American Historical Association's secret playbook on Palestine

(AHA)

Did AHA leaders secretly hire an expensive D.C. lobbying firm as part of its efforts to quash its members’ views against Israel’s genocide against Palestinians? (Two articles below)

By Adam Rzepka, reposted from The Chronicle of Higher Education via Archive, August 25, 2026

*Editor’s note: See how the AHA previously censored a book about the Israel lobby*

If you happened to be in Chicago this past January for the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), an unusual session might have caught your eye, scheduled for conference prime time — Saturday, just after lunch. The AHA’s Professional Division had invited “Jess Venable, Thorn Run Partners,” to chair and be the only speaker at an event called “The Historian as Advocate: A Strategic Seminar on Influencing Policy.”

“Thorn Run Partners” might have sounded discordant among all of the Oberlin and Boise State and Peking University affiliations, but you probably wouldn’t have known that it’s a top-10 D.C. lobbying firm. And you also probably wouldn’t have known that the advice about how to “advocate” politically that you’d hear from Venable — and Venable alone — was bought and paid for by your own membership and conference fees.

The AHA’s leadership had hired her and Thorn Run almost a year earlier, to lobby Congress, to advise the AHA’s Council on how to handle sensitive topics, and, as of this conference, to explain to AHA members why they should tone down their political advocacy. AHA’s leadership hadn’t told its members that it was searching for a lobbying firm, or that it was planning to hire Thorn Run. It omitted any mention of the hire from its public list of actions for that period. And it did not explain to AHA members the full scope of work that Thorn Run had been hired to do.

It still hasn’t. The closest it has come to telling its membership that the AHA has hired an expensive, leading D.C. lobbying firm, which also advises the Council on internal matters, have been references to Venable and Thorn Run as the organization’s “government relations consultants.” Thorn Run has never announced the relationship.

There were plausible reasons for the AHA leadership to seek out a federal lobbying firm around the time of the 2024 election. But why say so little to the AHA membership about the relationship? After all, this is a supposedly democratic scholarly organization, to be governed by its membership, and it operates under a public mandate issued by Congress in 1889. One reason for the reticence might be the AHA leadership’s ongoing battle to keep any federally risky acknowledgment that Israel’s war on Gaza constitutes a genocide out of its official positions, regardless of what its members might want — a posture that Thorn Run’s advice to leadership has directly encouraged, unbeknownst to AHA members.

In the past, AHA executives have been quite content to let members pass popular resolutions against such events as the Iraq war, and to make official statements opposing events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Regarding Palestine, though, they have decided that the AHA cannot take “institutional positions on an active geopolitical conflict,” lest the Trump administration take notice and find some way to revoke its congressional charter. Over the last 20 months or so, they have taken a series of what they have called “unusual steps” to quash every effort by the AHA membership to pass a resolution against the mass atrocities in Gaza, including vetoes of three separate popular resolutions acknowledging those atrocities as a genocide.

This must have involved some intense strategic and tactical discussions, since the war on Gaza is understood to be a genocide by at least 80 percent of AHA’s voting members; an estimated 80 percent or more of American students and faculty in the humanities; an overwhelming majority of experts in genocide studies, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars; every major human-rights organization, including both Palestinian and Israeli ones; and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s International Commission of Inquiry. If you want to make it appear as if a supermajority on your campus and in your professional organizations is actually an offensive fringe minority, you have to take some “unusual steps” indeed. It’s not easy to display a consensus when you’ve failed to manufacture it.

That’s what lobbyists are for. And in the fall of 2024, as it was considering how to handle the first of two popular resolutions opposing “scholasticide” — the total destruction of the educational system — in Gaza, the AHA’s leadership set about hiring one. Thorn Run has been helping the Council run that internal and external battle for official silence ever since.

Thorn Run Partners officially started representing and advising the AHA leadership in February 2025, about two weeks after leaders vetoed the first membership resolution condemning scholasticide in Gaza. The leadership had already been negotiating the Thorn Run contract when it met the previous month, on January 3, just as the resolution reached the Council after clearing a series of procedural hurdles throughout the fall.

