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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired back at former President Obama after he claimed Israel had stolen Palestinian land.
“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” Netanyahu responded in a stern video rebuke posted on X Friday.
Obama made headlines when he slammed the founding of Israel and defended Palestinian terrorism in a conversation with Irish journalist Susan McKay during a paid speaking engagement at the O2 Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Tuesday. The paid speaking event drew about 7,000 people.
“They took land off people and they were expelled. And those people understandably said, ‘This is 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” by its conduct in the war against Hamas in Gaza, which was launched after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed over 1,200 people in their barbaric Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.
“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.”
The 44th president was awarded an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast earlier that day.
Netanyahu firmly rejected the idea that Israel had stolen land and said that Jews were indigenous to the Levant.
“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,” he said.
The Israeli prime minister also claimed that the Jewish State was not the obstacle to peace in the region, and said that Israel’s enemies were also the enemies of the US.
“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,” Netanyahu said.
This is not the first time Netanyahu and Obama have clashed.
The two publicly clashed in May 2011, when Netanyahu pushed back during an Oval Office meeting against Obama’s call for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps.