By: Fern Sidman

In a far-reaching and sobering conversation with podcast host Alan Skorski, acclaimed historian and author Uri Kaufman offered a penetrating diagnosis of what he describes as a “new antisemitism” gripping sectors of the American left—a worldview that has helped legitimize public expressions of support for Hamas after the atrocities of October 7, 2023. The interview, which was the focus of a report that appeared on Sunday at VIN News, comes ahead of Kaufman’s forthcoming book, “American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Antisemitism”–a work poised to redefine the intellectual debate around rising hostility toward Israel in Western discourse.

Kaufman, whose previous history of the Yom Kippur War was named one of the year’s best books by the Financial Times, argued that the strange and unsettling spectacle witnessed on American streets after October 7—namely, activists and academics praising or excusing Hamas’s massacre—cannot be explained through conventional political frameworks. Instead, he traces it to an ideological construct that fuses cognitive dissonance with a racial binary imported from American domestic politics.

According to Kaufman, as cited in the VIN News report, the dominant ideological lens among progressives today is one obsessed with racial hierarchies. Within that framework, Israelis—despite being one of the most ethnically diverse peoples on earth—are cast as “white oppressors,” while Palestinians are automatically classified as “people of color” and therefore presumed morally innocent.

This racial shorthand, he argues, is intellectually lazy, historically inaccurate, and morally catastrophic.

“Support for Hamas after October 7 is rooted in cognitive dissonance,” Kaufman told Skorski. “It’s not about facts. It’s about maintaining a worldview in which Israelis are ‘privileged whites’ and Palestinians are ‘oppressed.’ That framework nullifies evidence, no matter how horrific.”

As VIN News noted in its coverage, Kaufman stressed that cognitive dissonance is not simply confusion—it is the active reshaping of reality to protect a preexisting belief system. When individuals—especially those steeped in activist rhetoric—encounter evidence contradicting their worldview, they do not adjust the worldview. They adjust the facts.

This explains why, after Hamas murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, raped women, burned babies, and kidnapped 250 civilians, segments of the American left still insisted on framing the war entirely in terms of “colonial oppression.”

Kaufman offered a jarring hypothetical to illustrate the point: “Imagine if white supremacists controlled Gaza and committed the same atrocities against Black Israelis. No one on the left would demand humanitarian aid for them. But because Palestinians are seen as ‘people of color,’ the same rules don’t apply.”

It is a thought experiment that underscores how racial categorization—not human rights, not international law—has become the primary driver of political judgment.

One of the most controversial elements of Kaufman’s interview was his critique of former President Barack Obama’s post-October 7 remarks. Obama, speaking in an interview roughly three weeks after the massacre, insisted that “nobody’s hands are clean” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Palestinians faced an “unbearable” situation partly caused by Israel’s “occupation.”

Kaufman pointed out that no Israeli occupation of Gaza has existed since 2005.

“There was no occupation,” he said flatly. “Israel withdrew completely under Ariel Sharon—every soldier, every civilian, every settlement. They even exhumed Jewish graves.”

According to Kaufman, Obama’s insistence on framing Gaza as “occupied” is not a harmless misstatement but part of a broader distortion that has taken root in progressive discourse. The narrative of occupation, he argues, has become so embedded in left-wing ideology that contradicting facts—like Israel’s painful unilateral withdrawal—are dismissed or simply erased.

This rewriting of reality, he warns, has helped fuel the “new antisemitism” now on display across elite universities, cultural institutions, and activist movements.

Kaufman also challenged widespread claims that Gaza was subjected to a relentless, suffocating blockade before October 7. As VIN News reported, he provided detailed data on Israel’s pre-war humanitarian and economic support to Gaza. The aid and support include 5.7 billion gallons of drinking water supplied in 2022, two-thirds of Gaza’s electricity, 100% of its fuel supply (until Hamas diverted it for military use), 67,000 truckloads of goods delivered via Israeli borders and work permits for 17,000 Gazans, providing substantial income for families

These facts, Kaufman noted, were overshadowed by narratives of “open-air prisons” and “apartheid,” narratives that persisted primarily because they aligned with ideological beliefs—not because they reflected reality.

“Hamas was willing to sacrifice everything for jihad,” Kaufman said. “Israel had no Plan B because it never imagined an enemy would choose national suicide over survival.”

In discussing Israel’s catastrophic intelligence failure on October 7, Kaufman invoked a term from Israeli military history: the Conceptzia, the mistaken belief that shaped Israeli strategy before the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then, Israeli officials clung to the assumption that Arab states would not attack, despite overwhelming intelligence.

A similar conceptual error, he argues, operated before October 7.

“Israel believed Hamas would never jeopardize its economic gains,” Kaufman explained. “Billions in aid, tens of thousands of workers crossing into Israel, foreign investment—Israel assumed Hamas valued survival.”

But Hamas, he said, valued martyrdom.

“Israel was facing an enemy for whom death was not a cost, but a strategy,” Kaufman told Skorski. “And Israel was utterly unprepared for that.”

The report at VIN News highlighted Kaufman’s stark assessment. Israel believed it was regulating a contained, economically rational adversary. Instead, it was dealing with an ideologically fanatical movement whose leadership was prepared to sacrifice the lives of its own people—and the very existence of the Gazan statelet—to inflict a symbolic blow on Israel.

Kaufman turned his attention to the global reaction to October 7, describing it as symptomatic of a broader “moral collapse” across Western democracies. VIN News has chronicled similar trends, especially the disturbing campus celebrations and street demonstrations that erupted globally within days of the massacre.

Kaufman argued that the moral unraveling has been most pronounced in Western Europe and the English-speaking world: Canada, Australia, France, and the United Kingdom. These are societies, he suggested, where identity politics and post-colonial guilt have eroded the ability to make basic moral distinctions.

But he also noted a contrasting phenomenon—strong and unambiguous support for Israel from Central and Eastern European nations.

Countries such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Serbia, he said, have refused to adopt the racialized ideological frameworks prevalent in Western Europe. Instead, their leadership views Hamas plainly as a terrorist entity and identifies Israel as a democratic ally confronting jihadist violence.

Kaufman also pointed to consistent backing from Asian democracies such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, whose strategic outlooks—rooted in security realism rather than ideological abstraction—leave little tolerance for romanticized narratives about extremist movements.

The overarching theme of Kaufman’s interview, as summarized in the VIN News report, is that the United States may now be experiencing the early stages of what he calls an “American Intifada”: not a violent uprising, but a cultural and ideological revolt against the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination.

This new phase, he argues, draws strength from three converging factors: The dominance of racial ideology in progressive politics, a widespread cognitive dissonance that erases inconvenient facts and a generation of students trained to prioritize identity narratives above empirical truth.

The result is a worldview in which Israel is automatically suspect—even when it is the victim of the most barbaric massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—and Hamas is cast as a symbol of resistance, even when it commits atrocities that shock the conscience.

Kaufman believes the country is at a crossroads. The ideological forces unleashed after October 7 are powerful, emotionally intoxicating, and institutionally entrenched. But he maintains hope that a renewed commitment to truth, history, and moral clarity can counter the rising tide.

As the interview concluded, Kaufman offered a somber assessment of what lies ahead.

“We are facing a new antisemitism,” he said. “It wears the clothing of social justice, but its heart is ancient hatred.”

His warning is not simply about Israel’s military struggle or its political battles abroad. It is about a deeper conflict unfolding within the intellectual and moral life of the Western world.

Kaufman’s American Intifada aims to confront that crisis head-on. If the response to October 7 is any indication, the debate it sparks will be both urgent and unavoidable.