None of the AHA members who wrote that resolution, gathered signatures for it, signed it, or shepherded it through the required process have said that they were aware that the Council, which kept fighting them on it all the way to its post-approval veto in January 2025, had been simultaneously in the process of retaining a major Washington lobbying firm, partly to help it strategize in fights just like this one. The AHA’s summary of Council actions for July 2024 to January 2025, published online for AHA members and the wider public, makes no mention of having hired Thorn Run.

Asked for comment, a person answering at the AHA’s press email address, who declined to give their name, said that Thorn Run was simply swapped in for lobbying services that the AHA had long accessed through a coalition of 43 historical organizations called the National Coalition for History (NCH), which closed up shop at the end of 2024. In that case, the AHA traded a pocketknife for a bazooka: The NCH had exactly one registered lobbyist — its executive director — and no PR or communications staff; Thorn Run is a large corporate lobbying firm near the pinnacle of the industry.

The bazooka makes some sense if you’re gearing up against a second Trump administration whose Project 2025 policy blueprint plots attacks on higher education and federal research funding. But if you’ve read Project 2025 — and the AHA Council had done exactly that to “begin preparations for responding to the new administration” — along with its October 2024 expansion pack, Project Esther, you know that the platform makes any opposition to Israel and any support for Palestinians a primary trigger for those attacks.

Judging by its subsequent actions from January 2025 onward, the AHA leadership’s strategy split the difference. It joined a major lawsuit seeking to restore federal grants that Trump had cut, even as it opposed and blocked attempts its members made — as they were silenced, denounced, doxxed, coerced, suspended, fired (with tenure or not), arrested, or deported for speaking, teaching, or writing against the genocide of Palestinians — to back each other in a resolution from their shared scholarly organization.

That contrast between these different ways of potentially incurring the wrath of the Trump administration makes it harder to credit a common-sense explanation of the vetoes that the AHA has echoed in its stated rationales — that approving the resolutions “would present institutional risk” and imperil the association’s “organizational standing, congressional charter, nonpartisanship, and independence.” If your strategy is to stay under the radar of a volatile regime because you think it holds your fate in its hands, you generally don’t sue it in federal court.

This hard line between the repression of scholarly speech on Gaza and scholarly speech on any other topic is perhaps starkest in the Council’s handling of the outlier of the three vetoed resolutions: a “Resolution Opposing Attacks on Core Principles of Higher Education,” written in response to the Trump administration’s assaults on academic freedom. (Full disclosure: I worked with a team of scholar-members to write the Modern Language Association’s companion to this statement.) The resolution identifies two primary vehicles for these federal assaults: charges that DEI-related programs constitute anti-white racism, and charges that protests against “the U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza” constitute antisemitism.

The Council first removed it from consideration at the annual membership meeting; then, after members voted to restore it and approve it, the Council vetoed it. The AHA leadership’s rationales for the double veto did not distinguish between the scholasticide resolution and the academic-freedom resolution, making clear what external commentators across the political spectrum understood: Even a resolution entirely in line with the AHA’s own concerted efforts to defend academic freedom was unacceptable if it explicitly defended the academic freedom to recognize the Gaza genocide.

By the summer of 2025, the Council had mostly weathered the initial blowback in the national press and in its membership from the veto of the first scholasticide resolution. That’s when it put the Thorn Run rep who had helped it weather that storm on the program for its January 2026 conference, to chair the session on “The Historian as Advocate” — a seminar lobbying AHA members to stop acting like “partisans” engaging in “crisis response” and start “engaging constructively across the aisle” to “demonstrate the value of history to national priorities like military readiness, veterans’ services, and economic development.”

The day after that session, on January 11, Venable attended the AHA Council meeting, as a “guest.” According to the council’s unpublished meeting minutes, she assessed “potential advocacy-related risks,” told the Council that “the federal administration is actively litigious,” and “urged the AHA to protect its statutory mission.”

