Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Barack Obama’s claim that Israel stole Palestinian land, calling Jews indigenous to Judea and blaming enemies for blocking peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a stern video on X on Friday pushing back hard against former President Barack Obama’s remarks that Israel had taken land from Palestinians and had ceded “moral ground” in its war against Hamas.
Obama made the comments Tuesday during a paid speaking engagement at the O2 Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a conversation with Irish journalist Susan McKay before a crowd of about 7,000. Earlier that same day, Queen’s University Belfast awarded him an honorary doctorate.
The New York Post reported that Obama framed Israel’s founding as an act of displacement and suggested its current strength came with a moral cost.
Obama told the Belfast audience that Jews fleeing European persecution had taken land and that those expelled understandably wanted it back.
"They took land off people and they were expelled. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back,'"
He went further on Israel’s conduct in the fight against Hamas in Gaza, arguing that raw power without concessions undercuts Israel’s standing.
"If the attitude of Israel is, now that we are the strongest, the most technologically advanced in the region, then our security will depend on us simply doing whatever we need and taking whatever we want, and not making any concessions to anyone, that may work short-term,"
Obama added the sharper judgment: “But you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take.”
Netanyahu’s Friday video answered those points directly. He rejected the idea that Israel sits on stolen territory and rooted the Jewish claim in history and continuous attachment.
"The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,"
He continued: “Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland; it’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years.”
Netanyahu then turned to the core barrier he sees standing in the way of peace. He said the problem is not Israel’s right to exist or its determination to defend that right.
"The obstacle to peace is not Israel, it’s not our fight for our very right to exist in our own state, it’s the refusal of our enemies, and America’s enemies to recognize the Jewish people’s right to a state of our own, in any boundaries,"
That framing places the refusal itself, not Israeli strength or borders, at the center of the conflict. It also ties Israel’s enemies to America’s enemies in plain terms.
The war Obama referenced began after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and killed more than 1,200 people in attacks described as barbaric. Netanyahu’s government has prosecuted that war in Gaza ever since. Critics of the Israeli leader have kept up pressure in other arenas, including when Mamdani branded Netanyahu over UN-related criticism.
The Belfast exchange also echoes an older public clash. In May 2011, Netanyahu pushed back against Obama inside the Oval Office after the then-president called for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps. Netanyahu rejected that baseline then; he is rejecting a related moral indictment now.
Security concerns around the prime minister have remained a live issue in recent months, as when two Venezuelan nationals were arrested near his New York hotel.
Street-level opposition has also followed him. More than 100 people, including Susan Sarandon, were taken into custody at an anti-Netanyahu protest outside the United Nations, and a socialist congressional nominee was among those arrested at a similar demonstration near the world body.
Netanyahu has separately addressed other threats tied to radicalization, including comments on a Flydubai co-pilot’s alleged Islamist radicalization in a plot against an Israel-bound flight.
Obama’s Belfast remarks treated the Jewish return as a zero-sum taking that left an understandable grievance. Netanyahu answered with indigeneity: the land is called Judea because that is where the Jewish people come from, and the attachment runs for thousands of years. He refused the foreign-occupier label outright.
He also refused the moral-ground lecture. In his account, security does not require permanent concession to parties that still deny the Jewish state’s right to exist inside any borders. The Oct. 7 death toll stands as the latest proof of what that denial produces when it turns violent.
The former president spoke as a private citizen on a paid stage. The sitting Israeli prime minister answered as the leader of a country still fighting the group that carried out the 2023 massacre. One side emphasized Palestinian grievance and Israeli power. The other emphasized Jewish roots and the refusal of recognition.
Peace does not advance by treating the Jewish homeland as stolen property or by asking a nation under attack to surrender the moral right to defend itself.
