Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He is a Holocaust scholar who has written extensively on the subject.
Former US president Barack Obama’s reported statement in Belfast on October 13 that Jews “took land off people" lends his authority to a false and malicious charge long directed against Israel. The accusation invites listeners to regard the Jewish national home as property seized by intruders. The historical record presents a very different account of a people’s return to its homeland and the international recognition of that return.[1]
Obama’s formulation belongs to a familiar tradition. The late Edward Said, a Palestinian Arab professor at Columbia University, portrayed the Palestinian Arabs as victims of Zionism: their society destroyed, their land appropriated and their people driven into exile. That interpretation makes Jewish national restoration itself the offense.[2]
Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at Bethlehem University, put the charge more bluntly: “Israel stole most of the land and now controls some 93 percent of the land of Palestine." He contrasted that figure with his claim that Jews owned only 2 percent before the British arrival and the Balfour Declaration. Such assertions encourage readers to treat the existence of Israel as the outcome of theft, while passing over the historical and legal foundations of the Jewish national home.[3]
International recognition of a national home
In April 1920, representatives of Britain, France, Italy and Japan assembled at San Remo to determine the future of former Ottoman territories. Their decisions placed the Balfour Declaration within the framework of the postwar mandates. Britain was selected to administer Palestine and charged with carrying out the commitment to a Jewish national home, subject to safeguards for the civil and religious rights of the country’s non-Jewish communities.[4]
The League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine in July 1922. Its preamble acknowledged the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home there. The document expressly identified a Jewish national home; it contained no corresponding provision for an Arab national home in Palestine. The protection of the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants was part of the same undertaking.[5]
These provisions belonged to a wider regional settlement. San Remo also addressed Syria and Mesopotamia, later Iraq, as territories moving toward independence under mandatory supervision. The regional order that followed included Arab states in Iraq, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon, while Saudi Arabia emerged through its own process of unification. Their paths to statehood differed, but the scale of the wider Arab world remains essential to understanding the settlement. The Jews sought their national home in one small territory, the land of their history. No sovereign Palestinian Arab state was dismantled and transferred to them.[6]
Attorney Douglas Feith, an American lawyer who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, drew attention to the Mandate’s choice of words. In his analysis, the document did not purport to manufacture Jewish rights through a grant from the victorious Allies or the League. It recognized rights that preceded those institutions, grounded in Jewish history. The word “reconstituting" was central to his argument: the national home was being restored. Feith explained that Britain distinguished the rights the Allies had acquired through military victory from the Jewish people’s longstanding connection to Palestine.[7]
That distinction bears directly on the accusation Obama repeated. Describing Israel simply as an occupier of stolen Arab land assumes away the Jewish national rights recognized in the Mandate. Israel’s emergence had an international foundation, and the people whose national home it became had a history there that no modern political slogan can erase.
What Britain’s own inquiry recorded
The British government’s Palestine Royal Commission, appointed in 1936 under Lord Peel to investigate unrest, examined the Jewish connection in its 1937 report. Its account began with an observation that cuts through the claim of foreign intrusion:
“While the Jews had thus been dispersed over the world, they had never forgotten Palestine."
The commissioners described how Jewish worship, secular thought and Hebrew poetry preserved that attachment. Even the season in which Jews prayed for rain reflected the needs of the land from which they had been dispersed.[8]
The inquiry also traced a continuing physical presence. Jews had lived in Palestine “always or almost always" since the fall of the Jewish state, it reported, and substantial Jewish communities existed in the chief towns under Arab rule. Those communities endured periods of devastation and received later arrivals. Jews in Eastern Europe regarded the remaining inhabitants as the “remnant of their race who were keeping a foothold in the land against the day of the coming of the Messiah." The connection survived in people and communities as well as in prayer.[9]
By the time the commissioners arrived, the national revival had produced a vigorous public culture. The report contrasted an “intensely democratic and highly organized modern community" with the “old-fashioned Arab world around it." Four daily Hebrew newspapers, ten weeklies and specialist literary and theatrical publications served the National Home.