The Council discussed with her what it called “a divergent moral center of our membership,” and its desire to “inform the membership of the risks and limits of speaking collectively.” Then Venable left the room, and the Council voted to veto both of the 2026 resolutions — one again opposing scholasticide in Gaza, and the other “Opposing Attacks on Core Principles of Higher Education” — that the AHA membership had passed a few days earlier.

The Council’s public summary of this meeting, where a D.C. lobbyist warned it of “advocacy-related risks” moments before the vetoes, lists 21 actions and elements of actions. Venable’s role in advising the Council isn’t mentioned.

One of the first passing indications of the contract with Thorn Run came in a March 3 roundup of highlights from the January conference, which summarizes Venable’s “Historian as Advocate” seminar. There, more than a year after the ink had dried on the contract with Thorn Run, the AHA acknowledged that Venable was “the AHA’s government relations consultant.”

That remains the second of just two public acknowledgments of the relationship that I’ve been able to find in the organization’s public materials. A subsequent advertisement for an “Advocacy 101 Training Workshop” for AHA members, led by Venable on June 26, gives her whole professional bio but never mentions that this apparent outside expert is also the AHA’s “government relations consultant.” (The video of the session, uploaded later to the same site, does include a verbal reference to it.)

That phrase itself is a euphemism. Thorn Run Partners is, in fact, a lobbying firm, and it is registered that way (“consultants” aren’t required to register). Senate lobbying disclosures show that since February 2025, the AHA has paid Thorn Run $20,000 to $30,000 per quarter — at least $170,000 — to lobby Congress on history education and appropriations.

A complete search of the Lobbying Disclosure Act database returns no prior filings with the AHA as a lobbying client. The organization had drawn some benefit, alongside 42 other historical organizations, from the NCH’s executive director lobbying Congress, but Thorn Run is the AHA’s first-ever independent lobbying firm, and one that lobbies for other kinds of clients as well.

Some of those other clients darken the optics of the AHA leadership’s furtive adventure in corporate lobbying, whether the leadership knows about them or not. Thorn Run has represented RTX Corporation, for example, a major supplier for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF); and Anduril Industries, which is aggressively seeking a partnership with the IDF, having already partnered with the infamous Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems.

A more recent client was Solel Boneh, one of Israel’s oldest and largest construction conglomerates. It’s in the UN database of businesses involved in illegal West Bank settlements, as a builder of the Har Homa, Modi’in Illit, and Ariel settlements, and it is accordingly barred from Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. It helped build the Gaza border wall in 2016.

Whether or not one thinks that lobbying for the suppliers of occupations and war crimes is an ethical business, none of this represents even the appearance of a conflict of interest on Thorn Run’s part. But the AHA leadership (again, whether it’s aware of this or not) has found itself paying members’ dues to a lobbyist for suppliers of the same occupation and genocide its members are trying to oppose, while simultaneously being advised by that lobbyist on how to suppress that opposition.

That advice included some hard extensions of Thorn Run’s call to present “international scholarly exchange as a tool of National Soft Power”: namely, “highlight[ing] the role of historians in maintaining military readiness and informing strategy within Professional Military Education (PME) institutions” and “fram[ing] historical thinking as a core component of national security rather than an elective academic pursuit.” Maybe that’s not a conflict of interest either — but it’s not a good look.

The fallout from this campaign at the AHA has continued to surprise its members with repressive actions they never anticipated, even after the three astonishing vetoes. On May 26, six days before ballots opened in its own leadership election, the AHA Council’s Executive Committee made another unprecedented intervention to correct its wayward membership, issuing an official statement against a slate of candidates running for open leadership positions. The statement dismissed their nominating petitions as the work of “less than 2 percent” of members, warned of “the destruction of our national professional organization” and “the wreckage of our discipline,” and urged members to vote with this “context” in mind.

By the Council’s own telling, this bizarrely antidemocratic move was its latest in the 2025-26 struggle to silence resolutions opposing the Gaza genocide. It is not clear whether the intervention was influenced by Thorn Run’s risk analysis. (The AHA says that the firm “has no role in crafting AHA communications.”)

