The question is: Why are so many white progressives so quick to condemn Israel’s actions while having little to say about Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which have done arguably more to oppress Palestinian civilians than Israel?

Part of the issue is how white progressives perceive the ethnic identities of the people involved. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has historically been viewed through the lens of territorial disputes and religious tensions, is increasingly being reframed in terms of race and ethnicity, mostly by white progressives.

Those on the far left who purport to care about the plight of Palestinian civilians have been promoting a distinctly racial narrative in which Israelis are the white oppressors abusing the brown people who live in Gaza and the West Bank. It is part of an overall shift occurring in America in which Jewish people are increasingly being seen as “white.”

Author Jay Rosenbaum discussed this paradigm shift in an op-ed discussing the differences in how Israeli and American Jews view antisemitism. “In America, Jews are safe because here everyone is a minority. Therefore, the best defense for Jews in America is to promote the values of diversity and tolerance which we believe are at the heart of American culture,” he writes.

The author continues, noting that “American Jews are heavily invested in continuing to see ourselves as a minority” and that since white supremacy “threatens” a lot of minorities, “focusing most of our attention on white supremacy reassures us that we are, in fact, still a minority and that we are in solidarity with all of the other American minorities.”

However, Rosenbaum acknowledges that this has changed.

But, are we a minority? Much of America no longer sees us that way. In fact, a lot of antisemitism is being directed at us because we are perceived as being the majority. In America, we’ve been kicked out of the ‘club of the oppressed’ and we are increasingly seen as white and privileged and therefore part of the oppressing class. Israel is seen by many on the Left as being a majority culture oppressing a minority.

When other minorities attack us, we are confused about how to respond. One response is to deny the problem. Another response is to deny that we are “white.” And, we wouldn’t be wrong. The term white as it is used today often has more to do with socioeconomic status than skin tone. To question whether Jews are “white” is not to ignore the fact that a percentage of us are people of color in the way that term is being used today. It is to question whether the term “white” describes any Jew, especially when it is used as a political tool to deny us the status of a persecuted people.

Author Joshua B. Lipson also discussed this shift, quoting a column in which the pro-Palestinian author claimed that American media was sending the following message: “We are basically being told, ‘It’s OK that our largest-funded ally is killing all those brown people—they asked for it.’”

Lipson argued that the overall conflict is far more nuanced and complex than those making the racial argument contend and is “anything but a matter of skin color.”

However, a growing contingent on the left has taken to caricaturing the conflict as one between white Israeli colonists and brown Palestinians indigenes at the mercy of an empire. The framework of colonialism is certainly worth including in the discussion. Yet in analogizing the Jews of Israel to Algeria’s Pieds-Noir and South Africa’s Boers, the pro-Palestinian left’s race-baiters stake a dangerous claim: European Jewish intruders should get out of the Middle East. For those of us who believe in some sort of coexistence in the land of Canaan, this language threatens the very foundations of peace and reduces the complexities of a tragic conflict to racial homily.

He continues, explaining that in Israel, Jewish folks come in all different skin colors, which makes the “white” designation a misnomer.

This is, of course, not to speak of the many Israeli Jews whose recent roots trace back to the Middle East and North Africa. If Palestinian Arabs are to be considered brown, it is unreasonable to call the hundreds of thousands of Yemeni, Iraqi, and Moroccan Jews in Israel anything but the same. And since the beginning of Ethiopian immigration in the 1980s, Israeli Jews have come in yet a darker shade. The reduction of Israel to whiteness thus proves to be nothing more than a sloppy, overreaching extension of the settler-colonial narrative prominent on the left.

Today, we can see how leftist efforts to label Jews as “white” have shaped their rhetoric and overall approach to the Israel-Hamas war. It mirrors the way they debate racial issues in America. White progressives, by and large, showed no sign of outrage at how Hamas deliberately slaughtered Israeli civilians. They had nothing to say when reports of terrorists brutally raping Israeli girls and women surfaced, despite pretending to be avid supporters of the #MeToo movement.

Indeed, one hears hardly a peep out of white progressives about how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have committed egregious human rights abuses against Palestinians. It’s the same reaction they have towards black people who are murdered by other black people. They only care about Palestinians and black folks when it is “white” people oppressing them.

The racial dynamic is an essential factor in understanding why progressives in America are reflexively opposing Israel’s actions against Hamas. It has little to do with principles or the facts on the ground. To them, the skin color of the people involved is the most important aspect of this conflict, and they view the Palestinians as yet another group of brown people they can exploit to further their agenda.