Music drew audiences well beyond an elite circle. Arturo Toscanini conducted six concerts with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, whose roughly seventy musicians were Palestinian Jews. Every seat was filled. About 3,000 workers attended one concert at reduced prices, and another 3,000 attended the final rehearsal. The commission judged the cultural achievement of a community of 400,000 to be among the National Home’s most remarkable features.[10]
Its discussion of science made the contrast equally vivid. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot, later part of the Weizmann Institute of Science, housed sophisticated equipment and conducted experiments followed by chemists throughout the world. From its windows, the commissioners wrote, one could see hills inhabited by peasants who regarded the institute as a power they feared and hated. The report acknowledged Arab literature and music, while describing Arab Palestine’s cultural life as concentrated among the intelligentsia. These were the British inquiry’s own observations about the society the Jews were rebuilding and the gulf separating it from its surroundings.[11]
The return that endured
David Ben-Gurion expressed the larger historical meaning of that return in a letter to Charles de Gaulle on December 6, 1967. He knew of “no other people that was exiled from its land and dispersed among the nations of the world to be hated, persecuted, expelled and slaughtered … that did not vanish from history, did not despair or assimilate (though many individual Jews did), but yearned incessantly to return to its land, believing for two thousand years in its messianic deliverance-and that indeed did return … and renew its independence."[12]
That persistence is central to any honest account of Israel’s restoration. The Mandate recognized the national home of a people whose attachment had survived exile and persecution. The Peel Commission documented both that attachment and the living community that gave it renewed expression. Reducing this history to Jews taking someone else’s land repeats a dishonest, mendacious, and vile charge while concealing the evidence needed to judge it.
Former public security minister Gilad Erdan once offered a deliberately irreverent response to efforts to challenge the Jewish return: perhaps the Palestinian Arabs should sue G-d for promising Abraham that the Land of Israel would be given to his descendants. The remark was facetious, but it pointed to the antiquity of the connection that Israel’s accusers would have the world forget.[13]
Footnotes
1 Jerusalem Post staff, “Israel ‘took the land’ from Palestinians, has ‘ceded moral ground,’ Obama tells Belfast crowd," October 15, 2026, reporting remarks delivered in Belfast on October 13. Contemporary report.
2 Edward W. Said, Introduction, in Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London and New York: Verso, 1988). Publisher’s book record.
3 Mazin Qumsiyeh, “Palestinians do have options for change and resistance," Pressenza, October 8, 2013. The percentages are Qumsiyeh’s assertions; his article does not provide their calculation. Article under the author’s byline.
4 Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, minutes of the meetings at San Remo, April 24-25, 1920, including the mandates resolution and selection of mandatory powers. Contemporary minutes.
5 League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine, approved July 24, 1922, preamble and Article 2. Mandate text.
6 San Remo minutes, April 24-25, 1920, provisions concerning Syria and Mesopotamia; Mandate for Palestine, Article 25, concerning Transjordan. For Saudi Arabia’s separate unification in 1932, see Saudi Press Agency, “King Abdulaziz Lays Institutional Foundations of Modern Saudi State," September 2026. San Remo minutes; Mandate, Article 25; Saudi government account.
7 Douglas Feith, “A mandate for Israel," Center for Security Policy, October 1, 1993, discussion of the Mandate’s preamble and the recognition of pre-existing Jewish rights. The passage presents Feith’s legal interpretation. Feith’s article.
8 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479 (London: HMSO, July 1937), Chapter I, paragraph 22, p. 11. Page references are to the report’s printed pagination. Full report.
9 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479, Chapter I, paragraph 23, pp. 11-12. Full report.
10 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479, Chapter V, paragraph 7, pp. 116-117. Full report.
11 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479, Chapter V, paragraph 8, p. 117. Full report.
12 David Ben-Gurion, letter to Charles de Gaulle, December 6, 1967. Ellipses indicate omissions from the letter. English text of the letter.
13 Adam Rasgon and Tovah Lazaroff, “Palestinians seeking to sue Britain over 1917 Balfour Declaration," The Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2016. See also Genesis 12:7 and 17:8. Report of Erdan’s remark.