Like an oil slick from a disabled tanker, hatred of Israel is spreading to some expected — and unexpected — places.

In January, the annual business meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), by a lopsided vote of 428-88, condemned Israel for “scholasticide”: what it called the intentional targeting by Israel of Palestinian schools, libraries, and archives, as Israel fights a defensive war against Hamas.

The vote was overruled by the AHA Council, citing the issue as being outside the organization’s core mission. That, in turn, brought howls of protest from such organizations as Historians for Palestine and the National Students for Justice in Palestine, with the former charging the AHA with denying “Palestinian existence.”

The AHA resolution did not mention Hamas and its use of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools as weapons depots or — as we have now learned — places where Israeli hostages were held and as classroom laboratories of hatred.

And, of course, nothing was noted in the AHA resolution about Hamas’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields as a principal tactic of war across Gaza.

The AHA vote was reminiscent of votes in recent years at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association — a group that has frequently taken similar positions highly critical of Israel.

Now enters a new player in the “demonize Israel” game in academia and in professional associations: the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). A periodical of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture founded in 1947, its mission statement notes “it is a platform for architectural educators, scholars, designers, writers, and organizers committed to the ongoing transformation of architectural education and the culture of architectural research toward an inclusive, just, and sustainable future.”

The hijacking of this publication occurred in a call for papers for an issue focusing on “Palestine.” In its outreach to readers and association members, the language leans on the side of the academic, but the message is clear: “In the face of the ongoing genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, this issue …. will build on existing knowledge, research, and publications to learn from and with practices of resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.”

And to make sure it has not left out any of the hackneyed anti-Israel verbiage of the street and campus demonstrations of the past year, the call for papers invites “contributions that document the architectural and special tools that participate in or are complicit in imperial formations of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide. Contributions could evidence how bombing, demolition, destruction, ruination, and scorched earth constitute military strategies planned and implemented for decades to fragment, debilitate, and destroy Palestinian built, social, economic, cultural, and natural environments.”

The call for papers also quotes the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, whose anti-Israel rants are a go-to repository of hate often used by Israel’s incessant global critics. She calls Israel’s Palestinian policy one of “erasure.” And, in the spirit of the American Historical Association’s charge of “scholasticide” the JAE states that “contributors might map, represent, theorize, and historicize genocide, ecocide, spaciocide, terracide, and urbicide.”

The request for papers closes with a revolutionary-style exhortation to potential contributors: “We invite authors to engage with such formations of anti-colonial struggle within and beyond Palestinian geographies, reflecting on how Palestine has inspired pathologies of hope, constellations of coresistance, and infrastructures of resistance the world over.”

There is no mention in the call for papers of Hamas, of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre against Israelis, or even of a two-state solution.

Well, one gets the point. This special issue will be loaded with paroxysms of doctrinaire anti-Israel bile. But that should come as no surprise. One of the “Theme Editors” was actually born in Haifa and is a graduate of the famed Bezalel School. Think of the hypocrisy: for all of Israel’s alleged policies of “genocide,” this Palestinian professor, now teaching in New York, was the beneficiary of what was most likely an outstanding education at Israel’s premier institution of art and design.

Academics everywhere continue to pile on Israel in a variety of ways, making Jewish students fearful, as they became caught in a vise between anti-Israel students (including many who protest), their professors, violence on the quad, and intellectual bullying in the classroom.

The Trump administration’s executive order addressing campus antisemitism sends an early and strong message to those who believe that chaos and violence will become accepted practice at American universities.

Now, though, the problem is moving from the campus to professional associations. The call for papers and the forthcoming issue of the JAE is one of hatred-creep dressed up in an academic wrapper. The language, the charges of genocide, and “settler-colonialist” occupation (interesting note: the three pages issuing the call for papers contain only two actual mentions of “Israel”; the other references to it are couched in anti-Israel terminology) could have been written in Gaza or Ramallah.

Architecture is a time-honored profession. Every day, we marvel at new buildings and old, and transformed cities and neighborhoods, and the artistic and mathematical creativity that produces such edifices. The turn by some in the field to politicize and demonize Israel is an ugly detour that sullies both the Journal of Architectural Education and those who will surely be submitting a series of heavily biased papers to it.

Daniel S. Mariaschin is the CEO of B’nai B’rith International. As the organization’s top executive officer, Mariaschin directs and supervises B’nai B’rith programs, activities, and staff around the world.

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