Former President Barack Obama told an audience of about 7,000 in Belfast on Tuesday night that the Jews who founded Israel “took land off people and they were excessive,” and that the Arabs living there “understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.'”
Obama made the remarks on October 13 during “An Evening With President Barack Obama,” a paid onstage interview with Northern Irish journalist Susan McKay at Belfast’s O2 Arena, the first stop of a three-city tour that continued to Glasgow and Manchester. Tickets ranged from about £60 to £1,000 for a VIP package that included a photograph with the former president. Earlier that day, Queen’s University Belfast awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Asked by McKay about the conflict, which he called “a sort of madness,” Obama offered his account of Israel’s founding.
“The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge,” he said, according to the Irish outlet Hot Press. “That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.'”
“Ceded Moral Ground”
Obama then turned to Israel’s current government.
“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,” he said. “That may work short-term… but you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take.”
“I would say the current Israeli government appears to have taken that,” he added. “It is incumbent on them to recognize that 7 million Palestinians are not going anywhere.”
He urged Israelis to “rethink, to reimagine” their future. “How are your children and grandchildren going to live in this region? Are you just going to be behind walls and wipe out everybody around you, or are you going to find some just way of defending yourself while still acting in an ethical, moral way?”
His criticism of Hamas took a different form. “The Palestinians also have to recognize that precisely because Israel is strong, and they’re not going anywhere, that then requires a strategy that is not premised on beating their military,” he said. “And Hamas, what they did on October 7, you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”
He told Palestinians they would not “outkill, outweaponise the Israelis” and should look to “nonviolent strategies.” His immediate goal, he said, was “relieving suffering, an actual end to violence,” and “at the bare minimum to stop the current ongoing encroachment into the West Bank, alongside helping Gaza to rebuild.” That, he said, would require “a US government that is willing to engage in that creative work which may not be forthcoming for a while,” an evident jab at President Trump.
The Missing History
Obama’s account left out the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel, which long predates European antisemitism, along with the land purchases that built the early Jewish communities and the roughly 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries after 1948, most of whom were absorbed by the new state.
HonestReporting summed up the remarks on X: “According to Barack Obama, Jews fled Europe, arrived in someone else’s land and became ‘excessive.'” The watchdog noted the omission of “the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the Land of Israel and centuries of continuous Jewish presence there.”
Sagit Alkobi Fishman, a President’s Fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s School of Communication, argued in a Times of Israel blog post that Obama applied two different standards. “Obama judged Israel by moral standards and Hamas by its effectiveness,” she wrote. The killing of some 1,200 people and the abduction of 251, she noted, would have been no more acceptable had they advanced Hamas’s goals.
She pointed to an example Obama’s Belfast audience knows well. In August 1998, four months after the Good Friday Agreement, the Real IRA detonated a car bomb in Omagh, killing 29 people and injuring about 220. Nobody described the bombing as a strategic miscalculation. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams condemned it “without equivocation.” Obama had praised that same Good Friday Agreement hours earlier at Queen’s as “a shining example of what can happen when people put aside old wounds and choose peace.”
“Moral ground can also be ceded in language,” Fishman concluded, “in the decision to judge an atrocity by whether it worked.”
A Familiar Theme
The Belfast remarks echo the framing of Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, where he grounded Israel’s legitimacy in the Holocaust and spoke of the “displacement” of Palestinians “brought by Israel’s founding.” Critics at the time, including Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz, faulted the speech for omitting the Jewish people’s ancient claim to the land and for reinforcing the portrait of Israel as a colonial upstart.
Obama appeared to correct course when he landed in Israel in March 2013. “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here,” he said at the arrival ceremony. “And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.” In Belfast, that history was gone.
His presidency produced a long list of confrontations with Jerusalem. In May 2011, he declared that a Palestinian state should be based on the pre-1967 lines, drawing a sharp public rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2015, he pushed through the Iran nuclear deal over Israel’s fierce opposition, culminating in Netanyahu’s address to Congress against it. In December 2016, in the final weeks of his term, his administration abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, a “flagrant violation” of international law. That same year his administration signed a 10-year, $38 billion military aid agreement with Israel. A 2013 poll found that only 36.5 percent of Israeli Jews regarded him as friendly to Israel.
Since leaving office, his criticism has sharpened. At a similar paid event in Dublin in September 2025, he said there was “no military rationale” for Israel’s operations in Gaza.
Alternative headlines: “Obama Tells Belfast Crowd Israel Was Built on Stolen Land” or “Obama in Belfast: Israel Lost the Moral High Ground, Hamas Just Picked the Wrong Strategy.”
Sources:
Hot Press
Irish Times
Jerusalem Post
Algemeiner
Times of Israel blog, Sagit Alkobi Fishman
Daily Wire (HonestReporting quote)
Obama White House archive, 2013 arrival remarks
David Horovitz on the Cairo speech
