kenneth L. Hanson, University of Central Florida Judaic Studies Program
The American Academy of Religion’s adoption of a “Resolution in Solidarity with Gaza” is not a triumph of scholarly conscience. It is a failure of scholarly integrity. An academic organization dedicated to critical inquiry should resist simplistic narratives. Instead, AAR has endorsed a resolution that effectively erases the event that made the current war inevitable: Hamas’s October 7 massacre—the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered, hundreds were kidnapped, and entire communities were devastated. Yet the resolution offers solidarity to one academic community while remaining silent about Israeli students, faculty, and universities affected, as well as the brutal taking of hostages—arguably a throwback to the seventh century. That silence is not neutrality. It is moral selectivity.
The resolution also ignores a central reality of the conflict: Hamas has systematically embedded its military infrastructure within civilian areas, including schools and other public institutions. This cynical strategy has transformed places of education into battlefields, placing Palestinian civilians—and Palestinian higher education itself—in grave danger. Any honest discussion of the destruction in Gaza must acknowledge that responsibility does not rest on one side alone.
Equally troubling is the Academy’s increasing willingness to substitute political activism for scholarly analysis. AAR exists to foster rigorous, evidence-based study of religion. It should not function as an advocacy organization that adopts resolutions reflecting only one interpretation of one of the world’s most contested conflicts. When 98 percent of those voting support such a one-sided measure, it raises uncomfortable questions about whether intellectual diversity still has a meaningful place within the organization.
Many scholars—including those who strongly support Israel—also grieve the immense suffering of Palestinian civilians (an unavoidable reality in war) and support humanitarian relief and the rebuilding of educational institutions. Compassion, however, is not a zero-sum enterprise. It is entirely possible to mourn the loss of innocent life in a war zone while recognizing Israel’s legal and moral right to defend its citizens against a terrorist organization explicitly committed to its destruction.
If the Academy truly wished to promote justice, it would have adopted a resolution condemning terrorism, full stop. Instead, it chose advocacy over scholarship, selective outrage over consistent principle, and political symbolism over intellectual balance. The American Academy of Religion can—and must—do better. Scholars should illuminate complexity, not flatten it. We should model careful historical judgment, not ideological conformity. The pursuit of truth demands nothing less.
Zev Garber, Editor, Iggeret Bulletin