American Intifada: How Israel became the progressive Left’s villain

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre, Uri Kaufman — an American Jewish lawyer — watched with concern as major NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations shifted blame from Hamas onto Israel.

More troubling to Kaufman was how mainstream media outlets and political figures — including The New York Times and former President Barack Obama — echoed false narratives. Obama, for example, cited Israel’s “unbearable occupation” of Palestinians, despite Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza nearly two decades ago.

College campus protests chanting anti-Israel slogans were no surprise. But when seasoned leaders joined in, Kaufman realized something deeper had changed.

In American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Antisemitism (Simon & Schuster), Kaufman traces the ideological shift that has made hostility to Israel commonplace among American progressives — often at the expense of historical truth.

Uri Kaufman (courtesy)

“For the first half of Israel’s history, liberals and Democrats were Israel’s strongest allies,” Kaufman writes. “Starting in the 1970s, the two parties began to switch sides.”

How did this happen? Kaufman offers a thought experiment:
Imagine the Hamas atrocities — beheadings, burnings, murders — were carried out not by Palestinians but by white Europeans of a different era. Would the Biden administration still send billions in aid to their “innocent civilians”?

In Kaufman’s view, America’s racialized view of the world now frames Palestinians as indigenous people of color and Israeli Jews — regardless of their actual ethnic diversity — as privileged white oppressors. Facts like Jewish indigeneity, legal immigration under Ottoman and British rule, and land purchases from Arabs are ignored.

This misperception is sustained, Kaufman argues, by cognitive dissonance — the tendency to alter facts rather than beliefs when they clash.

Thus, figures like Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, and J Street have, Kaufman writes, “tried to jam the square peg of racial justice into the round hole of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Carter, he notes, demanded more concessions from Israel at Camp David than Anwar Sadat himself — a stance Carter’s aides linked to his guilt over his family’s land being taken from Native Americans.

Amnesty International accused Israel of apartheid even as an Arab party sat in its governing coalition. It refused to acknowledge the rapes of Israeli women on October 7. The founder of Human Rights Watch later condemned his own organization for unfairly vilifying Israel.

Speaking to The Times of Israel, Kaufman described this phenomenon as “a new form of antisemitism — paved with the best of intentions.” It’s less about hatred of Jews, he says, and more about the reflexive defense of perceived people of color against “white privilege,” regardless of the facts.

Kaufman sees a clear racial double standard in how progressives respond to antisemitic violence.

When a white supremacist massacred Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders rallied to the Jewish community’s side.

“But when Hamas terrorists murdered Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in 2023,” Kaufman notes, “CNN’s Christiane Amanpour described it as a ‘shootout’ — as if both sides exchanged fire.” Amanpour later apologized. But, Kaufman asks, “Would she have used that language if the killers had been neo-Nazis?”

Though Kaufman hopes his book reaches all audiences, he wrote it with a specific reader in mind:

“I wrote this for people who sincerely care about racial justice but may have unknowingly absorbed false narratives about Israel,” he said.

“Some people get angry when confronted with their biases. Others are open to changing. I wrote this for those who can be convinced.”

The book can be found on Amazon here.