Thorn Run promotes its ability to synthesize lobbying with comprehensive communications services — to “engage policymakers, third-party allies, and stakeholders — both internal and external” — and its work for the AHA includes a central initiative to train AHA members to present a more “bipartisan” face to the federal government, in order to keep the AHA from “entering a state of realized politicization.”

Whether or not those aims informed the AHA leadership’s decision to denounce a slate of candidates running for leadership positions, it wouldn’t have expected any objection from the membership on those grounds: The morally divergent majority registering these candidates still had no idea that they themselves were paying for Thorn Run to advise the Council on how to deal with them.

If the AHA leadership continues to heed that advice, its members can expect further silencing of their voices within the organization. In addition to recommending that the AHA frame the historical profession as an arm of the “national security” apparatus, Thorn Run has told its leadership that it should reroute “all future requests for public statements,” “all member concerns regarding conflict zones,” and “all concerns regarding historians in conflict zones” to a leadership committee, so that it can contain and control “out-of-scope debates.”

The aim, in other words, is to “utilize the January 2026 veto as a safe harbor precedent to prevent future mission-creep” by shifting from vetoes to a place where institutional silence ensures that there is nothing to veto.

Under Thorn Run’s counsel, the AHA’s leadership has struck a familiar devil’s bargain. Convinced that pre-compliance with the Trump administration would shield its very existence, it traded its chartered basis in democratic and scholarly consensus for temporary institutional shelter.

That this shelter has turned out to contain a whole new storm of corporate lobbying interests and internal influence campaigns, and that enforcing a policy of “bipartisanship” during a U.S.-supplied war of annihilation has turned out to look strangely like enforced silence — all this is shocking, but it isn’t terribly surprising. Every battle in the wider war to silence objections to this genocide has motives just as traceable, and means just as concrete.

Adam Rzepka is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University. He was one of the authors of the “Resolution Opposing Attacks on Core Principles of Higher Education.”

Leaders of Historians’ Group Veto Resolutions Critical of Israel

The executive council of the American Historical Association said the resolutions, including one accusing Israel of ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza, would put the group at risk.

By Jennifer Schuessler, reposted from The New York Times, January 12, 2026

Leadership of the American Historical Association has vetoed two resolutions criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza that were approved by a member vote over the weekend, saying they lay outside the group’s mission and would pose risks to the organization and the historical profession.

The first resolution criticized what it characterized as intentional “scholasticide” in Gaza, where most of the educational system, including all 12 universities, has been damaged or destroyed. The second condemned ongoing attacks on academic freedom at American universities, including the silencing of protest against “the U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.”

Both resolutions passed with nearly 80 percent support from the roughly 360 members who attended the vote, held on Saturday during the group’s annual conference in Chicago. But on Sunday the 16 voting members of the executive council voted not to pass them on to the full membership of roughly 11,000 for final consideration.

“As worded the two resolutions fall outside the scope of the American Historical Association’s chartered mission,” the council said in a statement. “Approving them on behalf of the entire association would present institutional risk and have long-term implications for the discipline and the organization.”

The association, an independent nonprofit organization, is the largest group of professional historians in the country. It was chartered by Congress in 1889, with the mission of pursuing “the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts” and “kindred purposes in the interest of American history and of history in America.”

In recent years, the group has been a prominent critic of laws restricting teaching on race, gender and other controversial subjects. It has also strongly criticized President Trump’s efforts to promote what he calls “patriotic” history emphasizing a positive story of national greatness, including his continuing campaign against the Smithsonian.

But as with many universities and cultural organizations, the war in Gaza has opened up deep internal rifts. Those fissures have become only more complex as the Trump administration has cited pro-Palestinian activism and campus antisemitism as a central justification for its pressure campaign against higher education.

Last year, the council vetoed a similar “scholasticide” resolution after a member vote supporting it. In a statement at the time, the council said it “deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities and archives in Gaza,” without taking a position on whether the damage had been intentional or who was responsible for it.

