The American Educational Research Association’s Hamas Problem

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the largest interdisciplinary research organization in the United States (and normally quick to weigh in on pressing political matters), stayed silent. Yet in 2024, AERA’s conference theme reflected a human rights-centered view of education by calling educators to “dismantle racial justice.” AERA’s 2025 conference will be held next week, and it similarly calls on educators to produce research aimed at “remedy and repair.”

To add to this commitment to equality and social justice, AERA mandates that its activities should be “free of harassment, unwelcoming or exclusionary conduct, or discriminatory actions or innuendo.” Given the degree to which AERA has committed to making everyone feel welcome, as well as their emphases on anti-racist and other social justice causes, it is remarkable that a number of sessions and presentations approved for AERA use rhetoric identical to that of Hamas, one of the largest and deadliest terrorist organizations in the world, and one that has singularly dedicated itself to killing Jews.

By allowing these roundtables, AERA is fostering a hostile environment for Jewish scholars. An organization that claims to champion racial justice should not allow presentations at their conference that echo the genocidal terrorist group that has murdered the most Jews since the Holocaust.

When we say that numerous presentations at next week’s AERA conference will be disturbingly similar to Hamas’ 2017 Charter, we are not exaggerating. The official descriptions of the majority of the 23 approved roundtables referencing “Palestine” in AERA’s program closely mirror the language used by Hamas.

Hamas, explained in its Charter, seeks “to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.” By “Zionist project,” Hamas is referring explicitly to the state of Israel, the only Jewish state. When Hamas speaks of “liberation,” it is referring to its goal of eliminating Israel, ending what it characterizes as the “most dangerous form of settlement occupation.” This includes the explicitly violent removal of Israel and its inhabitants “from the river to the sea.”

In articulating their objective, Hamas describes Israel as a “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project” that “is hostile to the Palestinian people and to their aspiration for freedom, liberation, return and self-determination.”

Numerous presentations at AERA mirror this language, including the roundtable, “Palestinian Liberation and Solidarity,” featuring papers like: “Reclaiming Academic Freedom: A Decolonial Analysis of University Silence under the Palestine Exception,” “Decolonizing Dreamers for Palestine,” and “Until Liberation and Return.”

Not to be outdone, yet another roundtable, titled “Education and Palestine: Resisting and Reproducing Imperial/Colonial Epistemologies” seems to draw directly from the Hamas Charter. The roundtable focuses on the “crucial role to play in…contextualizing the genocide in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation, apartheid, genocide, and political contestations” as part of an effort to “rebuild, repair and remedy the impacts of occupation, genocide, and settler-colonial and imperial violence.

Make no mistake, when academics use words like “decolonize,” “liberation,” and “return,” or otherwise affirm the “right to resist,” they are not referring to progressive and potentially nonviolent solutions such as the two-state framework, a path to de-escalating the conflict that the Palestinians have routinely rejected. Hamas, using much of this same language, has been explicit about its intentions. In its 2017 Charter, the group states that “resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.” This includes, but is not limited to, “armed resistance.” Their goal is to kill as many Jews as they can, in any way that they can.

By using the same words as Hamas, academics legitimize Hamas’ actions. These actions include Hamas’ eight hour orgy of violence and destruction that included mass gang-rape, torture, murder, immolation, infanticide, and kidnapping on October 7, 2023, as well as the suicide bombing campaigns — the Intifadas — between 1987 and 2005 that took the lives of more than 1,000 Israeli men, women, and children simply going about their days. When AERA roundtables say that “Intifada Isn’t A Metaphor,” Jews are listening.

By sponsoring papers and roundtables with language identical to that of Hamas, AERA edifies the position of a terrorist organization responsible for some of the 21st century’s greatest atrocities, the deaths of thousands of innocent Jews, and the holding of innocent Jewish civilians as hostages.

It is unreasonable to expect Jewish scholars to feel safe and welcome in this sort of academic environment. By giving these sorts of papers and roundtables safe harbor, AERA is failing to meet its commitments to justice, equality, and non-discrimination. AERA failed to support Jewish scholars by rejecting these papers, condemning this type of language, and disavowing themselves from affiliated organizations that engaged in this rhetoric. In refusing to do so, AERA has sent a clear message: remedy and repair for everyone except the Jews.