‘This is our homeland’: Netanyahu slams Obama for saying Israel ‘took land off people’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired back on Friday at former US president Barack Obama, who earlier this week made remarks in Northern Ireland that criticized the circumstances surrounding Israel’s founding and said the Jewish state had “ceded moral ground” in the Middle East conflict.

Israel “took land off people and they were expelled” during its establishment, Obama said Tuesday at a paid speaking event in Belfast’s O2 indoor arena, with some 7,000 spectators, according to The Irish Times. He added, “And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’”

Earlier that day, Obama received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast.

In response, Netanyahu asserted on Friday that Jews were “in the land of our forefathers” and were not the obstacle to peace.

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” Netanyahu said in an English-language video posted on his X account.

“Our history is not a colonial enterprise,” he said. “Our land is not stolen land.”

“This is our homeland,” he said. “It’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years.

“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 boundary,” he said.

The Jewish people’s right to their own state in their ancestral homeland is non-negotiable.

Watch: pic.twitter.com/uMWfObAMaJ

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 16, 2026

Netanyahu argued that “a peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”

Israel, said Netanyahu, “will not gamble with its survival to accommodate those who refuse to accept the facts of history, to accept our right to exist, or wish to appease terror.”

Obama made Tuesday’s comments during a sit-down with Irish writer and journalist Susan McKay in Belfast. Asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “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 said, “but you have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take.”

Obama’s speech was reported by Irish media, including the Belfast Telegraph and The Irish Times.

Obama argued that Netanyahu’s government had taken that position, and that “it is incumbent on them to recognize that seven million Palestinians are not going anywhere.”

“It should pain everybody. It’s a distillation of us being trapped in history and a tribal, elemental, unforgiving divide. It’s a sort of madness,” he said.

“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.

“The citizenry of Israel has to rethink, to reimagine,” Obama said, asking: “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?”

Conversely, Obama said: “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.”

Touching on the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people and the abduction of 251 hostages into Gaza, Obama said, “And Hamas, what they did on October 7, you could not have designed something that was less likely to produce meaningful change.”

He concluded that democracy must “not be taken for granted,” and said that large institutions like the United Nations and the European Union were important but needed reform.

People “don’t want to feel as if there are five layers of bureaucracy before a decision is made,” Obama said. “You have to deliver the goods.”