Although it is the extremes of campus anti-Israel activism that most often make headlines, Hussein Aboubakr observes that belief that the Jewish state is demonic is an unquestioned axiom in many academic departments:
[T]he anti-Zionist stance . . . has become a supposition of most social-science scholarship treating the modern Middle East or modern Muslim societies. This, in significant part, is an uncritical acceptance of the Palestinian and Arab nationalist narrative as the historical account of the beginning of Middle Eastern political modernity, which is often annexed into a post-colonial anti-Western ideological perspective—resting on a historical condemnation of capitalism as the ideological source of all evils of Western imperialism—that is so deeply entrenched in the social sciences today.
[T]he hostility towards Israel is not an outcome of an analytical process but a presupposition of a scholarly construct with coercive contents that delegitimatize alternative views. It is impossible to understand such hostility without understanding the ideological worldview of which it is a part and is the default position of mainstream Middle East scholarship. This has led to a situation where the assumption that Israel is a colonialist oppressive power is often used as a starting point to construct further analytical structures unrelated to Israel or the Middle East. Israel has become merely a point of reference used for comparative purposes that indirectly passes the condemnatory judgment on Israel to the students.
An example of this would be how in a theoretical scholarly discussion about state coercive power and democracy in The Dark Side of Democracy, a book by the UCLA professor Michael Mann, Israel is casually and indirectly accused of murder and compared unfavorably to the Soviet Union and socialist Yugoslavia. . . . Suffice it to say, for Mann’s arguments to proceed, the student has to accept his presuppositions and his examples uncritically.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-higher-learning-instituions/