This past fall, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, a guest lecturer from Brown University, was invited to Cornell University’s architecture department to speak to students. Azoulay gave a biased, anti-Zionist presentation titled “Palestine Is There, Where It Has Always Been.” In it, she showed photographs of the early pioneers of the State of Israel working the land, each with their faces blacked out. She excused this erasure by saying, “I can’t bear to look at them.”

First of all, the event should have been an apolitical and factual lecture on architecture. What makes it more disturbing is that in a caption for one of her photographs that advertised the lecture, Azoulay singled out Jewish soldiers. She didn’t describe them as Israeli or Zionist soldiers, but as Jewish — resulting in a statement that is not just anti-Zionist but antisemitic.

One of the revamped photographs is the famous one of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, declaring the establishment of modern-day Israel on May 14, 1948. In the doctored version, Azoulay erased not only Ben-Gurion and the rest of the people present, but also the hanging portrait of Theodor Herzl and the two Israeli flags.