Israel has posed a great challenge to the Arab state system in the post-colonial Middle East. Hence, Israel occupies a central space in the daily debate that has been taking place in the region, which has grappled over the decade with how to respond to this challenge. For decades, ideological discourses have dominated the Arab World. Inevitably, this has had a profound impact on the mindset of many Arab scholars. In my book, “Israelism: Arab Scholarship on Israel, a Critical Assessment,” I assess the status of Israeli studies in the Arab World. Indeed, scholars’ incompetence and their lack of significant areas studies skills have contributed to the underdevelopment of Israeli studies in most Arab countries. However, the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the injustice that has befallen the Palestinians and the hegemonic ideological discourse have also greatly informed the epistemology and ontology of Arab scholarship on Israel. With a few exceptions, and despite the existence of a multitude of books, articles and studies that have tackled Israel, Israeli studies in the Arab World remains, by and large, weighed down by one-sided projections, ideological spin, prejudice and a necessity to expose rather than to understand the other. If anything, my book has demonstrated how many of scholarly works have been marred by the inability, or worse the unwillingness, of writers and authors to go beyond the hegemonic and ideological discourses. Israelism is the resultant mode of writing and scholarship, writing which has, to a great extent, suffered from an inherent bias in Arab scholars’ study of Israel. Much of their understanding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict has been rigidly tied to a framework that is highly informed by two components: the hegemonic discourse and the conflict prism. The outcome has been the underdevelopment of Israeli studies in the Meshreq Arab countries. Of great importance, Arab scholars have failed to match their Israeli counterparts in challenging the official and ideological narrative of their own state as the Israeli New Historians did in Israel. But, it would not be possible to account for the underdevelopment of Israeli studies without placing this in a wider perspective. A lack of academic freedom and political freedom had had enormous impact on the status and quality of social sciences in the Arab World. In addition to that, this book sets out the political, intellectual and historical contexts that have helped crate such a mindset of scholars.