(The resolution’s charge of “scholasticide” rests on an April 2024 statement by United Nations experts, which said that the damage or destruction of 80 percent of Gaza’s schools, including all 12 of its universities, stemmed from “patterns of attacks” by Israel. The Israeli government has disputed that report, blaming destruction of Gaza’s schools on the “exploitation of civilian structures for terror purposes” by Hamas.)

In November, the council announced that it would not allow a revised version of the “scholasticide” resolution along with a new one on academic freedom, to be presented for a vote at all. This weekend’s vote came after the resolutions were reintroduced at the meeting itself, as allowed under procedural rules.

Supporters of the resolutions, which were sponsored by the group Historians for Peace and Democracy, were dismayed that the council vetoed a member-approved resolution for a second time.

Margaret Power, a retired professor at the Illinois Institute for Technology, said the executive council’s action reflected an “anti-Palestinian bias among leadership” and a lack of respect for members’ democratic wishes.

“If they had any hesitation of which way to go, they should have sent it to the full membership, so the entire membership could express its opinion,” she said. “That’s how a democratic organization operates.”

Proponents of the resolutions have also accused the organization of a double standard, noting that within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the group’s leadership had issued a statement condemning it as “an unprovoked act of military aggression.”

Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the historical association, said that the statement about Ukraine was broader, and focused on what it called the “distorted and tendentious misreading of history” that the Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked to justify it. The “scholasticide” resolution, by contrast, commits the group to unspecified actions to support the rebuilding of Gaza’s educational system.

As for the academic freedom resolution, Weicksel said the concern lay with the reference to “the U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza.”

The issue, she said, wasn’t the accuracy or inaccuracy of the genocide charge, which is a matter of intense debate among scholars, legal experts and human rights advocates, but that it is “a political statement.”

“The resolution includes phrasing that requires the A.H.A. to take a political stance, and that would be problematic in terms of mission and in terms of the fiduciary responsibility to the organization to ensure its continued nonprofit status,” she said.

Opponents of the resolutions have noted that many individual scholars have spoken out strongly against Israel’s actions in Gaza, including accusing it of genocide, and the group should defend their speech rights without itself endorsing any one point of view.

They have also argued that the resolutions would damage the group’s reputation at a moment when the profession is already facing attacks from the political right.

“History is under assault right now,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor at the New School, said by phone Sunday after the vote. “Pushing the pre-eminent organization of historians to take an overtly political stance only serves to divide the organization and also to jeopardize its reputation as a place for nonpartisan historical inquiry.”

The tensions around the resolutions were present throughout the four-day conference, where nearly 3,000 scholars gathered for some 200 panels on both historical topics and current challenges to the profession, like the cratering academic job market.

The program included nearly a dozen sessions relating to Gaza and broader Palestinian history, where some panelists issued denunciations of the historical association, including charges that it was complicit in genocide.

Before the vote, the group’s outgoing president, Benjamin Vinson, a former president of Howard University, said the question before the council wasn’t whether the situation in Gaza “warrants moral concern.”

“It plainly does,” he said, noting that the association had begun forming a committee to advise on how to aid Palestinian historians. (Three invited members withdrew from the committee last month, after the council said it would not allow a vote on the resolutions.)

The issue, Vinson said, was whether the group should adopt “binding institutional positions on active geopolitical conflicts that would set enduring precedent,” particularly on matters where membership holds “deeply divergent views.”

The “scholasticide” measure was passed with 282 votes for, 76 against, and two abstentions. The academic freedom resolution passed 245 in favor, 62 against, with one abstention.

The academic freedom resolution was developed in coordination with members of the Modern Language Association, the country’s largest scholarly association in the humanities. Over the weekend, it was approved by that group’s delegate assembly, by a vote of 61 in favor, 52 against. That resolution will now pass to a vote by the group’s roughly 20,000 members, where it must receive a majority that also totals at least 10 percent of membership.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the group that sponsored two resolutions critical of Israel at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. It is Historians for Peace and Democracy, not Historians for Peace and Diplomacy.

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people in attendance for the vote at an American Historical Association meeting. It was about 360 members, not almost 500. The article also misstated the number of members in the American Historical Association. It is 11,000, not 14,000.

Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.

RELATED: