Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hit back at former President Obama after he claimed Israel stole Palestinian land.
“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our ancestors,” Netanyahu responded in a harsh rebuke video released on Friday.
Obama made headlines when he criticized the founding of Israel and defended Palestinian terrorism in conversation with Irish journalist Susan McKay during a paid speaking engagement at the O2 Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday. The paid conference attracted around 7,000 people.
“They took people’s land and they were expelled. And these people rightly said, ‘This is an injustice and I want my land back,'” Obama said, after first explaining that European persecution had driven Jews to seek refuge in the Middle East.
He also accused Israel of ceding “moral ground” through its conduct in the war against Hamas in Gaza, which was launched after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed more than 1,200 people in its barbaric attacks on October 7, 2023.
“If Israel’s attitude is this, 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 what we want, and not making any concessions to anyone, that can work in the short term,” Obama said.
“But you have given up moral ground if that is the position you take.”
The 44th president received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast earlier today.
Netanyahu strongly rejected the idea that Israel stole land and said Jews were originally from the Levant.
“Our land is not stolen land. It is our homeland; it is called Judea. This is where the Jews come from. We have been attached to it for thousands of years,” he said.
The Israeli prime minister also asserted that the Jewish state was not an obstacle to peace in the region and that Israel’s enemies were also the United States’ enemies.
“The obstacle to peace is not Israel, it is not our struggle for our right to exist in our own state, it is the refusal of our enemies and America’s enemies to recognize the right of the Jewish people to have their own state, regardless of its borders,” Netanyahu said.
This is not the first time that Netanyahu and Obama have clashed.
The two men clashed publicly in May 2011, when Netanyahu objected in an Oval Office meeting to Obama’s call for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps.
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