It is, on the basis of what you quote, kind of weird. I wonder whether maybe he's just getting unfairly conflated with all the people out there who use Zionism as a code for Judaism and proceed to go on and on and on about its evils while protesting that they aren't antisemitic at all, it's just those Zionists and Israelis. (This can run the gamut from people who clearly have an agenda to "Hmm, I was with you until you made clear that you consider Israel's human rights record to be worse than Syria's.") Granted, those people are not usually Jewish, but they can be, and I get the sense that they turn up in academia often enough that pro-Israel academics might have a little bit more of a hair-trigger reflex on that sort of thing these days than they would otherwise.

Though again, one thing one ought to be able to expect of academics is that they do their homework.